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A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

THE BERLIN JOURNAL<br />

Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke<br />

April 24, 1941 – December 13, <strong>20</strong>10


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<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 1<br />

Contents<br />

The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

© Hornischer<br />

richard holbrooke at the American academy, <strong>20</strong>08<br />

Remembering Richard Holbrooke<br />

5 The Gift of Conviction<br />

john c. kornblum<br />

5 The Bridge Builder<br />

richard von weizsäcker<br />

6 Friendship Forged through Film<br />

volker schlöndorff<br />

7 A Historian at Heart<br />

derek chollet<br />

8 Extravagant Laughter<br />

geoffrey wolff<br />

10 Beneath the Bluster<br />

gahl hodges burt<br />

12 Like a Western<br />

josef joffe<br />

14 A Man and His Métier<br />

karl m. von der heyden<br />

14 If Only Holbrooke Had Been in the<br />

Balkans in 1914<br />

fritz stern<br />

16 The House That Holbrooke Built<br />

frances fitzgerald<br />

17 A Last Breakfast<br />

norman pearlstine<br />

18 To Move the World<br />

henry a. kissinger<br />

19 Not a Quiet American<br />

strobe talbott<br />

21 Theory Versus Fact<br />

james der derian<br />

N1 On the Waterfront<br />

The American Academy’s newsletter, with<br />

the latest on fellows, alumni, and trustees,<br />

as well as recent events at the Hans<br />

Arnhold Center.<br />

From Our Friends and Fellows<br />

25 Doors Open, Doors Closed<br />

tamar jacoby deliberates the details of<br />

immigration in America and Germany.<br />

28 Crossing Over<br />

hal foster steadies the precarious art of<br />

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn.<br />

32 No Man’s Landscapes<br />

astrid m. eckert traipses the<br />

environments of the inter-German border.<br />

36 The Dead Letters Dept.<br />

peter wortsman sends up a short story<br />

on sorting mail and overdue revenge.<br />

40 Cairo’s <strong>Spring</strong> Cleaning<br />

roger cohen pits Egypt’s 2/11 as the<br />

counter to America’s 9/11.<br />

44 The Insurgency Within<br />

kirk w. johnson narrates the harrowing<br />

story of his Iraq War-triggered ptsd.


2 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

The Berlin Journal<br />

The American Academy<br />

A magazine from the Hans Arnhold in Berlin<br />

Center published by the American<br />

Executive Director<br />

Academy in Berlin<br />

Gary Smith<br />

Number Twenty – <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

dean of fellows & programs<br />

Publisher Gary Smith<br />

Pamela Rosenberg<br />

Editor Brittani Sonnenberg<br />

CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE<br />

Managing Editor<br />

OFFICER<br />

R. Jay Magill Jr.<br />

Andrew J. White<br />

Advertising Berit Ebert,<br />

Helena Kageneck<br />

Am Sandwerder 17–19<br />

14109 Berlin<br />

Design Susanna Dulkinys &<br />

Tel. (49 30) 80 48 3-0<br />

Edenspiekermann<br />

www.edenspiekermann.com<br />

Fax (49 30) 80 48 3-111<br />

www.americanacademy.de<br />

Printed by Ruksaldruck, Berlin<br />

14 East 60th Street, Suite 604<br />

Copyright © <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

New York, NY 10022<br />

The American Academy in Berlin<br />

Tel. (1) 212 588-1755<br />

ISSN 1610-6490<br />

Fax (1) 212 588-1758<br />

Cover: Kabul, Afghanistan,<br />

November 18, <strong>20</strong>09. Richard<br />

Holbrooke talks on the phone before<br />

the arrival of Secretary of State<br />

Hillary Rodham Clinton. Photo by<br />

Paula Bronstein/Getty Images.<br />

Honorary Chairmen Thomas L. Farmer, Richard von Weizsäcker<br />

co-Chairmen Karl M. von der Heyden, Henry A. Kissinger<br />

Vice Chair Gahl Hodges Burt<br />

President & CEO Norman Pearlstine<br />

Treasurer Andrew S. Gundlach<br />

Secretary John C. Kornblum<br />

Trustees Barbara Balaj, John P. Birkelund, Manfred Bischoff,<br />

Stephen B. Burbank, Gahl Hodges Burt, Caroline Walker Bynum,<br />

Mathias Döpfner, Marina Kellen French, Michael E. Geyer, Hans-Michael<br />

Giesen, Richard K. Goeltz, C. Boyden Gray, Vartan Gregorian,<br />

Andrew S. Gundlach, Franz Haniel, Helga Haub, Karl M. von der Heyden,<br />

Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Wolfgang Ischinger, Josef Joffe, Henry A. Kissinger,<br />

Michael Klein, John C. Kornblum, Regine Leibinger, Lawrence Lessig,<br />

Wolfgang Malchow, Nina von Maltzahn, Erich Marx, Wolfgang Mayrhuber,<br />

Julie Mehretu, William von Mueffling, Christopher von Oppenheim,<br />

Norman Pearlstine, David Rubenstein, Volker Schlöndorff,<br />

Peter Y. Solmssen, Kurt Viermetz, Pauline Yu<br />

Honorary Trustee Klaus Wowereit (ex officio)<br />

Trustees Emeriti Diethard Breipohl, Gerhard Casper, Fritz Stern<br />

Senior Counselors Richard Gaul, Franz Xaver Ohnesorg,<br />

Bernhard von der Planitz, Karen Roth, Yoram Roth, Victoria Scheibler<br />

SUPPORT<br />

The Academy is entirely funded by private donations. If you like what we<br />

are doing, please contribute by making a tax-deductible donation:<br />

IN GERMANY<br />

IN THE UNITED STATES<br />

Contributions may be made Contributions may be made<br />

by bank transfer to:<br />

by check payable to:<br />

American Academy in Berlin The American Academy in Berlin<br />

Berliner Sparkasse<br />

14 East 60th Street, Suite 604<br />

BLZ 100 500 00<br />

New York, NY 10022<br />

Account: 660 000 9908<br />

by bank transfer to: JPMorgan Chase<br />

IBAN:<br />

500 Stanton Christiana Road, Newark,<br />

DE07 1005 0000 6600 0099 08 DE 19713; Account: 967 33 12 77,<br />

BIC: BELADEBEXXX<br />

ABA: 21 00 00 21<br />

SWIFT CODE: CHASUS 33<br />

Director’s Note<br />

In Pursuit of Political Ideals<br />

You learn a great deal about a person by spending time in their<br />

library. A couple of summers ago my daughters and I stayed<br />

in the Holbrookes’ guest apartment, which doubled as<br />

Richard’s study. In the shelves surrounding us, we discovered the<br />

library of a man whose appetite for ideas was as capacious as his<br />

passion for people.<br />

Winston Churchill and George Orwell, Reinhold Niebuhr<br />

and Søren Kierkegaard, Philip Rieff and Norman O. Brown,<br />

George Kennan and Henry A. Kissinger, Edmund Wilson and Fritz<br />

Stern, Paul Berman and Leon Wieseltier, Rudyard Kipling and<br />

William Styron, Geoffrey Wolff and John le Carré – philosophers,<br />

statesmen, novelists, and historians jostled one another for<br />

space on Holbrooke’s shelves, each volume well-thumbed and<br />

exhaustively employed.<br />

In college, Holbrooke fell under the spell of Edmund Wilson’s<br />

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.<br />

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

book excited me mostly because it described something unusual<br />

and extremely important: the relationship of philosophical ideas<br />

and practical events – the savage intersection where theories<br />

and personalities meet and sometimes end up changing the world,<br />

for better or for worse.”<br />

Holbrooke was passionate about the transformative power of<br />

ideas, and he put great stock in the erudition that comes from true<br />

scholarship. His idea of the Academy resembled Ortega y Gasset’s<br />

notion of the university: institutions whose moral duty it is to<br />

“intervene in current affairs, treating the great themes of the day<br />

from its own point of view: cultural, scientific, and professional.”<br />

In this special Holbrooke memorial issue, the myriad aspects<br />

of the man – diplomat, friend, Academy founder, provocateur,<br />

moralist, historian – are celebrated, by voices as varied as<br />

Holbrooke’s talents. Film director Volker Schlöndorff recalls<br />

shared jaunts through Berlin’s hidden locales; novelist Geoffrey<br />

Wolff describes Holbrooke’s love of laughter; Henry A. Kissinger,<br />

in a condolence letter to Kati Marton, recalls the lessons he and<br />

Holbrooke learned from history; and Secretary of State Hillary<br />

Rodham Clinton recounts Holbrooke’s relentless and revolutionary<br />

approach to diplomacy. Features in this issue by Academy fellows<br />

explore themes that drove Holbrooke’s own work: contested<br />

borders, erupting revolutions, and the personal price of trauma.<br />

Holbrooke’s interventions, some legendary, some untold, reflect<br />

a lifelong ambition to be transformative in the service of higher<br />

ends, and he drew on a freight of resources as variegated as the<br />

authors that lined the walls of that wonderful guest apartment<br />

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

articulates the deepest convictions of the irreplaceable “realistidealist”<br />

(as Roger Cohen referred to Holbrooke), someone as much<br />

a scholar of foreign policy as that rare person who understood how<br />

to turn a vision into a reality: “If we are to hope to understand<br />

the violent world in which we live (and unless we try to understand<br />

it, we cannot expect to be able to act rationally in it and on it),<br />

the goals and motives that guide human action must be looked at<br />

in the light of . . . every intellectual resource that we have.”<br />

– Gary Smith


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 3<br />

© HORNischer


4 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

© Magnum Photos<br />

© Michel Clement/AFP/Getty Images<br />

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

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

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

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


The Gift of Conviction<br />

A former US ambassador to Germany on the enormous achievements of his successor<br />

<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 5<br />

I<br />

have always thought<br />

one fact explained Richard<br />

Holbrooke’s success more<br />

than any other. People who only<br />

met or talked with him briefly,<br />

or, in many cases, never met<br />

him at all, feel that he touched<br />

their lives. The number of people<br />

who considered themselves<br />

to be his “good friends” runs<br />

into the thousands – more than<br />

he could have ever had a serious<br />

conversation with. Those who<br />

felt that he contributed to their<br />

well-being can be counted in<br />

the millions.<br />

All of these groups were<br />

somehow moved by his voracious<br />

desire to know who they<br />

were and what was important<br />

to them. This ability to create<br />

instant empathy gave him an<br />

unmatched talent to build<br />

bridges. Nations he had never<br />

visited were brought back from<br />

despair by his commitments<br />

to the fight against aids or his<br />

peace efforts in the Balkans.<br />

Others have made similar<br />

contributions, but they lacked<br />

the human impact of Richard<br />

Holbrooke. The reason?<br />

Richard cared so much about<br />

the world and its condition that<br />

he instinctively absorbed the<br />

personal messages from others<br />

and transformed them into<br />

mutual understanding. His<br />

prodigious intellectual and<br />

rhetorical skills did the rest.<br />

One could never forget a conversation<br />

with him or ignore a<br />

request for assistance.<br />

Exposure to this force of<br />

personality did not always win<br />

Richard friends and admirers.<br />

Those who felt bruised,<br />

unhappy, or just plain jealous<br />

of his talents were also numerous.<br />

But in almost every case,<br />

even those who were less than<br />

thrilled with his treatment<br />

could not deny the power of<br />

his ideas.<br />

Once, at a crucial meeting in<br />

Washington, Richard accused a<br />

very senior general of disloyalty<br />

for not following the president’s<br />

goals – goals which Richard<br />

had, of course, written. A year<br />

later, this general was one of<br />

Richard’s most loyal deputies.<br />

Most successful was Richard’s<br />

two-year massaging of Serbian<br />

dictator Slobodan Milosevic.<br />

Milosevic was a true sociopath.<br />

He cared little for the lives of<br />

others. His only goal was to<br />

amass as much power and control<br />

as possible.<br />

p<br />

Richard met Milosevic when<br />

the ugly Balkan war was in<br />

its fifth year. Several teams of<br />

negotiators had tried to stop the<br />

killing and had failed. Richard<br />

had decided that Milosevic and<br />

only Milosevic was the key to<br />

success. He hit him with every<br />

ounce of his matchless powers<br />

of analysis, persuasion, and<br />

coercion. Milosevic, being no<br />

slouch, gave much the same<br />

in return. It was a contest<br />

Milosevic could not win, and<br />

he probably knew it. Richard<br />

understood that he needed<br />

Milosevic to help implement<br />

the agreement. He made it<br />

possible for Milosevic to lose<br />

gracefully by ensuring that the<br />

interests of the Serbian people<br />

were also protected. By the<br />

time it was over, the Dayton<br />

Agreement had pieced back<br />

together a human and historic<br />

puzzle that had burdened<br />

Europe for decades.<br />

Richard’s other main advantage<br />

was his discipline. Much<br />

of his cajoling of Milosevic took<br />

place after a tragic accident on<br />

Mount Igman, on the road to<br />

Sarajevo. The American delegation<br />

was forced to take this<br />

treacherous mountain road<br />

because Milosevic personally<br />

had refused them safe passage<br />

through Serbian checkpoints.<br />

Richard said farewell to the<br />

three colleagues who died in<br />

the accident and returned to<br />

Belgrade within two weeks<br />

for the next round of debate.<br />

His first meeting was with<br />

Milosevic.<br />

The American Academy in<br />

Berlin is the most enduring<br />

result of Holbrooke’s “specialness.”<br />

It is a unique bi-national<br />

institution crafted from little<br />

more than a commitment to<br />

the singular relationship that<br />

grew between Berlin and the<br />

United States after 1945. But its<br />

foundations are more than idealistic.<br />

The underlying goal of<br />

the Academy was very practical<br />

in nature. It was to ensure that<br />

the United States and Germany<br />

never forget the need to build<br />

on the deep cooperation forged<br />

in divided Berlin. The seemingly<br />

random mixture of culture<br />

and politics, history and vision<br />

that the Academy projects has,<br />

for more than a decade, transmitted<br />

the special Holbrooke<br />

method to a new generation.<br />

Each views it in his or her own<br />

terms, and, in fact, the number<br />

of people who claim to understand<br />

exactly what Richard<br />

had in mind for the Academy<br />

rarely agree with one another,<br />

but they are still all right. The<br />

message is the method rather<br />

than the content. It is neither<br />

cultural, nor scientific, nor<br />

political – it is human. Living<br />

humanity is what Richard<br />

Holbrooke was all about. The<br />

American Academy is the living<br />

essence of his life’s work.<br />

By John C. Kornblum<br />

The Bridge Builder<br />

Lasting impressions from a German president<br />

Richard Holbrooke’s<br />

decisive impulse<br />

gave wing to the audacious<br />

project of the American<br />

Academy in Berlin. Thanks to<br />

the moving generosity of the<br />

founding family, this ambitious<br />

project took flight.<br />

He was an incomparably energetic<br />

friend, a bridgebuilder<br />

over the Atlantic to Europe, to<br />

the world. Make peace with<br />

all your might: he served this<br />

purpose with his temperament.<br />

He never lost hope for peace. He<br />

was restless but never spiritless.<br />

The suffering of innumerable<br />

people was eased by the new<br />

lives he made possible for them.<br />

He was a great diplomat<br />

and at the same time undiplomatic<br />

when he thought it was<br />

appropriate. “Speak slowly,<br />

think quickly, act decisively,”<br />

he would say. His contributions<br />

to our history are enormous<br />

and resounding.<br />

It is his character that founded<br />

our Academy. This is – and<br />

will remain – our guide.<br />

By Richard von Weizsäcker


6 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Friendship Forged through Film<br />

A creative force in the company of artists<br />

A<br />

creative mind<br />

himself, vibrant in<br />

empathy and imagination,<br />

Richard Holbrooke always<br />

enjoyed the company of artists.<br />

Whether sports, theater, or<br />

cinema, he enjoyed the show,<br />

shared emotions, responded<br />

gleefully to the wit of a good<br />

line. The public figure had<br />

a private life, and he tried to<br />

unify them rather than practicing<br />

the strict separation of<br />

these spheres as most others<br />

do. He showed up backstage to<br />

meet the artists, often befriending<br />

them – John Guare, Susan<br />

Sarandon, Robert de Niro,<br />

Louis Malle, Wally Shawn,<br />

Mike Nichols – every one of<br />

them a dear friend, indeed.<br />

How did I, a moviemaker,<br />

end up on the American<br />

Academy’s board of trustees?<br />

Richard Holbrooke simply<br />

asked his New York friends,<br />

before leaving as ambassador<br />

for Bonn, whether they knew<br />

any fun people in Germany.<br />

Along with novelist Peter<br />

Schneider, I must have been on<br />

his list, for henceforth we were<br />

invited to numerous joyful dinners<br />

at the ambassador’s residence,<br />

one of them ending in a<br />

memorable “shouting contest”<br />

between Jack Valenti and me<br />

about the film industry, imperialism,<br />

and the Motion Pictures<br />

Association of America’s attitude<br />

toward subsidizing culture<br />

in Europe – which they felt was<br />

unfair to Hollywood. Rather<br />

than appeasing us, the ambassador<br />

pushed for escalation,<br />

albeit an intellectual one, to<br />

bring the conflict into the open.<br />

Late at night, the adversaries<br />

left as friends.<br />

He equally enjoyed taking<br />

me to the sidelines at the<br />

Olympic Stadium, where the<br />

Chicago Bears once played the<br />

Berlin Thunder, introducing<br />

me to the players, monuments<br />

RICHARD holbrooke and volker schlöNDORFF at the american academy, <strong>20</strong>03<br />

of muscle and flesh, whom he<br />

knew personally, of course. In<br />

return he asked me to show<br />

him and Kati Marton “my<br />

Berlin”: the Turkish corners of<br />

Kreuzberg and the old harbor in<br />

Wedding, a location for “foggy<br />

London” and movie set for<br />

Edgar Wallace’s detective stories<br />

that Germans enjoyed so<br />

much in the 1960s. He checked<br />

the bullet holes and shrapnel<br />

scars left in the facades of so<br />

many buildings, not only in the<br />

East. He crawled through the<br />

labyrinth ruins of the Tacheles,<br />

enjoyed mezze at Oren’s, and,<br />

most of all, raved about the<br />

studios in Babelsberg, where<br />

Marlene Dietrich had once<br />

crossed her beautiful legs in<br />

front of Joseph von Sternberg’s<br />

camera.<br />

He was fascinated by the<br />

story or rather history of the<br />

ufa film company, created in<br />

1917 by the Kaiser’s General<br />

Ludendorff to influence the<br />

minds of the working class,<br />

prime clients of these new<br />

flicks, in order to win them over<br />

for traditional values. I’ve contemplated<br />

this strategy myself:<br />

isn’t that what we should be<br />

doing? How about telling How<br />

to End a War to a mass audience<br />

on television?<br />

Richard Holbrooke must<br />

have been one of the first<br />

clients of Netflix and the Red<br />

Envelope home distribution<br />

of dvds. During sleepless jetlegged<br />

nights or over his brief<br />

weekends, he undoubtedly<br />

watched hours and hours of<br />

films, for he knew every one of<br />

them. He cut through the bs,<br />

going straight to the “deeper<br />

meaning,” viewing the films’<br />

content through the eyes of a<br />

Serbian as well as a Pakistani<br />

audience, ever aware of and<br />

eager to debate cross-cultural<br />

misunderstandings.<br />

Arts, politics, friendship, and<br />

history in the making were all<br />

one to him. No wonder his<br />

conversations with Arthur<br />

Miller (for once I had the privilege<br />

of introducing a luminary<br />

to him), with Susan Sontag,<br />

or with the politician in the<br />

then-opposition party, Angela<br />

Merkel, were not mere conversations<br />

but always had an aim,<br />

an urgency, such as when, one<br />

day before September 11, over<br />

lunch at my home, Richard<br />

insisted on the prime importance<br />

of Pakistan. The events of<br />

the next day proved him right,<br />

even though he had to wait the<br />

better part of a decade before<br />

he could tackle what he knew<br />

all along was the key to “ending<br />

a war,” never once considering<br />

the ending to his own life<br />

would be so poorly timed.<br />

By Volker Schlöndorff<br />

© Mike Minehan


A Historian at Heart<br />

<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 7<br />

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

Richard Holbrooke<br />

will always be remembered<br />

as his generation’s<br />

premier diplomat and statesman<br />

– a doer. But he also was<br />

a person who had a keen sense<br />

of the past and the role memory<br />

plays in defining today’s world –<br />

he was a historian at heart.<br />

¿<br />

Holbrooke loved history. He<br />

loved books and arguments,<br />

stories and sweeping narratives.<br />

In that sense he shared<br />

so much with the historiandiplomat<br />

he deeply admired,<br />

George Kennan. Holbrooke had<br />

little tolerance for the instant<br />

policy books that dominate<br />

Washington’s bookshelves (he<br />

described them as “glorified<br />

Foreign Affairs articles”) and<br />

always pushed people to write<br />

history; something, he would<br />

say, that would last.<br />

I learned this firsthand in<br />

the years I assisted him with his<br />

Bosnia memoir, as I watched<br />

him devour other great histories<br />

to help inspire his writing.<br />

In government, Holbrooke<br />

always infused his arguments<br />

with history (needless to say,<br />

Vietnam came up quite a bit<br />

in describing his most recent<br />

mission in Afghanistan and<br />

Pakistan), and he would circulate<br />

chapters from history books<br />

to his staff and colleagues. And<br />

history was at the core of his<br />

love for his wife, Kati, and<br />

her many books that explored<br />

the past in innovative and<br />

powerful ways.<br />

In my last conversation<br />

with him, shortly before he<br />

fell ill, he mentioned that he’d<br />

been re-reading Orwell’s 1946<br />

essay “Politics and the English<br />

Language” and intended to<br />

distribute copies to his team.<br />

“There’s so much bad writing<br />

in government,” he said. In<br />

recent months, we had started<br />

to talk about the next book he<br />

wanted to write, which I believe<br />

could have been the greatest<br />

diplomatic memoir since<br />

Kennan’s over forty years ago.<br />

I will miss so many things<br />

about Richard, and only with<br />

deep sadness can I accept<br />

that we will never get to read<br />

that book.<br />

By Derek Chollet<br />

This article first appeared in<br />

Foreign Policy online.<br />

AmercAcademie_185x124 22.03.<strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> 17:55 Uhr Seite 1<br />

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BONJOUR, MONSIEUR BOTERO. 1982<br />

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8 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Extravagant Laughter<br />

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

Dick and I met in<br />

Washington – 1965 or<br />

1966 – at one of the<br />

many weeknight dinner parties<br />

for a dozen or twenty guests<br />

arranged by Polly Wisner, a<br />

legendary hostess. These occasions<br />

were insistently meritocratic<br />

and cosmopolitan. An<br />

Israeli defense minister might<br />

be at dinner, or Sir Isaiah<br />

Berlin visiting Washington<br />

from Oxford to lecture on<br />

Russian literature. The most<br />

striking feature of these occasions<br />

was the calculated mix of<br />

elders and kids, personages and<br />

apprentices. In my twenties,<br />

the hundred-dollar-per-week<br />

book critic of the Washington<br />

Post, I might be seated beside<br />

my boss, Katherine Graham,<br />

and at the same table with<br />

Charles Bohlen or Averell<br />

Harriman. Nobody at that table<br />

would inquire where I had<br />

attended boarding school or<br />

whether my people summered<br />

at Fishers Island.<br />

The ruling principle at these<br />

encounters was instructional,<br />

at its best educational. The<br />

young among us were expected<br />

to govern our conduct by common<br />

sense, but not by caution.<br />

Fine wines and spirits were<br />

served in abundance, and we<br />

were encouraged to enjoy them.<br />

The parties ended at eleven<br />

sharp. Sometimes grownup<br />

guests would be obliged to<br />

leave early, summoned to the<br />

White House or Pentagon or<br />

State Department, but it was<br />

assumed that everyone at the<br />

Wisners’ tables had nationally<br />

consequential work to do first<br />

thing in the morning.<br />

Were we expected to zip<br />

our lips while affairs of the<br />

day were debated by the best<br />

and brightest? There was an<br />

unspoken policy of speakwhen-spoken-to,<br />

but The Young<br />

(maybe one-third of the guests)<br />

were very frequently spoken to,<br />

our opinions solicited. And no<br />

one I met at Polly Wisner’s – or<br />

since 1966 anywhere else in<br />

the world – was more willing to<br />

share his opinions about anything<br />

at all than was my friend<br />

Dick Holbrooke.<br />

Those reading this who met<br />

Dick in his full flamboyant<br />

flower of intellect and will and<br />

self-certainty should know that<br />

he was no different when he<br />

was twenty-three. And because<br />

the subject effacing all others<br />

in the mid-to-late-1960s was<br />

of course Vietnam, and because<br />

Dick’s first job in the foreign<br />

service was in Vietnam, and<br />

because I first encountered<br />

him home from Saigon to<br />

report to his superiors (he did<br />

have notional superiors) I first<br />

experienced Dick’s style of<br />

Ciceronian discourse applied<br />

to his view of the proper course<br />

of United States policy in<br />

Southeast Asia. His view – relying<br />

on the study of captured<br />

enemy documents and his<br />

systematic study of Vietnamese<br />

history and culture as it had<br />

played out against the French<br />

in 1956 – called for ratcheting<br />

up US commitment. This was<br />

not my view, which was that<br />

Americans should come home<br />

and behave themselves, but<br />

confirming that a broken clock<br />

tells perfect time twice a day, I<br />

happened to be right. Thus<br />

my first exchange of opinions<br />

with the young diplomat:<br />

Me: “How can you be so sure ?”<br />

Dick: “Because I’m not a fool ?”<br />

Me: “And I am a fool.”<br />

Dick: “You be the judge. I’d<br />

call it case closed.”<br />

Me: “You’re a jackass.”<br />

We two prodigies met a few<br />

years later in Princeton, where<br />

we were living with our families<br />

in junior faculty housing.<br />

We became close: we both<br />

missed Washington, and our<br />

younger sons were born a day<br />

apart in Princeton Hospital.<br />

Dick and I watched pro football<br />

games on Sundays. I soon<br />

learned to expect that if I was<br />

watching an event with Dick<br />

something momentous was<br />

bound to happen. So it was that<br />

we were together witnessing<br />

the upstart Jets’ Broadway Joe<br />

Namath redeem his cocksure<br />

promise of victory over Johnny<br />

Unitas’s old-guard Colts in<br />

Super Bowl III. And we were<br />

watching TV together in<br />

Vermont on February 23, 1976<br />

when Franz Klammer threw<br />

himself down the Olympic<br />

downhill course at Innsbruck<br />

to win the Gold Medal in the<br />

most ferocious expression of<br />

reckless physical skill either of<br />

us had ever witnessed.<br />

It seemed that Dick’s passionate<br />

engagement with whatever<br />

was at hand forced a dramatic<br />

outcome. And his sense<br />

of the ridiculous – his instinct<br />

for the distinction between<br />

ambition and performance –<br />

was exquisitely refined. He was<br />

a fanatic fan – the redundancy<br />

is necessary – and the most<br />

extravagant laugher I’ve ever<br />

known.<br />

It’s losing the sound of that<br />

laughter that breaks my heart.<br />

I’ll close with a ski trip we<br />

two took to Sol y Nieve, in the<br />

mountains above Granada.<br />

Skiing was an important bond<br />

for us. I believe that it amused<br />

Dick that some processes and<br />

phenomena – gravity, say, and<br />

iced pistes – were resistant to<br />

his charms and only grudgingly<br />

submissive to his will.<br />

This spring day of 1972 the<br />

sun was behind clouds and<br />

the wind blew snow off the ice<br />

upon which Francisco Franco’s<br />

army conscripts were being<br />

obliged to learn the science<br />

and art of skiing. They were<br />

beginners, of course, and their<br />

equipment primitive. They<br />

stumbled and got snow down<br />

the necks of wool uniforms so<br />

manifestly uncomfortable that<br />

they made me itch just looking<br />

at them. That day we watched<br />

grown men cry, and Dick at<br />

dinner couldn’t shut up about<br />

the karma of it – here was the<br />

undisguised face of dictatorship,<br />

inflicting arbitrary misery,<br />

unable to stand on its feet, let<br />

alone execute a parallel turn.<br />

We were sharing a room at<br />

a parador on the mountain, and<br />

immediately after dinner Dick<br />

went to bed, determined to be<br />

up and at ’em at first light. I did<br />

not go early to bed. I went to<br />

the bar and drank much more<br />

Fundador (por favor) than I<br />

needed. I met some Aussies at<br />

the bar, two young women, and<br />

a sullen young man. I decided<br />

that I was charming, and as<br />

long as I paid for the brandy –<br />

mine and the two young<br />

women’s – they agreed that I<br />

was charming. Even hilarious.<br />

I told of the alpine legionnaires<br />

under the command of el generalissimo,<br />

Caudillo de España,<br />

por la gracia de Dios. We sang<br />

songs. We drank more brandy.<br />

And then I heard from across<br />

the lobby a thunderous voice:<br />

“Wolff! Geoffrey Wolff! You<br />

come to bed right this minute!”<br />

Our diplomat was approaching<br />

fast to take me by the ear.<br />

He was wearing pajamas. These<br />

were cotton flannel pajamas,<br />

their dominant color mustard,<br />

or maybe it was honey. Memory<br />

assures me that printed on<br />

those pajamas were teddy bears.<br />

I must misremember that<br />

detail, don’t you think? I do not<br />

misremember that Ambassador<br />

Holbrooke was in dictator mode,<br />

and that his every wish was my<br />

command, and that I wouldn’t<br />

have had it any other way.<br />

By Geoffrey Wolff


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 9<br />

© nora feller/Getty Images<br />

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

AT their wedding on MAY 1, 1995<br />

Among those whom I like or admire,<br />

I can find no common denominator,<br />

but among those whom I love, I can:<br />

all of them make me laugh.<br />

w. h. auden


10 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Beneath the Bluster<br />

Holbrooke’s aggressive demeanor belied a deep compassion for humanity<br />

© Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis<br />

at the office, NEW YORK CITY, <strong>20</strong>09<br />

I<br />

worked for Henry<br />

Kissinger at the State<br />

Department from 1973–<br />

1977 and met Richard in 1977<br />

when he came in to serve in<br />

the Carter administration. We<br />

were just acquaintances then,<br />

but I got to know him better<br />

in Berlin, where my husband<br />

was the US ambassador from<br />

1985–1987 and where we maintain<br />

close ties.<br />

Richard became the ambassador<br />

in 1993, not long after<br />

the fall of the Berlin Wall and<br />

reunification. He was not considered<br />

a German scholar or<br />

even a European expert, but the<br />

fact that he became a very successful<br />

ambassador to Germany<br />

and then assistant secretary<br />

for European affairs did not<br />

surprise me at all. Richard<br />

always had a knack of knowing<br />

what he did not know and either<br />

staying away from it (i.e., the<br />

Middle East) or learning what<br />

he needed to know. So, you can<br />

imagine my shock, some years<br />

later, when he proposed the<br />

idea of the American Academy<br />

in Berlin.<br />

It was a very Holbrooke idea,<br />

replacing a military institution<br />

with an institute of culture,<br />

and it wasn’t easy to raise the<br />

money for yet another German/<br />

American institution. But he<br />

We stand face-to-face<br />

with the terrible question<br />

of evil and do not even<br />

know what is before us,<br />

let alone what to pit<br />

against it.<br />

carl jung


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 11<br />

was never one to be deterred,<br />

and we did it by brute force.<br />

Henry Kissinger liked to say<br />

about him, “If Richard calls you<br />

and asks you for something,<br />

just say yes. If you say no, you<br />

will eventually get to yes, but<br />

the journey will be very painful.”<br />

Richard was exceptionally<br />

bright and strategic. He<br />

would always place himself<br />

in the right place at the right<br />

time. You couldn’t be in his<br />

presence without marveling<br />

at how he could think outside<br />

the box. Shortly after he was<br />

named the special representative<br />

for AfPak, he insisted that<br />

both leaders, Hamid Karzai<br />

and Asif Ali Zardari, come to<br />

Washington together. He would<br />

not let them come separately.<br />

And he insisted that all of the<br />

cabinet-level meetings take<br />

place together as well. He was<br />

a big believer in civil society<br />

and institutions that could help<br />

these countries get on their<br />

feet, but he told me many times<br />

this was the toughest job he’d<br />

ever had. I sensed this summer<br />

that he was down, but Richard<br />

was not one to stay down, and<br />

he was never one to give up.<br />

Ç<br />

He could be very tough, it’s<br />

true. But once you came to<br />

know Richard, you realized<br />

that there was a big heart<br />

underneath the bluster. His<br />

impatience and insensitivity<br />

were often cited, but he actually<br />

cared more deeply about the<br />

human condition than almost<br />

anyone I know. Just ask people<br />

at the Asia Society or Refugees<br />

International, to name a few<br />

of the ngos that he helped<br />

establish or lent his considerable<br />

skill to.<br />

I don’t know of anyone else<br />

who could traverse so many different<br />

strata of people. When<br />

he went into the hospital, the<br />

calls were coming in from<br />

President Bill Clinton, Mick<br />

Jagger, and President Obama,<br />

and Hillary Clinton was there<br />

at his bedside. He could have<br />

friendships with all of these<br />

very different people and yet<br />

love them all and appreciate<br />

them all in their own way. And<br />

therefore his network became<br />

probably the most remarkable<br />

of anyone I have ever known.<br />

He loved knitting this whole<br />

patchwork together, and he did<br />

it expertly.<br />

On the night of December 13,<br />

while I was at the hospital, I<br />

looked around at his very<br />

youthful staff, and they were<br />

devastated, to the person. He<br />

had assembled the best and the<br />

brightest; these are kids in their<br />

<strong>20</strong>s and 30s. He was a wonderful<br />

mentor and relished the role.<br />

I was struck watching him<br />

on television one morning<br />

when he referenced Mika<br />

Brzezinski’s dad, Willie Geist’s<br />

dad, and Mark Halperin’s<br />

father. He knew the fathers,<br />

and now he knew the sons and<br />

daughters. Richard died before<br />

his time, but the mark he left<br />

on many, many institutions<br />

will be felt for years and decades<br />

to come. He will be sorely<br />

missed and never replaced in<br />

our hearts.<br />

By Gahl Hodges Burt<br />

This article first appeared in<br />

Foreign Policy online.<br />

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12 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Like a Western<br />

People like him just aren’t made any more<br />

Goodbye drinks in<br />

the Residence: after<br />

a mere nine months<br />

as ambassador to Germany,<br />

Richard Holbrooke was leaving<br />

in 1994 to head the European<br />

desk at the State Department.<br />

Dick took a small wooden figure<br />

with a bent head and bound<br />

hands from a glass case. It had<br />

been carved in a concentration<br />

camp by a Bosniac with a<br />

piece of glass and thrust into<br />

Holbrooke’s hands: “Please take<br />

this home. Tell America what is<br />

happening to us here.”<br />

This figure was a legacy. The<br />

European desk became the<br />

command post of Balkan policy,<br />

and Holbrooke, the “bulldozer,”<br />

became the conqueror of<br />

Slobodan Milosevic. This was<br />

not an exchange of diplomatic<br />

niceties; it was a showdown,<br />

something out of a Western.<br />

As Holbrooke wrote in his<br />

memoir of the Bosnian conflict,<br />

To End a War: “The Serbs talk<br />

big, but if you aim a pistol at<br />

them, they’re nothing but little<br />

troublemakers.”<br />

In one of the endless talks<br />

with Milosevic, Holbrooke<br />

set up a field telephone that<br />

connected him with the<br />

commander of un troops in<br />

Sarajevo. In another duel, the<br />

weapon of choice was alcohol.<br />

The Serb leader wanted to disable<br />

Holbrooke by making him<br />

drunk. “Therefore, we decided<br />

we would refuse drinks until<br />

we had reached a partial solution.”<br />

At the Dayton Air Force<br />

base, where, in 1995 the war<br />

was halted, Holbrooke placed<br />

the Serb delegation next to a<br />

cruise missile, the most potent<br />

symbol of American military<br />

might.<br />

L<br />

It was in Dayton that<br />

Holbrooke carved out a place<br />

for himself in the history<br />

books, even though in 1999<br />

cruise missiles were ultimately<br />

deployed during the war in<br />

Kosovo – for 78 days. The<br />

Balkans, synonymous with<br />

war until the last year of the<br />

twentieth century, had finally<br />

achieved peace. Yet a second<br />

triumph, as Obama’s man for<br />

Afghanistan and Pakistan, was<br />

not granted to Holbrooke. On<br />

December 14, <strong>20</strong>10 he died,<br />

69 years old, in Washington,<br />

after a twenty-hour emergency<br />

operation on a torn aorta.<br />

They don’t make people<br />

like Holbrooke any more, even<br />

less so in Germany, where a<br />

civil servant remains a civil<br />

servant until they turn 65. It is<br />

almost impossible to list all of<br />

Holbrooke’s jobs: junior diplomat<br />

(at 21) in Vietnam, Peace<br />

Corps director in Morocco,<br />

editor of Foreign Policy, head of<br />

the East Asia desk at the State<br />

Department, ambassador to<br />

Germany, Balkan negotiator,<br />

author, banker, ambassador<br />

to the United Nations. When<br />

Obama named Holbrooke as<br />

special representative to AfPak,<br />

Holbrooke was working on<br />

Wall Street. He served four US<br />

presidents: Johnson, Carter,<br />

Clinton, and Obama.<br />

© Amaerican Academy Archive photograph<br />

richard holbrooke AdDRESSES an audience in MUNICH, <strong>20</strong>07


VAT_39L_300_Energiemix_210x135 1 23.03.11 15:43<br />

<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 13<br />

He would have preferred to<br />

become a journalist. One of<br />

our colleagues called him a<br />

“frustrated foreign correspondent”;<br />

“he thinks like a journalist,<br />

he’s as stubborn as a journalist.”<br />

A friend, Frank Wisner,<br />

said: “He knew instinctively<br />

how to feed a reporter, he knew<br />

how to engage the press in<br />

order to get his agenda passed.”<br />

Talking with this wannabe<br />

journalist was not easy.<br />

Sometimes he gave a commentary<br />

on a football match on<br />

TV until the journalist, clearly<br />

unnerved, shut down his laptop.<br />

Our last talk, last year, took<br />

place in the kitchen of his New<br />

York apartment. Half of the talk<br />

was about Afghanistan, the<br />

other half about a giant panettone,<br />

a Christmas present to<br />

his wife, Kati Marton. The<br />

problem was: how to cover up<br />

the traces of nibbling on the<br />

panettone, since his wife had<br />

put him on a strict diet? While<br />

we didn’t solve the strategic<br />

problem of Afghanistan, we did<br />

achieve a tactical victory with<br />

the cake: we simply made it<br />

disappear.<br />

Holbrooke was larger than<br />

life – physically as well as<br />

intellectually. This bulldozer<br />

was driven, on the one hand,<br />

by unlimited ambition and<br />

energy and, on the other hand,<br />

braked by a sensitivity when he<br />

realized that he had gone too<br />

far. He then overwhelmed his<br />

friends and enemies with just<br />

as much charm and humor. For<br />

that reason, his friends loved<br />

him and his enemies forgave<br />

him; for that reason, the White<br />

House always called on him.<br />

Puffed-up sail, immense ego.<br />

It was just these undiplomatic<br />

qualities that gave him an inexhaustible<br />

stubbornness, which<br />

made him one of the most brilliant<br />

practioners of foreign policy<br />

in American history. Nobody<br />

expressed it as well as Henry<br />

Kissinger: “If Richard asks you<br />

something, just say yes. If you<br />

say no, you’ll eventually get<br />

to yes, but the journey will be<br />

very painful.” With Milosevic,<br />

Holbrooke just sat put: seven<br />

hours, twelve hours, in the end,<br />

fifty hours, until he had driven<br />

him mad.<br />

Holbrooke worked with<br />

Kissinger to deliver a unique<br />

success story, one that belongs<br />

to “cultural diplomacy.” Shortly<br />

before Holbrooke left Bonn,<br />

in 1994, he gathered his own<br />

“Henry,” former German president<br />

Weizsäcker, and a small<br />

group of committed friends<br />

to whom German-American<br />

relations were dear at Berlin’s<br />

Hotel Kempinski. These were<br />

the founding members of the<br />

American Academy, without<br />

which Berlin’s cultural fabric<br />

cannot be imagined. He also<br />

brought in the first six million<br />

dollars, donated by the family<br />

of New York German-Jewish<br />

banker Hans Arnhold. Without<br />

Holbrooke this intellectual<br />

lighthouse would never have<br />

been born.<br />

Let us quote, in closing,<br />

Hillary Clinton: “Richard<br />

helped shape our history,<br />

manage our perilous present,<br />

and secure our future.”<br />

The Washington Post called<br />

Holbrooke a “literary figure.”<br />

Just before he was anesthetized<br />

at George Washington<br />

University Hospital, he is<br />

supposed to have whispered<br />

to his Pakistani surgeon:<br />

“You must stop this war in<br />

Afghanistan.”<br />

By Josef Joffe<br />

This obituary was originally<br />

published in Die Zeit on<br />

December 15, <strong>20</strong>10.<br />

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14 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

A Man and His Métier<br />

Investment banking was not his first love, nor his second, third, or fourth<br />

The date was Friday,<br />

September 9, 1993. The<br />

Berlin Brigade of the<br />

US Army had left Berlin for<br />

the last time the day before<br />

with a Grosser Zapfenstreich<br />

ceremony at the Brandenburg<br />

Gate. A New Traditions<br />

Conference was being held at<br />

the Kronprinzenpalais, followed<br />

by a gala dinner sponsored<br />

by Deutsche Bank. The<br />

name of the US ambassador<br />

to Germany was Richard<br />

Holbrooke.<br />

I had known Richard for several<br />

years, not in his capacity as<br />

a diplomat but in that of a businessman;<br />

he was a businessman<br />

whenever the Democrats<br />

were out of power. During<br />

the Reagan administration he<br />

worked for Lehman Brothers.<br />

Investment banking was clearly<br />

not his first love, and probably<br />

not his second, third, or fourth<br />

love either, but he graciously<br />

entertained clients such as<br />

me at expensive New York<br />

restaurants.<br />

But now, with Bill Clinton<br />

as president, he was back in<br />

his métier. He was considered<br />

an Asia expert and reportedly<br />

wanted to be named ambassador<br />

to Japan. But President<br />

Clinton appointed him to Bonn<br />

instead. If Richard was disappointed,<br />

he didn’t show it but<br />

instead threw himself into this<br />

unfamiliar assignment with<br />

typical Holbrooke abandon.<br />

His parents had left Hamburg<br />

because of the Nazis, and his<br />

mother had not set foot on<br />

German soil since. When she<br />

heard about Richard’s new<br />

job, she threw up her arms in<br />

disgust and exclaimed: “Auch<br />

das noch!”<br />

Getting back to the dinner<br />

on September 9, 1993. During<br />

dessert Richard went around<br />

the room and asked several<br />

of us to go to the next room,<br />

which served as a messy staging<br />

area for the dinner. He<br />

spoke with great passion about<br />

the close links between the<br />

US and West Berlin since the<br />

end of World War II. America<br />

had saved West Berlin repeatedly<br />

from falling into Russian<br />

hands, and Berliners knew this.<br />

They loved America and what<br />

it stood for. He told us that this<br />

connection shouldn’t just suddenly<br />

end, and that we should<br />

form an institution in Berlin for<br />

German and American intellectuals<br />

and leading citizens<br />

to meet and continue their<br />

special relationship. He called<br />

it “The American Academy in<br />

Berlin.” All of us mumbled our<br />

agreement to join the board, or<br />

at least we didn’t say no. The<br />

whole thing lasted about ten<br />

minutes.<br />

The next day, a Saturday,<br />

at 11 am, those of us still in<br />

Berlin held a constituting board<br />

meeting, and the American<br />

Academy in Berlin was officially<br />

born. We then dispersed in all<br />

directions.<br />

ã<br />

Richard didn’t stay long as<br />

ambassador to Germany. The<br />

Balkans beckoned, and his<br />

greatest accomplishment came<br />

later with the successful conclusion<br />

of the Dayton Peace talks.<br />

Making the American Academy<br />

in Berlin a reality had to wait.<br />

When the Republicans were<br />

back in power, Richard now had<br />

several new activities besides<br />

investment banking. Perhaps<br />

the one he enjoyed the most<br />

was chairing the American<br />

Academy in Berlin. A villa<br />

was obtained from the city of<br />

Berlin, and it soon had a new<br />

name: Hans Arnhold Center,<br />

thanks to a generous initial gift<br />

by Stephen and Anne-Maria<br />

Kellen, which restored the<br />

villa for its intended use. As<br />

for Richard’s mother, she was<br />

finally persuaded to come for<br />

a return visit to Germany. I<br />

remember her sitting graciously<br />

at a dinner in Berlin, looking<br />

happy and engaged and having<br />

found some peace in encountering<br />

the new Germany. She<br />

struck me as a symbol of the<br />

closing of the tortured twentieth<br />

century.<br />

I saw Richard for the last<br />

time on November 8 of last year,<br />

at our board dinner, hosted<br />

by Norman Pearlstine at the<br />

Beacon Restaurant in New York.<br />

He overheard a conversation I<br />

had with Jim Wolfensohn about<br />

Carnegie Hall. Wolfensohn<br />

told me that his proudest<br />

accomplishment and legacy<br />

was not the work he had done<br />

leading the World Bank but the<br />

significant role he had played in<br />

saving Carnegie Hall from the<br />

wrecking ball. Richard took me<br />

aside and said: “The way Jim<br />

feels about Carnegie Hall is the<br />

way I feel about the American<br />

Academy.” Those were the last<br />

words he spoke to me.<br />

By Karl M. von der Heyden<br />

If Only Holbrooke Had Been in the Balkans in 1914<br />

From the very beginning<br />

I was impressed<br />

by Richard’s fierce intelligence<br />

and burning ambition<br />

to understand and, if possible,<br />

change the world. We first met<br />

in 1969 in Princeton: both of us<br />

were opposed to the Vietnam<br />

War, which we thought was<br />

injurious to our national interests.<br />

He was 29 at the time<br />

(I was somewhat older), but<br />

I don’t think the gap in our<br />

ages ever made any difference.<br />

We thought of each other as<br />

contemporaries.<br />

The following year, for a<br />

variety of personal reasons, he<br />

invited me and my family to<br />

visit him in Morocco, where<br />

he had been made head of the<br />

Peace Corps. I came to admire<br />

more deeply his personality,<br />

the rapidity of his learning, his<br />

highly nuanced Francophilia<br />

(he was fluent in the language),<br />

and the way he got on with<br />

Peace Corps volunteers and<br />

with the Moroccan political<br />

leadership. I thought of him<br />

as an ideal American proconsul.<br />

The combination of his<br />

profound knowledge and his<br />

extraordinary analytical skill<br />

was accompanied by a tactical<br />

energy and an ability to see not<br />

only all aspects of a given situation,<br />

but all of its ramifications<br />

as well: a man of that talent<br />

and ambition doesn’t remain<br />

director of the Peace Corps in<br />

Morocco for very long.<br />

He was wonderfully open and at<br />

peace in Morocco, though. We<br />

spent our days talking about<br />

writing, which was a passion of<br />

his – though it was never more<br />

important for him than action.<br />

He understood, already in 1970,<br />

that the success of our foreign<br />

policy depended on building<br />

relationships – not just between<br />

countries, but between people.<br />

He was capable of admiration<br />

of other people, and he was a<br />

quick judge of human beings.


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 15<br />

© Orjan F. EllingvAG/Corbis<br />

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

REHABILITATION in may <strong>20</strong>05. RICHARD HOLBROOKE, chairman of the ASIA SOCIETY, was moderator<br />

He had a particularly intuitive<br />

grasp of the distinction<br />

between capable and less capable<br />

colleagues and didn’t always<br />

disguise his views.<br />

ï<br />

Almost immediately upon his<br />

nomination as ambassador<br />

to Germany in 1993 he got in<br />

touch with me and asked me<br />

to become his senior advisor<br />

in Bonn. We arrived there<br />

at the same time in October<br />

1993. He quickly came to be<br />

perceived as quintessentially<br />

American in his openness, his<br />

energy, and his controlled candor.<br />

Europeans immediately<br />

understood him to be one of the<br />

most appealing, constructive<br />

American diplomats. I doubt<br />

that nato’s expansion would<br />

have happened had he not<br />

seized the initiative in those<br />

years. Later, of course, he went<br />

to the Balkans to devote his considerable<br />

energies to stopping<br />

a war.<br />

Once, at a celebratory occasion<br />

in Richard’s honor, on<br />

November 11, <strong>20</strong>04, by chance<br />

an anniversary of the Great<br />

War’s Armistice Day, I speculated<br />

about what might have<br />

happened if Holbrooke as a<br />

young statesman might have<br />

been in Europe in the summer<br />

of 1914:<br />

He would have gone on alert as<br />

soon as the Austrian archduke<br />

was assassinated in Sarajevo<br />

on June 28, 1914. When he<br />

first heard rumors of the<br />

Austrian ultimatum on Serbia,<br />

he would have jumped on the<br />

Orient Express and gone to<br />

Belgrade. There he would have<br />

told the Serbs: “For God’s sake,<br />

accept the ultimatum. Cheat<br />

later.” Before adding sotto voce,<br />

“I have in my pocket evidence<br />

of your complicity in the crime<br />

at Sarajevo.”<br />

He then would have been on<br />

his way to Vienna: “You’ll<br />

destroy your multi-national<br />

empire, already attainted, if<br />

you allow the Germans to push<br />

you into war. Don’t do it.” On<br />

to Berlin: “You’re going to risk<br />

your growing strength, your<br />

clear ascendancy, by linking<br />

yourself to a living corpse,<br />

the Austrian Empire? For<br />

a Habsburg – your ancient<br />

enemy?” On to St. Petersburg:<br />

“Have you learned nothing from<br />

1905? Another war, another<br />

revolution?” He then would<br />

have come to London, threw<br />

his arms around David Lloyd<br />

George and said, “David, you<br />

mustn’t go to war. All your<br />

social reforms will perish and<br />

some future historian will write<br />

a book about The Strange<br />

Death of Liberal England.”<br />

Yes, the Great War could have<br />

been averted if only Richard<br />

Holbrooke had been around.<br />

Stretching back to those days<br />

in Morocco, to the last time<br />

I saw him, at a recent meeting<br />

at a dinner for the American<br />

Academy in Berlin (which<br />

he founded and which we may<br />

regard as his greatest lasting<br />

legacy: symbol and reality of<br />

the civilian-cultural outreach of<br />

the United States), he remained<br />

a genuine, quiet, deep-down<br />

patriot, ever concerned with the<br />

fate of the United States. His<br />

death is a horror and a loss<br />

to me of a friend, and of a much,<br />

much admired contemporary.<br />

It is a loss to the nation of a<br />

talent that had earned worldwide<br />

recognition, a talent<br />

that could have still done so<br />

much for us.<br />

By Fritz Stern<br />

This article first appeared in<br />

Foreign Policy online.


16 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

The House That Holbrooke Built<br />

Divining Berlin as a future capital of culture and influence<br />

I<br />

think I was the first<br />

to have the Holbrooke<br />

Distinguished Visitorship<br />

at the American Academy in<br />

Berlin. It was a great honor, and<br />

it gave me enormous pleasure<br />

because Richard was a very<br />

old friend.<br />

We met in Saigon in early<br />

1966, when Richard was<br />

working as an assistant to<br />

Ambassador Cabot Lodge, and I<br />

was a fledging journalist. I will<br />

never forget the bicycle trip we<br />

took around the city one Sunday,<br />

Richard analyzing local politics<br />

as we made our way through<br />

the dense traffic of cyclo-pousses,<br />

motor scooters, ancient Frenchmade<br />

taxis, motorcycles, and<br />

heavy trucks. I was terrified.<br />

There were no stoplights<br />

and apparently no way to tell<br />

which side had the right of way<br />

at intersections. But Richard<br />

had figured out that Saigon<br />

drivers had a common understanding,<br />

and that there was an<br />

underlying order to the traffic.<br />

So we cycled on unharmed,<br />

he hardly drawing a breath in<br />

his disquisition.<br />

K<br />

I mention this because Richard,<br />

while always working the interests<br />

of his country, had fine<br />

antennae for the cultural patterns<br />

of the countries in which<br />

he served.<br />

When the American forces<br />

left Berlin, Richard felt they<br />

shouldn’t leave an absence –<br />

that the city should have some<br />

token of the continuing importance<br />

of US-German relations.<br />

While some might have chosen<br />

a monument, he, divining that<br />

Berlin would become one of<br />

the great cultural centers in<br />

Germany, thought to create the<br />

American Academy in Berlin.<br />

And Richard didn’t just have the<br />

idea. With all his other responsibilities,<br />

he worked very hard<br />

to make it a reality. When I had<br />

the privilege of a two-week stay<br />

at the Academy in <strong>20</strong>06, I was<br />

thrilled to see that the Academy<br />

was all that he had envisioned:<br />

a major center for intellectual<br />

and artistic exchange – and one<br />

with wonderful food.<br />

If I had any say in it, I would<br />

rename the institution in his<br />

honor. Were he still with us, I<br />

would have many facetious suggestions,<br />

such as the Holbrooke<br />

Home for Wayward Americans,<br />

but, unbelievably, he is not.<br />

By Frances Fitzgerald<br />

© Hornischer<br />

THe AMERICAN academy in berlin board of trustees and spring <strong>20</strong>07 fellows


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 17<br />

A Last Breakfast<br />

The Academy’s president and CEO recalls his final meeting with the Academy’s founder<br />

Richard Holbrooke<br />

was a founder of the<br />

American Academy in<br />

Berlin and, until his death in<br />

December, one of its proudest<br />

patrons.<br />

Together with Henry<br />

Kissinger and former German<br />

President Richard von<br />

Weizsäcker, Richard announced<br />

the creation of the Academy<br />

on September 9, 1994, one day<br />

after the US military withdrew<br />

its troops from Germany’s<br />

capital. He was then serving<br />

as America’s ambassador to<br />

Germany, having supervised<br />

the embassy’s recent move from<br />

Bonn to Berlin.<br />

Our mission statement<br />

embodies Richard’s belief that a<br />

cultural institution committed<br />

to scholarship and public policy<br />

could “foster greater understanding<br />

and dialogue between<br />

the people of the United States<br />

and the people of Germany<br />

through its presence in Berlin,<br />

a city with which the United<br />

States should maintain its<br />

unique cultural, social, political,<br />

and historical links.”<br />

â<br />

© <strong>20</strong>03 Mike Minehan<br />

In the years following the<br />

Academy’s creation, Richard<br />

served as our chairman when<br />

he wasn’t in government – as<br />

an assistant secretary of state,<br />

as US ambassador to the United<br />

Nations, and, most recently,<br />

as President Obama’s special<br />

representative for Afghanistan<br />

and Pakistan.<br />

I last saw Richard in<br />

November <strong>20</strong>10. Over breakfast<br />

at Washington’s Four Seasons<br />

hotel we spoke somberly<br />

about America’s challenges in<br />

Pakistan and Afghanistan. He<br />

told me despite the difficulty<br />

of his assignment and the wearying<br />

schedule that came with<br />

the job, he would stay in government<br />

so long as President<br />

AMERICAN ACADEMY in BERLIN BOARD MEETING luncheon, MAY 5, <strong>20</strong>03<br />

Obama and Secretary of State<br />

Hillary Rodham Clinton<br />

required his services.<br />

It was only when our conversation<br />

shifted to the Academy<br />

that his spirits brightened.<br />

He told me of his pride in the<br />

Academy, saying that his expectations<br />

had been high and that<br />

the Academy had exceeded all<br />

of them. He also revealed his<br />

desire to return to the Academy<br />

when his latest stint in government<br />

ended.<br />

While Richard’s death has<br />

deprived of us his leadership,<br />

the Academy remains the beneficiary<br />

of his vision, committed<br />

to building on that vision in<br />

the years to come.<br />

By Norman Pearlstine


18 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

To Move the World<br />

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

Dear Kati –<br />

I read somewhere that<br />

getting old means<br />

becoming increasingly a foreigner<br />

in one’s own country.<br />

The companions of one’s youth<br />

disappear one by one and those<br />

that remain are the product of<br />

different impulses.<br />

Richard and I took our<br />

impetus from the early Sixties<br />

when for a moment hope and<br />

possibility seemed conjoined<br />

for America. We met in that<br />

distillation of disillusionment<br />

which was the Vietnam conflict.<br />

Richard had gone there as a foreign<br />

service officer, a so-called<br />

provincial reporter, I as consultant<br />

to Ambassador Lodge.<br />

We both found that our goals<br />

were not fulfillable but also<br />

that the values that brought us<br />

to Indochina remained valid. I<br />

watched a Republic Day parade<br />

from the balcony in Richard’s<br />

apartment together with him –<br />

both saddened by the probable<br />

futility of what we were watching<br />

but committed to draw the<br />

lessons which would prevent<br />

comparable tragedies.<br />

Richard’s life was a testimony<br />

to that quest. Though<br />

we acted on opposite sides of<br />

our political contests I always<br />

considered Richard the most<br />

talented and the most relevant<br />

thinker on his side of the political<br />

dividing lines. On all the big<br />

issues of the day Richard saw a<br />

challenge not an obstacle. He<br />

did me the honor in September<br />

to invite me to meet with his<br />

staff. Those dedicated men<br />

and women elevated a forlorn<br />

problem into a moral adventure.<br />

That they did it – physically in<br />

the very fringes of the State<br />

Department – at a moment<br />

that required rededication is<br />

a tribute to Richard’s leadership.<br />

Tales are told about his<br />

ambitiousness – many of them<br />

true. But he was above all ambitious<br />

to do, not to be. So at a<br />

moment when America was at<br />

a loss about its strategy Richard<br />

and his team were elaborating<br />

a direction that has a chance of<br />

surviving the military phase.<br />

Of course the American<br />

Academy in Berlin will stand<br />

as a lasting tribute to Richard’s<br />

vision and consistent application.<br />

I contributed my name,<br />

Richard the dedication and<br />

imagination that turned the<br />

Academy into a permanent<br />

fixture of transatlantic relations,<br />

fulfilling the vision of an<br />

American presence in Berlin<br />

long after the American troops<br />

had left.<br />

Richard and I in those long<br />

ago days on Martha’s Vineyard<br />

would reflect how the world<br />

would evolve. We stayed in<br />

touch in the decades since<br />

and he leaves a big hole in our<br />

nation’s life.<br />

You of course were a principal<br />

enabler; you gave him the<br />

emotional security and the<br />

Archimedean point from which<br />

he could try to move the world.<br />

And in a way he achieved his<br />

ultimate goal: in his death he<br />

became a unifier who brought<br />

together all factions in the<br />

appreciation of a dedicated life.<br />

Warm regards,<br />

Henry


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 19<br />

DOD photo by US Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley<br />

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

RICHARD HOLBROOKE at the JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER for PERFORMING ARTS in WASHINGTON, DC, January 14, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Not a Quiet American<br />

Richard Holbrooke’s<br />

legacy goes well<br />

beyond the critical<br />

role he played in bringing a<br />

decade of fragile peace in the<br />

Balkans, welcoming a reunified<br />

Germany in an expanding<br />

nato, and normalizing relations<br />

with China. He also leaves<br />

a vast, multigenerational, intercontinental<br />

network of friends.<br />

Secretary of State Hillary<br />

Rodham Clinton spoke for many<br />

when she said . . . that she had<br />

never so admired, so depended<br />

on, and so cared for someone<br />

who drove her so crazy so often.<br />

Richard, like each of us, was<br />

a package of complicated, not<br />

always harmonious, qualities.<br />

But in his case, the combination<br />

allowed him to epitomize<br />

the very best of what a single<br />

American can do to improve a<br />

dangerous world.<br />

The obituaries are filled with<br />

words not always associated<br />

with eulogies: brash, aggressive,<br />

unyielding, exhausting. But<br />

put those together with effective,<br />

pragmatic, purpose-driven,<br />

indefatigable, and idealistic,<br />

and they’re redolent of our<br />

national character. Not the Ugly<br />

American, and certainly not the<br />

Quiet American, but the Can-<br />

Do, Must-Do, Get-the-Hell-Outof-My-Way<br />

American. Larry<br />

Summers, who knew Richard<br />

well, captured the sum of his<br />

parts in a single phrase: “the<br />

audacity of determination.” . . .<br />

Sometimes his style aroused<br />

resistance and resentment. But<br />

often, he was so solidly grounded<br />

in his command of the facts,<br />

so rigorous in his logic, and so<br />

compelling in the essence of<br />

his position that any sensible<br />

target of his browbeating would<br />

have the good sense to discount<br />

the hyperbole and accept the<br />

force of his argument. And if<br />

the ensuing debate exposed<br />

a weakness in that argument,<br />

he’d listen, adjust, and press<br />

ahead for a solution to the problem<br />

at hand.<br />

A voracious reader (and writer),<br />

Richard was never bashful<br />

about enlisting history on his<br />

side – or, for that matter, anticipating<br />

what future historians<br />

would say. In the 1990s, during<br />

high-stress moments in the<br />

Situation Room, the Cabinet<br />

room, or the Oval Office,<br />

Richard would lecture those<br />

present on how future generations<br />

would not forgive us if we<br />

didn’t take decisive action to<br />

stop the latest outrage in the<br />

former Yugoslavia, in Africa, or<br />

in Southeast Asia. Eyes might<br />

roll, but the net effect was often<br />

agreement around the table, led<br />

by President Bill Clinton. As a<br />

result, talk would turn to action<br />

– an alchemy of which Richard<br />

was a master.<br />

Nothing pleased him more<br />

than engaging the next generation.<br />

As special representative<br />

for Afghanistan and Pakistan,<br />

he recruited up-and-coming<br />

diplomats, policymakers, aid<br />

specialists, intelligence analysts,<br />

and military officers<br />

to form a team of non-rivals<br />

unparalleled in the quality<br />

and diversity of its expertise<br />

and skill. We must hope that<br />

President Obama and Secretary<br />

Clinton find a way to maintain<br />

this sterling example of how<br />

government ought to work<br />

despite the loss of its captain.<br />

On a busy day some months<br />

ago, he was introduced to a<br />

14-year-old girl who mentioned<br />

that she had some sense of what<br />

he was doing because she had<br />

read The Kite Runner, a novel<br />

set in Kabul. Richard fixed his<br />

eyes on her and conducted a<br />

lively conversation with her for<br />

<strong>20</strong> minutes. Never mind if he<br />

was late to his next meeting.<br />

He had found someone who<br />

understood what was at stake in<br />

his last mission – and someone<br />

whose world is the better for all<br />

he accomplished.<br />

By Strobe Talbott<br />

This article is excerpted<br />

from the Washington<br />

Post, where it appeared on<br />

December 15, <strong>20</strong>10.


<strong>20</strong> | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

© Bettman/Corbis<br />

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

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


Theory Versus Fact<br />

Scenes from a diplomatic career<br />

<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 21<br />

Iconducted an oncamera<br />

interview with<br />

Richard Holbrooke at Brown<br />

University, my home institution<br />

and his alma mater (’62). At<br />

the time a “professor-at-large”<br />

at Brown, Holbrooke was a<br />

natural choice for our documentary<br />

film, Human Terrain.<br />

“Winning hearts and minds”<br />

was Holbrooke’s first mission<br />

when he went to Vietnam as a<br />

member of the Foreign Service<br />

in 1963; now it was part of a<br />

controversial program in Iraq<br />

and Afghanistan we were<br />

investigating.<br />

Other discomforting parallels<br />

emerged in the course of<br />

the interview. Holbrooke had<br />

lost three close colleagues<br />

when, en route to negotiations<br />

in Sarajevo, their armored<br />

personnel carrier plunged off<br />

the side of a mountain. We<br />

were struggling with the loss<br />

of a colleague and collaborator,<br />

Michael Bhatia (Brown, ’99),<br />

after his Humvee hit an ied on<br />

the way to an inter-tribal negotiation<br />

in Afghanistan.<br />

Holbrooke apologized for<br />

having to leave his mobile<br />

phone on during our interview:<br />

he was waiting for “a very<br />

important call.” He took three<br />

calls; judging by his mood and<br />

the candor of his remarks, I’d<br />

say he didn’t get the one he had<br />

hoped for.<br />

The interview lasted well<br />

over an hour, though it was<br />

scheduled for just fifteen minutes.<br />

Holbrooke spoke reflectively<br />

and eloquently on the use<br />

and abuse of historical analogies,<br />

the role of academics in<br />

foreign policy, and the continuing<br />

importance of public service.<br />

Below are some excerpts<br />

from the uncut interview.<br />

On Holbrooke’s early<br />

days as foreign service<br />

officer in Vietnam:<br />

I graduated from Brown in<br />

1962 and entered the foreign<br />

service, and they decided what<br />

they were going to do with me.<br />

. . . Because I was a bachelor,<br />

and very young . . . they decided<br />

to teach me Vietnamese and<br />

send me to Vietnam, and then<br />

from Vietnam I was sent to the<br />

Lower Mekong Delta as a civilian<br />

in the pacification program.<br />

People today would probably<br />

call it “nation building,” a very<br />

misleading phrase. It all happened<br />

kind of serendipitously.<br />

ó<br />

On theory versus<br />

practice in Vietnam and<br />

Afghanistan:<br />

The Michigan State University<br />

teams hired by the US government<br />

went into Vietnam, studied<br />

it carefully, and decided that<br />

it was a village-based society<br />

and the best way to deal with<br />

it was to strengthen villages.<br />

Some people wanted to defend<br />

each village with barbed wires<br />

and bamboo spikes . . . . But<br />

all of this depended not on the<br />

physical idea of defending a<br />

hamlet (they were called strategic<br />

hamlets in those days) [but<br />

rather on] a government that<br />

could provide services, security,<br />

and an ideology worth living for<br />

and risking your life for. And<br />

that all failed, not because the<br />

United States was wrong, but<br />

because the central government<br />

in Vietnam, in Saigon,<br />

was not up to the task. If this<br />

sounds familiar to people, it<br />

echoes exactly what’s happening<br />

in Afghanistan. Nobody<br />

wants the Taliban back – not<br />

nobody, but very few people.<br />

[Most Afghanis] remember the<br />

black years, the brutality, the<br />

abuse of women – I don’t mean<br />

normal abuse, which is bad<br />

enough, I’m talking about killing<br />

women who dared to get an<br />

education, and beating people<br />

who danced, and things like<br />

that – and yet in Afghanistan<br />

today, notwithstanding the<br />

hatred of the Taliban, you have<br />

a very major issue: . . . the government<br />

is not providing any of<br />

the services.<br />

Jerry Hickey . . . wrote a<br />

book called Village in Vietnam,<br />

which was one of the early<br />

books I studied, and . . . Sam<br />

Popkin wrote a book called<br />

The Rational Peasant – these<br />

were terrific books but they<br />

didn’t change the basic fact,<br />

which was that no matter<br />

how conceptually sound your<br />

theory was, it would rise or fall<br />

on the strength of the central<br />

government in Saigon. It’s the<br />

government’s ability to protect<br />

the people, deliver services,<br />

and not be corrupt, and on that<br />

score the government of Ngo<br />

Dinh Diem failed, and then the<br />

successor governments, the<br />

military governments, more or<br />

less failed. And meanwhile the<br />

Viet Cong, although they were<br />

brutal, had a clear ideology, and<br />

that ideology was based on their<br />

co-opting the idea of nationalism.<br />

Even though they were<br />

communists from the North,<br />

directed from the North, they<br />

presented themselves as indigenous,<br />

nationalist patriots, to<br />

drive the Americans out.<br />

Again, this sounds familiar<br />

to anyone who’s watching<br />

Afghanistan today. Although<br />

the terrain is completely different,<br />

the culture is completely<br />

different, and the technologies<br />

have changed a lot, the core<br />

equation remains the same,<br />

and the biggest problem for the<br />

United States in fighting wars<br />

like Vietnam and Afghanistan<br />

is that they risk becoming the<br />

cause around which opposition<br />

rallies. Their very presence<br />

becomes a problem. That’s<br />

what happened in many areas,<br />

and in every case – South<br />

Vietnam, Afghanistan – the<br />

majority of the people wanted<br />

the American goals to succeed<br />

but they did not have enough<br />

strength, [nor the] security to<br />

stand up to the communists<br />

in Vietnam. In the case of<br />

Afghanistan, it’s not too late –<br />

there’s plenty of room to turn<br />

it around: the Taliban are so<br />

unpopular because of their<br />

history. Unlike South Vietnam,<br />

people in Afghanistan know<br />

what the Taliban stand for, and<br />

that is something that can be<br />

worked on.<br />

On comparing Kosovo<br />

and Afghanistan:<br />

Kosovo and Afghanistan have<br />

nothing really in common.<br />

The hatred in Kosovo between<br />

Albanians and Serbs is actually<br />

deeper than anything I’ve<br />

seen in Afghanistan . . . . In<br />

Afghanistan the Taliban are all<br />

Pashtun, and the majority of<br />

Afghans are Pashtun – it’s an<br />

ideological religious struggle.<br />

The methods are brutal, as they<br />

were in Kosovo, but it isn’t a<br />

racial hatred. To put it another<br />

way, there’s more chance of reconciliation<br />

in Afghanistan than<br />

there is in Kosovo; on the other<br />

hand, Afghanistan is much,<br />

much bigger, it’s got other<br />

ethnic groups, it’s complicated,<br />

and let us never forget it is the<br />

fifth poorest country in the<br />

world, the other four being in<br />

Africa. It is an extraordinarily<br />

remote and ancient culture<br />

with proud, deep tribal traditions,<br />

very high illiteracy rates<br />

among men and even higher<br />

among women, so the situations<br />

are quite dissimilar.


22 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

On drawing the line between<br />

humanitarian intervention<br />

and imperialism:<br />

It is a fine line . . . between<br />

humanitarianism and imperialism.<br />

In fact, sometimes a<br />

humanitarian is also an unintentional<br />

imperialist or a neocolonialist,<br />

because he or she<br />

comes from another culture to<br />

bring his or her values and culture<br />

to the place he is going. . . .<br />

Now there’s no easy solution<br />

to this, but . . . if you’re talking<br />

about non-military involvement<br />

(I wouldn’t call it intervention)<br />

there’s always been inner<br />

changes [created by] ngos,<br />

government, business, church<br />

missionaries, missionaries for<br />

secular ideas; it’s always been<br />

that way. What was Marco Polo,<br />

what were the people carrying<br />

ideas? I’m not too troubled<br />

over the semantics here. On<br />

the other hand, it is critically<br />

important that we not intervene,<br />

in the sense of interfere, with<br />

local cultures and traditions.<br />

. . . Now there are some local<br />

traditions not acceptable to<br />

Westerners, female circumcision<br />

is a perfect example; it’s<br />

just an appalling barbaric<br />

thing. While it’s an ancient<br />

tradition, it also happens to<br />

increase the spread of disease,<br />

infant mortality, and female<br />

diseases. I think the world is<br />

right to try to put pressure on<br />

those societies that still practice<br />

it. Similar with slavery, that was<br />

an ancient tradition, which still<br />

exists, there’s twenty or thirty<br />

million modern slaves in the<br />

world, we should do everything<br />

we can to stop that.<br />

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,<br />

But often, in the din of strife,<br />

There rises an unspeakable desire<br />

After the knowledge of our buried life;<br />

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force<br />

In tracking our true, original course;<br />

A longing to inquire<br />

Into the mystery of this heart which beats<br />

So wild, so deep in us – to know<br />

Whence our lives come and where they go.<br />

matthew arnold, “the buried life”<br />

difficult for traditional armies<br />

to figure out. The United States<br />

is grappling with it in Iraq<br />

and Afghanistan, as it did in<br />

Vietnam, with very limited<br />

success. The United States is<br />

powerful enough to seize any<br />

square meter . . . of soil on the<br />

face of the earth . . . because we<br />

have helicopters, we have missiles,<br />

we’re heavily armed. . . .<br />

But you can only hold it as long<br />

as the troops remain there,<br />

and what good is that? They’re<br />

a sitting target. So the issue<br />

becomes what is your goal<br />

and how do you leave something<br />

behind when you withdraw?<br />

. . . When your goal is not<br />

to destroy a national capital, as<br />

in World War II, but to push<br />

your enemy out and then turn<br />

it over to local authorities,<br />

you’re facing a whole different<br />

kind of war.<br />

consequences. Sadaam was<br />

worse than Milosevic, he was<br />

a terrible man, we all know<br />

that, but to do it this way was<br />

beyond reckless. At the same<br />

time, by doing it, we let the<br />

Taliban and especially al-Qaeda<br />

escape into Pakistan, so we<br />

went into Afghanistan to fight<br />

al-Qaeda, not the Taliban. The<br />

Taliban were terrible but so<br />

were the Burmese generals, so<br />

is Mugabe. The Taliban had<br />

been in power for six years<br />

already, and we drove them<br />

into Pakistan, where al-Qaeda<br />

stayed. The Taliban came back,<br />

and now we’re fighting the<br />

Taliban, but the enemy that<br />

took us into the region is in the<br />

country next door, which we<br />

can’t fight in, aside from occasional<br />

predators. So history’s<br />

going to give very black marks<br />

to [the Bush] administration.<br />

On the tension between<br />

traditional and modern<br />

warfare:<br />

I think there’s a tremendous<br />

tension between old-fashioned<br />

thinking about war and modern<br />

conditions. I won’t even say<br />

battlefield conditions because<br />

wars are not fought on battlefields<br />

anymore. This is very<br />

On how history will remember<br />

the invasion of Iraq:<br />

The invasion of Iraq was<br />

supremely reckless at a level<br />

that’s unbelievable. . . . History<br />

will record this as one of the<br />

most grotesque mistakes of all<br />

time. It is true that getting rid<br />

of Sadaam was a good thing,<br />

if there hadn’t been negative<br />

The above answers were<br />

extracted from raw footage<br />

for the documentary film<br />

Human Terrain, by James<br />

Der Derian, a professor of<br />

international studies at<br />

Brown University and a<br />

spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> Bosch Fellow at<br />

the American Academy.


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 23<br />

© Hornischer


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Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

On the Waterfront<br />

News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

N2 Academy Notebook: US<br />

Secretary of State Hillary<br />

Rodham Clinton speaks<br />

at the Academy’s Richard<br />

Holbrooke Memorial<br />

N4 Academy Notebook: Pamela<br />

Rosenberg on early inspiration;<br />

cellist Yo-Yo Ma stops by<br />

the Hans Arnhold Center;<br />

welcoming Helga Haub<br />

N8 Sketches & Dispatches: Rosina<br />

Bierbaum on climate change;<br />

John Wray reads from Lowboy;<br />

René Pape at the Morgan<br />

Library & Museum<br />

N11 Life & Letters: The spring<br />

<strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> fellows; obituary for<br />

alumna Miriam Hansen;<br />

Mitch Epstein’s Berlin; and<br />

recent alumni books<br />

The Internationalist<br />

Hillary Rodham Clinton visits the American Academy to celebrate the life of Richard Holbrooke<br />

Over 150 guests joined US Secretary<br />

of State Hillary Rodham Clinton,<br />

EU Foreign and Security Policy<br />

High Representative Catherine<br />

Ashton, and journalist and widow<br />

Kati Marton at the American<br />

Academy on April 15 to celebrate<br />

the life of veteran diplomat<br />

and Academy founder Richard<br />

Holbrooke. Vice Chair of the<br />

Academy, Gahl Hodges Burt,<br />

opened the forum of remembrances,<br />

followed by Kati Marton; Werner<br />

Hoyer, Minister of State at the<br />

German Foreign Ministry; columnist<br />

Roger Cohen; Vali Nasr,<br />

a senior Holbrooke advisor; Josef<br />

Joffe, publisher of Die Zeit; filmmaker<br />

Volker Schlöndorff; John<br />

Kornblum, former US Ambassador<br />

to Germany; Hillary Rodham<br />

Clinton; Philip D. Murphy,<br />

US Ambassador to Germany;<br />

Catherine Ashton; and Academy<br />

Executive Director Gary Smith.<br />

The following is the full text<br />

of Secretary Clinton’s speech:<br />

I<br />

want to start by thanking<br />

Gary Smith for the work<br />

you’ve done to realize the<br />

vision that the Academy represents<br />

and what Richard certainly<br />

hoped for. Gahl, thank you, for<br />

» continued on Page N2<br />

uS secretary of state hillary rodham clinton, April 15, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

© Hornischer<br />

Theater in the Trees<br />

The Academy’s Dean of Fellows and Programs on how<br />

an avant-garde performance unveiled a new world<br />

Tucked into the<br />

Hollywood Hills are hidden<br />

valleys and ravines, where<br />

the vegetation is so thick it feels<br />

like stumbling into wilderness,<br />

although the next house is only<br />

five minutes away. Many celebrities<br />

own villas there. My boarding<br />

school was in one such valley. My<br />

parents had sent me to Beverly<br />

Hills to finish the last two years of<br />

high school while they remained<br />

in South America. Those years,<br />

from 1960–1962, turned my life<br />

upside down.<br />

One night, shortly after arriving<br />

in Los Angeles, friends of<br />

my parents, Lynette and George<br />

Wooliver, took me to a so-called<br />

underground theater. Lynette<br />

predicted it would be an amusing<br />

and dada-esque evening; I<br />

was 15 and had no idea what a<br />

dada-esque evening could pos-<br />

» continued on Page N8<br />

The Cost of Change<br />

Rosina Bierbaum on the environmental time bomb<br />

The world has no time<br />

to waste when it comes<br />

to climate protection.<br />

To match that pace, Professor<br />

Rosina Bierbaum, Dean of the<br />

School of Natural Resources and<br />

Environment at the University<br />

of Michigan, spoke breathlessly<br />

on the topic at the American<br />

Academy in Berlin. Her opening<br />

hypothesis was that while<br />

climate change is threatening all<br />

countries, it has been particularly<br />

hard on the developing world.<br />

Bierbaum knows what she is talking<br />

about. She has been occupied<br />

with the topic of climate change<br />

for the last twenty years, and last<br />

year President Barack Obama<br />

elected her to be one of his climate<br />

advisors.<br />

“First off, we need to understand<br />

that there is still time<br />

to pursue a different style of<br />

politics,” Dr. Bierbaum says.<br />

“Developing countries can follow<br />

» continued on Page N12


N2 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

• Academy Notebook •<br />

1.<br />

1.<br />

» continued from N1<br />

the instrumental role you played.<br />

And, of course, Kati, it would not<br />

even have the meaning it does<br />

without the partnership and support<br />

that you gave Richard all<br />

those years. And I’m delighted<br />

that Sarah and three of Richard’s<br />

grandchildren, Beatrice, Kathryn,<br />

and William, are here as well.<br />

It is so fitting that we would<br />

have this, most likely, last memorial<br />

service and remembrance<br />

of Richard in a place that he<br />

loved so much, not only here<br />

at the Academy, but Berlin and<br />

Germany. It is a fitting place<br />

to tell these stories, and I only<br />

wished that we had arranged it<br />

so that it was somewhere relaxed<br />

in this beautiful building with a<br />

giant panettone and lots of good<br />

Riesling and other treats to keep<br />

us going, because the stories<br />

would never have ended. That<br />

was the thing about Richard,<br />

every story that I’ve heard has<br />

prompted even more in my own<br />

mind to come to the surface.<br />

Richard thrived on conversation.<br />

He was an absolutely relentless<br />

conversationalist, as any<br />

of us who have engaged in conversation<br />

with him understand<br />

and remember. Les Gelb, one<br />

of his dearest friends, said that<br />

a conversation with Richard<br />

meant listening to a breathless<br />

monologue, which you could only<br />

engage by interrupting. And the<br />

story that Gahl told about Richard<br />

following John Fuegi into the<br />

men’s room was so familiar. He<br />

followed me onto a stage as I<br />

was about to give a speech, he<br />

followed me into my hotel room,<br />

and on one memorable occasion,<br />

into a ladies room – in Pakistan.<br />

So these are all now very fond<br />

memories.<br />

This American Academy meant<br />

the world to him. He talked<br />

about it, along with all of his<br />

other passions, starting with Kati,<br />

endlessly. And it was, I think,<br />

a way for him to embody his love<br />

of Germany and his belief that<br />

Germany and the United States<br />

had to be indispensably linked<br />

together, going forward into<br />

the unknown future. As John<br />

Kornblum famously said, “living<br />

humanity” is what Richard<br />

Holbrooke was all about. The<br />

American Academy is a living<br />

example, an essence of his<br />

life’s work.<br />

When my husband asked him<br />

to be ambassador to Germany,<br />

I think he was a little disappointed<br />

at first; let’s be honest. I<br />

can remember the conversation.<br />

Bill said to Richard, “You know,<br />

Richard, we don’t know what’s<br />

going to happen in Europe now.”<br />

I think the point that Ambassador<br />

Kornblum made is worth remembering<br />

– what looks now to have<br />

been inevitable was not in any<br />

way preordinated.<br />

Watching Bill Clinton and<br />

Richard Holbrooke have a conversation<br />

was truly like watching<br />

two bull elephants circle around,<br />

trumpeting their positions –<br />

looking for openings, pawing<br />

the ground, and luckily, finally,<br />

coming to an understanding.<br />

1. hillary Rodham clinton<br />

signs the richard<br />

holbrooke condolence<br />

book<br />

2. Nina von Maltzahn, John<br />

C. KorNblum, Hillary<br />

rodham Clinton, Gary SMith,<br />

Kati marton<br />

3. kati Marton shows the<br />

Academy’s photo wall<br />

4. pamela rosenberg, philip<br />

D. murphy, tammy murphy


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N3<br />

All photos © Hornischer<br />

2.<br />

2.<br />

3.<br />

4.<br />

But what Richard so quickly and<br />

very importantly grasped was<br />

that, yes, the Cold War era was<br />

over and, yes, the Berlin Wall had<br />

come down, and yes, the last of<br />

the Berlin Brigade would be leaving,<br />

including 5,000 American<br />

troops. But there was nothing<br />

that made it at all sure that this<br />

relationship that had been based<br />

on the past would continue into<br />

the future.<br />

Richard believed we needed<br />

to create an entirely new relationship,<br />

one based not just on strategic<br />

necessity, but on friendship,<br />

shared vision, and shared values.<br />

He was absolutely convinced that<br />

the United States and Germany<br />

had to form the core of a permanent<br />

transatlantic community,<br />

and that led him to the extraordinary<br />

effort about enlarging<br />

nato, which, as I was listening<br />

to John, I thought of all of the bitter<br />

arguments that were held<br />

over those years about what that<br />

would mean.<br />

Now, there are many ways<br />

to describe Richard, and we’ve<br />

heard some wonderful descriptors.<br />

You can describe him by the<br />

many hats that he wore, not just<br />

hats, but caps and helmets. You<br />

can see him wearing a cap as a<br />

development officer or a Peace<br />

Corps director or an ambassador,<br />

a magazine editor, a presidential<br />

advisor, a peace negotiator, an<br />

aids activist, a banker, a diplomat,<br />

and someone who believed<br />

always in the power of ideas. He’s<br />

also been described by numerous<br />

political labels. He’s been called<br />

a liberal interventionist, a neoconservative,<br />

a multilateralist, a<br />

liberal hawk, and those are some<br />

of the nicer things that have been<br />

said about him. He is certainly<br />

referred to as a thinker, an idea<br />

generator, a man of serial enthusiasms,<br />

a voracious reader, a prolific<br />

writer, a prodigious intellect,<br />

and a great friend.<br />

But instead of talking about<br />

who he was, what we’ve heard<br />

today is what he stood for and<br />

what he did. He was, of course, a<br />

man of powerful convictions, but<br />

he was a pragmatist and he never


N4 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

1.<br />

» continued from N3<br />

saw any contradiction between<br />

the two. He believed in doing<br />

what was right for America and<br />

right for the world, and he actually<br />

thought those two intersected<br />

more times than not. He spent<br />

his life grappling with two of the<br />

hardest questions in international<br />

relations. The first was when<br />

and how to use military force.<br />

Sometimes, of course, nations<br />

must act unilaterally to protect<br />

their security.<br />

But there are also times,<br />

which he knew, when nations<br />

are called to join together to<br />

defend common principles, stop<br />

humanitarian crises, and act on<br />

behalf of those shared values.<br />

He believed totally in building<br />

international coalitions. When he<br />

was appointed to be the special<br />

representative for Afghanistan<br />

and Pakistan, he was the first of<br />

a kind. By the time he finished<br />

there were 42. He reached out<br />

and included Muslim-majority<br />

nations, and his successor,<br />

someone who had worked with<br />

Richard, Ambassador Marc<br />

Grossman, went to a recent meeting<br />

of the special representatives<br />

sponsored by the Organization<br />

of the Islamic Conference held<br />

in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. And<br />

as Marc told me later, it was so<br />

clearly the work of Richard.<br />

He understood that at times,<br />

one had to use military force. But<br />

he also fought hard about how<br />

to end it and what tools were<br />

necessary to do so. He knew that<br />

you had to deal with some fairly<br />

unlikable characters from time<br />

to time. After he visited Bosnia<br />

as a private citizen, he came back<br />

totally convinced that the world<br />

– not just Europe – but the world<br />

had to act, because he watched in<br />

horror one day as Serbian soldiers<br />

rounded up Bosnian Muslims,<br />

and it was, for him, a terrible,<br />

eerie echo of what had happened<br />

fifty years before.<br />

When Richard took on the<br />

State Department’s European<br />

Bureau, in September 1994, after<br />

leaving Germany as ambassador,<br />

it was, as has been described, a<br />

time of a lot of uncertainty. In<br />

the article that was written and<br />

published in the spring 1995<br />

Foreign Affairs issue, he laid out<br />

so many of the concerns and suggested<br />

actions that we have been<br />

following ever since. When he<br />

did the extraordinary work that<br />

Kati has provided an inside look<br />

to all of us for the Dayton Peace<br />

Accords, he was not only professionally<br />

engaged, but personally<br />

committed. Because the part<br />

that Kati didn’t tell you is that<br />

his three colleagues died on that<br />

road after Milosevic had refused<br />

to allow them safe passage and<br />

made them ride that road that<br />

was ringed by Serbian snipers.<br />

And yet, despite that loss, Richard<br />

was relentless in his pursuit of<br />

peace and absolutely convinced<br />

he would get Milosevic to the<br />

final line.<br />

When he was asked by<br />

President Obama to serve in<br />

Afghanistan and Pakistan, he<br />

took on the challenge with relish.<br />

He was very clear-eyed, but<br />

he did say on more than one<br />

occasion, “I thought Dayton was<br />

pretty difficult at the time. This<br />

is a lot tougher.” He set to work<br />

the only way he knew: full-bore,<br />

with everything he had, relying<br />

on the principles that have always<br />

guided him.<br />

He mapped out three mutually<br />

reinforcing tracks: a military<br />

offensive, which he, along with<br />

the rest of us, were working with<br />

President Obama, who inherited<br />

a deteriorating situation in<br />

Afghanistan, a Taliban with an<br />

enormous sense of momentum.<br />

Waiting on the President’s desk<br />

that first day were requests for<br />

troops that had not been in any<br />

way discussed or acted on by the<br />

prior administration.<br />

At the same time, Richard<br />

was probably the most relentless<br />

1. gahl hodges burt (R)<br />

2. JOSef joffe<br />

3. baroneSS catherine ashton<br />

4. werner hoyer


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N5<br />

All photos © Hornischer<br />

2.<br />

3.<br />

4.


N6 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

© Hornischer<br />

1.<br />

» continued from N5<br />

and passionate advocate for a<br />

civilian campaign. When Richard<br />

became srap, there were 300<br />

American civilians, including<br />

the Embassy in Kabul, in all of<br />

Afghanistan. They were largely<br />

on six-month tours, and many of<br />

them spent a third of that time on<br />

R & R outside the country because<br />

it was really hard.<br />

And finally a third track was<br />

an intensive diplomatic push.<br />

Now, those who found negotiations<br />

with the Taliban distasteful<br />

got a very powerful response<br />

from Richard. Diplomacy would<br />

be easy, he would say, if you only<br />

had to talk with your friends.<br />

Negotiating with your adversaries<br />

wasn’t a disservice to people who<br />

had died, if by talking you could<br />

prevent more violence.<br />

He saw the regional implications,<br />

and as Vali Nasr said, he<br />

dove into Pakistan with all his<br />

Richard-ness. After the devastating<br />

floods that affected almost<br />

<strong>20</strong> million Pakistanis last year, he<br />

went to visit a dusty refugee camp<br />

not far from Karachi. As usual,<br />

he arrived in a way he hated. He<br />

hated having security, he hated<br />

the armored cars, and he if could<br />

duck his entourage, he always did,<br />

and then, of course, I would get<br />

the phone calls. He slipped, alone,<br />

into a tent occupied by two refugees<br />

from the floods, a father and<br />

his young son. He just wanted to<br />

hear their story.<br />

He also loved breaking protocol.<br />

He may have been the first person<br />

who told me the joke – “What’s<br />

the difference between a terrorist<br />

and a protocol officer? You can<br />

negotiate with a terrorist.” And<br />

so the protocol officers would say,<br />

“Do not wear the usaid hat. If<br />

you go to this region, you will be<br />

a target and you will also be considered<br />

somewhat undiplomatic.”<br />

Well, all over The New York Times<br />

were pictures of Richard in his<br />

usaid hat.<br />

He did make a big impact in<br />

a very complex situation, and<br />

in two countries that no one<br />

should pretend to understand.<br />

But he built a foundation for us<br />

to build on. He formed friendships<br />

and alliances. He broke<br />

a lot of pottery. He brought<br />

together an exceptional team of<br />

people. Vali described them as<br />

sort of a Silicon company startup.<br />

I thought of it more as the<br />

bar scene in Star Wars – because<br />

Richard was intent upon doing<br />

something that all governments<br />

and every bureaucracy hates.<br />

He wanted to break down all of<br />

the barriers.<br />

So this was going to be a<br />

whole-of-government commitment,<br />

which I certainly thought<br />

it was and what I thought we were<br />

being asked to do. He wanted<br />

people from every agency in the<br />

government. So you try calling<br />

the Department of Agriculture<br />

and saying we want some agricultural<br />

specialists to work with<br />

us in the State Department on<br />

helping improve agriculture in<br />

Pakistan and in Afghanistan.<br />

Very tough negotiations. But in<br />

the end, Richard got his way.<br />

Now, I think that part of what<br />

we will miss about Richard is that<br />

as we have seen the actions and<br />

events of the last months, many<br />

of us have thought, “What would<br />

Richard have said?” We didn’t<br />

have Richard to advise us in Libya<br />

but we had his principles to guide<br />

us. And we did work hard to bring<br />

the international community<br />

together – and quickly.<br />

The world did not wait for<br />

another Srebrenica in a place<br />

called Benghazi. Instead, we<br />

came together in the United<br />

Nations, a place where Richard<br />

served as our ambassador, to<br />

impose sanctions, a no-fly zone,<br />

and an arms embargo, and protecting<br />

civilians. In a single week,<br />

we prevented a potential massacre,<br />

stopped an advancing army,<br />

and expanded the coalition.<br />

And as Colonel Qadhafi continues<br />

attacking his own people,<br />

we are gaining even more partners<br />

in our efforts.<br />

There will always be conflicts as<br />

long as there are human beings,<br />

as long as there are power-mad<br />

egomaniacs running countries<br />

– which, of course, never happen<br />

in democracies, thank goodness.<br />

And we will have to navigate them<br />

without Richard, but not without<br />

his insight.<br />

I want to finish by reading<br />

something he wrote not long after<br />

the Dayton Accords were signed:<br />

“There will be other Bosnias in<br />

our lives,” he wrote. They will<br />

“explode with little warning, and<br />

present the world with difficult<br />

choices – choices between risky<br />

involvement and potentially<br />

costly neglect.” He concluded:<br />

“Early outside involvement will be<br />

decisive.”<br />

That doesn’t mean we don’t<br />

need patience. It doesn’t mean<br />

that we don’t have to continue<br />

to do the hard work that tries<br />

to avoid conflicts. But we do need<br />

to remember Richard’s plea for<br />

principled interventionism. He<br />

lived those ideals, and perhaps<br />

better than any other diplomat<br />

of his generation, he made them<br />

real to so many of us.<br />

We have a lot to learn<br />

from Richard Charles Albert<br />

Holbrooke, as advisor, counselor,<br />

teacher, but above all else, dear<br />

friend. I can see in this room on<br />

the faces of so many of you the<br />

kind of memories that we all have<br />

of this extraordinary man. Let<br />

us give thanks for him.<br />

1. peter schneider and<br />

wolfgang ischinger<br />

2. alexandra Gräfin<br />

Lambsdorff, hillary<br />

rodham clinton, kati<br />

marton, werner hoyer,<br />

vali nasr, gabriela<br />

von habsburg<br />

3. gary smith, Gahl hodges<br />

burt, hillary rodham<br />

clinton, kati marton,<br />

catherine Ashton


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N7<br />

© Sean Gallup/getty images<br />

© Hornischer<br />

2.<br />

3.


N8 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

Theater in the Trees<br />

» continued from N1<br />

sibly entail. But I was curious<br />

because Lynette, a former dancer<br />

at the Martha Graham Dance<br />

Company, would take part in the<br />

performance.<br />

We drove to a villa, located<br />

in one of Hollywood Hills’ wild,<br />

overgrown ravines. The theater<br />

was not inside the villa but<br />

behind it, in the garden house. In<br />

my memory, it was a tree house<br />

on stilts, with a large room and<br />

an adjacent smaller room. There<br />

were about thirty spectators, and<br />

we sat on the floor, at the edges<br />

of the big room. As the youngest<br />

among them, I felt fairly nervous.<br />

Night had fallen outside, and<br />

black window shades prevented<br />

any mote of light from penetrating<br />

the interior. In this bottomless<br />

black, the actors began to<br />

move. I occasionally felt a breeze<br />

of body movement; I heard steps<br />

and breaths. Suddenly the light<br />

was switched on, and the actors<br />

froze and remained motionless<br />

for a couple of seconds. Then,<br />

without a word, through mimicry<br />

and gestures, they established<br />

relationships amongst each other.<br />

I had never seen theater like this.<br />

I longed to try it myself – to<br />

move like Lynette, lithesome and<br />

feline; to make uninhibited faces;<br />

to play like a child – but sensed<br />

that I was too self-conscious.<br />

After the show, the actors sat<br />

around with their friends and<br />

heatedly discussed art. They talked<br />

as if their lives depended on it,<br />

as if art was a matter of survival.<br />

And for them, it was. I had never<br />

met people before in my life for<br />

whom art was so essential.<br />

I was raised in a conservative<br />

household. When I was very<br />

young, my parents moved from<br />

Los Angeles to Caracas where<br />

my father, a former naval officer,<br />

worked for an oil company. I had<br />

always been a sensitive, serious<br />

girl. In Caracas I had an Armenian<br />

piano teacher. Once a month I was<br />

allowed to visit her salon where I<br />

met Russian emigrants who made<br />

music, discussed literature, and<br />

spoke several languages. Even<br />

those early salons opened another<br />

world to me, separate from the one<br />

my parents lived in, and stirred a<br />

deep longing in me. My parents<br />

led a typically upper-middle-class<br />

life, with dinner parties and golf<br />

tournaments. I realized that the<br />

conventional atmosphere at home<br />

was stifling me.<br />

Now I sat, cross-legged, in a<br />

tree house in Hollywood and felt<br />

understood. Not that I joined the<br />

actors’ conversations. I eavesdropped<br />

and observed. I liked<br />

these original spirits. I had been<br />

searching for them. That evening,<br />

I felt like a knot unraveled inside,<br />

and I intuited that my own path<br />

would lead me far from home.<br />

On our way back, Lynette told me<br />

that the performers were a steady,<br />

hard-working group of actors. In<br />

retrospect, their forms of interpretation<br />

were reminiscent of<br />

Jerzy Grotowski’s methods, who<br />

granted the body a significant<br />

role on stage. I began to look<br />

closer, to scrutinize the gestures<br />

of those around me. George,<br />

Lynette’s husband, also enjoyed<br />

the evening, even though he<br />

wasn’t an artist but the chief ceo<br />

of a large company.<br />

Lynette became an important<br />

parental figure to me. Her crazy<br />

home was full of people, guests<br />

that spontaneously dropped<br />

by, unlike my parents’ home,<br />

where you made an appointment,<br />

arrived punctually at 8 pm, and<br />

sat dutifully at the table. Artists,<br />

including the famous painter<br />

Sam Francis, came and went.<br />

In their passionate discussions<br />

I learned to question the act of<br />

seeing. I could watch Lynette for<br />

hours when she worked on one<br />

of her sculptures. Her house and<br />

garden were full of sculptures,<br />

and she worked on them in turns.<br />

Los Angeles in the 1960s was<br />

cutting edge: the galleries on<br />

Cienega Blvd set the trends. You<br />

could find the newest, most exciting<br />

art scenes, the avant-garde.<br />

Shortly after the tree house<br />

evening, Lynette organized a<br />

“dark theater” at her home. I also<br />

participated. It took me some<br />

time to grow unconstrained and<br />

free. Every now and then, a hostile<br />

face or sudden grimace from<br />

another performer startled and<br />

shocked me. Gradually, I sunk<br />

into the play. It felt as if the makepamela<br />

rosenberg by Monika Rittershaus


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N9<br />

believe surrounding us simply<br />

dissolved. I benefited from such<br />

experiences, which question the<br />

apparent and the obvious, and<br />

continued to profit from them in<br />

the decades to come when I went<br />

on to work at the San Francisco<br />

Opera, the Oper Frankfurt, and<br />

the Staatsoper Stuttgart.<br />

My parents were happy that I<br />

had found a second family in Los<br />

Angeles with whom I could spend<br />

the weekends. To them, Lynette<br />

and George’s home was amusing<br />

and exotic. Their lifestyle was not<br />

to be taken seriously. They had no<br />

clue what the encounter had triggered<br />

within me.<br />

I developed a critical eye<br />

toward my parents’ lifestyle. It<br />

is not atypical for a 15-year-old<br />

to rebel – but my rebellion was<br />

not the typical one where peers<br />

played an important part, nor did<br />

it involve fashion or music. I disregarded<br />

all of that. My rebellion<br />

took the form of participating in<br />

L.A.’s underground scene and<br />

befriending Lynette and George,<br />

who were the same age as my<br />

parents. Larger conflicts with my<br />

parents erupted later, during my<br />

studies in Berkeley. My parents<br />

blamed my rebellion on the popular<br />

student movements of the<br />

time. But without the inspiration<br />

I had received at the Woolivers,<br />

I probably would not have been<br />

receptive to the spirit of the student<br />

movements.<br />

I remained friends with<br />

Lynette and George and visited<br />

them often during my studies in<br />

Berkeley. Over time, I witnessed<br />

how George became infected by<br />

the passion of the artists who<br />

spoke, night after night, in his<br />

home; whom he met in galleries<br />

and theaters. He eventually<br />

began painting, resigned from<br />

his high-paying position, and<br />

became a successful artist.<br />

When I walk through a gallery<br />

today or attend an avant-garde<br />

dance performance, I feel Lynette’s<br />

spirit, in whose house I learned to<br />

consciously look and to transgress<br />

boundaries by thinking. Ever since<br />

that night, sitting among artists in<br />

the dark theater, I’ve sought to surround<br />

myself with such original,<br />

passionate people.<br />

By Pamela Rosenberg<br />

Originally published in<br />

German in the Berliner<br />

Zeitung, March 5, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

On January 11, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>, an intimate circle of Academy guests and<br />

spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> Fellows welcomed world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma<br />

for an informal reception and discussion. Ma was in Berlin for<br />

performances with the Berliner Philharmoniker, including works<br />

by Anders Hillborg (Cold Heat, Première) Dmitri Shostakovich<br />

(Cello Concerto No. 2), and Carl Nielsen (Symphony No. 5). He<br />

had expressed his eagerness to meet Academy fellows at the Hans<br />

Arnhold Center, and he did not arrive alone: “I never expected<br />

him to bring his cello !” said Pamela Rosenberg. The evening was<br />

anchored by Ma’s moving rendition of a Bach Sarabande, an homage<br />

to his friend and Academy founder, Richard Holbrooke.<br />

© cornelia peiper<br />

Conservationist on Board<br />

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

The American Academy<br />

is pleased to introduce a<br />

new member of its Board of<br />

Trustees: Helga Haub, co-owner<br />

of the Tengelmann Group and a<br />

dedicated philanthropist. “We are<br />

delighted that Helga Haub has<br />

joined our board,” says Academy<br />

Co-Chairman Karl M. von der<br />

Heyden. “She is the quintessential<br />

Atlanticist: equally at home in<br />

Europe and North America, she<br />

understands the nuances of cultures<br />

on both sides of the ocean.”<br />

Haub helps to oversee the international,<br />

multi-sector retailer<br />

Tengelmann Group, which has<br />

been family-owned and managed<br />

for five generations. Its divisions<br />

include Kaiser’s and Tengelmann<br />

supermarkets,obi stores, and<br />

the discounter Kik, in addition to<br />

several smaller production companies,<br />

service providers, and<br />

e-commerce retailers.<br />

In addition to her business,<br />

Haub chairs the Elizabeth Haub<br />

Foundations for Environmental<br />

Law and Policy in Germany,<br />

Canada, and the United States.<br />

The foundations support the<br />

development and implementation<br />

of legislative provisions for<br />

the conservation and sustainable<br />

use of nature. She has also served<br />

on the board of the American<br />

Chamber of Commerce since<br />

1995 and is active with the George<br />

Helga Haub<br />

C. Marshall International Center<br />

at Dodona Manor, the University<br />

of Wyoming’s Helga Otto Haub<br />

School of Environment and<br />

Natural Resources, and the uso<br />

Germany, serving as longstanding<br />

president of its Rhein-Main<br />

area. Haub has received honorary<br />

doctorates from St. Joseph’s<br />

University, in Philadelphia, and<br />

from the University of Wyoming.<br />

She has also been awarded the<br />

Medal of Merit from the United<br />

States Air Force in Europe; the<br />

Spirit of Hope Award from uso<br />

World; and the Distinguished<br />

Public Service Medal from the<br />

US Department of Defense.


N10 | Financial Overview of the American Academy in Berlin | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

• Financial Overview of the American Academy in Berlin •<br />

The American Academy in Berlin<br />

is funded almost entirely by private<br />

and corporate benefactors<br />

and does not accept any donations<br />

from governments or political<br />

organizations.<br />

The American Academy<br />

operates as a Charitable Private<br />

Corporation (gemeinnützige<br />

GmbH) in Germany, which is<br />

wholly owned by The American<br />

Academy in Berlin, Inc., a 501(c)3<br />

corporation based in New York<br />

City. Both organizations are registered<br />

charities and empowered<br />

to receive tax-deductible donations<br />

in accordance with respective<br />

legal codes.<br />

In addition to donations to our<br />

annual fund, certain individual<br />

benefactors, groups of benefactors,<br />

and corporations have<br />

established endowments – both<br />

multi-year or in perpetuity –<br />

to secure the financing of named<br />

fellowships, distinguished visitorships,<br />

or lectureships.<br />

The American Academy prepares<br />

Consolidated Financial<br />

Statements in accordance with<br />

generally accepted US accounting<br />

principles, which are audited by<br />

independent auditors.<br />

Sources of Income and<br />

Expenditure for the last<br />

two years<br />

Our sources of income can be<br />

broken down as shown in the<br />

pie charts below:<br />

Revenue<br />

<strong>20</strong>10<br />

<strong>20</strong>09<br />

Corporate unrestricted<br />

Private unrestricted<br />

Corporate restricted<br />

Private restricted<br />

Other<br />

expenditures<br />

<strong>20</strong>10 <strong>20</strong>09<br />

Fellows & Distinguished<br />

Visitor program<br />

Development<br />

General Administration<br />

In line with regulations governing<br />

charitable organizations<br />

and applicable tax rules,<br />

whenever allowable we reinvest<br />

income from our endowments<br />

to further enhance the value<br />

and income-generating potential<br />

of such benefaction.<br />

Abridged Financial Information<br />

Our Consolidated Balance<br />

Sheet as of December <strong>20</strong>10<br />

showed net assets of $39.8m<br />

compared with $36.5m at the<br />

end of <strong>20</strong>09. This increase<br />

was attributable largely to the<br />

Our net aSSets are categorized as follOWS:<br />

abridged cash flOWS:<br />

continuing excellent performance<br />

of our investment<br />

managers as well as further<br />

endowments in perpetuity<br />

during the year.<br />

<strong>20</strong>10<br />

$m<br />

<strong>20</strong>09<br />

$m<br />

Available for operations: 1.9 2.1<br />

Board-designated endowments 10.9 8.6<br />

Fixed assets 2.2 2.6<br />

15.0 13.3<br />

Temporarily restricted assets 9.3 11.3<br />

Permanently restricted assets 15.5 11.9<br />

39.8 36.5<br />

<strong>20</strong>10<br />

$m<br />

<strong>20</strong>09<br />

$m<br />

Net cash provided by operating activities (1.0) 1.2<br />

Net cash used in investment activities (2.4) (3.0)<br />

Cash flows from financial activity 1.9 1.9<br />

Exchange-rate effects 1.6 (0.4)<br />

Net (decrease)/increase in cash and<br />

cash equivalents<br />

0.1 (0.3)<br />

Outlook for <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>/<strong>20</strong>12<br />

The American Academy was<br />

fortunate in <strong>20</strong>10, as it received<br />

not only continuing support<br />

from its lasting benefactors but<br />

also was able to extend its base<br />

of donors both in the US and<br />

Germany, thanks to the munificent<br />

generosity of its supporters.<br />

We are extremely grateful<br />

to the members of our Board<br />

of Trustees, who continue to<br />

support us unhesitatingly, as<br />

we are to the descendents of<br />

Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold,<br />

who from their founding gift<br />

onwards have continued their<br />

invaluable support.<br />

Not least are we grateful<br />

to the multiple corporations,<br />

foundations, and private individuals<br />

who continue to enable<br />

the American Academy in<br />

Berlin to serve as a beacon of<br />

intellectual and cultural life in<br />

the German capital.<br />

The American Academy<br />

has changed its fiscal year end<br />

to June 30 in <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> to bring it<br />

in line with similar institutions<br />

and to align it with our academic<br />

year.<br />

The stub fiscal period ending<br />

on June 30, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> will be<br />

in line with our expectations.<br />

a.w.


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Private Initiative – Public Outreach | N11<br />

• Private Initiative – Public Outreach •<br />

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

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<br />

the contributions made to the American Academy from April <strong>20</strong>10 to April <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>.<br />

FellOWShips and Distinguished<br />

Visitorships Established in Perpetuity<br />

John P. Birkelund Berlin Prize in the Humanities<br />

Daimler Berlin Prize<br />

German Transatlantic Program Berlin Prize<br />

supported by European Recovery Program funds<br />

granted through the Transatlantic Program of the<br />

Federal Republic of Germany<br />

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize<br />

Nina Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize in History<br />

Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize for Fiction<br />

Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize<br />

Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize<br />

Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts<br />

Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship in Law<br />

Carol F. Lee, William Lee, WilmerHale<br />

EADS Distinguished Visitorship<br />

EADS<br />

Marina Kellen French Distinguished Visitorship<br />

for Persons with Outstanding Accomplishment in<br />

the Cultural World<br />

Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitorship<br />

Stephen M. Kellen Distinguished Visitorship<br />

Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Visitorship<br />

Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Visitorship<br />

Annually funded FellOWShips and<br />

Distinguished Visitorships<br />

Berthold Leibinger Berlin Prize<br />

Metro Berlin Prize<br />

Siemens Berlin Prize<br />

Axel <strong>Spring</strong>er Berlin Prize<br />

Allianz Distinguished Visitorship<br />

Endowment Giving<br />

Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship in the<br />

Visual Arts<br />

Thomas van Aubel & Jutta von Falkenhausen,<br />

Deutsche Börse AG, Marie Louise Gericke,<br />

Lily & Klaus Heiliger, Jeane Freifrau von<br />

Oppenheim, Galerie Sprüth Magers, Galerie<br />

Thaddaeus Ropac GmbH, Victoria & Aurel<br />

Scheibler, Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz &<br />

Bernd Schultz, Peter Schwicht, Villa Grisebach<br />

(Berlin)<br />

Marcus Bierich Distinguished Visitorship in the<br />

Humanities<br />

Dr. Aldinger & Fischer Grundbesitz und<br />

Vermarktungs GmbH, C.H. Beck Stiftung,<br />

Deutsche Bank AG, Mary Ellen von<br />

Schacky-Schultz & Bernd Schultz, Villa<br />

Grisebach (Berlin)<br />

Individuals and Family Foundations<br />

CORPORATIONS AND CORPORATE FOUNDATIONS<br />

Founders’ Circle<br />

$1 million and above<br />

Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen<br />

Foundation and the descendants of<br />

Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold<br />

Chairman’s Circle<br />

$ 25,000 and above<br />

Henry H. Arnhold<br />

Lester Crown<br />

Marina Kellen French<br />

Werner Gegenbauer<br />

Richard K. Goeltz<br />

Helga & Erivan Haub<br />

Mary Ellen and Karl M. von<br />

der Heyden<br />

The Estate of Richard C. Holbrooke<br />

Stefan von Holtzbrinck<br />

Michael Klein<br />

Nina von Maltzahn<br />

Christopher Freiherr von Oppenheim<br />

Maren Otto<br />

Norman Pearlstine and Jane Boon<br />

Pearlstine<br />

Kurt F. Viermetz<br />

Trustees’ Circle<br />

$10,000 and above<br />

Constance and John P. Birkelund<br />

Wolfgang Ischinger<br />

Dr. Pia & Klaus Krone<br />

Wolfgang Malchow<br />

Dieter & Si Rosenkranz<br />

Rafael J. Roth<br />

Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz &<br />

Bernd Schultz<br />

The Fritz Stern Fund of the Princeton<br />

Area Community Foundation<br />

Barbara & Jörg Zumbaum<br />

Patrons<br />

$2,500 and above<br />

Henrik Aldinger, Thomas van Aubel<br />

& Jutta von Falkenhausen, Heinrich<br />

J. Barth, Kathrin Barwinek & Alexander<br />

Ochs, Joel Bell & Marifé Hernández,<br />

Volker Booten, Stephen Burbank, Gahl<br />

Hodges Burt, Matthias & Christa Druba,<br />

Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Julie<br />

Finley, Georg & Doris Gafron, Hans-<br />

Michael & Almut Giesen, Marisa &<br />

Carl Hahn, Jörg Menno Harms, Ina<br />

Vonnegut-Hartung & Wilhelm Hartung,<br />

Klaus & Lily Heiliger, Brigitte & Bernd<br />

Hellthaler, Roe Jasen, Ulrich Kissing,<br />

Henry A. Kissinger, Stephanie & Martin<br />

Korbmacher, John C. Kornblum, Renate<br />

Küchler, Evi & Peter Kurz, Erich Marx,<br />

Mehretu-Rankin Family, Jeane Freifrau<br />

von Oppenheim, William D. & Nancy<br />

Ellison Rollnick, Norman Selby,<br />

Peter Y. Solmssen, Paul Volcker, Will<br />

Foundation (Hans George Will), Roger<br />

M. & Jill J. Witten<br />

President’s Circle<br />

Above $25,000<br />

Carnegie Corporation of New York<br />

Cerberus Deutschland GmbH<br />

Daimler AG<br />

Daimler-Fonds im Stifterverband<br />

für die Deutsche Wissenschaft<br />

Deloitte & Touche GmbH<br />

Deutsche Börse AG<br />

Deutsche Lufthansa AG<br />

Deutsche Post AG<br />

Germanwings GmbH<br />

GÖRG Partnerschaft von<br />

Rechtsanwälten<br />

KPMG AG<br />

Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft<br />

Liberty Global Europe BV<br />

Macy’s<br />

Marsh GmbH<br />

Merrill Lynch International Bank Ltd.<br />

MSD Sharpe & Dohme GmbH<br />

Pepsico Foundation<br />

Pfizer Pharma GmbH<br />

Philip Morris GmbH<br />

Porsche AG<br />

Robert Bosch GmbH<br />

Siemens AG<br />

Susanna Dulkinys and<br />

Erik Spiekermann<br />

Edenspiekermann AG<br />

Telefónica O 2<br />

Germany GmbH & Co. OHG<br />

Vattenfall Europe AG<br />

Benefactors<br />

up to $25,000<br />

Axel <strong>Spring</strong>er Stiftung, Bayer<br />

Schering Pharma AG, Bertelsmann<br />

ag, Coca-Cola Deutschland GmbH,<br />

Deutsche Bank AG, Deutsche<br />

Bundesbank, Fleishman-Hillard<br />

Germany/Public Affairs & Gov.<br />

Relations, Investitionsbank Berlin,<br />

Rudolf August Oetker Stiftung,<br />

Villa Grisebach (Berlin)<br />

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


N12 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

• Private • Sketches Initiative &– Dispatches Public Outreach • •<br />

The Cost of Change<br />

» continued from N1<br />

low-carbon paths while they build<br />

up their economies and alleviate<br />

poverty. Still, they are dependent<br />

on the financial and technical<br />

support of countries with high<br />

incomes. And these high-income<br />

countries have to act quickly to<br />

reduce their C02 emissions and<br />

to further the development of<br />

alternate energy sources to solve<br />

the problem of climate change.”<br />

Developing countries, of<br />

course, are not to blame for the<br />

crisis, and they are hardly prepared<br />

to face its challenges. Yet<br />

they must bear the financial<br />

and environmental burdens of<br />

climate change and its multiple<br />

dangers. They are, in fact, disproportionately<br />

affected by climate<br />

change. And so the world com-<br />

munity is obliged to help them<br />

more intensely.<br />

Dr. Bierbaum indicated that<br />

around 1.6 billion people in the<br />

third world do not have access<br />

to electricity. These developing<br />

countries, where the emissions<br />

per head are only a fraction of the<br />

emissions in countries with a<br />

high income, are in dire need of<br />

assistance in the fields of energy,<br />

transportation, urban planning,<br />

and agricultural production.<br />

Increasing access to energy and<br />

other facilities with a high carbon<br />

footprint will produce more<br />

greenhouse gases and thus precipitate<br />

climate change.<br />

The solution to the worrisome<br />

climate situation requires<br />

the transformation and further<br />

development of the world’s<br />

energy systems in the decades<br />

to come. Each year, investments<br />

for research and development<br />

amount to € 100 – 500 billion.<br />

No country can accomplish this<br />

alone. “This is why we need private<br />

funds,” says Bierbaum. “And<br />

that means more tax deductions<br />

for private citizens who invest in<br />

climate protection.”<br />

The financial means to fight<br />

climate change have to be augmented<br />

dramatically because<br />

current investments do not meet<br />

predicted needs. The Climate<br />

Investment Funds (cifs), administered<br />

by the World Bank in collaboration<br />

with local banks, are<br />

one such chance to engage support<br />

from industrial countries<br />

effectively, because these means<br />

can reduce the costs of technologies<br />

with low carbon footprints in<br />

developing countries.<br />

At the end of her impassioned<br />

talk, Dr. Bierbaum reminded<br />

the audience of the bygone days<br />

of smokers: “Forty years ago<br />

smoking was in fashion – there<br />

was not a movie where an actor<br />

did not have a cigarette dangling<br />

from their lips. Today, smoking is<br />

passé. The same goes for climate<br />

protection. We need to have the<br />

sense that climate protection is<br />

in style. We have everything at<br />

our hands to make this endeavor<br />

successful: new technologies,<br />

money, and determination.”<br />

By Peter Brinkman<br />

Excerpted from the<br />

European Circle’s Green Mag<br />

November 4, <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Translated by Rieke Jordan<br />

Tunnel Vision<br />

Wray’s third novel goes underground<br />

in New<br />

York knows the subway<br />

but nobody ever “Everybody<br />

looks at it closely,” said John<br />

Henderson, alias John Wray,<br />

son of an American leukemia<br />

researcher and an oncologist<br />

from Kärnten, Austria. For four<br />

years, the 39-year-old literary star<br />

from Brooklyn closely observed<br />

an underground world that others<br />

had merely glanced at in passing.<br />

He traveled exhaustively on<br />

the subway, a laptop perched on<br />

his knees, wearing headphones,<br />

as he wrote Lowboy. “Maybe I<br />

wrote in the subway because my<br />

grandfather was a subway planner<br />

in Vienna – and because I was<br />

not making any progress in my<br />

apartment,” he explained.<br />

Lowboy is the story of William<br />

Heller, a 16-year-old schizophrenic<br />

who believes he is the only one<br />

capable of saving the world. He is<br />

hunted because he is considered<br />

to be dangerous, after pushing<br />

his girlfriend, Emily, onto the<br />

subway tracks, and because<br />

he fled from a mental institution.<br />

The Frankfurter Allgemeine<br />

Zeitung called Wray’s third novel<br />

a “piece of art destined to become<br />

a classic.”<br />

This fall, the American<br />

Academy invited John Wray<br />

to Berlin for a fellowship. On<br />

Wednesday, the highly praised<br />

author came to Göppingen to<br />

read excerpts from his novel in<br />

the local art gallery. While reading,<br />

Wray stood in front of 35 listeners<br />

and the installation “Dead<br />

End Lopes,” which is reminiscent<br />

of a subway entrance. It evoked a<br />

tunnel-vision effect that could not<br />

have been more suggestive.<br />

“Lowboy,” as William calls himself,<br />

feels free and unobstruc ted<br />

in the subway and its tunnels.<br />

Wray describes Lowboy’s and<br />

the subway’s nature in a lengthy<br />

and effusive – but never tedious<br />

– fashion. “Even his cramped and<br />

claustrophobic brain felt a measure<br />

of affection for the tunnel.<br />

It was his skull that held him captive,<br />

after all, not the tunnel or<br />

the passengers or the train.”<br />

By Hans Steinherr<br />

Excerpted from the<br />

Südwest Presse<br />

December 12, <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Translated by Rieke Jordan


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N13<br />

© Jennifer Brommer<br />

Pianist Brian zeger and BaSS virtuoso rené pape perform at the Morgan library on october 21, <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Nostra Voce Munifico<br />

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

The American Academy<br />

in Berlin was graced with<br />

the generosity of German<br />

bass René Pape, who delivered<br />

a stirring benefit recital on<br />

October 21, <strong>20</strong>10 at the Morgan<br />

Library & Museum in New<br />

York City, expertly arranged by<br />

Academy trustee Marina Kellen<br />

French. Pape was accompanied<br />

by noted concert and chamber<br />

pianist Brian Zeger in a program<br />

that included a moving<br />

rendition of Robert Schumann’s<br />

Dicterliebe, as well as a set of<br />

Franz Schubert’s Lieder.<br />

The evening performance<br />

proved to be not only a musical<br />

tour-de-force but a fundraising<br />

success. The benefit was<br />

attended by nearly two hundred<br />

Academy trustees, benefactors,<br />

alumni, and a great many<br />

additional friends. Present from<br />

the Academy’s own board were<br />

co-Chairman Karl M. von der<br />

Heyden, Academy President<br />

and ceo Norman Pearlstine,<br />

and trustees Stephen Burbank,<br />

Marina Kellen French, Michael<br />

Klein, and Richard K. Goeltz.<br />

To add to the night’s musical gifts,<br />

Deutsche Grammophon had<br />

produced a special-edition CD<br />

of Pape singing previously unreleased<br />

Wagner arias.<br />

Dresden-native Pape, a longtime<br />

friend of the Academy, debuted<br />

at the Berlin Staatsoper Unter<br />

den Linden in 1988 and has been<br />

a member ever since. He has<br />

appeared with the world’s leading<br />

orchestras and conductors<br />

in major concert halls all over<br />

the globe. The recipient of two<br />

Grammys, Pape has appeared<br />

at the New York’s Metropolitan<br />

Opera every season since 1995,<br />

a venue he recently called “his<br />

second musical home.”<br />

Pape was in New York at the<br />

Metropolitan Opera during<br />

the fall <strong>20</strong>10 season to sing the<br />

title role in a new production of<br />

Boris Godunov – a role that has<br />

won him an “Artist of the Year”<br />

title from the German Critics<br />

Association, among other accolades.<br />

The opera was directed<br />

by Stephen Wadsworth, with<br />

Valery Gergiev conducting. Pape<br />

was also honored during the<br />

fall <strong>20</strong>10 season as part of the<br />

Metropolitan Opera Guild’s new<br />

series “The Met Mastersingers.”<br />

In February <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> Pape and<br />

Zeger gave a West Coast debut<br />

recital at the Dorothy Chandler<br />

Center in Los Angeles. Without<br />

surprise, our voce munifico won<br />

resounding praise.<br />

m. r./r.j.m.


N14 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

The Cult of the Word<br />

Authors develop<br />

– how could it be otherwise?<br />

– special relationships<br />

to language. Han Ong, a<br />

New York-based novelist and<br />

dramatist born in the Philippines,<br />

nurtures a distinct vocabulary<br />

fetish. The 42-year-old is the<br />

current Holtzbrinck Fellow at<br />

the American Academy, in<br />

Wannsee, and is working on his<br />

third novel. At a recent reading<br />

he celebrated his cult of words<br />

with the public.<br />

An ideal balance of eccentricity<br />

and laconic self-irony accented<br />

Ong’s performance, as well the<br />

use of single words projected<br />

on a screen. Using rare Anglo-<br />

American terms like “to transmogrify”<br />

and “inchoate,” Ong<br />

described what his new project<br />

was all about.<br />

Initially, “Burden of Dreams”<br />

was a self-contained short story;<br />

he refined the piece over months,<br />

read many short stories by other<br />

authors and then realized that<br />

his story lacked the essence of<br />

the genre’s brevity. Since then he<br />

has been working on expanding<br />

his original story about a rich<br />

American who supports twelve<br />

Philippine students financially<br />

and has decided to include the<br />

stories of the twelve students.<br />

“Immigration” and “assimilation”<br />

– expressions that have<br />

already found their way into<br />

everyday language – were the<br />

keywords of the evening. Ong<br />

was born in 1968 in Manila to<br />

Chinese immigrants. Sixteen<br />

years later the family moved to<br />

Los Angeles. Due to an early and<br />

overabundant consumption of<br />

English literature and Hollywood<br />

films, Ong’s English was hardly<br />

shabby before he came to the<br />

United States. Nonetheless he<br />

wanted to lose his accent – which<br />

he did. He coquettishly compared<br />

his adolescent ambition with the<br />

heroine of Shaw’s Pygmalion,<br />

who is transformed from a<br />

cheeky brat into an elegant lady.<br />

“Eliza Doolittle has nothing on<br />

me,” he quipped.<br />

In most of his books (which<br />

have not yet been translated into<br />

German), Ong tells the story of<br />

immigrants and their highly<br />

original methods to stomach<br />

their culture shock in America.<br />

The author has obviously come to<br />

terms with it. His dramas have<br />

been showered with stipends and<br />

prizes: his debut Fixer Chao was<br />

chosen as the book of the year<br />

<strong>20</strong>01 by the Los Angeles Times; six<br />

years ago his second novel The<br />

Disinherited was short-listed for<br />

the Lambda Book Award.<br />

Ong does not return to the fate<br />

of immigrants in order to critique<br />

society or because of his familiarity<br />

with their mentality. What is<br />

particularly alluring to him are<br />

the verbal possibilities. The linguistic<br />

clumsiness of his protagonists<br />

allows the English language<br />

to gain pliable dimensions and<br />

semantic versatility. There is<br />

nothing clumsy in Ong’s writing,<br />

but he exudes a childlike awe<br />

and delight in language.<br />

By Marianna Lieder<br />

Excerpted from Tagesspiegel<br />

December 12, <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Translated by Rieke Jordan<br />

Stalinism and Genocide<br />

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

Beginning in the 1930s,<br />

a Polish-Jewish attorney<br />

named Raphael Lemkin<br />

became fascinated and horrified<br />

by the topic of mass killings that<br />

had occurred throughout history.<br />

In all likelihood he had a premonitory<br />

sense of what was to happen<br />

in neighboring Germany, so he<br />

lobbied the League of Nations<br />

to make constituents aware of a<br />

phenomena he was calling “barbarism.”<br />

He was ignored.<br />

In 1939 Lemkin left Poland<br />

and landed in the United States,<br />

where he began working for<br />

the Carnegie Endowment, and<br />

then for the Department of War.<br />

During this time he wrote a book,<br />

The Axis Occupation of Europe,<br />

where the word “genocide” was<br />

used for the first time.<br />

On March 3, Norman<br />

Naimark, the Axel <strong>Spring</strong>er<br />

Fellow this spring, discussed<br />

Lemkin’s work and his continued<br />

lobbying to punish and prevent<br />

genocide across the world.<br />

A specialist on the Stalinist<br />

genocide of the 1930s and early<br />

1940s, Naimark focused in his<br />

lecture on the ways that the<br />

Soviet Union managed to erase<br />

between ten and twenty million<br />

people in social, national, economic,<br />

and political slaughters<br />

meant to square society with<br />

the Communist project. These<br />

groups included not only ethnic,<br />

political, and religious minorities<br />

but “socially harmful” people:<br />

prostitutes, the homeless, alcoholics,<br />

drug users, political<br />

opponents, and former revolutionaries.<br />

Stalinist ideology<br />

was used to justify these mass<br />

murders, to dehumanize and<br />

then exterminate human beings,<br />

Naimark reminds, leading to<br />

the literal decimation of the<br />

Russian population still demographically<br />

palpable.<br />

Aside from the historical problems<br />

involved in the Stalinist<br />

genocide, there is also the<br />

problem of numbers of deaths<br />

unearthed in the nkdv (People’s<br />

Commissariat for Internal<br />

Affairs) archives since being<br />

opened after the end of the<br />

Cold War. You simply can’t<br />

believe them, Naimark says.<br />

Why? Because just like the Five-<br />

Year Plan, they always add up.<br />

The number of ethnic Kulaks<br />

eradicated in the process of<br />

de-Kulakization, for example,<br />

reads exactly 1,837,622. Crimean<br />

Tartars killed exactly 179,604.<br />

Naimark notes that these figures<br />

don’t include tortured victims<br />

who died from their injuries, people<br />

who were simply left to perish<br />

of famine, and those who were<br />

“deported,” many of whom simply<br />

died out of sight.<br />

After the war, in 1946, Raphael<br />

Lemkin went to the Nuremberg<br />

trials and insisted that the Nazis<br />

be tried for genocide. His pleas<br />

fell on deaf ears. No one was tried<br />

for genocide, Naimark points<br />

out, and the very idea was not<br />

attached to any indictments.<br />

Yet Lemkin’s efforts forced the<br />

United Nations into recognizing<br />

that something of extraordinarily<br />

horror had just occured.<br />

The United Nations Genocide<br />

Convention of 1948 successfully<br />

passed an international<br />

law prohibiting the mass killing<br />

of “national, ethnic, racial, or<br />

religious groups, as such.” By lobbying<br />

the un with the assistance<br />

of the Poles, however, the Soviets<br />

had prevented the legislation<br />

from including the words “social”<br />

and “political.” They would reign<br />

over half of Europe for another<br />

four decades.<br />

r.j.m.


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N15<br />

• Life & Letters •<br />

Berlin via Epstein<br />

Academy alumnus Mitch Epstein’s book of visual odyssies through the German capital<br />

Photographer Mitch Epstein, who<br />

was awarded the presitgious Prix<br />

Pictet in March <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>, was a Guna<br />

S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual<br />

Arts at the American Academy in<br />

spring <strong>20</strong>08. He had just completed<br />

his monumental photo survey<br />

American Power (Steidl, <strong>20</strong>09)<br />

and was looking for a small respite<br />

in Berlin. No such luck: Epstein’s<br />

curiousity was piqued by the<br />

German capital’s quotidian and<br />

quirky corners, such as this defunct<br />

air-raid shelter in Wünsdorf.<br />

The result of Epstein’s rich visual<br />

odyssey, Berlin, will, at last, be<br />

available in June <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> from<br />

Steidl. The following is the book’s<br />

Introduction.<br />

I<br />

was raised in a Jewish<br />

American family that refused<br />

to visit Germany in deference<br />

to lost kin who had perished in<br />

the Holocaust. At 49, I broke the<br />

family protocol and traveled to<br />

Göttingen to supervise the printing<br />

of a book of my photographs<br />

at the publisher Steidl. This trip<br />

became the first of a dozen to<br />

Germany in the decade that followed,<br />

during which I worked<br />

on more books at Steidl, and<br />

on exhibitions in Cologne with<br />

my gallerist, Thomas Zander.<br />

Then, in <strong>20</strong>08, I was awarded<br />

the Berlin Prize. To my astonishment,<br />

Germans had become my<br />

staunchest allies.<br />

I left New York with my wife<br />

and daughter for a six-month residency<br />

at the American Academy<br />

in Berlin. We arrived in bonechilling<br />

January and I planned<br />

to sequester myself for a period<br />

of reflection and reading. But the<br />

city – more complicated and poignant<br />

than any I’d known, except<br />

Hanoi – could not be ignored.<br />

Mitch Epstein, Winkelturm Air-Raid ShelTER, Wünsdorf, <strong>20</strong>08<br />

The day we arrived, a driver took<br />

us from Tegel airport to the<br />

Academy in Wannsee, the suburb<br />

where the Nazis plotted the Final<br />

Solution. As he drove, I asked<br />

questions, and a flood of historical<br />

information poured forth: What<br />

was that toy-like tower? “That was<br />

Hitler’s radio and look-out tower<br />

during the war. Now it’s part of<br />

the Berlin Convention Centre.”<br />

The highway we were driving<br />

on was Hitler’s former racetrack.<br />

Only a few miles down the road<br />

was the legendary Glienicke<br />

Bridge in Potsdam, where the cia<br />

and kgb traded captive spies only<br />

twenty years ago.<br />

It was tempting to remain in the<br />

comfortable Academy enclave,<br />

with its fireplace and brilliant<br />

scholars. But I was drawn to<br />

the Berlin that had attempted to<br />

annihilate my ancestors, as well<br />

as the Berlin that had embodied<br />

the Cold War division, which had<br />

threatened the bedrock stability<br />

of my American childhood. I<br />

looked for the remnants of those<br />

tormented wartime and postwar<br />

histories; they were often overt,<br />

and sometimes lay just below the<br />

thin skin of contemporary Berlin.<br />

With an 8 x 10 camera, I started<br />

at Sachsenhausen concentration<br />

camp in January and ended with<br />

the Dalai Lama speaking at the<br />

Brandenburg Gate in June.<br />

Berlin was reconceived with<br />

the reunification of East and<br />

West in 1990. And although it<br />

has to contend with the stresses<br />

of all modern cities, Berlin has<br />

come to signify a society with<br />

a conscience. The remnants of<br />

wretched histories that I found<br />

were not accidental. Berliners<br />

have chosen to leave traces of the<br />

worst of themselves in their architecture<br />

and landscape. They have<br />

understood what a largely amnesiac<br />

America has not: reform<br />

relies on memory.<br />

mitch epstein


N16 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

A Life in Film<br />

The Academy mourns the death of film theorist and alumna Miriam Hansen (1949–<strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>)<br />

Since it began, film was<br />

made to be seen. It has created,<br />

in turn, unique ways<br />

of seeing. Miriam Hansen, an<br />

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow in<br />

spring <strong>20</strong>04, spent her academic<br />

career fascinated by this filmic<br />

dialectic. Hansen’s intense commitment<br />

to film led her to found<br />

the now legendary Committee<br />

on Cinema and Media Studies<br />

at the University of Chicago,<br />

where she was the Ferdinand<br />

Schevill Distinguished Service<br />

Professor in the Humanities<br />

in the Department of English<br />

since 1990 until her death, on<br />

February 5, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>.<br />

Born Dorothea Miriam Bratu<br />

in 1949 in Offenbach, Germany,<br />

Hansen’s parents were Jewish<br />

exiles who had met returning<br />

home after World War II. Hansen<br />

went on to receive a doctorate,<br />

in 1975, from the Johann<br />

Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in<br />

Frankfurt. Prior to her arrival<br />

at the University of Chicago, in<br />

1990, she taught at Yale and<br />

Rutgers. Her pioneering study,<br />

Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship<br />

in American Silent Film (Harvard,<br />

1991) was lauded by peers as “a<br />

work that has revolutionized the<br />

concept of spectatorship.”<br />

Hansen was an influential and<br />

subtle reader of the key cultural,<br />

social, and film theorists loosely<br />

affiliated with the city of her studies,<br />

including Theodor Adorno,<br />

Walter Benjamin, Alexander<br />

Kluge, and Siegfried Kracauer.<br />

She had completed a book manuscript<br />

on these monumental<br />

thinkers shortly before her death.<br />

American Academy Executive<br />

Director Gary Smith, who taught<br />

at the University of Chicago contemporaneously<br />

with Hansen,<br />

was struck by both her brilliance<br />

and her kindness towards rising<br />

scholars. “Miriam was revered<br />

by younger colleagues for her<br />

personal generosity as well as<br />

her scholarship. I remember her<br />

always having time to discuss<br />

Walter Benjamin and other topics,<br />

despite her continuing battles<br />

with cancer.”<br />

The eminent German author,<br />

social theorist, and film director<br />

Alexander Kluge, who broadcast<br />

several lengthy interviews of<br />

Miriam Hansen on German television,<br />

described to the Academy<br />

her profound influence: “Like<br />

a careful gardener, Miriam<br />

Hansen planted and interwove<br />

traditions of Frankfurt critical<br />

theory, modern film history, and<br />

her own critical passions and<br />

curiosity. She is an important<br />

transatlantic bridge for the traditions<br />

of enlightenment and film<br />

art. She was not only a theoretical<br />

mind, but someone who also<br />

exerted a strong, practical influence<br />

on filmmaking. Because of<br />

her, the Minutenfilm saw a rebirth,<br />

as well as film projected onto<br />

multiple screens, the Max Ophüls<br />

renaissance, and much more. We<br />

auteurs listened to her. She was –<br />

as she sat in her Chicago office<br />

and worked, occasionally glancing<br />

over the lake – our prophet.”<br />

Hansen is survived by her<br />

husband, Michael Geyer, the<br />

Samuel N. Harper Professor of<br />

German and European History at<br />

the University of Chicago and a<br />

trustee of the American Academy<br />

in Berlin.<br />

r.j.m.<br />

© Howard Helsinger<br />

Profiles in Scholarship<br />

Presenting the spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> fellows<br />

James Der Derian<br />

The terrorist attacks of<br />

September 11, <strong>20</strong>01 occurred a<br />

decade ago. Yet the preoccupation<br />

with terrorism continues to<br />

hamper the response of statesmen<br />

and scholars alike to global<br />

changes. Bosch Fellow James Der<br />

Derian, professor of international<br />

studies at Brown University,<br />

argues that the American unipolar<br />

moment has passed, succeed<br />

by a “heteropolarity” of networked<br />

forms of power. Is there<br />

a way to move on to a new global<br />

security agenda that recognizes<br />

and can manage these changes?<br />

Der Derian has been theorizing<br />

what such an environment would<br />

look like, as well as its ethical<br />

considerations. While at the<br />

Academy in spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> he will<br />

be writing on these subjects and<br />

completing an e-book version of<br />

the documentary film Human<br />

Terrain.<br />

Der Derian received his BA at<br />

McGill University in Quebec and<br />

was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford<br />

University, where he completed<br />

his MPhil and DPhil in international<br />

relations. Der Derian<br />

has authored and edited several<br />

books on international relations.<br />

In addition to his work on Human<br />

Terrain, Der Derian has produced<br />

two documentaries, Virtual y2k<br />

and After 9/11. His writing has<br />

appeared in numerous global<br />

security publications, as well as<br />

the New York Times, The Nation,<br />

Washington Quarterly, and Wired.<br />

Astrid M. Eckert<br />

Since Churchill’s Fulton Speech,<br />

in 1946, the Iron Curtain has<br />

served as one of the primary<br />

political metaphors in Cold War<br />

politics. But what exactly happened<br />

at the Aussenrand of the<br />

“free world” during those tense<br />

decades? Daimler Fellow Astrid<br />

M. Eckert revisits the history<br />

of Cold War West Germany by<br />

focusing on its most sensitive<br />

geographical space, the border<br />

with its ideological adversary,<br />

socialist East Germany. An assistant<br />

professor of modern German<br />

history at Emory University,<br />

Eckert studies the borderlands<br />

that emerged on the eastern edge<br />

of the new West German state.<br />

Viewing borderlands as “fields<br />

of heightened consciousness,” as<br />

Daphne Berdahl observed, Eckert<br />

seeks to recast West German history<br />

from the periphery. Her new<br />

book project, tentatively entitled<br />

West Germany and the Iron<br />

Curtain, will be Eckert’s focus<br />

during her residency.<br />

Eckert received her PhD from<br />

the Free University of Berlin in<br />

<strong>20</strong>03. With a dissertation entitled<br />

Battle for the Files: The Western<br />

Allies and the Return of Captured<br />

German Archives after World War<br />

II, which was awarded the <strong>20</strong>04<br />

Friedrich Meinecke Dissertation<br />

Prize of the Free University’s<br />

history department and the biennial<br />

Hedwig Hintze Dissertation<br />

Award of the German Historical<br />

Association. She also co-edited


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N17<br />

Institutions of Public Memory: The<br />

Legacies of German and American<br />

Politicians, published in <strong>20</strong>07.<br />

Hal Foster<br />

In Walter Benjamin’s 1933<br />

essay “Experience and Poverty”<br />

he observes, “In its buildings,<br />

pictures, and stories, mankind<br />

is preparing to outlive culture,<br />

if need be.” Hal Foster, the<br />

Townsend Martin Class of 1917<br />

Professor of Art and Archaeology<br />

at Princeton University, takes<br />

inspiration from Benjamin’s<br />

“surviving civilization” sentiment<br />

in his project, “Bathetic, Brutal,<br />

Banal: Strategies of Survival in<br />

<strong>20</strong>th Century Art.” While each<br />

of these terms refers to a specific<br />

Foster began writing art criticism<br />

for Artforum in 1978. The<br />

strength of this early writing<br />

quickly propelled him into a<br />

major presence in the New York<br />

art scene: from 1981–1987 he<br />

was an editor at Art in America,<br />

and in 1983 he edited a seminal<br />

collection of essays on postmodernism<br />

The Anti-Aesthetic:<br />

Essays on Postmodern Culture.<br />

Foster received his PhD from<br />

the Graduate Center at the<br />

City University of New York in<br />

1990. Foster’s books include<br />

Compulsive Beauty (mit, 1993),<br />

The Return of the Real (mit, 1996),<br />

Design and Crime (and Other<br />

Diatribes) (Verso, <strong>20</strong>02), and<br />

Prosthetic Gods (mit, <strong>20</strong>04). He<br />

Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar,<br />

Straus & Giroux, <strong>20</strong>08), was<br />

selected as a New York Times<br />

Notable Book of the Year as<br />

well as both a Slate and Salon<br />

Best Book of <strong>20</strong>09. Galchen<br />

has taught creative writing at<br />

Columbia University, where<br />

she completed her own MFA in<br />

Fiction in <strong>20</strong>06 and was a Robert<br />

Bingham Fellow. She also holds<br />

a medical degree in psychiatry<br />

from the Mount Sinai School of<br />

Medicine. Her medical expertise<br />

and psychiatric sensitivity<br />

reveal themselves discreetly<br />

in Atmospheric Disturbances<br />

through the leading character of<br />

Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist<br />

who believes his wife has been<br />

the Believer, and New York<br />

Magazine. In July <strong>20</strong>10, Galchen<br />

was featured as one of the New<br />

Yorker’s “<strong>20</strong> under 40” fiction<br />

writers.<br />

Todd Gitlin<br />

No fewer than three crises are<br />

affecting journalism today,<br />

claims Columbia University professor<br />

Todd Gitlin: the economic<br />

travails of newspapers; an attention<br />

crisis of the news-consuming<br />

public; and, perhaps most worrisome,<br />

an authority crisis that<br />

has led to mistrust of the news<br />

media generally. Journalism and<br />

journalists<br />

themselves have begun to lose<br />

both morale and legitimacy.<br />

© hornischer<br />

Class of spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> (l to R): Hal foster, H. C. erik midelfort, david b. ruderman, dave mckenzie, p. adams sitney, ellen kennedy,<br />

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

cultural moment – respectively<br />

Dada, Brutalist architecture, and<br />

Pop banality – they are unified<br />

in a longer view of modernism,<br />

specifically in a key, overlooked<br />

strategy that Foster calls “mimetic<br />

exacerbation.” Exploring what<br />

exactly this strategy is and how<br />

it continues to influence contemporary<br />

art will be Foster’s focus<br />

as a Berlin Prize Fellow at the<br />

American Academy.<br />

continues to write regularly for<br />

the London Review of Books, the<br />

Los Angeles Times Book Review,<br />

October (where he is also a coeditor),<br />

and the New Left Review.<br />

Rivka Galchen<br />

Rivka Galchen, the Mary Ellen<br />

von der Heyden Fiction Fellow,<br />

is a New York-based writer and<br />

a contributing editor to Harper’s<br />

magazine. Her debut novel,<br />

replaced by an almost identical<br />

double.<br />

Galchen won the <strong>20</strong>10<br />

William Saroyan International<br />

Prize for Writing and has<br />

received fellowships from the<br />

New York Public Library’s<br />

Cullman Center for Scholars<br />

and Writers and the Rona Jaffe<br />

Foundation. Her work has<br />

appeared in the New Yorker,<br />

Harper’s, the New York Times,<br />

“To say that the atmosphere<br />

among journalists is troubled,”<br />

Gitlin says, “is an understatement.<br />

’Toxic’ might be a better<br />

adjective.” At the American<br />

Academy as a Bosch Fellow, Gitlin<br />

aims to write a concise account<br />

of journalism’s current predicament:<br />

its origins, significance,<br />

and the eventual effects it will<br />

have on both civil society and our<br />

shared intellectual environment.


N18 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

Gitlin was educated at Harvard<br />

University, the University of<br />

Michigan, and the University of<br />

California, Berkeley; and is the<br />

author of twelve books, including,<br />

most recently The Bulldozer and<br />

the Big Tent: Blind Republicans,<br />

Lame Democrats, and the Recovery<br />

of American Ideals (Wiley, <strong>20</strong>07).<br />

Gitlin’s articles have appeared in<br />

scores of publications, including<br />

New York Times, Los Angeles Times,<br />

San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s,<br />

and Mother Jones, where he is a<br />

contributing writer, and he has<br />

often appeared on television<br />

and radio programs. Prior to his<br />

position at Columbia, Gitlin was<br />

a professor of sociology and director<br />

of the Mass Communications<br />

Program at the University of<br />

California, Berkeley, and then<br />

a professor of culture, journalism<br />

and sociology at New York<br />

University.<br />

Pieter JudSOn<br />

For over eight centuries the<br />

Habsburg Monarchy alternately<br />

attempted, succeeded, and failed<br />

to unify states throughout<br />

Europe under a succession of<br />

duchys, kingdoms, and banats<br />

from Vienna to Carpathia. The<br />

policies implemented to achieve<br />

such grand reach did not die with<br />

the Empire in 1918, however, and<br />

it is the aim of historian Pieter<br />

Judson to write a new history of<br />

the Habsburg Monarchy and its<br />

successor states, one that looks<br />

closely at events that occurred<br />

as the Empire crawled to a halt.<br />

Judson’s Academy project during<br />

his Nina Maria Gorrissen<br />

Fellowship will consider a broad<br />

range of imperial campaigns<br />

that sought to unify the diverse<br />

regions and thereby offer an alternative<br />

to the fragmented, nationbased<br />

accounts that continue to<br />

dominate narratives about East<br />

Central Europe.<br />

A professor of history at<br />

Swarthmore College, and an<br />

award-winning author, Judson’s<br />

current work on modern<br />

European history, specifically<br />

on Germany and the Austro-<br />

Hungarian Empire between 1848<br />

and 1948, focuses on nationalist<br />

conflicts, revolutionary and<br />

counter revolutionary social<br />

movements, and European fascism.<br />

Judson has been awarded<br />

grants from the Guggenheim<br />

Foundation, the neh, and has<br />

been a Whiting, Marshall, and<br />

Fulbright fellow. His most recent<br />

book, Guardians of the Nation:<br />

Activists on the Language Frontiers<br />

of Imperial Austria (Harvard,<br />

<strong>20</strong>06), offers new challenges to<br />

traditional accounts of the rise<br />

of nationalism in multi-ethnic<br />

regions of Central and Eastern<br />

Europe.<br />

Ellen Kennedy<br />

In University of Pennsylvania<br />

political scientist Ellen<br />

Kennedy’s Academy project<br />

“The Political Theory of Market<br />

Governance,” she observes how<br />

economic and financial crises in<br />

Weimar Germany and the United<br />

States became a source of greatly<br />

expanded executive powers in<br />

both constitutions. Economic<br />

emergencies caused escalations<br />

in presidential power. These historical<br />

examples, Kennedy says,<br />

reveal the fragility of “rule of law”<br />

concepts in the social context of<br />

modern democratic constitutions.<br />

There is an alternative, however,<br />

in the theorists of Ordo liberalism<br />

and the soziale Rechtsstadt,<br />

specifically in the relatively<br />

obscure figure of Walter Eucken,<br />

an economist whose ideas helped<br />

create the miracle economy of<br />

postwar Germany – the subject<br />

of her work in Berlin as an Axel<br />

<strong>Spring</strong>er Fellow.<br />

Kennedy’s work has long<br />

focused on a variety of topics<br />

with the fields of comparative<br />

political economy and the history<br />

of modern European political<br />

and legal theory. She received<br />

a PhD in government from the<br />

London School of Economics,<br />

and before joining the faculty at<br />

the University of Pennsylvania,<br />

Kennedy taught at the universities<br />

of London, York, Manchester,<br />

and Freiburg. Kennedy is the<br />

author of several books, among<br />

them Constitutional Failure:<br />

Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Duke,<br />

<strong>20</strong>04), The Bundesbank (Johns<br />

Hopkins, 1997), and Freedom<br />

and the Open Society: Henri<br />

Bergson’s Contribution to Political<br />

Philosophy (Garland, 1987).<br />

Dave McKenzie<br />

Brooklyn-based artist Dave<br />

McKenzie blazes across multiple<br />

media – sculpture, video, painting,<br />

and performance, while<br />

engaging in the tradition of<br />

public art that boldly interrogates<br />

society’s unspoken assumptions<br />

about itself. Often employing<br />

his own likeness, McKenzie’s<br />

self-ironizing, playful approach<br />

to art-making belies the seriousness<br />

of his themes: artistic and<br />

racial identity, social masking,<br />

and economic nonfunctionality,<br />

which he will continue exploring<br />

as a Guna S. Mundheim Visual<br />

Arts Fellow at the Academy.<br />

McKenzie was born in<br />

Kingston, Jamaica in 1977. He<br />

received a BFA in printmaking<br />

from the University of the Arts in<br />

Philadelphia and studied at the<br />

Skowhegan School of Painting<br />

and Sculpture. He has had<br />

numerous solo exhibitions, most<br />

recently On Premises at Susanne<br />

Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects<br />

in <strong>20</strong>09, Present Tense at the<br />

Atlanta Contemporary Art Center<br />

and Screen Doors on Submarines,<br />

shown at redcat Gallery in Los<br />

Angeles, both in <strong>20</strong>08. Prior<br />

exhibitions were held at the<br />

Institute of Contemporary Art<br />

Boston in <strong>20</strong>07, as well as<br />

at Gallery 40000 in Chicago<br />

in <strong>20</strong>06.<br />

H. c. Erik Midelfort<br />

During his Ellen Maria<br />

Gorrissen Fellowship at the<br />

American Academy in Berlin,<br />

historian of early modern<br />

Germany H. C. Erik Midelfort<br />

will pursue his project “Fear of<br />

Freethinking: the Suppression of<br />

Dissent in Germany, 1650–1750,”<br />

which examines the ways in<br />

which the German states during<br />

that century, with no Inquisition<br />

like that of Catholic Italy or Spain<br />

– and with virtually no effective<br />

central government – managed<br />

to suppress radical and dissenting<br />

political, moral, religious or<br />

irreligious views. It is Midelfort’s<br />

aim to show how certain cultural<br />

dynamics led to the development<br />

of a surprisingly academic<br />

culture in which Catholics and<br />

Protestants (both Lutherans and<br />

Calvinists) could survive in their<br />

own separate religious niches,<br />

but where other thoughts were<br />

rigorously censored.<br />

Midelfort’s pioneering<br />

research into some uncanny<br />

facets of early modern Germany,<br />

including exorcism, witchcraft,<br />

and the history of madness,<br />

has resulted in acclaimed findings<br />

and in prize-winning<br />

books such as Mad Princes in<br />

Renaissance Germany (Virginia,<br />

1994), and A History of Madness<br />

in Sixteenth-Century Germany<br />

(Stanford, <strong>20</strong>00). Midelfort, at<br />

the University of Virginia since<br />

1970 and since 1996 the Julian<br />

Bishko Professor of History, has<br />

been a visiting scholar at several<br />

universities in the US and abroad,<br />

including at his alma mater Yale –<br />

where he received his BA, MA,<br />

and PhD degrees – at Harvard,<br />

and at both Wolfson and All<br />

Souls College at the University<br />

of Oxford.<br />

Norman Naimark<br />

What was the span of Joseph<br />

Stalin’s plans for Europe from<br />

the end of World War II until his<br />

death, in 1953? Which European<br />

ideologies, social movements,<br />

and cultural values intersected<br />

with Soviet designs on Europe<br />

at the beginning of the Cold<br />

War? Norman M. Naimark, the<br />

Robert and Florence McDonnell<br />

Chair in East European History<br />

at Stanford University, is interested<br />

in the problems of radical<br />

politics in the Russian Empire<br />

and Eastern Europe. In his current<br />

Academy project, the Axel<br />

<strong>Spring</strong>er Fellow aims to explore<br />

seven case studies that highlight<br />

how the shape and tenor of<br />

postwar Europe were decided<br />

by a “three-cornered historical<br />

relationship” between Stalin’s


News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N19<br />

policies, European social movements<br />

and values, and the growing<br />

rivalry between the US and<br />

Soviet Union.<br />

Formerly a professor of history<br />

at Boston University, a<br />

fellow of the Russian Research<br />

Center at Harvard, and senior<br />

fellow at the Hoover Institution,<br />

Naimark has served as Director<br />

of Stanford’s Center for Russian<br />

and East European Studies and<br />

chair of the history department,<br />

in addition to acting as director of<br />

Stanford’s interdisciplinary programs<br />

in International Relations<br />

and International Policy Studies.<br />

In 1996, Naimark was presented<br />

with the Distinguished Service<br />

Cross from the government of<br />

the Federal Republic of Germany.<br />

David B. Ruderman<br />

In 1797 Phinehas Elijah Hurwitz,<br />

a Jewish mystic who lived<br />

from 1765 to 1821, published an<br />

obscure book called the Sefer<br />

ha-Brit (Book of the Covenant)<br />

in Moravia. The book offers an<br />

exegesis on an older work of<br />

Jewish mysticism and expounds<br />

upon the sciences of the day<br />

before detailing the soul’s preparation<br />

for imbibing the Divine<br />

Spirit. David B. Ruderman, the<br />

Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of<br />

Modern Jewish History and<br />

the Ella Darivoff Director of<br />

the Center for Advanced Judaic<br />

Studies at the University of<br />

Pennsylvania, will tackle his own<br />

exegesis of Hurwitz’s volume in<br />

his project “Mysticism, Science,<br />

and Moral Cosmopolitanism in<br />

Enlightenment Jewish Thought.”<br />

The German Transatlantic<br />

Program Fellow aims to open a<br />

fascinating window into the processes<br />

of continuity and change<br />

in Jewish thinking at the dawn of<br />

the modern era.<br />

Ruderman was educated at<br />

the City College of New York,<br />

the Teacher’s Institute of the<br />

Jewish Theological Seminary<br />

of America, and Columbia<br />

University. He received his rabbinical<br />

degree from the Hebrew<br />

Union College-Jewish Institute<br />

of Religion in New York and<br />

his PhD in Jewish history from<br />

the Hebrew University. He has<br />

taught at Yale University and<br />

the University of Maryland,<br />

College Park, and at the Graduate<br />

School of the Jewish Theological<br />

Seminary of America and the<br />

Hebrew University in Jerusalem.<br />

He is the author or editor of<br />

eighteen books, including The<br />

World of a Renaissance Jew: The<br />

Life and Thought of Abraham b.<br />

Mordecai Farissol (Hebrew Union<br />

College Press, 1981) and Jewish<br />

Enlightenment in an English<br />

Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction<br />

of Modern Jewish Thought<br />

(Princeton, <strong>20</strong>01).<br />

P. Adams Sitney<br />

P. Adams Sitney, Professor of<br />

the Council of the Humanities<br />

and Visual Arts at Princeton<br />

University, was last in Berlin in<br />

the bright fall of 1967. It was then<br />

that he met two pioneering filmmakers:<br />

Gregory Markopoulos<br />

and Robert Beavers. Both avant<br />

garde auteurs would come to<br />

occupy a large portion of Sitney’s<br />

critical attention over the coming<br />

decades, and in Sitney’s<br />

Academy project, “Cinema and<br />

Poetry,” he re-examines not only<br />

their work, but also that of filmmakers<br />

Pier Paolo Pasolini and<br />

Andrey Tarkovsky, both of whom<br />

push the subtle visual language<br />

of poetry into the cinematic<br />

dimension.<br />

Sitney, this spring’s Anna-<br />

Maria Kellen Fellow, was educated<br />

at Yale University, where he<br />

studied Greek and Sanskrit as an<br />

undergraduate before obtaining<br />

his MA and PhD in comparative<br />

literature. He went on to found<br />

the Anthology Film Archives and<br />

curate international film series<br />

and exhibitions of contemporary<br />

film, as well as serve as associate<br />

editor at Film Culture for three<br />

decades. He has taught at New<br />

York University, Bard College,<br />

Cooper Union, and Middlebury<br />

College. His book Visionary<br />

Film: The American Avant-Garde<br />

(Oxford, 1974) remains required<br />

reading for aspiring filmmakers.<br />

Sitney’s most recent work<br />

is Eyes Upside Down: Visionary<br />

Filmmakers and the Heritage of<br />

Emerson (Oxford, <strong>20</strong>08).<br />

Ken Ueno<br />

Composer Ken Ueno’s music<br />

shirks easy categorization, drawing<br />

on influences as disparate<br />

as heavy metal and Tuvan throat<br />

singing. Ueno himself is not only<br />

a composer of acoustic and electronic<br />

works, but also a performer<br />

and vocal improviser specializing<br />

in “extended techniques,” such<br />

as growling, gurgling, humming,<br />

and whispering. In his second<br />

semester as the Berlin Prize<br />

in Music Composition Fellow,<br />

Ueno will continue work on two<br />

compositions.<br />

Currently an assistant professor<br />

of music at the University<br />

of California, Berkeley, Ueno<br />

has taught at the University of<br />

Massachusetts, where he was<br />

also was the director of the<br />

Electronic Music Studios. A<br />

graduate of West Point, he holds<br />

degrees from Berklee College of<br />

Music, Boston University, the<br />

Yale School of Music, and a PhD<br />

from Harvard University.<br />

Sneak Preview<br />

Announcing the fall <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> fellows<br />

This fall welcomes<br />

another outstanding class<br />

of scholars and writers<br />

to the Hans Arnhold Center.<br />

Jennifer Culbert, a political<br />

scientist at Johns Hopkins<br />

University, will be studying the<br />

jurisprudence of Hannah Arendt;<br />

Leland de la Durantaye,<br />

who teaches English at Harvard<br />

University, is beginning work<br />

on a study of Samuel Beckett;<br />

James Der Derian, a<br />

spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> fellow from Brown<br />

University, will fulfill the remainder<br />

of his Bosch Fellowship at<br />

work on his film, Human Terrain,<br />

part of his project of “Global<br />

Engagement through Innovative<br />

Media.” A professor of social<br />

psychology at Northwestern<br />

University, Alice Eagly,<br />

delves into the origins of malefemale<br />

psychology, and, tangentially,<br />

Adam Haslett, a San<br />

Francisco-based writer, is at work<br />

on his novel Kindness. Daniel<br />

Hobbins, an associate professor<br />

of history at Ohio State, is<br />

researching the medieval origins<br />

of print; Susan McCabe<br />

of the University of Southern<br />

California furthers her research<br />

on the writer Annie Winifred<br />

Ellerman, in her project “Bryher:<br />

Female Husband of Modernism,”<br />

and Geoffrey O’Brien,<br />

Editor-in-Chief of Library of<br />

America, is working on “America<br />

before the Code.” Visual artist<br />

Paul Pfeiffer will delve into<br />

new works, and Elizabeth<br />

Povinelli, who teaches anthropology<br />

and gender studies at<br />

Columbia University, explores<br />

the relationship between “new<br />

media and late liberalism.” Jut ta<br />

Schickore, a professor of history<br />

and philosophy of science at<br />

Indiana University, is studying<br />

three hundred years of experiments<br />

with snake venom (1660–<br />

1960); poet Tom Sleigh, of<br />

Hunter College, is putting down<br />

brave new lines while in Berlin,<br />

and lastly John Van Engen,<br />

a professor of history at Notre<br />

Dame, is studying the European<br />

twelfth century as a “turn” in<br />

the medieval narrative.


N<strong>20</strong> | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

Alumni Books<br />

Recent releases by former fellows<br />

Anne Applebaum<br />

Gulag Voices: An Anthology<br />

Yale University Press,<br />

January <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Sigrid Nunez<br />

Sempre Susan:<br />

A Memoir of Susan Sontag<br />

Atlas, March <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Charles Lane<br />

Stay of Execution: Saving<br />

the Death Penalty from Itself<br />

Rowman & LittleField,<br />

October <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Mitch Epstein<br />

Berlin<br />

Steidl, June <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Francisco Goldman<br />

Say Her Name<br />

Grove Atlantic, April <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Nicole Krauss<br />

Great House<br />

W. W. Norton, October <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Wendy Lesser<br />

Music for Silenced Voices:<br />

Shostakovich and His Fifteen<br />

Quartets, March <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

W. S. Di Piero<br />

When Can I See You Again ?<br />

New Art Writings<br />

Wafer Press, September <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Geoffrey Wolff<br />

The Hard Way Around:<br />

The Passages of Joshua Slocum<br />

Alfred A. Knopf, October <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Michael Taussig<br />

Feldforschungsnotizbücher<br />

Hatje Cantz, March <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Alex Katz<br />

Catalogue Raisonné<br />

Hatje Cantz, June <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Leonard Barkan<br />

Michelangelo: A Life on Paper<br />

Princeton University Press,<br />

January <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Thomas Holt<br />

Children of Fire: A History<br />

of African Americans<br />

Hill & Wang, October <strong>20</strong>10<br />

Mitch Epstein<br />

State of the Union<br />

Hatje Cantz, March <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Walter Mattli<br />

(with Tim Büthe)<br />

The New Global Rulers:<br />

The Privatization of Regulation<br />

in the World Economy<br />

Princeton University Press,<br />

March <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Call for Applications<br />

The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for residential<br />

fellowships for <strong>20</strong>12–<strong>20</strong>13 and future academic years. The<br />

application deadline is October 1, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>. Prizes will be awarded<br />

in February <strong>20</strong>12 and publicly announced in early spring <strong>20</strong>12.<br />

Approximately two-dozen fellowships are awarded to established<br />

scholars, writers, and professionals who wish to engage in independent<br />

study in Berlin. Prizes are conferred annually for an academic<br />

semester – and on occasion for an academic year – and include<br />

round-trip airfare, housing, partial board, and a monthly stipend of<br />

$5,000. Fellows are expected to reside at the Hans Arnhold Center<br />

during the entire term of the award.<br />

Fellowships are restricted to candidates based long-term in the<br />

United States. American citizenship is not required, and American<br />

expatriates are not eligible. Candidates in academic disciplines<br />

must have completed a doctorate at the time of application. The<br />

Academy gives priority to a proposal’s significance and scholarly<br />

merit, not its specific relevance to Germany. It is helpful, however,<br />

to explain how a Berlin residency might contribute to the project’s<br />

further development. Application forms may be submitted via the<br />

Academy’s website, www.americanacademy.de.


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 25<br />

Doors Opened,<br />

Doors Closed<br />

Can’t anyone get immigration right ?<br />

By Tamar Jacoby<br />

Ithought I was taking a break<br />

from my life as an immigration reform<br />

advocate in Washington during my<br />

stay at the American Academy in Berlin. I<br />

knew, of course, that immigration was a<br />

roiling issue in Europe, too. Even from my<br />

beleaguered bunker inside the Beltway, I’d<br />

caught wind of the murder of Dutch filmmaker<br />

Theo van Gogh, the Paris riots, the<br />

Danish Mohammad cartoon crisis. Still,<br />

I thought a few months of living in Europe<br />

and listening in on its immigration debate<br />

would clear my head and give me some perspective.<br />

After all, I reasoned, the issues –<br />

and our countries – are so different.<br />

I couldn’t have been more wrong – about<br />

the escape.<br />

Europe and the United States are certainly<br />

different. Germany, where I spent<br />

two months this winter, is an economic<br />

powerhouse. But to an American its stratified<br />

social structure feels left over from<br />

another era: rigid high-school tracking,<br />

pervasive credentialism, and workplace<br />

seniority systems sharply limit personal<br />

opportunity. Denmark, where I also visited,<br />

is even more different: a tiny, homogeneous<br />

country (population 5.5 million),<br />

with the world’s most developed welfare<br />

state. What, I asked, could it possibly have<br />

in common with the giant, hyper-diverse<br />

US, the world’s most developed free-market<br />

economy?<br />

In both Germany and Denmark, unlike<br />

in the US, the immigration debate is less<br />

about how many foreigners to admit than it<br />

is about how to handle those already living<br />

there. In the 1960s, both nations imported<br />

guest workers from southern Europe and<br />

Turkey – foreigners allowed to stay, joined<br />

later by their families. But for one reason or<br />

another – some economic, some cultural,<br />

some rooted in government shortsightedness<br />

– many of these workers and families<br />

failed to integrate into their new societies.<br />

And over the past decade, both German and<br />

Danish publics have become increasingly<br />

alarmed, calling for sometimes helpful,<br />

sometimes punitive and coercive integration<br />

policies – from government-funded<br />

language courses to much-resented restrictions<br />

on visas for foreign spouses.<br />

Still, for all the differences, when you<br />

scratch the surface, Europe and the US<br />

turn out to be more similar than they first<br />

appear. All three countries, it turns out,<br />

need foreign workers – both highly skilled<br />

and less skilled. But voters in all three<br />

nations are anxious about the cultural<br />

As the world’s second<br />

largest exporter, just<br />

behind China, Germany has a<br />

voracious need for foreign<br />

workers to do jobs Germans<br />

are either too educated or<br />

not educated enough to do.<br />

differences the immigrants bring. As a<br />

result, policymakers in all three places are<br />

paralyzed: caught between rationality and<br />

emotion, between their country’s economic<br />

interests and voters’ spiraling fear and<br />

resentment.<br />

As the world’s second largest exporter,<br />

just behind China, Germany has a voracious<br />

need for foreign workers to do jobs<br />

Germans are either too educated or not<br />

educated enough to do. Every summer<br />

300,000 Eastern Europeans and others<br />

come to Germany to fill seasonal agricultural<br />

jobs. That’s a huge number: translated<br />

to the US, it would amount to 1.2 million<br />

agricultural workers every year. In fact, we<br />

admit fewer than 70,000 legally, relying<br />

instead largely on illegal immigrants. But<br />

the bottom line is the same in both countries:<br />

the domestic workforce, hardly growing<br />

and increasingly educated, has less<br />

and less interest in outdoor, physical work.<br />

Neither nation can sustain its agricultural<br />

sector without immigrants. And in both<br />

countries, even in the downturn, the same<br />

is true in an array of other industries – hospitality,<br />

the personal service sector, and,<br />

most urgently in Germany, home healthcare<br />

for the elderly.<br />

Europe’s generous welfare<br />

states complicate the picture. In<br />

the US, the labor market self-corrects<br />

to synchronize with the business cycle.<br />

Thanks to cell phones and the Internet,<br />

even unskilled workers know about job<br />

opportunities a continent away. And when<br />

little work is available, fewer migrants<br />

make the trip – so few that during the<br />

downturn less than half as many Mexicans<br />

entered the US each year than were coming<br />

a decade ago, when the economy was booming.<br />

It doesn’t work that way in Germany<br />

or Denmark, where many immigrants and<br />

their children find it cheaper to live on the<br />

dole than hold a job. Still, in either case,<br />

what drives most migration is an economic<br />

calculus – individuals’ calculus about their<br />

opportunities in a global labor market.<br />

Receiving countries need to manage this<br />

dynamic to their advantage.<br />

The same is true at the skilled end of<br />

the job ladder. The twenty-first century is<br />

posing the same challenge in all developed<br />

countries. Innovation is our era’s key to<br />

business success, not just in it and communications,<br />

but also in traditional sectors<br />

from banking to manufacturing. No nation<br />

produces enough scientists, engineers,<br />

inventors, or high-end business managers<br />

to drive its knowledge economy. And all of<br />

our countries are scrambling to attract fi


26 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

© Scott Groller<br />

Dave McKenzie, installation from the exhibit Screen Doors on Submarines at REDcat, Los Angeles, <strong>20</strong>08


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 27<br />

highly skilled immigrants. This is<br />

the global race of our era: not for new,<br />

advanced weaponry – or colonies or<br />

natural resources – but for international<br />

brainpower.<br />

In <strong>20</strong>05 Germany created a new visa<br />

to attract highly skilled immigrants.<br />

It’s an appealing package: the visa is<br />

permanent, not temporary; you can<br />

bring your spouse, who can also work<br />

legally. And there’s no test to determine<br />

if you’re taking a job that could<br />

be filled by a German worker, tests of<br />

a kind that often lead to red tape and<br />

delay. Still, even these favorable terms<br />

attracted fewer than <strong>20</strong>0 applications<br />

for the new visa last year. In the US, by<br />

contrast, we admit some 350,000 highly<br />

skilled immigrants annually, some temporary,<br />

some permanent, plus roughly<br />

five times as many foreign students as<br />

Germany. Yet in the US, too, employers –<br />

from universities to government labs to<br />

cutting-edge it companies – complain<br />

about a shortage of high-end workers.<br />

It’s no mystery why policymakers in<br />

Germany, Denmark, and the US have<br />

proven unable or unwilling to satisfy<br />

their economies’ demand for foreign<br />

workers. Voters in all three countries are<br />

skeptical of immigrants, if not hostile<br />

to them, blind to the economic benefits<br />

they bring, and worried about whether<br />

they will integrate. Last summer,<br />

establishment politician and former<br />

central banker Thilo Sarrazin shocked<br />

Germany with an incendiary, bestselling<br />

book claiming that immigration<br />

was destroying the country, more than<br />

likely because of foreigners’ defective<br />

genes. In Denmark, the Danish People’s<br />

Party is fixated on origins, calling for a<br />

halt to all immigration from non-Western<br />

countries. And though Denmark’s<br />

mainstream parties have hesitated to<br />

go that far, in government both left<br />

and right have followed the DPP’s lead,<br />

slowly making their tiny country less<br />

and less hospitable to foreigners.<br />

In America, we still pride ourselves<br />

on being a nation of immigrants, and<br />

we frown on talk of genetic inferiority.<br />

But returning to the US from Europe this<br />

spring, I began to feel this was perhaps a<br />

distinction without as much difference as I<br />

once thought. Rising anti-immigrant sentiment<br />

in Arizona and elsewhere doesn’t<br />

feel that far removed from the xenophobia<br />

surfacing in Germany and Denmark. And<br />

new claims, from House Republicans<br />

and others, that every immigrant we<br />

deport will open a job for an unemployed<br />

American, are just as misleading and ultimately<br />

self-defeating as the counterfactual<br />

anti-immigrant arguments I heard in<br />

Europe. Once again, in all three countries,<br />

the bottom line seems much the same: rising<br />

public anxiety, mainly about unskilled<br />

immigrants, is driving out all rational<br />

discussion and preventing policymakers<br />

from acting effectively to meet national<br />

economic needs.<br />

The fact that many of the immigrants in<br />

Germany and Denmark are Muslims only<br />

raises the stakes, adding to concerns about<br />

what their failure to integrate would mean<br />

for the host country – for its cultural mores<br />

and national security. Muslim populations<br />

are growing; native-born families are having<br />

fewer children. And it’s easy for many<br />

Danes and Germans to imagine the worst –<br />

that every headscarf and every mosque is<br />

a sign of surging fundamentalism.<br />

there is relatively little American debate about whether<br />

immigrants are succeeding in the United States.<br />

We count on the traditions of generations past – that<br />

mysterious alchemy we once called “the melting pot.”<br />

Thoughtful people in both Denmark and<br />

Germany recognize that radical Islam is<br />

a reality in their country, but many feel the<br />

threat is exaggerated. According to Naser<br />

Khader, a Danish member of parliament<br />

of Syrian-Palestinian descent and an outspoken<br />

critic of Islamic fundamentalism,<br />

perhaps 10 percent of Muslims in Denmark<br />

are anti-Western Islamists. An equal share,<br />

he says, are unequivocally supportive of<br />

Western values. The problem, in his view,<br />

and survey research bears him out, is that<br />

the majority in the middle is often hesitant<br />

to repudiate radicals, and no one, newcomer<br />

or native born, draws a sharp enough<br />

distinction between “religious Islam” and<br />

“political Islam.” This dynamic and the<br />

need to reverse it help put our American<br />

situation in some perspective. Whatever<br />

problems we’re facing, they look small in<br />

comparison to Europe’s.<br />

Still, standing back, I found myself struck<br />

by a final, haunting parallel. We Americans<br />

tend to think we know the answers on<br />

immigrant integration. We argue bitterly<br />

about border issues and enforcement and<br />

how many foreign workers to admit. But<br />

compared to Europe there is relatively little<br />

American debate about whether immigrants<br />

are succeeding in the United States.<br />

We count on the traditions of generations<br />

past – that mysterious alchemy we once<br />

called “the melting pot.” And unlike<br />

in Europe, we make virtually no effort to<br />

help newcomers make their way in the<br />

new country.<br />

But what if, like Europe a generation<br />

ago, we too are sowing the seeds<br />

of a long-term failure? True, immigrants<br />

in the US are still integrating more<br />

successfully than in Europe: labor force<br />

participation is higher, unemployment<br />

lower, language acquisition and educational<br />

outcomes significantly better. But what<br />

kinds of results can we expect over the long<br />

haul from eleven million unauthorized<br />

immigrants and their children – newcomers<br />

blocked by law from full participation in<br />

society? Workers stuck in black-market jobs<br />

with little opportunity for advancement;<br />

families discouraged from putting down<br />

roots; parents afraid to send their children<br />

to school; talented students denied college<br />

scholarships – it’s not exactly a recipe for<br />

successful assimilation. Add our angry<br />

debate to the mix – the unrelenting antiimmigrant<br />

rhetoric now a staple across<br />

the country – and it’s hard not to fear for<br />

the future. Legal and illegal, Latino young<br />

people are getting the message, and it is<br />

breeding social alienation that will create<br />

problems for decades to come.<br />

Yes, the US and Europe are different.<br />

But thanks to the global economy, we are<br />

all what Germans call “immigration countries,”<br />

and the challenges we’re facing are<br />

surprisingly similar. So instead of a needed<br />

respite, my time in Europe felt like a wakeup<br />

call. America has a glorious record as<br />

a nation of immigrants, but that heritage<br />

may be more fragile than we think. µ<br />

Tamar Jacoby, president of<br />

ImmigrationWorks USA, was a Bosch<br />

Public Policy Fellow at the American<br />

Academy in fall <strong>20</strong>10. A version of this<br />

article first appeared in Zócalo Public<br />

Square, an online magazine.


28 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

crossing over<br />

The precarious practice of Thomas Hirschhorn<br />

By Hal Foster<br />

What happens when the<br />

avant-garde is faced with a state<br />

of emergency, whether real (when<br />

the rule of law is actually suspended) or<br />

imagined (when it only seems to be)?<br />

Modernist movements like Dada were<br />

marked by the chaos of world war, to be<br />

sure, yet in many ways our own present is<br />

also one of emergency. If there is a condition<br />

that has governed recent art, it is a<br />

precarious one.<br />

Almost any litany of the machinations<br />

of the last ten years will evoke this state of<br />

uncertainty: a stolen presidential election;<br />

the attacks of September 11 and the War on<br />

Terror; the deception of the Iraq War and<br />

the debacle of the occupation; Abu Ghraib,<br />

Guantánamo Bay, and rendition to torture<br />

camps; another problematic presidential<br />

election; Katrina; the scapegoating of<br />

immigrants; the healthcare crisis; the ecological<br />

disaster; the financial house of cards,<br />

and so on. For all the discussion of “rogue<br />

states” elsewhere, our own government<br />

has sometimes operated out of bounds. It<br />

is little wonder, then, that the concept of<br />

“the state of exception” (developed by Carl<br />

Schmitt, in the early 19<strong>20</strong>s) was revived,<br />

that this state once again appeared to be<br />

“not the exception but the rule,” as Walter<br />

Benjamin wrote in his 1940 essay “Theses<br />

on the Philosophy of History,” and that<br />

as a consequence one could assert that the<br />

camp was “the new biopolitical nomos<br />

of the planet,” as Giorgio Agamben did<br />

in 1994.<br />

Perhaps our political bond – whether we<br />

call it the “social contract” or the “symbolic<br />

order” – is always more tenuous than we<br />

think; it was certainly precarious long<br />

before September 11. Prior to Bush and<br />

Blair, Reagan and Thatcher led the charge<br />

of neoliberalism with the battle cry, “There<br />

is no such thing as society,” and the lives of<br />

the most vulnerable (the underclass, gays<br />

and lesbians, immigrants) have become<br />

ever more precarious since. It is this heightened<br />

insecurity that some art has attempted<br />

to manifest, even to exacerbate. This<br />

social instability is redoubled by an artistic<br />

instability, as this contemporary practice<br />

foregrounds its own schismatic condition,<br />

too, its own lack of shared meanings and<br />

methods. Paradoxically, then, “precarity” is<br />

almost constitutive of some art today.<br />

This “precariat” is seen as a product of the<br />

post-Fordist economy; though, historically, precarity might<br />

be more the rule, and the Fordist promise of relative job<br />

security and union protection the exception.<br />

Precarity has come to figure in sociological<br />

discourse, where it is used to describe<br />

the situation of a vast number of laborers<br />

in neoliberal capitalism whose employment<br />

(let alone healthcare, insurance,<br />

and pension) is anything but guaranteed.<br />

This “precariat” is seen as a product of the<br />

post-Fordist economy; though, historically,<br />

precarity might be more the rule, and the<br />

Fordist promise of relative job security and<br />

union protection the exception, as Gerald<br />

Raunig points out in A Thousand Machines<br />

(<strong>20</strong>10). It is a tricky category. What might<br />

be lost in a discursive shift from “proletariat”<br />

to “precariat”? Might the latter term<br />

normalize a specific condition, a “society<br />

of risk,” a condition that is subject to challenge<br />

and change? Can the precariat be<br />

pried from its victim status and developed<br />

as a social movement? At least one thing is<br />

certain: it is not a unified class. As Raunig<br />

argues, there are “smooth forms of precarization”<br />

for “digital bohemians” and<br />

“intellos précaires,” on the one hand, and<br />

“rigidly repressive forms of labor discipline,”<br />

for migrants and sans papiers, on the other.<br />

The Swiss artist Thomas<br />

Hirschhorn, who represents<br />

Switzerland in the <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> Venice<br />

Biennale, has long used the term précaire,<br />

though its full significance was not always<br />

apparent. Initially the term denoted the<br />

insecure status and limited duration of<br />

his pieces, some of which, such as Travaux<br />

abandonnés and Jemand kümmert sich um<br />

meine Arbeit (both 1992), were made up of<br />

odds and ends left on the street to be picked<br />

up by others. In a conversation with Alison<br />

M. Gingeras, Hirschhorn stressed the<br />

commonality of his means:<br />

What I’ve got around me is some packing<br />

material; there’s some aluminum<br />

foil in the kitchen and there are cardboard<br />

boxes and wood panels downstairs<br />

on the street. That makes sense to me:<br />

I use the materials around me. These<br />

materials have no energetic or spiritual<br />

power. They’re materials that everyone<br />

in the world is familiar with; they’re<br />

ordinary materials.<br />

For a while, Hirschhorn merely distinguished<br />

the precarious from the ephemeral.<br />

He told Gingeras,<br />

My work isn’t ephemeral, it’s precarious.<br />

It’s humans who decide and determine<br />

how long the work lasts. The term


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 29<br />

© Photo courtesy of Paul Sacher Foundation<br />

© Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London<br />

Stefan wolpe, circa 1936<br />

Thomas Hirschhorn, Europa, 1999, Mixed media wall sculpture, 181 x 221 x 6 cm<br />

‘ephemeral’ comes from nature, but<br />

nature doesn’t make decisions.<br />

Soon enough, however, the precarious<br />

came to figure less as a characteristic of his<br />

work than as a predicament of the people<br />

addressed by précaire, with ramifications<br />

both ethical and political.<br />

Is there a way to cross from our stable,<br />

secure, and safe space in order to join<br />

the space of the precarious? Is it possible,<br />

by voluntarily crossing the border<br />

of this protected space, to establish new<br />

values, real values, the values of the<br />

precarious – uncertainty, instability, and<br />

self-authorization?<br />

This is a question that Hirschhorn has<br />

probed in all three of his “monuments” to<br />

date, which take the form of makeshift<br />

centers of homage, assembled with the help<br />

of local inhabitants, where discussions,<br />

readings, performances, and more casual<br />

encounters can occur.<br />

The first monument, dedicated to<br />

Baruch Spinoza, was set in the red-light<br />

district of Amsterdam, in 1999; the second,<br />

to Gilles Deleuze, was located in a<br />

mostly North African quarter of Avignon,<br />

France, in <strong>20</strong>00; and the third, to Georges<br />

Bataille, was placed in a largely Turkish<br />

neighborhood in Kassel, in <strong>20</strong>02; a fourth,<br />

the last, dedicated to Antonio Gramsci, is<br />

planned for Queens, New York, in <strong>20</strong>12.<br />

This practice of “the precarious as a real<br />

form” has also guided Hirschhorn in his<br />

other projects, such as his Musée Précaire<br />

Albinet, set in the Aubervilliers banlieue<br />

of Paris, in <strong>20</strong>04, and his Bijlmer-Spinoza<br />

Festival, located in the Biljmer project of<br />

Amsterdam, in <strong>20</strong>09.<br />

What does this precarious practice entail?<br />

“The truth can only be touched in art in<br />

hazardous, contradictory, and hidden<br />

encounters,” Hirschhorn asserted in a text<br />

for his <strong>20</strong>06 installation Restore Now. This<br />

suggests a first principle, an actual sharing<br />

in the conditions of social risk lived by a<br />

precariat in a particular situation; to this<br />

end, Hirschhorn has sometimes adopted<br />

the guise of a squatter on-site (in effect,<br />

he also “squats” the work of the artists,<br />

writers, and philosophers chosen for his<br />

altars, kiosks, and monuments). “In order<br />

to reach this moment I have to be present<br />

and I have to be awake,” Hirschhorn<br />

continues. “I have to stand up, I have to<br />

face the world, the reality, the time and I<br />

have to risk myself. That is the beauty in<br />

precariousness.” Alert to the Deleuzian<br />

caveat about “the indignity of speaking for<br />

others,” Hirschhorn does not stand in fi


30 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

place of a precariat; rather, he insists, in an<br />

essay for Musée Précaire Albinet, he wants<br />

“to engage [in] dialogue with the other without<br />

neutralizing him.”<br />

In fact, Hirschhorn does not always seek<br />

solidarity with this precariat, for such solidarity<br />

might only come of a forced union of<br />

very different parties. To the benign community<br />

imagined by relational aesthetics,<br />

he counters with the principle of “Presence<br />

and Production,” which names his double<br />

commitment to be present on the site<br />

where he produces his work and acknowledges<br />

that the result might be antagonism<br />

with residents as much as fellowship. In<br />

this way, Hirschhorn updates the argument<br />

in “Author as Producer” (1934), where<br />

Benjamin finds the political use-value of a<br />

work less in the attitude of its content than<br />

in the import of its production.<br />

the political dimension<br />

of the precarious shades<br />

into the ethical.<br />

Precarious derives, the oed<br />

tells us, “from the Latin precarius,<br />

obtained by entreaty, depending<br />

on the favor of another, hence uncertain,<br />

precarious, from precem, prayer.” This definition<br />

underscores that this state of insecurity<br />

is a constructed one, engineered by<br />

a regime of power on whose favor the precariat<br />

depends and which it can only petition.<br />

This means that to act out the precarious,<br />

as Hirschhorn often does, is not only<br />

to evoke its perilous and privative effects<br />

but also to intimate how and why they are<br />

produced, and so to implicate the authority<br />

that imposes this “revocable tolerance,” as<br />

his sometime collaborator, the French poet<br />

Manuel Joseph, defines précarité. The note<br />

of entreaty lodged in the word “precarious”<br />

is strong in many Hirschhorn projects,<br />

where it often also carries the force of<br />

accusation.<br />

Here the political dimension of the precarious<br />

shades into the ethical. “To give a<br />

form to the precarious,” Hirschhorn comments<br />

in his <strong>20</strong>09 essay “Théâtre précaire<br />

pour ‘Ce qui vient’,” is to attest to “the<br />

fragility of life,” awareness of which “compels<br />

me to be awakened, to be present,<br />

to be attentive, to be open; it compels me<br />

to be active.” In “Precarious Life” (<strong>20</strong>04),<br />

her brief essay on Emmanuel Levinas,<br />

Judith Butler writes in a similar vein:<br />

“In some way we come to exist in the<br />

moment of being addressed, and something<br />

about our existence proves precarious<br />

when that address fails.” Here Butler<br />

explores the notion of “the face,” which<br />

Levinas posed as the very image of “the<br />

extreme precariousness of the other.”<br />

To respond to a face and to understand its<br />

meaning, Butler argues, “means to<br />

be awake to what is precarious in another<br />

life or, rather, the precariousness of life<br />

itself.” This is the face often put forward<br />

by the precarious art of Hirschhorn,<br />

who refuses to turn away. µ<br />

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin 1917<br />

Professor of Art and Architecture at<br />

Princeton University and the spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

Siemens Fellow at the American Academy.<br />

29


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 31<br />

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32 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

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

© Ullsteinbild – Jürgen ritter<br />

© Ullsteinbild – Jürgen ritter<br />

Jürgen Ritter, Former Inner-German border at the Junkerkuppe Hill between Lindewerra and Oberrieden, September 1, <strong>20</strong>09


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 33<br />

No Man’s Landscapes<br />

The Iron Curtain stopped humans from crossing political borders for over four decades.<br />

In their stead, an ecosystem all its own.<br />

By Astrid M. Eckert<br />

One day in March 1982, a<br />

red telephone rang at the East<br />

German Border Control Office<br />

in Salzwedel. The phones had appeared<br />

nine years earlier, a by-product of the 1973<br />

inter-German Border Commission, and<br />

allowed for immediate communication<br />

between West and East German border<br />

guards. Conversations unfolded according<br />

to a strict protocol; the caller began by saying,<br />

“I have some information for you,” to<br />

which the respondent would answer with<br />

a single word. Not even a “Good day” crept<br />

into these austere exchanges.<br />

The call that day in March was no<br />

exception. A Western border guard in<br />

Uelzen asked his Salzwedel counterpart<br />

to postpone a scheduled mine detonation<br />

until late June. The explosion, the Western<br />

officer explained, would disturb the breeding<br />

grounds of cranes. The East Germans<br />

consented, and the red receiver was placed<br />

back in its cradle. Before returning to<br />

more pressing business, however, the East<br />

German officer mused over the peculiar<br />

nature of the call, making a note that<br />

“requests . . . pertaining to bird sanctuaries<br />

have not been made before.”<br />

In truth, no official bird sanctuary<br />

existed, though an accidental one was<br />

flourishing. By 1982 the border strip had<br />

already undergone more than two decades<br />

of enforced tranquility. East German borderland<br />

regulations, introduced thirty years<br />

earlier, had reduced legal cross-border traffic<br />

to a trickle. After the construction of the<br />

Berlin Wall, in August 1961, gdr authorities<br />

also escalated fortifications along the<br />

inter-German border. The various layers of<br />

border elements created a space Westerners<br />

commonly called “no man’s land” although<br />

it was part of gdr territory. It began at the<br />

demarcation line and extended to the first<br />

fence; Westerners were forbidden entry.<br />

Depending on the terrain, it could be<br />

50 to <strong>20</strong>0-plus meters deep. In the parlance<br />

of East German border guards, this strip<br />

of land lay “on the enemy side” (feindwärts).<br />

It was patrolled by reconnaissance troops<br />

(Aufklärer) known to be politically reliable;<br />

regular border troops remained behind the<br />

fence and covered the hinterland. Hence,<br />

this stretch of land rarely ever encountered<br />

foot traffic. Birds, especially ground-breeding<br />

ones, were the prime beneficiaries of<br />

the new ecological regime in the immediate<br />

border strip.<br />

What, then, do state borders<br />

do to nature? The inter-German<br />

border was, of course, a very particular<br />

border. Its political and social function<br />

was to delineate the socialist project<br />

the Iron Curtain was<br />

set up to lock people in,<br />

not to keep invaders<br />

out. Not surprisingly,<br />

it regularly drew<br />

comparisons to a prison.<br />

from its capitalist foe and to prevent East<br />

Germans from exercising a choice between<br />

the two. To that end, the East German<br />

regime invested heavily in border fortifications<br />

that were designed to kill. At the<br />

very least, 270 people, but more likely well<br />

over 700, lost their lives trying to cross the<br />

Berlin Wall and the inter-German border.<br />

Unlike other fortified state borders, the<br />

Iron Curtain was set up to lock people in,<br />

not to keep invaders out. Not surprisingly,<br />

it regularly drew comparisons to a prison.<br />

As the spatial theorist Karl Schlögel puts it,<br />

if borders are the outer skin of states, their<br />

appearance tells us much about the polity<br />

they surround.<br />

East Germany’s “skin” consisted of<br />

several generations of border fortifications<br />

that evolved from a simple barbed wire<br />

fence, in the 1950s, to an elaborate border<br />

control system replete with metal fences,<br />

walls, minefields, spring-guns, observation<br />

towers, flood lights, vehicle ditches, guard<br />

dogs, alarm wires, and border patrols in the<br />

1980s. In May 1952, East German authorities<br />

deported borderland residents deemed<br />

untrustworthy and created a 500-meter<br />

security strip and a five-kilometer-deep<br />

security zone characterized by access<br />

restrictions. All in all, the border created<br />

a buffer zone in the heart of Europe<br />

that funneled traffic through a scant few<br />

permissible routes.<br />

In view of this excessive infrastructure,<br />

Western commentators often referred to<br />

the Iron Curtain in relation to its impact on<br />

nature and the surrounding cultural landscapes.<br />

“From the air,” noted a British travel<br />

writer, “the border looks like earth that has<br />

just been prepared for a new road, much<br />

lighter than the surrounding ground of<br />

fields and forests.” Watchtowers disturbed<br />

the scenery “like the gibbets in a landscape<br />

by Breughel.” Another writer emphasized<br />

the border’s interventions in the landscape,<br />

describing the mined strip as it “runs over<br />

hill and dale, zigzagging through woodland<br />

and meadow. Trees and undergrowth<br />

have been cut down to minimize cover<br />

and provide a wide field of fire.” With the<br />

ground ripped up, weeds controlled with<br />

herbicides, and corridors cleared in thick<br />

forests, the idea of a “scar” in the landscape<br />

became a common metaphor. fi


34 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

A leading West German geographer called<br />

the border a Zerreißungsgrenze, a lacerated<br />

boundary. What incensed him in particular<br />

was the extent of arable land lying fallow<br />

in the East German security strip. For this<br />

geographer, the landscape on the other side<br />

thus took on the character of a “wasteland.”<br />

The Iron Curtain sliced through<br />

mountains, forests, lakes, wetlands,<br />

grasslands, fluvial ecosystems, open<br />

cultural landscapes, and even mining areas<br />

– a cross section of German landscape<br />

types. With the same biota often found on<br />

both sides of the fence, the Iron Curtain<br />

confirms a truism of environmental history:<br />

nature rarely respects man-made<br />

boundaries. The installations and practices<br />

that constituted this border, however,<br />

impacted nature and wildlife on both sides.<br />

Depending on the species, this impact<br />

could prove beneficial or problematic.<br />

Where red-listed birds eventually found a<br />

welcome refuge, game animals could meet<br />

a cruel end. Much like the recently constructed<br />

fence between the US and Mexico,<br />

the installation of a ten-foot razor wire<br />

fence between East and West Germany in<br />

the 1960s posed formidable challenges<br />

to mammals. Traditional deer-crossings<br />

became impenetrable, restricting habitats<br />

and interfering with genetic exchange.<br />

Worse still, along 800 kilometers of<br />

the border, minefields supplemented the<br />

fence. Between 1961 and 1986, well over<br />

one million landmines were planted. They<br />

were triggered frequently, and locals shuddered<br />

at the sound of explosions, unsure<br />

whether the mines had encountered beast<br />

or man. Clearing dead animals in the mine<br />

corridor was usually not worth the risk;<br />

an East German hunter residing in the<br />

security strip in the district of Schwerin<br />

remembers “cadaver fields” adjacent to the<br />

fence. By the mid-1960s, West German<br />

customs personnel in the Harz Mountains<br />

were convinced that the mines had already<br />

seriously reduced the population of roe<br />

deer. The mines were sensitive enough to<br />

be triggered by hares and foxes, prompting<br />

gdr authorities to insert holes into the wire<br />

mesh to serve as passages for small game –<br />

not out of consideration for the animals but<br />

because replacing mines was expensive<br />

and dangerous. The carnage abated along<br />

those stretches of border that eventually<br />

received a double fence, closing off the<br />

minefields.<br />

Although the East German regime did<br />

not intend the border to serve as a contact<br />

zone and tried to undercut any ties and<br />

unsupervised communication across the<br />

border, the Iron Curtain impacted the<br />

natural environment in a fashion that<br />

forced both German states to address its<br />

consequences. To that end, the Border<br />

Commission was founded in 1973. Its<br />

primary job was to come to an agreement<br />

about the exact location of the demarcation<br />

line in order to remove recurring irritants<br />

in German-German relations. Many of its<br />

subsequent negotiations, however, dealt<br />

with environmental problems, above all<br />

with water management. In the Harz<br />

Mountains, the border cut through a water<br />

reservoir, turning maintenance of the<br />

dam into a diplomatic maelstrom. Both<br />

sides also had a stake in the dikes along<br />

the Elbe River. Each and every cross-border<br />

stream could turn into a state affair. Some<br />

had been outfitted with grids to prevent<br />

escapes and became clogged with debris.<br />

Drainages in marshes could not be maintained<br />

because the ditches were off-limits.<br />

At times, the ensuing floods washed up<br />

landmines on the western side, turning<br />

farming into a dangerous occupation.<br />

Inter-German water management was<br />

probably more pressing for the Federal<br />

Republic than for the gdr. With 37 streams<br />

pointing westward and only ten flowing<br />

eastward, one of the overarching West<br />

German concerns during the 1970s and<br />

beyond was the pollution of border rivers<br />

and streams with untreated sewage, slurry,<br />

household waste, and chemicals. Similarly,<br />

the air in the western borderlands was at<br />

times heavy with sulfur dioxide, fly ash,<br />

and other dust, affecting people’s health,<br />

the integrity of forests, and the public<br />

images of borderland towns. The politically<br />

contentious border threw these environmental<br />

offenses into sharp relief. The<br />

history of the Iron Curtain thus confirms<br />

another truism of environmental history:<br />

if nature knows no boundaries, neither<br />

does pollution.<br />

In short, the border fortifications and all<br />

activities that kept them functional became<br />

causal (either directly or in a somewhat<br />

mitigated fashion) to changes in the natural<br />

environment adjacent to the border. The<br />

conditions impacting the 1393-kilometerlong<br />

strip on both sides of the Curtain<br />

The history of the Iron Curtain thus confirms<br />

another truism of environmental history:<br />

if nature knows no boundaries, neither does pollution.<br />

included its inaccessibility to humans in<br />

certain sections, and the relatively thin populations<br />

found in others; scant agriculture,<br />

forestry work, and fishing; the restriction of<br />

industrial development in the East and its<br />

subsidization to little avail in the West; and<br />

the presence of security structures such as<br />

fences, towers, and ditches. The resultant<br />

landscapes are probably best understood<br />

as having “transboundary natures,” which<br />

transcend a politically and socially constructed<br />

barrier, a barrier, however, that<br />

was itself an agent in their emergence.<br />

Landscapes with comparable transboundary<br />

natures emerged along the<br />

seams of the ideological divide in Asia. The<br />

1953 armistice between North and South<br />

Korea brought forth, in the words of historian<br />

Lisa Brady, “a new ecological regime<br />

. . . shaped by war and maintained by diplomacy.”<br />

A 155-mile-long and 2.5-mile-deep<br />

Demilitarized Zone (dmz) was designated<br />

as a neutral buffer to keep the two antagonists<br />

apart until hostilities abated. Not<br />

only did military activities cease in this<br />

stretch of land, but agriculture, logging,<br />

and development came to a halt as well,<br />

allowing the native ecosystems to recover<br />

without human interference. The resultant<br />

accidental nature preserve has become a<br />

haven for flora and fauna, most notably<br />

for migratory birds like cranes. In recent<br />

years, it has also turned into a destination<br />

for ecotourism, showcasing the once native<br />

natural heritage that had prevailed on the<br />

Korean peninsula before rapid industrial<br />

and urban development compromised the<br />

integrity of many ecosystems. Efforts are<br />

underway to turn this accidental oasis into<br />

a transboundary Peace Park or, in the yet<br />

unlikely event of a political status change<br />

in Korea, to protect the swath of land from<br />

sudden development.<br />

In Germany, too, the idea of transboundary<br />

nature preserves briefly flared up in the<br />

mid-1980s, when it had become sufficiently<br />

clear that red-listed species such as whitetailed<br />

eagles, black storks, eagle-owls and<br />

whinchats had withdrawn into portions<br />

of the sparsely developed borderlands.<br />

West German state officials, supported by<br />

environmental non-governmental organizations,<br />

extended feelers to persuade<br />

gdr authorities to help establish several


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 35<br />

commonly protected areas on the border.<br />

These included parts of the Lauenburg lake<br />

region in the north, the Drömling wetlands<br />

east of Wolfsburg, and the Rhön mountain<br />

range straddling the border between<br />

the states Hesse, Bavaria, and Thuringia.<br />

None of these projects came to fruition,<br />

however. gdr officials, already forced by<br />

international agreements to negotiate on<br />

transboundary pollution, had no interest in<br />

getting roped into a cooperation that would<br />

increase unwanted contact with West<br />

Germans and did not promise any Western<br />

currency for the trouble.<br />

November 9, 1989 changed all that.<br />

At issue was no longer whether the gdr<br />

would agree to conservation across borders.<br />

Rather, the fall of the Iron Curtain<br />

suddenly presented both the real chance to<br />

protect the transboundary natures that had<br />

emerged along the inter-German border as<br />

well as the real danger of their destruction.<br />

Hastily opened and locally celebrated new<br />

border crossings sometimes led directly<br />

through the hatcheries of rare birds. The<br />

heavy equipment used to take down border<br />

fortifications and locate remaining landmines<br />

plowed through tranquil meadows.<br />

Bogged down by throngs of cars driven<br />

by excited East and West Germans who<br />

wanted to visit each other, politicians in<br />

borderland towns soon called for new roads<br />

across the former German divide. After<br />

years of controls and high fences, local residents<br />

yearned to swim, row, and fish in the<br />

border lakes, hike without stop signs, and<br />

take back the land.<br />

Alarmed by such demands, a group of<br />

conservationists under the leadership of<br />

a Bavarian environmental ngo, the Bund<br />

Naturschutz in Bayern, convened a meeting<br />

of East and West German activists in<br />

December 1989, calling for the preservation<br />

of the “Green Belt” that had developed<br />

in the border strip. The demise of the gdr<br />

and the concomitant disappearance of<br />

border fortifications allowed ecologists to<br />

conduct habitat inventories on both sides<br />

of the border, confirming the conservation<br />

value of what had become a unique string<br />

of habitats. Against many odds, the Green<br />

Belt today has become one of the flagship<br />

projects in German nature and wildlife<br />

conservation, enjoying widespread political<br />

and public support. Its efforts are seconded<br />

by the European Green Belt project that<br />

covers the Iron Curtain in its entirety from<br />

Finland to the Adriatic Sea.<br />

An environmental history of<br />

the Iron Curtain has much to tell us<br />

about natural spaces along fortified<br />

borders. It reminds us how military activities<br />

and installations shape environments.<br />

In view of the success of the Green Belt<br />

conservation project, it is quite tempting to<br />

read the Iron Curtain’s history as a “barbedwire-into-biodiversity”<br />

conversion. But animal<br />

encounters with landmines and contaminated<br />

rivers are as much a part of this<br />

tale as the resurgence of red-listed birds<br />

and undisturbed wetlands. This “dirty”<br />

side of the story makes the emergence of<br />

a Green Belt in the heart of Europe even<br />

more wondrous. What an environmental<br />

approach certainly contributes is a better<br />

understanding of the historicity of the landscape<br />

that the Iron Curtain occupied and<br />

helped create. µ<br />

Astrid M. Eckert is an assistant professor<br />

of modern German history at Emory<br />

University and the spring <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> Daimler<br />

Fellow at the American Academy.<br />

Mehr ZEIT für Sie!<br />

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erhältlich!<br />

www.zeit.de<br />

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25.03.<strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> 10:06:29 Uhr


36 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

The Dead Letters DepT.<br />

By Peter Wortsman<br />

image courtesy of the artist, www.christian-stoll.com<br />

christian stoll, mailroom, <strong>20</strong>10


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 37<br />

“Besides, 99 hundredths of<br />

all the work done in the<br />

world is either foolish and<br />

unnecessary, or harmful<br />

and wicked.”<br />

Herman Melville<br />

At 16, after my father’s repeated<br />

prodding to stop idling and finally<br />

make something of myself, I<br />

answered a want ad in the Sunday paper<br />

under the heading “Editorial,” and was, to<br />

my great surprise and decidedly mixed<br />

emotions, hired as a junior filing clerk in<br />

the Dead Letters Department of Selden<br />

& Reinhardt, an international dealer in<br />

obscure reference materials and arcane<br />

scholarly works: Uzbek-Russian dictionaries,<br />

Sanskrit etymologies, Finno-Ugaritic<br />

grammars and the like.<br />

In those bygone days of cheap storage<br />

space, before hard drives hoarded data and<br />

shredders devoured the detritus, Dead<br />

Letters was the company repository of<br />

the unresolved: partially completed order<br />

forms, letters of inquiry and the like, which,<br />

for one reason or another, could not be processed<br />

– either because the return address<br />

was unintelligible, the zip code inaccurate,<br />

incomplete, or lacking altogether, or the<br />

sender’s name obscured. It was company<br />

policy to maintain such missives for future<br />

reference, based on the old bromide: You<br />

never know. Envelopes stamped with a<br />

telltale finger above the words “Returned<br />

to Sender,” inscribed in various languages<br />

and shades of red, were filed and consigned<br />

to a state of administrative limbo. fi


38 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

My immediate superior, Leo<br />

Coocoo, was short, beady-eyed,<br />

near-sighted, stooped and squat,<br />

his oily black hair and leathery complexion<br />

mole-like, his paws girded with long fingernails<br />

twisted like claws, his foul breath<br />

reeking of mold and decay. He had worked<br />

his way up – or rather, strictly speaking,<br />

down – from company gofer to head clerk<br />

of Dead Letters, a position he had carved<br />

out for himself and from which there was<br />

no prospect of promotion. Still, Leo took<br />

unconcealed pride in his work, which he<br />

viewed as a wellspring of future possibilities.<br />

Having amassed a kind of patchwork<br />

erudition reading through reams of unanswered<br />

inquiries from, as well as returned<br />

Sunlight and fresh air<br />

never filtered down to our<br />

windowless precinct –<br />

sometimes I thought of<br />

it as a bunker.<br />

mail addressed to, scholars and librarians<br />

from a wide spectrum of fields, fueled with<br />

the conceit of the autodidact and the resentment<br />

of the scorned romantic, he felt woefully<br />

underappreciated by the higher-ups,<br />

who, by an inverted emotional geometry, he<br />

considered beneath him.<br />

“They see us as scavengers, but we are<br />

treasure hunters, Henry, archival archeologists!”<br />

He flashed me the semi-deranged,<br />

under-oxygenated smile of a happy coal<br />

miner in a Golden Book I pretended to be<br />

able to read when I was five, simultaneously<br />

nodding and shaking his head. Leo thought<br />

I had promising filing fingers and advised<br />

me to keep a good inch-and-a-half of nail<br />

on my right thumb and index if I hoped to<br />

make the grade.<br />

Sunlight and fresh air never<br />

filtered down to our windowless<br />

precinct, an oblong partitioned<br />

chamber – sometimes I thought of it as a<br />

bunker, sometimes as a submarine going<br />

nowhere, sometimes as the secret passageway<br />

of a pyramid – lined with scratched<br />

gray filing cabinets and illuminated only<br />

by a pair of flickering bare fluorescent<br />

bulbs forever on the blink, two flights<br />

below street level. Having come of age in<br />

the “duck-and-cover” days of the Cold War<br />

era, it did occur to me that I might survive<br />

a nuclear attack here, and so felt somewhat<br />

snug and cozy at first, even privileged –<br />

before the claustrophobia set in.<br />

There were a few minor annoyances I<br />

tolerated at first. The ceiling leaked a sticky<br />

black ooze and buckets had to be placed at<br />

strategic locations; their position changed<br />

in accordance with the shifting source of<br />

the leak and were emptied several times<br />

daily – part of my ill-defined job description.<br />

While Leo manned the helm, silently pawing<br />

and sorting the recently returned mail<br />

that dropped down the shoot, I was perched<br />

in an alcove adjacent to the clanking boiler<br />

room, in an armless olive-green metal<br />

office chair on wheels that badly needed<br />

oiling and gave off a tortured squeak.<br />

Despite the squeak, I even developed<br />

a fondness for my chair, which I dubbed<br />

Rosinante, Rosy for short, after the broken<br />

down nag of the Spanish knight errant –<br />

whose illustrated adventures, translated<br />

into Serbo-Croatian, and returned to sender,<br />

address unknown, I salvaged from a<br />

frayed Warsaw Pact paper-wrapped package<br />

and kept hidden at the bottom of a filing<br />

cabinet. I pulled it out and flipped through<br />

the pictures from time to time, focusing,<br />

in particular, on a rather racy depiction of<br />

Don Quixote’s lady love, Dulcinea, her torn<br />

dress falling off one shoulder, to distract<br />

from the drudgery.<br />

In the early days of my employment I<br />

liked to ride Rosy from corner to corner,<br />

shoving off with a spry flex of the knees<br />

from the cabinets assigned to the first few<br />

letters of the alphabet and butting the dented<br />

back of the chair into the x’s, y’s and z’s.<br />

Correspondence from foreign lands<br />

with unrecognizable alphabets were<br />

lumped together in what Leo designated<br />

the “Beyond-Z-Zone” – he himself had<br />

devised the system, of which he was very<br />

proud. It was my job to fetch batches of<br />

discarded letters and packages through<br />

which Leo had sifted, to be filed for future<br />

reference according to a roster of decipherable<br />

features, the first letter of a surname<br />

or company acronym, if that could be made<br />

out, or any other clue, like the city, state or<br />

country indicated on the rubber cancellation<br />

stamp. I was efficient, even avid, for<br />

the first two hours or so, studying each<br />

envelope closely, doing my best to break the<br />

code of unintelligibility. In time I turned it<br />

into a game, pretending I was at the nexus<br />

of a top-secret spy operation in the bowels<br />

of the fbi and that the future of the Free<br />

World depended on my precision and zeal.<br />

Occasionally I would break for target practice<br />

with rubber band and paper clips to<br />

simulate the firing range in the basement<br />

of the Bureau in Washington, which had<br />

profoundly impressed me on a family trip.<br />

On good mornings I took pains<br />

to weed out the obviously Asian<br />

letterings from the Semitic and<br />

the Cyrillic. But soon enough my spirit<br />

sagged and my energy level slumped for<br />

lack of stimulation and oxygen. I could<br />

keep filing more or less efficiently till noon,<br />

cheering myself on with the promise of<br />

light, nourishment, and communion in<br />

the company cafeteria and a timid peek at<br />

the lengthened lashes of the new recruits<br />

in the secretarial pool. But we were the<br />

company’s untouchables, the lowlifes at<br />

the bottom of the barrel. Leo’s oily hair<br />

and calcified claws drew sneers from the<br />

gum-clicking typists who changed hair<br />

color monthly and lived for their bi-weekly<br />

manicure. Being Leo’s underling, the scorn<br />

rubbed off on me too. At the water fountain<br />

they shrank from us.<br />

“Don’t let it bother you,” Leo breathed<br />

his foul breath on me in between bites of<br />

his mustard-doused Wonderbread and<br />

bologna sandwich, sensing my distress.<br />

“Deadbeats – I’ve filed more with my left<br />

pinky than their manicured digits ever<br />

It was my job to fetch batches of discarded letters<br />

and packages through which Leo had sifted,<br />

to be filed for future reference according to a roster<br />

of decipherable features.<br />

thought about.” At such times, Leo liked<br />

to reminisce. “Did I ever tell you about the<br />

time I hit pay dirt – almost?”<br />

“Tell me again,” I dutifully replied,<br />

repressing a yawn. Leo derived great pleasure<br />

from the storytelling, and it was a welcome<br />

respite from my filing duties.<br />

“It was a saffron-colored 9 x 12 with a<br />

broken red-wax seal and a rubber stamp in<br />

classical A-rab script I’d filed away in the<br />

Beyond Z-Zone,” he began.<br />

“I thought it was gold-sealed, Leo!”<br />

Leo shrugged, as if such inconsequential<br />

details hardly mattered. “Whatever, it<br />

was all Greek to me, but I kept coming back,<br />

trying to sniff out its secrets!”<br />

“Who was it from?” I asked on cue.<br />

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


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 39<br />

you know it! One day, Accounts Payable<br />

hires this babe from Casablanca” – in<br />

alternate accounts, she hailed from<br />

Cairo, Damascus, Karachi, and Istanbul,<br />

sometimes she was a Kurd, sometimes a<br />

Chaldean, sometimes a Lebanese Maronite<br />

from Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn –<br />

“a swell gal with dark eyes and just the right<br />

length of nail.” – I could tell by the tone of<br />

his voice and the glint in his eyes when he<br />

spoke of her, particularly her fingernails,<br />

that he had been smitten in the Beyond<br />

Z-Zone. – “So one day I show her the letter.<br />

‘Sulaya,’ I says,” – sometimes her name was<br />

anglicized as Sally – “‘who’s it from?’<br />

“One glance at the sender on the back<br />

of the envelope and those coal black orbs<br />

almost popped out of their mascara-ringed<br />

sockets. ‘This missive, Mr. Coocoo, is from<br />

the private secretary to His Royal Highness,<br />

Mohammed V, King of Morocco!’ She<br />

bowed her head as she uttered the name.<br />

“‘Holy Moly!’ I says, ‘Open sesame! What<br />

does His Highness want?’<br />

“Gently then, like she was handling something<br />

precious, or dangerous, Sulaya inserted<br />

the long red nail of her right thumb in<br />

under the break in the seal, plucked out and<br />

studied the gold-rimmed letter.” – Leo’s<br />

voice trembled each time in the telling, as if<br />

he himself were the letter and that long red<br />

nail were inserting its sharp edge beneath<br />

the buttons of his pinstriped Permapress<br />

shirt, stroking his chest hairs. – “I tell ya,<br />

Henry, she was breathless! ‘It is, Sir, an<br />

order for a thousand red leather-bound copies<br />

of the Holy Koran to be given as gifts to<br />

the members of His Highness’ entourage<br />

on the last day of the month of Ramadan.’ –<br />

it was a chance in a million, Henry . . . a<br />

chance in a million!”<br />

“Did the company fill the order?!” I asked,<br />

though I already knew the answer.<br />

And each time he told the tale, Leo<br />

heaved a great sigh, part moan, part groan,<br />

part lamentation, dramatically laying a<br />

hand on his chest for the inconsolable loss.<br />

Slowly he shook his head. – “It was too late.<br />

By the time the big shots upstairs finally<br />

got their act together to reply, the old King’d<br />

kicked the bucket and the new private secretary<br />

of his son and successor, Hassan II,<br />

reneged on the order.”<br />

“And Sulaya?” I pried.<br />

Leo paused, his face flushed a Vitamin-<br />

E-deficient shade of faded red. – “She was<br />

promoted to the executive typing pool, and”<br />

– Leo shook his head and paused again, as<br />

though revisiting the memory of a terrible<br />

tragedy – “they made her cut her nails.” The<br />

reminiscence always ended abruptly. “No<br />

point crying over spilt milk,” he tried to<br />

shrug it off with a half-hearted smile and a<br />

last gulped-down bolus of bread and baloney.<br />

“There’s work to be done!”<br />

The afternoon hours were the worst,<br />

the final home stretch after coffee break<br />

between three and five o’clock positively<br />

lethal. I filed for a while till my energy level<br />

ran dangerously low. The boiler banged,<br />

a sharp pair of claws would<br />

clasp me by the shoulder<br />

blades and a malodorous<br />

cloud would waft round my<br />

nostrils. “Just keeping you<br />

on your fingertips, kid !”<br />

echoing my impatience, and the ventilation<br />

system strained noisily, pumping in a day’s<br />

worth of carbon-dioxide-rich yawns from<br />

above. I checked the ooze buckets and spat<br />

in them for good measure. I kicked around<br />

in Rosy, tilting with my windmills of boredom,<br />

peered repeatedly at my wristwatch,<br />

but time slowed to a crawl and the squeaking<br />

grated on my ears.<br />

Initially I was cautious in my distress.<br />

Leo liked to creep up behind unannounced.<br />

Suddenly a sharp pair of claws would clasp<br />

me by the shoulder blades and a malodorous<br />

cloud would waft round my nostrils. –<br />

“Just keeping you on your fingertips, kid!” –<br />

he’d slap me on the back: “Keep up the good<br />

work!” and slink back off to his hole.<br />

One day I thought I hit pay dirt.<br />

The brittle brown-edged envelope<br />

must have slipped out the back<br />

of a battered cabinet drawer and landed in<br />

another, God knows how long ago. I happened<br />

upon it when trying to wrench open<br />

the S-drawer. “Sehr geehrter Herr/Most<br />

Honored Sir,” read the crisply folded note<br />

typed on the Gothic letterhead of the Reich<br />

Office for Racial Research, “We are respectfully<br />

seeking any and all original literature<br />

available on the slave trade, posters, bills<br />

of sale and the like, as well as bodily measurements<br />

and sample skulls, should they<br />

be available, to aid in our research. Your<br />

kind assistance in this matter would be<br />

most appreciated.” It was signed Professor<br />

Hans Hauptmann, Doctor of Anthropology,<br />

Section Head, Department of Racial<br />

Documentation. I dashed over to show Leo<br />

the letter.<br />

“It’s a historical find!” I cried out.<br />

Leo gave it the once over. “It’s historical<br />

alright,” he pointed out the postmark,<br />

August 4, 1941. “A quarter century too late,<br />

f & f it, kid!”<br />

The same command to f &f (meaning file<br />

and forget), which I’d heard and dutifully<br />

obeyed countless times before now made<br />

my stomach twitch. Something snapped in<br />

me. The drip drip drip into the ooze bucket<br />

drove me to distraction. The sordid truth<br />

of my totally useless work broke into my<br />

benumbed consciousness. Nothing we did<br />

or would ever do down here mattered. It<br />

was a total waste of time.<br />

Despondent, I cast caution to the wind.<br />

It started with a stray letter of the alphabet,<br />

a furtive f scribbled on the back of an<br />

envelope to be filed, and soon expanded<br />

to full-fledged expletives spelled out in<br />

ever-bolder script inscribed ever more<br />

audaciously on the lips of envelopes and the<br />

fronts of letters and unfilled order forms.<br />

For weeks I got away with it, though the<br />

curses swelled to colossal capital-lettered<br />

imprecations:<br />

F*ck THIS JOB ! F*ck SELDON<br />

& REINHArdt ! F*ck DEAD<br />

letters ! F*ck LEO COOCOO !<br />

scrawled in black magic marker and circled<br />

in rings of red.<br />

I gave poor Rosy a kick and sent her<br />

flying with a desperate un-oiled squeal,<br />

denting the gray metal face of the Beyond-<br />

Z-Zone. I fired paperclips round the room<br />

and peed into the ooze bucket for good<br />

measure. For a while Leo didn’t notice. Or<br />

maybe he chose to ignore these infractions,<br />

hoping I’d get it out of my system, buck up<br />

and pull myself together. But when finally<br />

he did, inevitably, catch me red-handed<br />

stuffing curse-covered correspondence in<br />

the gaps between hanging files behind the<br />

Beyond-Z-Zone, it was with more disappointment<br />

than anger that he let me go.<br />

“You had the finger for it, Henry – ” he<br />

shook his head sadly, unable to finish the<br />

sentence.<br />

I raced up the stairs, stumbling on every<br />

second step, chest heaving, gasping for air,<br />

my duplicitous heart beating double-time,<br />

feeling a bottomless sadness coupled with<br />

a profound sense of relief once I reached<br />

street level and ran out the door, as if half of<br />

me had been returned to life and the other<br />

half buried alive. µ<br />

Peter Wortsman is a translator and writer<br />

and was the spring <strong>20</strong>10 Holtzbrinck<br />

Fellow at the American Academy.


40 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh<br />

Amr abdallah dalsh, Prayer on tahrir square, february 4, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 41<br />

Cairo’s <strong>Spring</strong><br />

Cleaning<br />

A new generation of young Egyptians inspires the old<br />

By Roger Cohen<br />

Watching the revolution<br />

unfold in Cairo and, before<br />

that, in Tunisia, I have come to<br />

believe that 2/11, the day Hosni Mubarak<br />

fell, may very well emerge as an important<br />

antidote to 9/11.<br />

We have been living with an Arab<br />

Jurassic Park. Rulers in place for decades<br />

turned their countries into personal fiefdoms.<br />

They enriched themselves and their<br />

offspring, groomed to succeed them as if<br />

by divine right. All this was justified in the<br />

name of the tired binary thinking whose<br />

For a long time a dismissive<br />

phrase, “the Arab Street,”<br />

has been used as<br />

the glib shorthand for<br />

the disenfranchised<br />

Arab masses. Let’s retire<br />

the phrase.<br />

core was that the only alternative to jihadist<br />

mayhem in the Middle East was the repression<br />

of Western-backed dictators as practiced<br />

from Benghazi to Bahrain. In fact the<br />

brutality of the Arab dinosaurs fed the very<br />

condition the West has sought to reverse.<br />

When the only legal place of assembly is the<br />

mosque, Islamist radicalization becomes<br />

more likely.<br />

For a long time a dismissive phrase,<br />

“the Arab Street,” has been used as the glib<br />

shorthand for the disenfranchised Arab<br />

masses. Let’s retire the phrase. The Arab<br />

<strong>Spring</strong> has given the lie to it. I’ve seldom<br />

seen such discipline and composure – and<br />

culture – as in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Many<br />

people there said to me, “This is the first<br />

time I’ve felt I really count for something,<br />

that I as a human being have my dignity<br />

and can have some impact on the society<br />

around me.” Here was another source of<br />

radicalization among the systems now<br />

crumbling: people who feel their identities<br />

are worthless are more likely to subsume<br />

those identities in violent movements<br />

promising eternal redemption.<br />

Of course, the uprisings are not a panacea.<br />

Remaking Arab societies in ways that<br />

offer freedom and representation to their<br />

people will be the work of generations.<br />

There will be setbacks; as I write, the fate<br />

of Libya hangs in the balance. Germany<br />

knows something about how painstaking<br />

these rebuilding processes are – but also<br />

how they can succeed over time. The West<br />

has a deep strategic interest in buttressing<br />

positive outcomes, particularly in Egypt,<br />

where it will be important to show that a<br />

democratic system can also bring growth,<br />

jobs, and education.<br />

After Hosni Mubarak fled, I witnessed<br />

remarkable encounters between an older<br />

generation and younger Egyptian protestors<br />

who were working together to clean the<br />

streets. One young woman in particular<br />

made a deep impression on me. Normally,<br />

Cairo is the city of dust par excellence.<br />

But Tahrir Square, the day after Mubarak’s<br />

fall, was gleaming – almost Zurich on<br />

the Nile. I asked why she swept. “We want<br />

to clean out the old and bring in the new,<br />

bring in what is fresh,” she said.<br />

A man in his sixties<br />

approached me and pointed<br />

at the young woman,<br />

commenting, “They did what<br />

we couldn’t do.”<br />

Her vigorous sweeping was also about<br />

affirmation of purpose: doing things<br />

to change things rather than being the<br />

pawn of some despot. A man in his sixties<br />

approached me and pointed at the young<br />

woman, commenting, “They did what we<br />

couldn’t do. This is a precious generation.”<br />

In other words, the Facebook-armed young<br />

overcame fear. Both Egypt and Tunisia<br />

were studies in how real-time, flat, websavvy,<br />

youth-driven movements could<br />

outmaneuver heavily armed but ponderous<br />

hierarchies at a loss in the world of twentyfirst-century<br />

politics and social media.<br />

While reporting on the revolution<br />

in Egypt, I found myself<br />

comparing it to the tumultuous<br />

<strong>20</strong>09 protests I covered in Tehran. The<br />

Green Movement was an important precursor<br />

of the Arab uprisings. The repression<br />

of it was brutal, as I witnessed fi


42 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

but the Iranian example of courage in confronting<br />

repression important. Nothing<br />

has been more grotesque in recent weeks<br />

than the attempt by the Islamic Republic to<br />

claim that it has been a source of inspiration<br />

to people in Cairo and Tunis. On the<br />

Iran is ready for some form<br />

of representative<br />

government that will<br />

at last balance freedom<br />

and faith, rather than<br />

betraying the former<br />

in the name of the latter.<br />

contrary, Iran’s hypocrisy in repressing its<br />

own people has been further exposed.<br />

I have thought a lot about Iran since<br />

<strong>20</strong>09. The desire for freedom that has<br />

existed there for more than a hundred years,<br />

the hunger of which Ayatollah Khomeini<br />

spoke in 1979, at the time of the revolution,<br />

remains present in Iran today. Protest<br />

has been pushed down but anger persists.<br />

Many of the friends I made have been<br />

through terrible times since I left. Some<br />

have been in prison. Many are leaving, or<br />

trying to leave, mainly to Canada. It is a<br />

terrible waste. Iran is ready for some form<br />

of representative government that will<br />

at last balance freedom and faith, rather<br />

than betraying the former in the name of<br />

the latter.<br />

The example of Iran’s revolution<br />

has been much cited by those who<br />

believe the Arab <strong>Spring</strong> will only<br />

yield some new form of repression. Israel,<br />

worried by change and the loss of Mubarak,<br />

has advanced this view. My own is more<br />

hopeful. The challenges are immense, but<br />

Egypt, always a reference point for the Arab<br />

I believe 2/11 may do more<br />

to counter 9/11 than<br />

all America’s recent wars.<br />

world, can inspire Arabs with an example<br />

of freedom and development, as well as<br />

the first example of a peace between Arab<br />

and Jewish democracies. That will be good<br />

for the peoples of the region. It will also be<br />

good for Western societies. They have suffered,<br />

in New York and Madrid and London,<br />

from the rage the dinosaur-despots generated<br />

year after year. And so I believe 2/11 may<br />

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

recent wars. µ<br />

Roger Cohen is the international affairs<br />

columnist of the International Herald<br />

Tribune and the international writer-atlarge<br />

for the New York Times. This essay is<br />

derived from an interview he gave on npr<br />

on February 16, <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong>.<br />

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44 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

© Cy Twombly – Courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation<br />

Cy Twombly, Proteus, 1984


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 45<br />

The Insurgency<br />

Within<br />

Out of Fallujah, into the bell jar of trauma<br />

By Kirk W. Johnson<br />

There is an amusement park in<br />

downtown Fallujah. Jolan Park has<br />

not functioned or amused for years,<br />

since our war in Iraq began. When Zarqawi<br />

held sway over the city in <strong>20</strong>04, his minions<br />

reportedly used the cluster of shacks<br />

within the park as torture cells. Some of<br />

the fiercest fighting occurred there when<br />

the Marines finally took control of the city<br />

later that year. A grove of trees once shaded<br />

the rides, but Fallujans cut them down for<br />

wood to heat their homes and to fire the<br />

ovens that baked their bread during the<br />

siege. Splintered foot-tall stumps remain,<br />

dusted pikes stabbing up through the<br />

weary soil.<br />

One of the main rides, a whirly-goround,<br />

is improbably aquatic themed. A<br />

ten-foot-tall octopus, the color of moldering<br />

lime, looms at the hub of the ride, extending<br />

his swirling tentacles outward over the<br />

small cars, which are made to look like severed<br />

heads of fish. They are all scowling as<br />

they bake under the Fallujah sun.<br />

A motorless Ferris wheel slumbers nearby,<br />

more of a monument now, its bucket<br />

seats piling up with years of dust.<br />

I try to wipe the dust from my brow and<br />

cheeks, but it turns into a film as it mingles<br />

with sweat and clings there. I lick my<br />

lips and frown as the chalky dust settles<br />

on my parched tongue. The sky is more<br />

orange than blue. I do not like this place, or<br />

this day.<br />

Across the street, renamed Route Henry<br />

by Marines who struggled with Arabic<br />

street names, the veterinarian of Fallujah<br />

is waiting for me. Dr. Nazar is a tall, hefty<br />

man, maybe sixty, with a darkly creased<br />

face and gold-rimmed glasses that he<br />

pulls from a breast pocket before running<br />

through a list of supplies and equipment<br />

he has prepared for me, with the hope that<br />

I might direct some usaid support his way.<br />

He needs incubators, vaccines to combat<br />

diseases like Brucellosis, refrigerators for<br />

the vaccines, generators for the incubators<br />

and refrigerators, fuel for the generators.<br />

Syringes, gauze, everything.<br />

Ihave just arrived in Fallujah as<br />

usaid’s first coordinator for reconstruction<br />

in the city, after seven frustrating<br />

months confined within the sixteen-foot<br />

blast walls encircling Baghdad’s Green<br />

Zone. I am 24, relieved to be in the field<br />

and using my Arabic again, having studied<br />

and lived throughout the region. I came<br />

to Iraq to pitch in on rebuilding efforts,<br />

despite my opposition to the war. I didn’t<br />

come to party with drunken contractors<br />

and jaded bureaucrats.<br />

I want an early success. I’m not sure<br />

what information I’ll need from Dr. Nazar,<br />

so in a pale-green US Government-issued<br />

Federal Supply Service notebook, I write<br />

down everything I can learn from the<br />

doctor. How many head of cattle are there<br />

in Fallujah and the outlying villages?<br />

How many animals does he treat a week?<br />

Which diseases are most prevalent at the<br />

I have just arrived in Fallujah as usaid’s first<br />

coordinator for reconstruction in the city, after seven<br />

frustrating months confined within the sixteen-foot<br />

blast walls encircling Baghdad’s Green Zone.<br />

moment? What are the farmers doing without<br />

these vaccines? How many chickens are<br />

there in the city?<br />

I take his list, which will take hours to<br />

decipher and translate (after all, I never<br />

learned the Arabic words for Brucellosis or<br />

hypodermic or hoof ) into a report with recommendations<br />

for my bosses in Baghdad,<br />

and wedge it in my notebook. I heave my<br />

armored body back into the tub of the<br />

Humvee, and Dr. Nazar calls out to me.<br />

Mister Kirk ?<br />

One of the Marines protecting me gives a<br />

glance, signaling that we need to move<br />

on, so I answer the veterinarian brusquely.<br />

We never spend more than a few minutes<br />

in each place.<br />

Yes, doctor, what ? We are in a rush.<br />

Fallujah needs a working slaughterhouse<br />

again. fi


46 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

The Marines had temporarily occupied the<br />

old slaughterhouse just a few blocks away,<br />

which the veterinarian wants to re-open<br />

with our help. He needs a generator to<br />

keep it cool. He points to the ground I just<br />

walked across, at a startling rivulet of dark<br />

blood running alongside the curb, which<br />

is also stained blood-brown. The stream<br />

issues from the gullets of sheep and other<br />

small livestock being slaughtered twenty<br />

feet up the street. There is enough flow<br />

to stretch another fifteen feet down before<br />

it disappears into a small heap of rubble<br />

and garbage.<br />

It’s not good, it’s not safe to handle meat<br />

this way, Doctor Nazar pleads.<br />

The butchers are staring at us, in one<br />

hand a blade, in the other, the napes of<br />

wild-eyed livestock. Over their shoulders,<br />

the octopus glares.<br />

We need to clear out, a Marine grunts,<br />

to my relief.<br />

Sweetie ? Kirkie ?<br />

I opened my eyes at the sound of my mother’s<br />

voice and Fallujah – the amusement<br />

park, the menacing octopus, the veterinarian,<br />

the Marines – evaporated. Something<br />

was wrong with my vision; there was a<br />

jagged grayish frame around the edges of<br />

my sight.<br />

Sweetie can you see me ?<br />

Yes, I mumbled. What is this ?<br />

It’s a mask, honey. They put it on you<br />

after the operation. The doctors said<br />

that you . . .<br />

I was in an anesthetic haze in a dimly lit<br />

hospital room at the Centro Medico<br />

Bournigal in the Dominican Republic.<br />

I had left Fallujah a few days earlier for a<br />

week-long R&R with my parents and brothers.<br />

I knew there had been an accident, but<br />

the details now evaded my drugged state<br />

of mind, as I struggled to orient myself.<br />

I glanced through the tunnel of my vision<br />

and caught a dusky sight of myself in the<br />

screen of a wall-mounted hospital television<br />

broadcasting my reflection. Dread<br />

seeped from my brain, coursing throughout<br />

my battered body, which I inventoried<br />

with alternating panic and fury. I could not<br />

breathe through my nostrils. I furrowed<br />

my brow in frustration and a punishing jolt<br />

of pain answered. My teeth felt missing.<br />

My arms felt heavy.<br />

I was broken all over and could not<br />

grab the tails of any memories from the<br />

morning hours of December 29, two days<br />

earlier. They had all fled to an undiscovered<br />

country in my mind, and now amnesia<br />

had clawed an impenetrable ocean around<br />

them. I stumbled around my thoughts, calling<br />

out futilely for something to explain<br />

what happened?<br />

The antibiotics turned my stomach. My<br />

jaw broken, I drank meals through a straw.<br />

I soon gave up trying to control the eruptions<br />

of my mind, which erratically spewed<br />

forth scenes, snippets of conversations,<br />

and scents, without order or mercy. In the<br />

span of a few seconds, I flitted from the<br />

memory of a midnight ride in a Humvee<br />

filled with mannequins (to be propped on<br />

rooftops by counter-sniper Marines) to the<br />

wail and acrid smoke of my 1969 Pontiac’s<br />

roasting tires during a drag race in high<br />

school, to the past-tense conjugation of<br />

a form-four Arabic verb, to the name of<br />

my kindergarten teacher. At first, I tried<br />

to make sense, to understand why one<br />

thought followed another, but was soon<br />

beaten back by a new torrent of unconnected<br />

thoughts and memories. My mind was<br />

a wasp trapped in a jar, bouncing furiously<br />

against its walls and ceiling.<br />

I spoke with quiet apprehension: if<br />

I opened my mouth too wide, the tear<br />

across my chin would slit open and the pus<br />

of infection colonizing its borders would<br />

stream watery-yellow down my chin<br />

and neck.<br />

Mom, I need to get out of here.<br />

I know, dear, you will, but first you<br />

need to heal a bit more.<br />

The first drops of an oncoming storm of<br />

depression began to fall, as I realized that<br />

I had failed, that my mind had stumbled,<br />

that Iraq had spit me out. A year of struggle,<br />

risk, and fatigue had resulted in a chaotic<br />

disorder, filed neatly under the label posttraumatic<br />

stress. The fugue state that piloted<br />

my sleeping self from my bed and out my<br />

hotel window (as I would subsequently<br />

piece together from the reports of a hotel<br />

watchman) was not a state but a shadow,<br />

from which it would take years to flee.<br />

I<br />

would not return to Iraq to finish<br />

my work. Doctor Nazar would not<br />

get his vaccines. I always knew that<br />

I would eventually leave Fallujah, of course,<br />

but I wanted to do so on my own terms.<br />

The potent knowledge that I could just<br />

leave whenever I wanted had sustained me:<br />

I always knew that my seat ejected when<br />

things got bad enough. What did the Iraqis<br />

have? Or the Marines?<br />

The first drops of an oncoming storm<br />

of depression began to fall, as I realized that<br />

I had failed, that my mind had stumbled,<br />

that Iraq had spit me out.<br />

But I was ready to stay another six months<br />

beyond the year I’d already spent in<br />

country, partly in reaction to the endless<br />

turnover in personnel that was dogging<br />

even the most basic government initiatives.<br />

Every other night back in the Green Zone,<br />

there were “hail and farewell” parties in<br />

the aid compound, to bid goodbye to some<br />

lucky soul on his or her way out and to size<br />

up the fools who were only just arriving.<br />

Those who left brought with them a year<br />

of accrued but erratically documented<br />

knowledge.<br />

And in time, one sensed that we had<br />

stumbled into a sweltering Macondo,<br />

amnesiacs pinning simple labels on this<br />

project here or that face there in a futile<br />

attempt to exert control over a situation<br />

that was well beyond our grasp. usaid<br />

developed a massive database of its 10,000<br />

projects throughout the country, but I<br />

never knew more than three people in the<br />

government other than myself who bothered<br />

to study it. The Marines maintained<br />

their own database in Fallujah with photos<br />

and notes, updated regularly, on each of<br />

the sheikhs and civilian leaders throughout<br />

Anbar province. This one was good.<br />

Trustworthy. This one funds an ied-factory.<br />

We gave this one money in <strong>20</strong>05. Rumored<br />

al-Qaeda in Iraq. This newspaper on payroll:<br />

don’t arrest editor.<br />

We pinned these little scraps of information<br />

to the hide of the beast, sometimes<br />

with hope, more often with resignation. In<br />

doing so, Americans attempted to reduce<br />

the churning cauldron of shifting alliances,<br />

insurgency, corruption, blood-feuds,


<strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong> | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 47<br />

criminal enterprise, and revenge to a<br />

consumable broth. We hoped that once we<br />

left Iraq and our memory faded, that these<br />

notes, these databases, these reports would<br />

aid whoever was mad enough to replace us<br />

and patient enough to read. It was not to<br />

be. Each of us came in blank, unwittingly<br />

made the mistakes of our predecessors,<br />

and left with fried or cynical brains. Our<br />

replacements fared little better.<br />

Dr. Nazar’s list of medications and<br />

other veterinary supplies remained folded<br />

inside my notebook, one of a stack that I<br />

left on my desk in Camp Fallujah before<br />

leaving for what I thought would only<br />

be a week-long vacation, which, after my<br />

accident, resulted in months of reconstructive<br />

surgery and rehabilitation. During<br />

this time, the Marines surmised that<br />

I wouldn’t be returning, gave my desk<br />

to someone else, and likely pitched my<br />

notebooks into the burn pit. Within a<br />

year, nobody working for usaid in Iraq or<br />

the Marines knew who I was, and I didn’t<br />

know who they were. Iraqis that I worked<br />

with were assassinated or else chased out<br />

of the country.<br />

Weeks after my fall, I realized that the<br />

daily tide of Vicodin, depression, and<br />

fatigue would soon erode the details I did<br />

remember. After mourning the loss of my<br />

Fallujah notebooks, I pulled blank ones<br />

from the shelf of my childhood bedroom,<br />

where I recuperated.<br />

But I could not write with a normal pen.<br />

Both wrists were broken, and my thumbs<br />

and index fingers had been imprisoned in<br />

blue fiberglass, just inches apart. I lurched<br />

my way to the basement, where I found<br />

a roll of duct tape and a white sock from the<br />

laundry room. Even this degree of effort<br />

left me winded, with a headache that felt as<br />

though my brain was swelling against the<br />

inner walls of my cracked skull. I worked<br />

my way back to my room, sat down at the<br />

desk and placed the duct tape next to the<br />

pen and sock.<br />

I clumsily wrapped the sock around<br />

the pen and spent the better part of 15<br />

infuriating minutes trying to free a corner<br />

of the tape without the capacity of opposable<br />

digits. Sweat issued relentlessly, and I<br />

barked, to no one,<br />

God dammit, does it have to be so hot<br />

in here ?!<br />

With great effort I managed to tear free<br />

a foot-long piece of tape, which I crudely<br />

wrapped around the sock. I lowered my<br />

right hand over the fattened pen and<br />

wedged it into the space between my<br />

thumb and index finger until it lodged<br />

tightly. I had regained the capacity to write.<br />

The sweat made the lacerations in my<br />

face sting. I looked at the clock, and realized<br />

that an hour and a half had passed, all<br />

for a sock-pen. A few weeks earlier, I was<br />

coordinating tens of millions of dollars<br />

worth of aid. People called me sir.<br />

I wedged the sock-pen into position<br />

over a blank page and began to write, in<br />

nervous and oversized letters. Most pages<br />

could hold no more than six or eight<br />

words. I raced against the loss of memory<br />

of a year that nearly destroyed me, filling<br />

notebook after notebook, documenting<br />

the recurrence of nightmares, capturing<br />

details from Baghdad and Fallujah, writing<br />

through my ptsd and my recovery.<br />

One morning, years later, on<br />

a golf trip with my brothers, I read<br />

about plans in Fallujah to convert<br />

the amusement park into a cemetery. In<br />

the weeks following the siege of <strong>20</strong>04, the<br />

Marines warehoused the dead in a potato<br />

storage facility on the eastern outskirts of<br />

I clumsily wrapped the sock around the pen<br />

and spent the better part of 15 infuriating minutes<br />

trying to free a corner of the tape<br />

without the capacity of opposable digits.<br />

town, until the Fallujans ploughed their<br />

soccer field into a graveyard. They had since<br />

run out of room in the pitch, and were tired<br />

of burying their dead in backyards.<br />

Later that afternoon, I pull a wedge out<br />

of my golf bag to pitch a ball over fifty emerald<br />

yards of watered suburban fairway grass<br />

and towering oaks.<br />

Think you can clear ’em ?<br />

my brother asks. µ<br />

Kirk W. Johnson founded and directs<br />

the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies and<br />

formerly served as the usaid Regional<br />

Coordinator for the Reconstruction<br />

of Fallujah. He was a Bosch Public Policy<br />

Fellow at the American Academy in<br />

fall <strong>20</strong>10.<br />

The List Project<br />

The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies<br />

was founded by Kirk Johnson in <strong>20</strong>07<br />

in order to help resettle Iraqi refugees<br />

who aided the United States during<br />

the Second Gulf War. The project<br />

has brought together 250 attorneys<br />

from eight leading law firms to offer<br />

thousands of hours of pro bono representation<br />

for Iraqi refugees. So far<br />

the organization has resettled over<br />

sevenhundred Iraqis and cultivates<br />

grassroots support across the United<br />

States.<br />

The List Project was founded on<br />

the belief that the US government has<br />

a clear and urgent moral obligation to<br />

resettle to safety Iraqis who are imperiled<br />

due to their affiliation with the<br />

United States and who can no longer<br />

return to Iraq without fear of reprisal or<br />

death stemming from their affiliation.<br />

Legal volunteers have formed chapters<br />

across the United States and are helping<br />

Iraqi refugees with everything from<br />

retooling resumes to finding furniture.<br />

The List Project also provides<br />

recently resettled Iraqi children with<br />

support and material resources to<br />

adjust to life in the United States,<br />

called List Kids. This arm of the project<br />

sends monthly carepackages to children<br />

to give them a sense of belonging<br />

and to provide them resources to promote<br />

academic success. These packages<br />

include books, school supplies,<br />

ESL materials, toys, gift cards, and<br />

other emergency assistance.<br />

Never before in US history has<br />

there been such a vast group of refugees<br />

with access to their own pro bono<br />

representation by top American law<br />

firms. The project, which receives an<br />

average of 12 new Iraqi citizens each<br />

week, hopes to contribute to a new<br />

model of how refugees can be assisted<br />

and resettled with dignity. More information<br />

about the List Project can be<br />

found online at www.thelistproject.org.


48 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong><strong>20</strong>11</strong><br />

We are grateful to<br />

for underwriting<br />

The Berlin Journal.<br />

This special issue commemorating<br />

American Academy Founder<br />

Richard Holbrooke<br />

would not have been possible<br />

without their<br />

generous support.<br />

Thank you !


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