Spring 2003 | Issue 6

A Newsletter from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Six | Spring 2003
The BerlinJournal
America:
The Ambivalent
Empire?
Michael Ignatieff
Josef Joffe
Hans-Ulrich Wehler
David Rieff
Plus:
Jeffrey Eugenides
Alex Ross and Kent Nagano
Amity Shlaes
Fritz Stern
Paul Volcker

Schering
C3
American Academy

The BerlinJournal
Number Six | Spring 2003
In These Times
Berlin has seen many changes since its Wall fell in
1989, but the recent shift in attitude toward America
has been particularly jarring. As historians will
remind us, Europe has a distinguished tradition of
looking askance at American cultural, political, and
economic practices. But, for fifty years, Berliners harbored
a special affection for America. Now, in the
city once kept free by the airlift, a new atmosphere of
discomfort and even resentment about the US exercise
of power abroad seems to have taken hold. At a
time when attacks on the administration’s foreign
policy are conflated with polemics about Americans
in general, the presence of a dozen or more American
scholars, policy experts, and artists just a short drive
from the Bundestag has proven invaluable.
The seasoned negotiator Richard Holbrooke
predicted in the Academy’s founding tractate that
this institution would become “a unique meeting
place for the post-cold-war generation of American
and German intellectual, cultural, and political
leaders.” And indeed it has. Fellows find themselves
repeatedly in the shoes of cultural ambassadors.
In the breadth of their views, they embody what
Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Fritz Stern in these pages
admiringly call the American genius for constructive
self-criticism.
Thus this spring, some fellows met privately with
politicians including Angela Merkel and Friedrich
Merz of the cdu, Interior Minister Otto Schily (spd),
and Jürgen Trittin and Rezzo Schlauch of the Greens.
The Hans Arnhold Center’s well-attended array of
public programs was supplemented by out-of-house
panel discussions with ngos, church groups, and
radio and television audiences. Fellows published
articles and interviews in the German press.
However ideologically fraught the debate on
American power has been in certain sectors of Berlin
and Washington, high priority is given in traditional
Atlanticist quarters to reestablish a common agenda.
The pessimism of many pundits is unwarranted: as
dramatic as the transatlantic rift may seem, it may, in
the end prove to be therapeutic in forcing clarity
about our relations and institutions such as the
Security Council.
Long before the statues of Saddam toppled in
Baghdad, cautionary words about “empire” were
on the lips of many. In the hopes of bringing a sober
appraisal to bear on current events, we invited four
experts to reflect on the pitfalls and promises of the
American empire. And we also made room for the
poetry, portraits, art, and lively writing that make
each issue of the Berlin Journal something more. All
of this should remind readers of the extent to which
the US and Germany remain culturally, economically
and historically intertwined.
Gary Smith
Paul Volcker discusses
current corporate
practices and the urgent
need for reform.
Is America Ambivalent
About Empire?
We asked four experts.
Alex Ross interviews
Kent Nagano about his
friendship with composer
Olivier Messiaen.
Historian Fritz Stern
cautions against the
misappropriation of
history.
Amity Shlaes describes
the commodity curse and
explains why riches sometimes
harm, not help.
Pulitzer Winner Jeffrey
Eugenides searches for
history beneath the Hans
Arnhold Center.
3
8
33
38
40
Plus
Paul Volcker chairs the
Trustees of the International
Accounting Standards
Committee Foundation.
He served as chairman of the
Board of Governors of the
Federal Reserve System from
1979 to 1987 and headed the
New York Federal Reserve
Bank between 1975 and 1979.
He has taught economics at
Princeton and nyu. Last fall
he delivered the first annual
Stephen Kellen Lecture, which
also launched the Academy’s
JPMorgan Policy Briefs.
Michael Ignatieff is director
of the Carr Center for Human
Rights Practice at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government.
Josef Joffe is editor and
publisher of Die Zeit and a
trustee of the American
Academy in Berlin. Hans-
Ulrich Wehler is professor of
history at the Universität
Bielefeld. Haniel Fellow
David Rieff is the author, most
recently, of A Bed for the Night:
Humanitarianism in Crisis.
Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s
music critic and was
Holtzbrinck Fellow at the
American Academy in Berlin
last fall. His book on the history
of twentieth-century
music will be published
next year. Kent Nagano is
chief conductor and artistic
director of the Deutches
Symphonie-Orchester Berlin,
leads the Berkeley Symphony,
and is principle conductor at
the Los Angeles Opera.
Fritz Stern, emeritus professor
of history at Columbia
University and a founding
trustee of the American
Academy in Berlin, is author,
most recently, of Dreams and
Delusions: The Drama of
German History and Einstein’s
German World. This spring,
an annual lecture series at the
Academy was inaugurated
in his honor. Reinhard Meier
is an editor at the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Amity Shlaes holds the
JPMorgan International Prize
in Finance this spring. She is
a senior columnist on political
economy at the Financial
Times. Her recent book The
Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive
Americans Crazy and What to
Do About it was a US national
bestseller. Her first book,
Germany: The Empire Within,
explored German national
identity at the end of the
cold war.
August Kleinzahler offers a
poem; Newsweek’s Europe editor
Michael Meyer profiles
Academy trustee Karl von der
Heyden; writer Christine
Brinck lends an ear to
Ambassador Richard
Holbrooke for Die Zeit;
scholar Hayden White’s new
project; and the best
springtime news about the
American Academy in Berlin,
its visitors, friends, alumni,
and current fellows.
A Newsletter from the
American Academy in Berlin
Published semi-annually at the
Hans Arnhold Center
Number Six – Spring 2003
Cover:
Karen Yasinsky, dvd projection
still from the animation
“still life w/cows,” 2000.
T HE
A M E R IC A N
AC ADE M Y
I N B E R LIN
Hans Arnhold Center
Editor
Gary Smith
Associate Editor
Miranda Robbins
Design
Susanna Dulkinys and
Erik Spiekermann,
United Designers
Managing Editor
Teresa Go
Original Drawings
Ben Katchor
Advertising
Renate Pöppel
Translations
Daniel Huyssen
The American Academy in Berlin
Am Sandwerder 17–19
14109 Berlin
Tel. (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-0
Fax (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-111
Email: journal@americanacademy.de
The Berlin Journal is funded entirely
through advertising and tax-deductible
donations. Contributions are very
much appreciated, either by check
or by bank transfer to:
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All rights reserved ISSN 1610-6490
Executive Director
Gary Smith
Deputy Director
Paul Stoop
Development Director
Anne-Marie McGonnigal
External Affairs Director
Renate Pöppel
Fellows Services Director
Marie Unger
Program Coordinator
Ute Zimmermann
Press Coordinator
Ingrid Müller
Fellows Selection
Coordinator
Lily Saint
Trustees of the
American Academy
Honorary Chairmen
Thomas L. Farmer
Henry A. Kissinger
Richard von Weizsäcker
Chairman
Richard C. Holbrooke
Vice Chairman
Gahl Hodges Burt
President
Robert H. Mundheim
Treasurer
Karl M. von der Heyden
Trustees
Gahl Hodges Burt
Gerhard Casper
Lloyd Cutler
Jonathan F. Fanton
Thomas L. Farmer
Julie Finley
Vartan Gregorian
Jon Vanden Heuvel
Karl M. von der Heyden
Richard C. Holbrooke
Dieter von Holtzbrinck
Dietrich Hoppenstedt
Josef Joffe
Stephen M. Kellen
Henry A. Kissinger
Horst Köhler
John C. Kornblum
Otto Graf Lambsdorff
Nina von Maltzahn
Deryck Maughan
Klaus Mangold
Erich Marx
Wolfgang Mayrhuber
Robert H. Mundheim
Joseph Neubauer
Franz Xaver Ohnesorg
Robert Pozen
Volker Schlöndorff
Fritz Stern
Kurt Viermetz
Alberto W. Vilar
Richard von Weizsäcker
Klaus Wowereit, ex officio

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www.schering.de
The Berlin Prize Fellowships 2004 – 2005
The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for its fellowships for
the 2004–2005 academic year. The Academy is a private, non-profit center
for the advanced study of culture and the arts, music, law, public policy,
finance and economics, historical, and literary research. It welcomes
younger as well as established scholars, artists, and professionals who wish
to engage in independent study in Berlin for an academic semester or in
special cases for an entire academic year.
The Academy, which opened its doors in September 1998, occupies the
Hans Arnhold Center, a historic lakeside villa in the Wannsee district of
Berlin. Fellowships have been awarded to writers and poets, painters and
sculptors, curators, anthropologists, German cultural scholars, economists,
historians, theologians, legal scholars, journalists, architectural and
cultural critics, composers and musicologists and public policy experts.
Specially designated fellowships include the Bosch Fellowship in Public
Policy, the George Herbert Walker Bush Fellowship, the Citigroup
Fellowship, the DaimlerChrysler Fellowship, the Gillette Fellowship, the
Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellowship, the Haniel Foundation Fellowship, the
Holtzbrinck Fellowship in Journalism, the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship,
the JP Morgan International Prize in Finance Policy and Economics, and the
Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts.
US citizens and permanent residents (in both cases permanently based in
the United States) are eligible to apply. Fellows are expected to be in residence
at the Academy during the entire term of their awarded semester.
The Academy offers furnished apartments suitable for individuals and
couples, and a very limited number of accommodations for families with
children. Benefits include a monthly stipend, round-trip airfare, housing at
the Academy and partial board. Stipends range from $3000 to $5000 per
month (depending on level of attainment).
Application forms are available from the Academy or may be downloaded
from its web site (www.americanacademy.de). Applications for all fellowships
(with the exception of applications in the visual arts and music, due in
New York by December 1, 2003) must be received in Berlin by October 31,
2003. Candidates need not be German specialists, but the project description
should explain how a residency in Berlin will contribute to further
professional development.
Applications will be reviewed by an independent selection committee
following a peer review process. The 2004–2005 Fellows will be chosen in
January 2004 and publicly announced in early spring.
American Academy in Berlin
Am Sandwerder 17-19
D-14109 Berlin, Germany
Telephone +49 (30) 804 83 - 0
Fax +49 (30) 804 83 - 111
applications@americanacademy.de
T HE
A M E R IC A N
AC ADE M Y
I N B E R LIN
HansArnholdCenter

Robert H. Mundheim Introduces Paul Volcker
On October 7, 2002, Academy president Robert H.
Mundheim welcomed an audience to the Hans Arnold
Center for the inaugural Stephen Kellen Lecture.
The lecture series was announced last spring on the
occasion of the founding trustee’s eighty-eighth birthday.
Mundheim made the following remarks to honor
the man after whom the lecture is named and to introduce
the very first Kellen lecturer, Paul Volcker.
Stephen Kellen is both a Berliner and an American. It
has been his dream to draw together the city of his birth
and his adopted country, and he has done that in a variety
of ways: by bringing the Berlin Symphony Orchestra
to Carnegie Hall, by sponsoring Germans to study in the
United States, and by being a prime supporter, in every
way, of the American Academy in Berlin, housed in the
former home of his wife, Anna-Maria Arnhold Kellen.
The American Academy functions, basically, as a
private cultural embassy to Berlin and to Germany.
The dozen or so Berlin Prize Fellows who live here each
semester are its principal ambassadors. They embody
the richness and diversity of American culture and
values. The Academy is also a forum for exchanging
ideas, linking people, and promoting understanding.
This role is of special significance at a time when official
relations between our two governments seem to be
under some strain. I have never been more convinced of
the importance to Germans and Americans of the
American Academy, which Richard Holbrooke, Richard
von Weizsäcker, Henry Kissinger, Gary Smith, and above
all, Stephen Kellen, have built. The creation of the
Stephen Kellen Lectures represents a “thank you” to
Stephen from the Academy trustees, who contributed
individually to fund them.
The first Kellen Lecture is given by Paul Volcker, a man
whom Stephen admires enormously. Stephen was
pleased with his theme – “Protecting the Integrity of the
Markets” – because he has been a lifelong investment
banker and has adhered to a set of values that protected
market integrity. He has watched, I think, with some dismay,
as those values have eroded. The topic also marks
a fitting occasion to launch the American Academy’s
new series of JPMorgan Economic Policy Briefs, with
the generous help of JPMorgan Chase.
Economist Paul Volcker’s forebears were German, from
Westphalia. From Princeton and Harvard, he went on to
a distinguished career in public service. I will mention
some highlights. He served as Undersecretary for
Monetary Affairs in the Nixon Treasury at a time when
the undersecretary had international and domestic
finance, as well as economic policy, within his jurisdiction.
Later, he became the president of the New York
Federal Reserve Bank – probably the most powerful of
the 12 Federal Reserve Bank districts. One may remember
that the US experienced financial trouble in the late
1970s. Interest rates reached double digits. Inflation was
high; the cost of living increased by 40 percent in
roughly three years. The dollar was weak. The US had to
borrow money in Germany and in Switzerland, the Carter
Notes. The then-chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank,
Bill Miller, had just been appointed Secretary of the
Treasury. The president said, ‘we need someone who can
see into the future clearly and devise solutions to get us
out of the mess we’re in.’ And his advisors responded,
‘we know a perfect candidate! He’s 6-foot 7-inches tall.
Surely he can see into the future better than anyone
else.’ Well, I don’t know if they were right about the
advantages of height, but I do know that Paul Volcker
did help us get out of the financial mess we were in.
His leadership of the Federal Reserve Bank has been
universally admired.
Paul Volcker’s post-government service includes
teaching at Princeton and New York University.
He has chaired the committee dealing with Holocaust
claims against Swiss financial institutions. He has
authored two reports on the reform of the US Government,
the last of which was submitted in January of
2003. He chairs the International Accounting Standards
Committee Foundation. Even this abbreviated list
indicates that Paul Volcker’s life is rich with experience.
We are delighted that he shares some of that
experience with the American Academy in Berlin. uu
Protecting the
Integrity of
Capital Markets
A New Priority
--------------------
Paul A. Volcker
Photograph: Lawrence Chaperon

The present challenge in German-American
relations has brought me to reflect on my own
years in government.
I was privileged to work with a long line of distinguished
German central bankers and finance and
economy ministers. Those relationships extending
over thirty years tell their own story. They were
stronger than with any other country. The
US and Germany, with the largest and strongest
economies, have been anchors of the transatlantic
alliance, an alliance that has served the world well.
Perhaps that relationship has been diluted a bit, but
it would be a tragedy for it to break down. I know
the American Academy in Berlin has become one
of the institutions designed to make sure that does
not happen.
Neither that history nor this institution fully
explain why I take such satisfaction in presenting
this lecture. Stephen and Anna-Maria Kellen are a
remarkable couple. I know them as major contributors
to the cultural life of New York City. But all else
pales beside their personal commitment – a commitment
rising above events that could well have
embittered lesser men or women – to strengthening
ties between their native and adopted countries.
The American Academy in Berlin is one reflection of
that commitment, and it is an honor to give the first
Stephen Kellen Lecture. Appropriately, the series
has been established in recognition both of
Stephen’s professional life in financial affairs and
his dedication to the interests of his two countries.
It is fitting, but also a bit ironic, that my theme
is the need to restore the integrity of capital markets,
not least in the US. That is a subject upon
which we Americans have been fond of lecturing
others, and certainly Stephen Kellen and the firm
of Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, Inc. have represented
the best of our traditions. We cannot, however,
escape the fact that the truly historic boom in
the American stock market in the 1990s has been
accompanied by weaknesses in our corporate culture.
Ethical breakdowns among financial market
participants are widely recognized. The procession
of flagrant examples – beginning even before the
sensational collapses of Enron and the Arthur
Andersen accounting firm – has preoccupied business
reporting for months at a time.
I do not believe that the apparent fraud or
corporate looting of Enron, WorldCom, Global
Crossing, Adelphia, Tyco, and others are at all representative
of American business practices. But I do
fear they are an extreme manifestation of a more
widespread tendency to “push the envelope” of
what is acceptable in business practice.
It is not accidental that these developments
took place in the midst of a virtually unprecedented
stock market bubble and subsequent decline. Quite
suddenly in the 1990s unimagined fortunes could
be made on Wall Street. There seemed to be a sense
of the entitlement of wealth. Alan Greenspan
caught the spirit in his phrase “infectious greed.”
A reflection of this has been executive compensation,
which has far exceeded earlier norms in relation
to average pay. Somehow, such excesses did not
seem shocking when the escalating stock market
exceeded all expectations. But now, to drive the lesson
home, are examples of payments of tens of millions
of dollars (at times more than one hundred
million dollars) to executives of failing companies
and huge separation arrangements to ethically tarnished
officials in the midst of falling markets.
A whole new profession of financial
engineering has been invented,
-------------------------------
with its richly rewarded practice
directed toward finding ways around
accounting standards and tax
regulations.
-------------------------------
Much of the anger has been directed at Andersen
and other auditing firms for failing to detect and
report the abuses in financial reporting. But the
responsibility should be spread more widely.
The large investment banks and the big commercial
banks, in aggressively diversifying into
lending, trading, stock research, and investment
company conglomerates, have become nests of
conflict. A whole new profession of financial engineering
has been invented, with its richly rewarded
practice directed in large part toward finding ways
around accounting standards and tax regulations.
Consultants and advisors are readily available
to promote and justify ever-bigger mergers and
acquisitions and to rationalize a ratcheting up of
executive pay.
One disillusioned Wall Streeter went even
further when he commented to me, “What can you
expect? For decades our best business schools have
preached the doctrine that whatever boosts the
stock price is ‘value added.’ ”
These troubles have relevance far beyond the
US. The organizations involved are typically international.
No doubt Europeans will be familiar with
the parallels in Europe. What may be more important
– and overlooked – is the potential impact on opinion
in the emerging and transitional economies. If there
are strong doubts about the integrity of our capital
markets, those who question the acceptability of
global financial markets will have their doubts reinforced.
One need only recall the emphasis, after the
Asian financial crisis, placed by the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, our governments,
and private financial institutions alike on the weakness
of indigenous financial practices as a precipitating
and complicating factor. ‘If only,’ so the refrain
went, ‘the emerging countries had US-style accounting
standards, disciplined auditing, and transparency
– if only they had stronger legal and ethical traditions
and less crony capitalism – then they would not have
been so vulnerable.’
That message was woefully incomplete. Other
more structural and systemic factors were at work.
The openness and the small size of the financial sectors
of emerging economies made and still make
them especially vulnerable to the inevitable volatility
of free financial markets. Nonetheless, those countries
cannot find “salvation” – cannot reach anything
like their potential growth – without participating in
global markets and, particularly, without continuous
inflow of direct investment. If we cannot make good
on our implicit boast that our capitalist financial
institutions are honestly and ethically governed –
that our business and financial reporting standards
are worthy of emulation – then the willingness to
accept foreign investment and the process of economic
development will be dealt a serious blow.
Of course, it is specifically our gaap (Generally
Accepted Accounting Practices), our auditing firms,
our sec (Securities and Exchange Commission), and
our legal system that have been seen as constituting
the model. Given the American weight in the world
economy and the economically strong and technologically
cutting-edge performance of the US in the
1990s, that perception is perhaps natural, whatever
its intrinsic merit.
We in the US must bring our practice more closely
into line with what we preach. It is important in our
own interest. It is important to Germany and other
already industrialized countries that have a big stake
in the success of a globalized financial system. And it
may well be crucial to those countries that aspire to
our economic success but face entrenched interests
that resist change, modernization, and full participation
in the world economy.
The good news is that we have had a “wake-up
call.” The loss of some eight trillion dollars in stock
market valuations over the past three years has
attracted attention. The examples of gross corporate
malfeasance have provided political impetus for
change.
4 Number Six | Spring 2003

The bad news is that constructive change will
not be easy. There can be no turning back the technological
changes that have spawned the mindbending
complexity of today’s financial markets.
Our established accounting and financial reporting
models were designed for a world of relatively simple
manufacturing and service companies – not for
the “virtual” world of derivatives, options, securitization,
massive intangibles, and trading-dominated
balance sheets and income statements.
Accounting and auditing have, for good reason,
been thrust to the front and center of the reform
effort. An auditor’s ultimate responsibility is not to
the corporate clients, but to the investor, to the market,
and, finally, to the general public. Public corporations
in the US have no choice but to follow US
gaap and to have their accounts audited by a
certified professional. This is also true for any company
that wants to raise capital in the US and that
have its securities freely traded there. Increasingly,
similar requirements are in place in other countries
as well.
The first requirement is a creditable accounting
model, with comprehensive, up-to-date and
enforceable standards. Further, the logic of globalized
finance requires a set of internationally
agreed and accepted accounting standards. The
existing system in the US meets neither criterion.
The perceived crisis in accounting triggered by
recent events has surely punctured the sense of
sanctity that had surrounded American gaap.
Now, there are pressures for a simpler, more
straightforward, statement of principles better
adapted to today’s world. Recognition of the need
for change, for standardization across countries,
and for insulation from national political pressures
has enhanced the prospects of converging on an
international standard.
Those objectives cannot be reached quickly,
however. The intellectual, organizational, and political
obstacles are substantial. But what seemed
unrealistic and impossibly visionary a few years ago
now seems both possible and necessary.
The consistent application of international
accounting principles will depend upon the discipline
and the professionalism of auditors. It is now
apparent that the big American accounting firms
have fallen short, bending too readily to the strong
pressures from clients and an intensely competitive
marketplace. My experience working with
Andersen, though brief, was long enough to confirm
the impression that the firm was distracted and
conflicted by the unceasing emphasis on more
remunerative consulting services. Those circumstances
are not unique to one firm.
Executive compensation is another area in need
of reform. There is little doubt in the US that the
spreading practice of providing stock options has
been the prime instrument driving the process.
Typically, those options take the form of a one-way
option to purchase stock at the price prevailing on
the day of grant, vesting a few years in the future.
Prevailing practice, as the result of political pressure,
has been to exclude that form of compensation
as a business expense on income statements, which
increases its attractiveness to management.
(Inconsistently, the difference between the option
price and the higher market price at the time it is
exercised is recognized as an expense for tax
purposes.)
The combination of generous options and
booming stock prices has produced large – at times
incomprehensibly large – rewards to top executives.
An instrument widely touted as aligning the interests
of management with stockholders is now widely
perceived as capricious in practice. In a bull market,
with the valuations of stocks rising across the board,
not only the best, but also the mediocre and even
sub-par performers are rewarded. Conversely, when
the stock market moves lower for several years, even
the most (relatively) successful managers may benefit
little or not at all, bringing pressure to reprice
existing options or provide successively more
options at lower prices. To compound the problem,
incentives for managers can be perverse, reinforcing
a focus on short-term results and manipulation of
financial reports.
Finally, broader questions of corporate governance
are being forcibly raised. A feature of the
American model has been the unique power of the
chief executive officer. In theory, a company’s board
of directors represents the owners and exercises
oversight and direction over its agent, the ceo and
management. In practice, the American ceo is also
typically chairman of the board and has heavy
influence over the choice of board members. The
arrangement has been almost sacrosanct in the view
of most ceos, who hold that their authority must
not be diluted and that it protects their ability to
promote innovation and take risks. As many know,
this is not the standard governing pattern in most
other industrialized countries.
Matters of corporate governance, in particular
the organization and modus operandi of boards of
directors, have for some time made up a cottage
industry for American consultants. But only now,
The good news is that we have had
a “wake-up call” – the loss of some
eight trillion dollars in stock market
valuations over the past three years.
--------------------------------
The bad news is that constructive
change will not be easy.
--------------------------------
with the pressure of recent events, has this discussion
come to take on the basic issues: effective oversight
of the ceo, compensation practices, and
financial reporting.
The forces against effective reform in these and
other areas remain strong. Vested interests and vast
sums of money add to the confusion. Arguments
have been pressed regarding the danger of political
and legislative responses, that such responses could
stifle the innovation and risk-taking at the heart of
American economic success. And indeed, we have
had experience with the unintended consequences
of legislation passed in haste. There are such
dangers, but there is also a role for legislation today,
just as there was a role for it in the 1930s after the
excesses of the 1920s.
The best defense against political and legislative
“overkill” is effective reform within the corporate
community itself. In particular, effort is necessary in
the three critical areas of financial reporting, compensation,
and corporate governance.
I chair the International Accounting Standard
Committee Foundation, an organization that
embodies the effort to seek convergence of accounting
standards globally. Our committee’s particular
responsibility is to appoint the board of professionals
– the iasb – charged with developing standards
of broad applicability and high quality.
Our efforts are not entirely free of political pressures
or special industry pleading – these are endemic
– but the inherently international composition
of the committee and the board that it appoints
helps neutralize and diffuse those pressures. Europe
and much of the rest of the world, by legislation or
otherwise, has signaled its willingness to adopt international
standards. My sense is that the insularity of
the American view is fading, and the US authorities
are now willing and eager to find common ground.
The spotlight is now on the capacity of accounting
professionals around the world to arrive at a
strong consensus on new principles and rules that
are well adapted to the complexities of the twentyfirst
century. We will insist that the iasb decisionmakers
consult broadly and follow due process. It is
not an easy task, but the need is urgent.
Good standards are not enough. They must be
applied with consistency and discipline. This is an
The Berlin Journal 5

area in which legislation has been clearly needed,
and now has been achieved. The newly enacted
Sarbanes-Oxley Act will reduce the conflicts and distractions
caused by the past emphasis of accounting
firms on their consulting practices. It also provides
for effective oversight of auditing practices by a
body removed from industry control.
The fact that earlier industry-sponsored and -
controlled oversight efforts failed makes a dramatic
case for arrangements that are more analogous to
those long in force in the US securities industry.
What remains is to provide for effective administration.
The appointment of a strong oversight
board is key, but there needs to be cultural change
within auditing firms themselves.
Success will depend, too, upon a new sense of
discipline in the corporate boardroom. For one
thing, a more effective, more disciplined auditing
process entails cost. That applies especially to the
compensation of the outside auditors. Too many
corporations have looked upon auditing fees as a
cost, to be squeezed to the extent practical, especially
when the possibility of profitable consulting
assignments is available to the accounting firm.
Today, boards of directors, ceos, and chief financial
officers are more alert to the need to assure accurate
financial reporting. But will these attitudes persist
after the present crisis passes?
A heavy weight is being placed on audit committees.
They will require more time, more financial
sophistication, and more authority. Members of
boards of directors are chosen – quite rightly – to
achieve a variety of perspectives and to bring different
strengths to the board. They typically develop a
collegial relationship with management. The question,
however, is how boards as presently constituted
can find members with the capacity, the time,
and the will to oversee the auditing and accounting
of a large and financially complicated corporation
effectively. This is especially difficult when a high
value is (understandably) placed upon the collegiality
of a board, whose main responsibility remains
to advise the company and consult on strategic
matters and vital personnel decisions.
One way around the conundrum could be to
rethink the way auditing committees are selected.
Why not ask stockholders themselves to select
members of the auditing committee, electing them
either as a separate committee reporting to the
board of directors or simply as an identifiable part
of the board itself? Such an arrangement could provide
better focus for the heavy responsibilities of
audit committees, and in doing so, better match the
responsibilities with those able to discharge them.
In the US, the responsibilities of the auditing
committee are essentially spelled out in the new
Sarbanes-Oxley Act and in most of the writings on
corporate governance. They include hiring the auditor,
deciding on an appropriate fee, exercising oversight
over both the external and internal auditing
processes, and assessing corporate controls. For a
large and complicated public company, these are
substantial responsibilities, requiring both relevant
experience and a lot of time. For most boards, such
resources are scarce.
In a broader context, I am encouraged by the
fact that discussion is underway about separating
the responsibilities of the ceo and board chairman.
Some variation of that approach is common in the
United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries
and on the European continent as well. In
Germany, the chairman of the supervisory board
seems to have a comparable oversight role.
The “imperial ceo” is strongly entrenched in
the US, however. Few incumbent or aspiring ceos
would want to contemplate giving up any authority
with respect to setting the board agenda and managing
board discussions. But recent events have
illustrated the dilemma. There is broad agreement
that, for the stockholder’s sake, ultimate control of
the corporation should lie with directors independent
of management. If so, should there not be a clear
focus for board leadership beyond the ceo? Who
can act when there are doubts about the ceo himself?
Who should take the initiative among the independent
directors? Are those matters better left to a
more spontaneous and informal response to perceived
crisis or to a part of established board procedures?
I do not suggest that one size should fit all. But I
do believe that for large and complicated public
companies, the check and balance implicit in a nonexecutive
chairman should be the norm. For one
thing, independent board leadership would help
maintain more effective control over executive
remuneration – remuneration that, as is now recognized,
has in some cases been grotesquely large and
inconsistent with performance. It is also important
to understand that the widely disproportionate
growth in executive compensation is a function of
the widespread use of fixed-price stock options
interacting with a bull market for stocks that
exceeded all expectations. The capricious results of
those perverse incentives came from a failure to
align the long-term interests of stockholders with
management.
Of course stock options may well be useful for
small, risky, and cash-starved ventures without
access to public markets. For established public companies,
options closely related to relative performance
over extended periods may be designed. But for
broadly owned public companies with active markets
for their stock, there should be strong presumption
against the practice of fixed-price options for
executives. The temptation for abuse is simply too
great and will remain so even if, contrary to present
practice, they are “expensed.” If equity ownership by
executives is desirable – and I believe it is – there are
more effective ways to achieve that end, including
grants of stock with restrictions on sale.
A global economy with the free flow of capital
has the potential of bringing enormous benefits to
the emerging as well as the economically developed
world. But, as many know, there is resentment and
resistance. Much of this opposition may rest on false
and specious grounds, but it is also true that much
more needs to be done before many emerging
economies reach their potential. Rhetoric that trumpets
the benefits of international financial markets
will ring hollow so long as the integrity of the capital
markets of the developed world is challenged.
The weaknesses in corporate governance and in
accounting and financial reporting in the US have
been exposed for all to see, and the challenge is not
limited to my own country. It is a matter of multinational
companies, accounting firms that operate
globally, and international markets.
What is happening today in the US offers a certain
degree of comfort and satisfaction. We are acting
with a reasonable mixture of private initiative
and legislation to deal forcibly with problems that
have been neglected for too long. There is still a long
Rhetoric trumpeting the benefits of
international financial markets will
ring hollow so long as the integrity of
the developed world’s capital markets
is challenged.
--------------------------------
way to go to assure reforms are undertaken and
maintained, and it is not, moreover, a challenge for
one country alone, however large and influential it
may be.
I believe that the end result must bring our practice
more closely into line with our stated principles.
Taking critical steps now to assure the integrity of
our own capital markets will help pave the way for
the acceptance of democratic capitalism the world
over. o
6 Number Six | Spring 2003

America:
The Ambivalent
Empire?
Four Views
Last fall, the human rights scholar Michael Ignatieff arrived for a
seminar at the Hans Arnhold Center with a working draft of his
forthcoming book Empire Lite under his arm. Among other
matters discussed that day, Ignatieff pointed out how President
Bush’s administration has painstakingly avoided using the
language of empire. He cited a speech from June 2002 in which
the president declared, “America has no empire to extend or
utopia to establish.”
American foreign policy has a long tradition of being ambivalent
about empire. Sometimes the nation has been adamantly
isolationist, other times, extroverted in its involvement abroad.
The reluctance to serve as the world’s sheriff has often been at
odds with both the Wilsonian image of America “making the
world safe for democracy” and the more hard-headed pursuit of
national interests.
How circumspect is the US in its exercise of power? How will it
choose to perpetuate its preeminence in the post-cold-war
world? What are the pitfalls and promises of the American
Empire? We asked four friends of the American Academy to
comment: Ignatieff himself; Josef Joffe, one of our founding
trustees; David Rieff, the spring Haniel Fellow; and Hans-Ulrich
Wehler, a noted German historian.
Michael Ignatieff Empire Lite
Josef Joffe Lonely at the Top
David Rieff An American Empire
Hans-Ulrich Wehler The Chosen Nation
8 Number Six | Spring 2003

Michael Ignatieff Empire Lite
Reconciling Democracy and Empire
It is unsurprising that force projection overseas should awaken
resentment among America’s enemies. More troubling is the hostility
it arouses among friends, those whose security is guaranteed by
American power. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Europe. At a
moment when the costs of empire are mounting for America, her rich
European allies matter financially. But in America’s emerging global
strategy, they have been demoted to reluctant junior partners. This
makes them resentful and unwilling allies, less and less able to understand
the nation that liberated them in 1945.
For fifty years, Europe rebuilt itself economically while passing on
the costs of its defense to the United States. This was a matter of more
than just reducing its armed forces and the proportion of national income
spent on the military. All Western European countries reduced the martial
elements in their national identities. In the process, European identity
(with the possible exception of Britain) became postmilitary and postnational.
This opened a widening gap with the US. It remained a nation in
September 11 rubbed in the
lesson that global power is still
measured by military capability.
which flag, sacrifice, and martial honor are central to national identity.
Europeans who had once invented the idea of the martial nation-state
now looked at American patriotism, the last example of the form, and no
longer recognized it as anything but flag-waving extremism. The world’s
only empire was isolated, not just because it was the biggest power but
also because it was the West’s last military nation-state.
September 11 rubbed in the lesson that global power is still measured
by military capability. The Europeans discovered that they lacked
the military instruments to be taken seriously and that their erstwhile
defenders, the Americans, regarded them, in a moment of crisis, with suspicious
contempt.
Yet the Americans cannot afford to create a global order all on their
own. European participation in peacekeeping, nation-building, and
humanitarian reconstruction is so important that the Americans are
required, even when they are unwilling to do so, to include Europeans in
the governance of their evolving imperial project. The Americans essentially
dictate Europe’s place in this new grand design. The US is multilateral
when it wants to be, unilateral when it must be; and it enforces a new
division of labor in which America does the fighting, the French, British,
and Germans do the police patrols in the border zones and the Dutch,
Swiss, and Scandinavians provide the humanitarian aid.
This is a very different picture of the world than the one entertained
by liberal international lawyers and human rights activists who
had hoped to see American power integrated into a transnational legal
and economic order organized around the United Nations, the World
Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court and other international
human rights and environmental institutions and mechanisms.
Successive American administrations have signed on to those pieces of
the transnational legal order that suit their purposes (the World Trade
Organization, for example) while ignoring or even sabotaging those parts
(the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto Protocol) that do not. A
new international order is emerging, but it is designed to suit American
imperial objectives. America’s allies want a multilateral order that will
essentially constrain American power. But the empire will not be tied
down like Gulliver with a thousand legal strings.
On the new imperial frontier, in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia
and Kosovo, American military power, together with European money
and humanitarian motives, is producing a form of imperial rule for a
postimperial age. If this sounds contradictory, it is because the impulses
that have gone into this new exercise of power are contradictory. On the
one hand, the semiofficial ideology of the Western world – human rights
– sustains the principle of self-determination, the right of each people to
rule themselves free of outside interference. This was the ethical principle
that inspired the decolonization of Asia and Africa after World War II.
Now we are living through the collapse of many of these former colonial
states. Into the resulting vacuum of chaos and massacre a new imperialism
has reluctantly stepped – reluctantly because these places are dangerous
and because they seemed, at least until September 11, to be marginal
to the interests of the powers concerned. But, gradually, this reluctance
has been replaced by an understanding of why order needs to be brought
to these places.
Nowhere, after all, could have been more distant than Afghanistan,
yet that remote and desperate place was where the attacks of September
11 were prepared. Terror has collapsed distance, and with this collapse
has come a sharpened American focus on the necessity of bringing order
to the frontier zones. Bringing order is the paradigmatic imperial task,
but it is essential, for reasons of both economy and principle, to do so
without denying local peoples their rights to some degree of self-determination.
Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan –
This is imperialism in a hurry: spend
money, get results, turn the place back
to the locals and get out.
The old European imperialism justified itself as a mission to civilize,
to prepare tribes and so-called lesser breeds in the habits of self-discipline
necessary for the exercise of self-rule. Self-rule did not necessarily
have to happen soon – the imperial administrators hoped to enjoy the
sunset as long as possible – but it was held out as a distant incentive, and
the incentive was crucial in co-opting local elites and preventing them
from passing into open rebellion. In the new imperialism, this promise of
self-rule cannot be kept so distant, for local elites are all creations of modern
nationalism, and modern nationalism’s primary ethical content is
self-determination. In Iraq, local elites must be ‘‘empowered’’ to take over
The Berlin Journal 9

as soon as the American imperial forces have restored order and the
European humanitarians have rebuilt the roads, schools, and houses.
Nation-building seeks to reconcile imperial power and local self-determination
through the medium of an exit strategy. This is imperialism in a
hurry: to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to the locals
and get out. But it is similar to the old imperialism in the sense that real
power in these zones – Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and soon, perhaps,
Iraq – will remain in Washington.
At the beginning of the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, published in 1776, Edward Gibbon remarked that
empires endure only so long as their rulers take care not to overextend
their borders. Augustus bequeathed his successors an empire ‘‘within
those limits which nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks
and boundaries: on the west the Atlantic Ocean; the Rhine and
Danube on the north; the Euphrates on the east; and towards the south
the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa.’’ Beyond these boundaries lay the
Empires survive when they understand
that diplomacy, backed by force, is
always to be preferred to force alone.
barbarians. But the ‘‘vanity or ignorance’’ of the Romans, Gibbon went
on, led them to ‘‘despise and sometimes to forget the outlying countries
that had been left in the enjoyment of a barbarous independence.’’ As a
result, the proud Romans were lulled into making the fatal mistake of
‘‘confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the earth.’’
This characteristic delusion of imperial power is to confuse global
power with global domination. The Americans may have the former, but
they do not have the latter. They cannot rebuild each failed state or
appease each anti-American hatred, and the more they try, the more they
expose themselves to the overreach that eventually undermined the classical
empires of old.
The secretary of defense may be right when he warns the North
Koreans that America is capable of fighting on two fronts – in Korea and
Iraq – simultaneously, but Americans at home cannot be overjoyed at
such a prospect, and if two fronts are possible at once, a much larger
number of fronts is not. If conflict in Iraq, North Korea, or both becomes
a possibility, Al Qaeda can be counted on to seek to strike a busy and
overextended empire in the back. What this suggests is not just that overwhelming
power never confers the security it promises but also that even
the overwhelmingly powerful need friends and allies. In the cold war, the
road to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, led through Moscow and
Beijing. Now America needs its old cold-war adversaries more than ever
to control the breakaway, bankrupt Communist rogue that is threatening
America and her clients from Tokyo to Seoul.
Empires survive when they understand that diplomacy, backed by
force, is always to be preferred to force alone. Looking into the still more
distant future, say a generation ahead, resurgent Russia and China will
demand recognition both as world powers and as regional hegemons. As
the North Korean case shows, America needs to share the policing of nonproliferation
and other threats with these powers, and if it tries, as the
current National Security Strategy suggests, to prevent the emergence of
any competitor to American global dominance, it risks everything that
Gibbon predicted: overextension followed by defeat.
America will also remain vulnerable, despite its overwhelming military
power, because its primary enemy, Iraq and North Korea notwithstanding,
is not a state, susceptible to deterrence, influence and coercion,
but a shadowy cell of fanatics who have proved that they cannot be
deterred and coerced and who have hijacked a global ideology – Islam –
that gives them a bottomless supply of recruits and allies in a war, a war
not just against America but against her client regimes in the Islamic
world. In many countries in that part of the world, America is caught in
the middle of a civil war raging between incompetent and authoritarian
regimes and the Islamic revolutionaries who want to return the Arab
world to the time of the prophet. It is a civil war between the politics of
pure reaction and the politics of the impossible, with America unfortunately
aligned on the side of reaction. On September 11, the American
empire discovered that in the Middle East its local pillars were literally
built on sand.
Until September 11, successive US administrations treated their
Middle Eastern clients like gas stations. This was part of a larger pattern.
After 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet empire, American presidents
thought they could have imperial domination on the cheap, ruling the
world without putting in place any new imperial architecture – new military
alliances, new legal institutions, new international development
organisms – for a postcolonial, post-Soviet world.
The Greeks taught the Romans to call this failure hubris. It was
also, in the 1990s, a general failure of the historical imagination, an
inability of the post-cold-war West to grasp that the emerging crisis of
state order in so many overlapping zones of the world – from Egypt to
Afghanistan – would eventually become a security threat at home.
Radical Islam would never have succeeded in winning adherents if the
Muslim countries that won independence from the European empires
had been able to convert dreams of self-determination into the reality of
competent, rule-abiding states. America has inherited this crisis of selfdetermination
from the empires of the past. Its solution – to create
democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll out the same happy experiment
throughout the Middle East – is both noble and dangerous: noble
because, if successful, it will finally give these peoples the self-determination
they vainly fought for against the empires of the past; dangerous
because, if it fails, there will be nobody left to blame but the Americans.
The dual nemeses of empire in the twentieth century were nationalism,
the desire of peoples to rule themselves free of alien domination,
and narcissism, the incurable delusion of imperial rulers that the ‘‘lesser
breeds’’ aspired only to be versions of themselves. Both nationalism and
narcissism have threatened the American reassertion of global power
since September 11. o
© 2003 The New York Times Magazine.
Michael Ignatieff is the Carr Professor and Director of the Carr
Center for Human Rights Practice at the Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University. His next book is Empire Lite: Nation-building in
Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan is published this May in London. He presented
a working version of this paper at the Academy last fall.
10 Number Six | Spring 2003

Josef Joffe Lonely at the Top
The Last Remaining Superpower
Needs All the Help it Can Get
Is america an empire? If so, it is a very strange kind of empire. It is
not like Rome, a real imperium that started out with the small possession
of Latium and then went on to conquer, occupy, and rule much
of the then-known world – from the British Isles via Lusitania to the
Levant. Nor is it like the Turkish or Russian empires, both of which relentlessly
grabbed land to rule it – and to “russify” or “turkify” it.
America is a very different kind of political animal. First of all, it
was in the fortunate position of being able to conquer at home, so to
speak. Its expansion was inward, into a largely unpopulated territorial
expanse where it met with enemies (Native Americans, Mexicans) who
were easily bested. There was also a natural limit to expansion: the
Pacific, beyond which the young republic did not have to venture, since
there were no existential threats on the other littoral. Similarly, the
Atlantic provided a nice moat that kept dangerous European intruders at
bay. Finally, there was a healthy revulsion against the “broils and troubles
Alas, neither the French nor the
Germans, neither the Chinese nor the
Russians, show a proclivity to shoulder
the burden and to pay the price.
of Europe.” Better to stay out and not be contaminated by those corrupt
princes and potentates who stood against all the values Americans cherished.
And so it took some heavy prompting before the US intervened in
Europe in 1917 and again in 1941.
In short, the US did not conquer by dint of superior virtue but
because it lacked those seemingly compelling reasons that relentlessly
pushed Rome, Turkey, and Russia outward and forward. (Exceptions:
Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, a misstep that might be excused by reference
to the colonialist ideologies then in vogue.) Nor did the US have to
conquer for economic reasons; again, it did very nicely by producing and
exchanging goods in its vast home market. Indeed, until the 1970s,
exports amounted to only four percent of its gdp, as opposed to export
ratios of 30 percent in postwar West Germany or post-colonial Holland.
Why then this overblown rhetoric of “empire” as attached to the
United States? One explanation is that the US may well be the functional
equivalent of empire. American bases and troops circle the globe, a fact
made all the more remarkable given the demise of its one and only mortal
rival, the Soviet Union. Its wars have become wars of choice, be it in
Vietnam, in Afghanistan or in the Gulf. The US inserts its fleet between
Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. Short of real war, it punishes
malfeasants in places like Libya or pre-2003 Iraq. And it waves the stick of
war in the faces of countries like North Korea.
A B
Is this the behavior of a real empire? No, but it reflects a hegemonic
mind-set not unlike Britain’s in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
America’s penchant is not for direct rule but for intermittent intervention
in order to restore or uphold regional balances by laying low the local
would-be hegemon du jour. Nor is this behavior necessarily a bad thing
when analyzed in the language of cold realpolitik. This is a nasty world,
with endless threats to regional stability and to the “decent opinions of
mankind.” When local powers cannot take care of regional order, when
fearsome despots like Milosevic or Saddam commit outrages against
their own populations, there has to be somebody who upholds minimal
standards of acceptable behavior.
Alas, neither the French nor the Germans, neither the Chinese nor
the Russians, show a proclivity to shoulder the burden and to pay the
price. So, resorting once more to the cold language of power politics, one
might breathe a sigh of relief and mutter: “Thank God for America.”
Thank God for an “imperial republic,” as Raymond Aron called the US
forty years ago, that does not conquer but intervenes, at least intermittently,
to sober up those who challenge the status quo. In an ever more
messy world, it would be easier to condemn the US if others were willing
to discharge these tasks.
The problem is overdoing it –
and picking up more enemies in
the process.
So what are the problems? They have been well analyzed by
Michael Ignatieff. The US may be a power even greater than Rome. It certainly
dwarfs all possible comers. Just an example: When George W. Bush
asked Congress for a supplemental defense appropriation in early 2002,
the sum was more than twice that of Germany’s total annual defense
budget. If the US goes on spending as planned, and if other countries do
not increase their own efforts, it will invest more in its military panoply
than all other nations combined.
The Berlin Journal 11

The problem is not overspending, as “declinists” from Paul
Kennedy onward have argued. Today, the US does not devote more
resources to its military than did Germany during the Cold War: around 3
percent of GDP. The problem is not even “overextension.” A geographical
metaphor makes little sense in an age when American B-52s can rise in
Missouri, fly halfway around the world, drop their ordnance on places
like Afghanistan, and return home safely.
The problem is overdoing it – and picking up more enemies, be
they inspired by fear or hate, than are eliminated in the process of intrusion.
Evidently, this intervention does not reduce the sum total of
Cooperation may serve American
interests better in the long haul than
the most sophisticated military
panoply.
America’s ill-wishers. The problem is also underdoing the more economical
or efficient thing, which is to harness friends and allies to the common
purpose. Britain set the historical example; apart from the occasional
naval engagement, it always fought coalition wars. This, of course,
requires a surfeit of diplomatic skill (and patience) that may not be
America’s strongest suit – at least not under the aegis of the Bush II
administration.
America’s problem is not decline but loneliness – and worse.
“Worse” implies “ganging up” on the part of the lesser powers in the ways
we have first seen this year. Two former allies of the US – France and
Germany – have executed a kind of “reversal of alliances” by inducting
their former enemy Russia into an anti-American “axis.” Now, it is true
that the “hyperpower” can fend them off singly and in combination, but
this is not the real issue. The point is that this “last remaining superpower”
needs all the help it can get when it comes to the more interesting
problems of the twenty-first century.
We know the list. It ranges from terrorism to climate change, from
proliferation to protectionism. Here is a very practical example: Even
while Schröder was launching his rhetorical sallies against the Bush
administration, American customs agents were peacefully collaborating
with their German colleagues in the port of Hamburg. All of them were
looking for terrorist contraband in containers bound for the US. These
are the issues that directly and dangerously affect American welfare, and
no power in the world can dispatch them on its own.
One hopes that these “mundane” items of cooperation will occupy
a larger space in the American diplomatic imagination once the Saddam
problem is safely solved. Precision munitions are no substitute for cooperation.
Indeed, in the long haul, the latter may serve American interests
better than the most sophisticated military panoply. o
Josef Joffe is editor and publisher of Die Zeit and an associate of the
Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. He is a trustee
of the American Academy in Berlin.

David Rieff An American Empire
Imperialism, it seems, is back in vogue in America – at least
among the chattering classes in Boston, New York, and Washington.
Whether this enthusiasm of pundits and policy-wonks, by no means
all of them on the right, will survive the actual experience of the practice
of imperial policing, from Tora Bora to Bagdad, is another question. It is
one thing to write about an “imperial renaissance‚” as the conservative
British historian, Niall Ferguson, did at the end of his fine study of the
British empire, and of the need to accept the fact that America’s global
role demands that it take on the motley of empire. It is all very well to
quote Kipling to the effect that the US military must accept its destiny of
fighting “the savage wars of peace,” as the American writer Max Boot has
done in his elegant neo-imperial polemics. But that is before the real savagery
of war is brought home in video of maimed babies in bombed-out
hospitals and funerals in south-central Los Angeles or the mountain hamlets
of eastern Tennessee. However successful in military terms it has
proven to be, the current punitive expedition in Iraq (for that, rather than
a war in any normal sense is what it has been), so eerily reminiscent of the
campaign of the fledgling US Marine Corps against the Barbary Pirates in
the early nineteenth century, may well leave so sour a taste in the
American public’s collective mouth that all fantasies of empire currently
entertained in Washington will wilt like that city’s cherry blossoms when
the summer heat sets in.
But for the moment, however risible the idea may appear in the rest
of the world, the idea that America is the planet’s only sure guarantor of
liberty, and its corollary, that if there is to be a democratic revolution in the
poor world on the same order of magnitude as the democratic revolution
that extinguished the Soviet Union, or at least an avoidance of the worst
horrors of imploding states like Rwanda and Bosnia that marked the
first post-Cold War decade, only an America willing not just to be powerful
but imperial will do, continues to dominate the policy debate in the
United States. Open any of the neo-conservative magazines widely
assumed to influence senior members of the Bush administration, and
you will find a plethora of articles with gloating titles such as “Why
America Must Police the World” and “What’s Wrong with an American
Empire?” Meanwhile, on the liberal side, writers like Leon Wiesletier,
Paul Berman, Samantha Power, and Michael Ignatieff, while duly skeptical
of the Bush administration’s motives and conduct, are anything but
hostile to a new Pax Americana. Ignatieff, in particular, has called for
what he has dubbed “Empire Lite,” believing, not out of triumphalism
but out of despair at the lack of any other solution that might stop a
Rwandan genocide or bring to an end the almost uniquely evil tyranny of
a Saddam Hussein (President Bush was two-thirds right when he evoked
an “axis of evil,” only erring by throwing the Iranian regime into the
hopper), that the only order on offer in a world of failing states, ethnic cleansing,
terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction is the one guaranteed
by American power.
It is hard to argue with one premise shared by liberals and conservatives
on this issue, namely that American power is the only game in
town, however much one might wish it otherwise. For Europeans, Britain
excepted, simply no longer wish to think about the problem of force in
any way that is not utopian. It is not that the European approach to a particular
problem – Iraq, say – is necessarily wrong. To the contrary, a case
can be made that a peaceful solution to the Iraqi crisis was still on offer
when the war began. But this does not obviate the fact that Europeans can
no longer act militarily in any other context but that of peacekeeping
operations or infinitesimal expeditions like the (very commendable)
British intervention in Sierra Leone to put down the murderous insurgency
of the so-called Revolutionary United Front. Europe, for example,
would have been incapable of mounting the operation that dislodged the
Serbs from Kosovo and reversed the mass deportation of the Kosovar
Albanians. This is not because Europe could not do so, if it chose to spend
the money on proper military forces. It is because it does not choose to do
so. But the result of this choice is that only the United States can act effectively.
It is perhaps for this reason that a resentful American diplomat
referred to the European position as wanting the US “never on top but
always on tap.” And unless and until Europe rearms to the extent that it
has the technological capacity to fight wars and not just mount peacekeeping
operations or post-conflict police actions, which seems highly
unlikely in a Europe where a German foreign minister can seriously claim
his country is not pacifist and adduce as an example German deployments
in post-Balkan war Macedonia and post-war Afghanistan, interventions
will either be spearheaded by the US or they will not take place
at all.
Unlike so many imperialisms of
the past, the imperialism of 2002
was couched in defensive terms.
Again, were the Europeans really reconciled to allowing the next
Bosnia or Rwanda to take place, or still hewed to the Westphalian idea of
the absolute nature of national sovereignty, their position would make
more sense. But this is not their view. To the contrary, it is European governments
that have insisted more rigorously that the Westphalian order
is ending, that we live in a world where human rights norms must be
respected by governments at the risk of seeing their sovereignty abrogated,
and that the ethical standards enshrined in post-World War II
international law – above all, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention – must be
applied throughout the world. To which the new American imperialists
and neo-imperialists say, ‘fine, but the only way to enforce these standards
that we all agree need to be maintained is through the policing of
the world – that is to say, through force. And world policing is, when all is
said and done, a euphemism for empire.’ From the American perspective,
the Europeans want what US power can achieve; they are simply squeamish
about the tragic nature about what the use of such power costs in
terms of destruction and the loss of innocent life. Obviously, there is
hypocrisy on both sides. Europeans believe that the rule of law can be
extended to those areas of the world that do not yet benefit from it
The Berlin Journal 13

through so-called soft power, rather than force, and that patience is
required. Americans tend to believe that in some situations at least, only
force will do. Neither side admits how much its approach suits its geostrategic,
and, perhaps more importantly, geo-economic interests.
In the American case, obviously, the conviction that the world
urgently needed to be policed was hardened by the events of September
11. Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 had been comparatively altruistic
exercises in the use of force; for most Americans, however, Afghanistan in
2001 was a war of self-defense, as Iraq was, although clearly there was far
more opposition to that campaign in the United States. It had been one
thing to argue for a Pax Americana on largely moralistic grounds. With
the recognition of a genuine terrorist threat, and new fears about the willingness
of certain states to sooner or later deploy chemical and biological
weapons, many American policymakers came to the conclusion that, if
the United States might not necessarily need to become an empire in any
formal sense, it did need to reassume the role of world policeman.
Interestingly, the Bush administration had come into office promising it
would undertake no such effort. But like so many attributes of the Bush
presidency, and, indeed, of the man himself, September 11 changed
everything. Unlike so many imperialisms of the past, the imperialism of
2002 was couched in defensive terms. It is this cognitive gap between the
American sense of why the US must take on the role and the European
(and world) sense that an empire is an empire is an empire – i.e. a selfaggrandizing,
self-interested, fundamentally amoral if not immoral
enterprise, as all European empires were, with the possible partial exception
of Britain, and certainly all earlier empires – that lies at the root of
much of the genuine misunderstanding over the Iraqi crisis.
The new imperialism is driven by
one of the oldest of American ideas,
that of American exceptionalism.
That said, probably the crisis would have occurred anyway. In the
post-cold-war world, it is by no means clear that Western Europe and
the United States have the same commonality of interest that they did
when Europe fairly willingly accepted a subordinate role out of the need
to secure American military protection from the Soviet Union. The
Soviet Union disappeared, and with it the need for European subservience
toward the US on matters where it sees the world differently.
And, after all, the US was in many ways an empire even during the cold
war, despite all the very real senses in which the current imperial aspiration
is different. From a Latin American perspective, for example, has
all that much really changed? Defenders of the new imperial vision
argue that, in contrast to the cold war, when US policymakers felt
obliged to support all manner of blood-thirsty tyrants, the new imperial
vision of American power can afford to set a higher level of ethical standard.
That seems unlikely. The deals the US government made with
such tyrannies as the Uzbekistan of Islam Karimov and the
Turkmenistan of Nyazov, or, indeed, attempted to make with the
Turkish government over Iraq, do not inspire much confidence that a
new philosophy of imperialism has taken root. What is likelier is that
the new imperialism is driven by one of the oldest of American ideas,
that of American exceptionalism.
It can be said of George W. Bush that doubt is not a quality he seems
to possess in more than trace amounts. The same can be said about the
new imperialists both within and outside the administration. Their irenic,
unshakeable belief is that an American empire will never be corrupted by
its own power in the way that all previous empires in human history have
been, that it will, by definition, be a force for good in the world, and that to
question these assumptions, to question the benevolence and the emancipatory
potential of American power is, objectively, as Marxists used to say
(and a certain Marxist language, turned on its head, is a feature of neoconservative
rhetoric, a fact that probably derives from the Trotskyist past
of some of the most senior members of the neo-conservative clan), to side
with those President Bush has called “the enemies of freedom.” Perhaps
such a belief is no more preposterous than any other religious creed. Credo
qui absurdum est (“I believe because it is absurd”) was the famous
justification of faith of the early Church father, Tertullian. But politics, at
least outside the world of Islamic fundamentalism is not supposed to be
about faith. And it is worrying that the neo-conservative, and even, to
some extent anyway, the liberal confidence in the goodness of American
power stems from what is essentially an unproveable belief. Add to this the
fact that this belief is held largely by Americans about America, with all
the possible distortions based on self-love that this entails, not to mention
the fact that, from a historical perspective, the contention that any
empire could live up to the claims apologists for America make for it is, to
put it charitably, far-fetched, and one has a doctrine that should engender
a healthy skepticism.
And skepticism about America by Americans is, well,
un-American. Obviously, there are those who see the United States at the
root of all the world’s evils – Edward Said and Noam Chomsky come to
mind. But they are really just turning US-centered self-love into UScentered
self-hate, and have more in common with their ideological
adversaries than they care to admit. The sense that America is different is
as old as the Republic. Phrases like “the city on the hill,” “the last best
hope of humanity,” and “the home of liberty,” are the boilerplate of the
American civic religion. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “the cause of the
United States is the cause of humanity.” To put the matter more coolly
and historically, Americans have always seen their own role as one of
being agents of revolutionary change. The debate has been whether they
should do so by force or by example. As a result, the temptation to a particularly
crusading, proselytizing version of imperialism is hard-wired
into the foreign policy of the United States. It is not the only view, of
course. John Adams famously said that it was not the duty of the United
States to “go out and fight monsters.” But such quietism is perhaps out of
step with the America of the early twenty-first century. Indeed, to the new
imperialists, going out and fighting monsters is, or at least should be, the
sworn duty of the United States. And, in fairness, in Osama Bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein, they have found actual monsters, not fabricated
ones. But the problem remains one of the confusion of religious and political
vernaculars.
It is one thing to say that Osama Bin Laden, or, more problematically,
Saddam Hussein represents a threat to American security and act to
14 Number Six | Spring 2003

If George Bush is our Octavian, then
the chances are that the results for
the US will be just as tragic as those
the Romans suffered as they moved
from republic to empire.
thwart that threat, unilaterally, if necessary. (Here, European opinion on
Iraq is genuinely hypocritical; few Europeans objected to bypassing the
UN to reverse Slobodan Milosevic’s policies in Kosovo, or insisted any
action taken in that province was illegitimate without a UN Security
Council mandate.) But it is quite another to describe, as many of the new
imperialists do, a world that will remain “fallen” – or, in the modern vernacular,
repressive, undemocratic, etc. – without the consistent redeeming
admixture of US military might. And it is sheer fantasy to imagine
that, whatever good US power can do, that the results for the United
States will not be catastrophic. To run an empire is a corrupting business;
that is the lesson of history. American conservatives often accuse their
opponents both at home and abroad of being utopian dreamers. But such
fantasies about empire are, in fact, the most utopian dream of all. None of
this means that it will not come about, or that George Bush may not prove
to be our Octavian. But if he is, then the chances are that the results for
the United States will be just as tragic as those the Romans suffered as they
moved from republic to empire. As for the rest of the world, I suppose that
depends on how one views the idea of a crusade, even a crusade undertaken
with the best of intentions. From my perspective, the old Biblical
adage that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions is appropriate
here, and the road to empire is, indeed, the road to Hell.o
© 2003, David Rieff
David Rieff (Haniel Fellow, spring ’03) is the author, most recently,
of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. He has written three
books on immigration in American cities as well as Slaughterhouse: Bosnia
and the Failure of the West. He co-edited with Roy Gutman the A-to-Z guide
War Crimes: What the Public Should Know, the online edition of which is
continually updated and expanded.
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The Berlin Journal 15

Hans-Ulrich Wehler The Chosen Nation
America’s Missionary Nationalism
and Germany’s Blunder
From its foundation, the United States has belonged to the system
of expanding Western nations. The political generation of the
“founding fathers,” however, looked with deep ambivalence upon
the nation’s relationship to the expansion of its own state. That generation
of Americans had grown up in the tradition of English mercantile
imperialism, and it was such an empire that the US embraced. “Our
Rising American Empire,” as contemporaries often called it, was initially
to consist of the North American continent from the east coast to the west
– with Canada, if possible, as the “14th colony.” The Caribbean was seen
from early on as the “American Mediterranean,” and Jefferson included
all of Latin America in “our hemisphere.” The continental expansion
ended with the conquest of half of Mexico and the acquisition of Alaska in
1867. Yet the newly-acquired, vast regions that were added to the coastal
states were not governed as colonial territories, but were rather absorbed
into the Union as equal states. This was entirely in line with the settlers’
democratic right of self-determination granted by the shrewd membership
mechanism of the “Northwest Ordinance” (1787). After winning
through revolution its own emancipation from Britain – and with it, a
fundamental liberal-democratic consensus – the US had no wish to
become a colonial master over second-class colonial subjects.
England’s “Informal Empire” remained the greatly admired model
for the American power elites into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Characterized by economic hegemony and trade agreements, military
bases, and maritime dominance, here was an ingenious way of avoiding
the financial, political, administrative, and military strain of formal
colonial rule – to say nothing of the glaring injustice to the democratic
principle of self-government. The outcome of the American expansion
overseas, set in motion in the 1880s by the “New Imperialism” and especially
the Spanish-American War of 1898, shows this as well. The
Caribbean ultimately became part of the American “sphere of influence,”
but Cuba was informally controlled rather than annexed. Puerto Rico was
originally thought of merely as a naval base. Hawaii and Guam were subsequently
annexed but only to serve as intermediate stops on the way to
East Asia. In essence, the most important war aim of 1898 was to come
closer to the Asian market, whose potential at the time was grossly overestimated.
A naval base in the Spanish Philippines was initially considered
to enable close participation in the power struggle over China. With
the disintegration of the Spanish colonial empire and the competition
between rival countries that resulted, the Philippines intermittently
became a formal American colony. Just thirty years later, the country was
granted independence – long before general decolonization began.
From that point on, the US assumed no formal colonial rule. It
remained true to the commercial advantages and political vindications of
the model of “informal empire,” even during the Cold War and the war in
Vietnam. Nor will Iraq be an American colony. Even a short-term colonial-style
protectorate would bring immense disadvantages. In short:
though the US has participated from the start in the process of “empirebuilding,”
since the conquest of its own continent, it has limited itself to
Global primacy, combined with
the shock of September 11, has
triggered a fatal reaction:
the current Bush administration’s
doctrine of preventive war.
wielding an indisputably heavy influence abroad, securing it with bases,
trade agreements, and commercial influence. In doing so, it has been able
to pursue its enormous economic potential and its political interests, all
under the sign of the free-trade “Open Door” policy. The approach is not
only similar to that of Victorian England, but also to the Roman Empire,
which for years operated just as successfully with the same techniques. It
is undoubtedly difficult today to subject the expansionist thrust of the
American economy (or more specifically, of multinational corporations)
to binding regulations, which will have to be repeated in an international
framework. The nineteenth-century nation-states were able to subject
unruly capitalism to regulations. But, apart from a brief interlude in the
late nineteenth century, the spread of American influence does not
amount to direct, formal colonial rule.
The Soviet collapse conferred sole superpower status upon the US,
but China will soon establish itself as a regional hegemonic power, India is
striving for a similar role, and Russia will undoubtedly recover. The fact
remains, however, that the US will be the only major world power for some
time to come. History has shown that this role is invariably accompanied
by the obligation to intervene in the centers of conflict all over the world,
be it amicably or militarily. Twelve years of global primacy, however, combined
with the shock of September 11, have triggered a fatal reaction: the
current Bush administration’s doctrine of preventive war. The presumption
that danger zones can be preventively eliminated by virtue of one’s
own superiority calls into question a fundamental principle of interna-
16 Number Six | Spring 2003

tional law, which allows for such action only in extreme cases of selfdefense.
Now, on the basis of debatable information gathered by its intelligence
apparatus, the American hegemon has decided to go it alone. The
war in Iraq is not a war for oil – as a biased and vulgar Marxism stubbornly
asserts – but rather a far more dangerous war of demonstration. This war
sets out to prove in effect the hegemon’s willingness and ability to intervene.
But, as with all preventive wars, the war in Iraq is fraught with consequences
that, as every cost-benefit-analysis illustrates, question its greater
good. The power vacuum that will follow the destruction of Saddam’s
regime; the Kurdish thirst for independence; Turkey’s aggressive willingness
to intervene; the threat to Israel; the mobilization of fanatic Arab
masses; the diffusion of a fundamental hatred against the West; the support
of terrorism. So begins a long list of pernicious consequences.
A B
The fact that American nationalism (customarily known by its
euphemism “patriotism”) is once again taking pains to justify itself indicates
a more long-standing problem. The missionary sense of purpose
characteristic of most forms of nationalism has, with America, too, exerted
a profound influence since the formation of the Union. The first settlers
on the coast of “New” England, fleeing persecution at home,
brought with them the puritanical belief that they were a “chosen people.”
This belief transformed the emerging community, first through religious
dogma and later in secular form, into the “New Zion,” the new
“American Israel,” the “new Jerusalem,” and the “shining city on the hill.”
For this people, a homestead was to be created, one that distanced itself
from Old World vices and oppression. Along with these hopes came the
expectation that this unique community would serve the entire world as a
In Germany, the consciencemotivated
protest against the war is
respectable. But a realistic and
responsible political position it is not.
model. Thus, the seventeenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards
spoke of the colonies as “Renovator of the World.” From the very outset of
the American Revolution, this missionary purpose flowed into the budding
national self-awareness. Whence the motto still emblazoned on the
great seal of the United States: Novus Ordo Seclorum (a new order of the
ages). The new country was to point the way for the world as a “beacon
for oppressed mankind.” Authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt
Whitman sounded the note of salvation. In 1866, Senator Nathaniel P.
Banks expressed his conviction that the US must “enlighten and civilize
the rest of the world.” Thus was the religious doctrine of superiority
based on the puritan “covenant” subsequently reshaped into a worldly
union of exemplary republicans. What emerged was a hinge joining
Calvinist predestination with secular Messianism.
Apparently, the favorable effects of such righteousness on the
model republic were nothing short of inevitable. Continental expansion
could thus be seen as midwife to an almost natural tendency. Before the
Civil War, Parke Goodwin continued to speak of the “natural law” of
American expansion, which, according to Theodor Parker, Americans
were destined to export “unintentionally as the instrument of God.” The
theory, extant since antiquity, that the center of power migrated from
East to West was seen from the eighteenth century on to apply to
America. It was an article of faith for the “founding fathers” and general
public alike that America represented the culmination of this providential
power. Jedidiah Morse treated this ideal as a fact in his famous
American Geography of 1792, in which he predicted that the “American
empire” would be both the “last phase” and “the largest empire that was
ever created.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Brooks Adams
(Henry’s brighter brother) associated this teleological doctrine with the
increasingly discernable industrial supremacy of the US.
The central motif of Manifest Destiny (1835–45) intertwined the
notion of divine destiny with the nation’s own envisioned objectives, suggesting
that the US was predestined to dominate the continent and the
world. Even at the turn of the century, the famous journalist William
Allen White was still referring to “Our Manifest Destiny of the conquest of
the world,” for “the chosen people of America . . .” And Albert Beveridge,
a fixture in the Senate, considered “God’s great plan” to be revealed
simultaneously “in the Trinity of America’s wealth, America’s supremacy,
[and] America’s empire.” Material profit was to be expected, but the
much more important goal remained the world’s “deliverance” by means
of its Americanization.
The leitmotif of American nationalism was thus deeply anchored
by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the two World Wars and
during the crises that followed, the intention was always the creation of a
“new world order” under altruistic American leadership. One can
observe variations of the same model in the envisioned objectives of presidents
Wilson, F.D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and both George H.W. Bush and
George W. Bush. In its current form, the familiar religious message is particularly
strong: that America has a historic world mission to fulfill and is
predestined to be the global superpower. Thus, one dilemma of the new
preventive war lies in the fact that the plausible calculation of interests –
the elimination of an inhumane dictatorship with weapons of mass
destruction – is cloaked in the traditional rhetoric of mission. It is no surprise
that this religious claim to superiority has unleashed protest the
world over.
American interest politics would be far more convincing if it were
disassociated from the political religion of nationalism. Traditions that
ascribe a mission to a “chosen people” tend to have a fatal legacy. History
suggests that such radical criticism of nationalism is only possible in the
wake of shocking events of the type Europe experienced in the two World
Wars. Until now, however, America has won all its major wars, and has
filed these successes under the category of “just wars.” Let us hope that
with the help of its well-developed talent for self criticism, America will
nevertheless be able to distance itself from its own nationalism. Only
then will its superpower status be more tolerable to the rest of the world.
A B
Regardless of how its missionary nationalism unfolds, America will
remain the world’s leading power for the foreseeable future. In light of
this fundamental configuration, German politics since the summer of
2002 has embodied a host of conspicuously flawed long-term decisions.
This fall, with the prospect of war in Iraq growing more and more likely,
The Berlin Journal 17

Chancellor Schröder pursued reelection under the “primacy of domestic
politics.” Exploiting the popular desire for peace and linking this precarious
game with the propagation of a new “deutscher Weg,” he chose to
ignore the disastrous precedent set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
by the German Sonderweg, an idea that was fully discredited by history.
In fact, the situation does not call at all for a German way but rather
a European one. Europe should have immediately sought a common position
in order to raise timely critical objections to its friend, the American
superpower (though it would likely have had to do so without Blair’s
England). Failing to consider the consequences that a self-righteous
deutscher Weg might produce, a dangerous tension was risked – especially
considering the fact that Washington had not requested direct German
military support. German foreign affairs began to deteriorate. The
momentum of the anti-war campaign became a sole source of approval
for a government whose economic, social, health, and education politics
had totally failed up to that point. The rise of anti-Americanism distinctly
registered in the opinion polls came to be accepted in exchange for public
approval. In eastern Germany, this anti-Americanism appeared as an
American policy would be far
more convincing if it were
disassociated from the political
religion of nationalism.
almost seamless continuation of the distorted political mentality of the
late gdr. Once this erroneous course was set, new mistakes almost
inevitably followed: the spectacle over the awacs crews (as if the Federal
Republic could step out of rank on its own without a nato Security
Council resolution); the farce of American fly-over rights; and yet, ultimately,
coy participation – in the form of contribution of computer
experts, reconnaissance tanks, and warships.
The fact that this course has found wide acceptance in a country
whose post-1945 “reeducation” seems to have been successfully completed
by no means indicates that it is a wise course in the long run. In
December 1979, too, there was widespread protest against nato’s brilliant
Double Resolution, which put considerable pressure on the Soviet
Union through the threat of short-range nuclear missiles in Europe and
the simultaneous offer to negotiate. Luckily at the time, the Federal
Government remained steadfast in the face of public opposition, and the
treaty’s ultimate success – the fact that the ussr sealed its fate with its
own arms build-up – should actually serve as a lesson. Today’s overwhelmingly
conscience-motivated protest against the war is also
respectable. But a realistic and responsible political position it is not.
America is and will remain a prominent member of the Western world. It
lives from European traditions. We marvel its political system, its language,
its literature, and its ability for self-criticism and regeneration. On
the other hand, which European can find something remotely attractive
in a future Chinese, Indian, or Russian superpower – let alone be content
with such splendid allies as Russia and China?
A middle-sized European country like the Federal Republic can in
no way afford the Wilhelmine posturing of a deutscher Weg. In a disagreement
with a long-standing ally – who happens to be a superpower – there
is only one path to take: to raise European objections emphatically,
confidentially, and at a certain distance from the marketplace of public
opinion. And if such objections are not heeded, and a misguided America
nonetheless asserts its unilateralism, Berlin must accept the burden,
along with all its unforeseeable consequences, with composure, selfconfidence,
and the dignity of a legitimate position, without malice or
heightened emotion. For, opinion polls notwithstanding, any reasonable
calculation of interests demands the cultivation of a close relationship
with the sole world power. o
Translated by Daniel Huyssen
Hans-Ulrich Wehler is professor of history at the University of
Bielefeld. The fourth book in his multi-volume history of German society,
Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (1914–1949), is forthcoming. A fifth volume
is in preparation.

NOTEBOOK ofthe ACADEMY
Encouraging
Support
The Hans Arnhold Family Leads
with a Challenge Grant
The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen
Foundation and the descendants of Hans
and Ludmilla Arnhold launched the year
with the announcement of a timely challenge
grant. The grant is designed to
attract corporate support from both sides
of the Atlantic to the American Academy
in Berlin. The family generously pledged
to contribute one million dollars over four
years, provided that ten corporations
pledge substantial support as well. “It is
our hope that once corporations become
acquainted with the valuable work of the
Academy, they will continue their sponsorship,”
said Academy trustee Stephen
M. Kellen when the challenge was issued.
In a letter to Stephen and Anna-Maria
Kellen, Academy president Robert H.
Mundheim voiced his optimism about
meeting the Arnhold family’s fundraising
expectations. “I am confident we will meet
the challenge and use it as a platform to
broaden and deepen our pool of support.”
The rallying cry was heard, and by late
March, a number of companies had
indeed responded. Donations have taken
both the form of membership in the
President’s Circle for two or more years,
as well as larger grants. Citigroup,
DaimlerChrysler, Dürr AG, KPMG, Marsh
& McLennan Holdings GmbH, Porsche
AG, and Schering AG have made pledges.
The law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges
has also renewed its membership in the
President’s Circle for an additional
two years.
Since the Academy’s inception in 1997,
the Arnhold family has been the institution’s
principal benefactors, earmarking
funds for improvements to the Hans
Arnhold Center on Lake Wannsee and supporting
a rich array of programs.
Corporate funds raised through the challenge
grant may be applied to a number of
areas, from the funding of fellowships, lectureships,
and program highlights, to capital
improvements and general support for
the Academy.o
Strengthening the Foundation
Joseph Neubauer Joins Academy Board of Trustees
Joseph Neubauer joined the American
Academy’s board of trustees on
November 1, 2002. He is chairman and
chief executive officer of ARAMARK
Corporation, a world leader in managed
services – providing food, facility and
support services, and uniform and
career apparel.
Born in 1941 in Israel to refugees
who had fled Germany in 1938,
Neubauer came to the United States on
his own when he was just fourteen. He
began his career in the corporate world at
Chase Manhattan Bank in 1965, after
receiving a degree in chemical engineering
from Tufts and an mba from the
University of Chicago. He went on to hold
executive positions at Chase and PepsiCo
before joining ARA Services – later
known as ARAMARK Corp. – in 1979. In
1983, he became chairman and ceo of the
corporation and oversaw its privatization
that following year, successfully fending
off two takeover bids. Last year, he helped
the company go public again. Of
ARAMARK’s more than 200,000
employees in 17 countries, some eight
thousand of them have a financial stake
in the company. As he told Business Week
last September, “We have an obligation
to our people. We’ve always wanted to
control our own destiny.”
Neubauer’s philanthropic commitments
are impressive. A champion of
higher education, Neubauer was elected
to the Horatio Alger Association of
Distinguished Americans in 1994. He
serves as board member to Tufts
University, the Jewish Theological
Seminary, and the University of Chicago.
The Neubauer Family Foundation, which
he runs with his wife Jeanette Lerman-
Neubauer, has given abundantly to educational
institutions. When the foundation
funded a graduate fellowship
program in the Humanities division at
the University of Chicago, it was the
largest sum ever given to that division of
the university. “These scholarships
embody things that matter so much to
me,” Neubauer said at the time.
The scholarly and cultural project of
the American Academy in Berlin matters
to him, too. Neubauer’s extraordinary
management abilities, commitment to
scholarly pursuits, and keen sense of
social responsibility make him an ideal
member of the Academy’s board. “I am
delighted that Joe has agreed to serve on
our board,” said longtime trustee Karl
von der Heyden. “We both have roots
and family in Germany, and we both
were youngsters when we came to
America, where we have known each
other for thirty years. Besides, Joe’s company,
ARAMARK, has extensive operations
in Germany. All of this means that
the cultivation of good relations between
our two countries comes naturally
to him.”o
The Berlin Journal 19

Corporate Fellowship
The Gillette Company and Citigroup Establish Named Stipends
Guest Appearances
Notes from the Spring Program
Citigroup and The Gillette Company, two
major transatlantic corporations known
for their philanthropic spirit, are funding
new fellowships at the American
Academy in Berlin in the 2003–04 academic
year. Each fellowship will enable one
Berlin Prize recipient to spend a semester
of work and study at the Hans Arnhold
Center. As the Academy’s executive
director Gary Smith points out, “neither
grant is restricted to a particular field.
Thus the only criteria for selection is
excellence.”
Svetlana Boym, Curt Hugo Reisinger
Professor of Slavic Languages and professor
of comparative literature at Harvard
has been named the Gillette Fellow for
the fall semester. She will work on a
cultural history of the concept of freedom
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Russia.
The Citigroup Fellow, noted art historian
T.J. Clark, holds the George C. &
Helen N. Pardee Chair at the University of
California, Berkeley, and will take up his
fellowship in the fall semester. Clark, a
leading expert on European modern art
and culture, will work on Picasso,
Mondrian, and modernism in Paris
between 1925 and 1933. o
The American Academy welcomed two
Distinguished Visitors and a host of
other special guests to the Hans Arnhold
Center during the spring semester. Harry
Frankfurt, emeritus professor of philosophy
at Princeton came to Berlin this
April for a two month’s stay at the Academy.
In the middle of the month, he presented
his lecture “Some Mysteries of Love,”
a talk based on one of three prestigious
Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Lectures he
gave at Princeton in 2000. All three lectures,
including “How Should We Live?”
and “The Dear Self,” will be published
next winter in The Reasons of Love.
Frankfurt has long been interested in how
people see themselves morally and intellectually,
how love and non-moral goals
are relevant to issues of practical reason,
and how ideals and values shape our
lives. His books include The Importance of
What We Care About (1988) and Necessity,
Volition and Love (1999).
Harvey Pitt, who served until recently
as chairman of the US Securities and
Exchange Commission, arrived in Berlin
in late April and presented a lecture,
“Restoring Investor Confidence: The Role
of Regulators and Regulations.”
Additional events during the Distinguished
Visitor’s stay in Germany included
interviews with national newspapers
such as Die Zeit and a meeting with the
editors at Springer Verlag. Pitt also met
with small groups in Frankfurt and
Munich, where he gave an opening
speech at the Munich Economic Summit.
Appointed 26th chairman of the SEC by
President Bush in August 2001, Pitt
presided over a tumultuous time at the
Commission. During a period marked by
corporate scandal, the bursting of the
1990s stock-market bubble, and widespread
clamor to repair a damaged system
of corporate surveillance, Pitt
became a crucial figure in the debates
over reforming the accounting industry.
He led the SEC through late February
2003, when he was succeeded by William
H. Donaldson. Prior to chairing the SEC,
Pitt worked as a prominent corporate
lawyer and lobbyist in Washington in the
1980s and 1990s. He has also taught at
various law schools, among them the
Georgetown University Law Center, the
George Washington University Law
School, and the University of
Pennsylvania School of Law and is currently
ceo of the global consulting firm,
Kalorama Partners, llc.
Academy trustees provided a number
of highlights to the spring program.
Academy president Robert H. Mundheim
spoke in early March with founding
trustee Kurt Viermetz about “best practices”
of corporate governance in the US
and Germany. One would be hard
pressed to find two more experienced
partners for such a dialogue. Viermetz
was vice president at J. P. Morgan from
1990 until his retirement in 1998 and
served as chairman of the Hypo
Vereinsbank supervisory board.
Mundheim, an attorney and former dean
of the University of Pennsylvania School
of Law, is presently Of Counsel at
Shearman & Sterling. He both chaired
the American Bar Association’s recent
task force on corporate governance and
also served on the nasd’s task force on
this subject. The discussion was one of a
new series of JPMorgan Economic
Policy Briefs.
Later that month, Academy trustee
Robert Pozen inaugurated a new annual
lecture series at the Hans Arnhold
Center: the Fidelity Investments Lecture.
He spoke on “Global Trends in Retirement
Systems.” The event was part of the
ongoing Berlin Economic Policy Forum,
an Academy program designed to foster
discussion of key policy issues affecting
both Germany and the US. Pozen,
who recently retired from his position
as vice chairman of Fidelity Investments
and president of Fidelity Management
& Research Company, currently serves
as Secretary of Economic Affairs for
Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney
and is a visiting professor at Harvard
Law School. The lecture and subsequent
discussion was moderated by Klaus C.
Engelen, diplomatic correspondent
for Handelsblatt.
The next day in Dresden, esteemed
Academy trustee John C. Kornblum delivered
the semester’s Lisa and Heinrich
Arnhold Lecture at the Villa Salzburg, in
cooperation with the Dresden Heritage
foundation. The former US Ambassador
to Germany and current chairman of
Lazard Frères & Co. in Germany
addressed the topic of change in the postcold-war
world. Ambassador Kornblum
has been an audible and diplomatic voice
in the current public debate in Germany
on transatlantic and world politics.
Our journal went to press in early
May, just before the launch of another
high-profile lecture series: the Fritz Stern
Lecture. The series, named in honor of
the founding trustee and distinguished
scholar of German history, is to be inaugurated
by legal scholar Dieter Grimm, a
Karen Yasinsky, Animal Behavior, dvd projection stills, 2003
20 Number Six | Spring 2003

former Justice on the German Constitutional
Court. Grimm currently heads the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin,
Germany’s most important institute for
advanced study. Grimm addressed the
topic of German and American constitutionalism.
The Stern lectureship, generously
endowed by Henry Arnhold, the
firm of Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, Inc.,
as well as Fritz Stern’s principal German
publisher, Beck Verlag, was announced
last year.
Literary guests at the Hans Arnhold
villa this spring include Berlin-based
author Jeffrey Eugenides, who held a
Berlin Prize at the Academy during the
2000–01 year. He will read from his prizewinning
novel Middlesex in mid May. The
Academy also hosted a dinner in honor of
his former Princeton student, Jonathan
Safron Foer, whose successful new novel
Everything is Illuminated saw German publication
in March.
A number of public as well as private
meetings were organized by the Academy
in order to address, if not assuage, current
political tensions. Legal scholar Ruth
Wedgwood visited the Academy in early
January. As part of the ongoing
“Streitraum” series at the Schaubühne
Berlin, Wedgwood sparred with writer
and novelist Tariq Ali over the Iraq crisis.
The segment was co-organized with the
Academy and the Goethe Forum. A
breakfast meeting in late February with
cdu head Angela Merkel resulted in a
portrait in the Financial Times by current
JPMorgan Fellow and FT columnist
Amity Shlaes. One month later, at the
request of German Environmental
Minister Jürgen Trittin, the Academy
organized a discussion at the Hans
Arnhold Center with American intellectuals
including Haniel Fellow David Rieff,
New York Times Berlin bureau chief
Richard Bernstein, economist Adam S.
Posen, visiting economist Howard Rosen,
and National Interest editor Adam
Garfinkle. Posen, who was a Bosch Fellow
at the Academy during the 2000–01
academic year and is currently senior
fellow at the Institute for International
Economics, also gave a lecture on the
topic of monetary policy – another
installment in the Berlin Economic Policy
Forum. In April, the Academy hosted a
meeting between German Interior
Minister Otto Schily and a similar group
of fellows. John Reilly, former president
of the Chicago Council on Foreign
Relations, stayed at the Academy for several
weeks in April and early May, with
the support of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
He led a seminar exploring the topic of
American hegemony.
Finally, in mid-May, Doug Daft, chairman
and chief executive of the Coca Cola
Company, will visit the Hans Arnhold
Center to address a lunchtime audience
of business, policy, and media leaders
invited by Ambassador Holbrooke.
Daft’s topic – “Recalibrating
Relationships in the Twenty-first
Century” – is one in which he has no
small expertise. Perhaps no one is in a
better position to understand the role of
multinational companies in the world
today. Daft joined Coke in 1969 in his
native Sydney, Australia, acquired extensive
experience in Asia, and became
president of the company’s Middle and
Far East Group in 1995. In 1999 the
Africa Group and Schweppes Beverage
division also came within his purview.
Chairman and ceo since February 2000,
he also currently chairs the Hong Kong-
US Business Council (US section) and
serves on the boards of countless business
groups and philanthropic organizations.
o
Another Encomium for Eugenides
Middlesex Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Hearty congratulations to Academy alumnus Jeffrey Eugenides,
whose novel Middlesex just won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Middlesex is the tragicomic life story of a hapless hermaphrodite
in suburban Detroit – and the epic history of the warped gene that
caused the mischief in the first place. It comes out in German next
fall from Rowohlt Verlag.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2002,
Eugenides’ book was instantly hailed as a stroke of genius. Author
Jonathan Franzen called it “a weird, wonderful novel that will
sweep you off your feet,” and the New York Times described it as
“an uproarious epic about misplaced identities and family
secrets.” Middlesex was named a National Book Critics Circle
Finalist. The Pulitzer, one of America’s most prestigious literary
awards, consolidates this success. Eugenides’ first novel,
The Virgin Suicides, was a bestseller in the early 1990s.
He recently spoke to Deutsche Welle about the unusual choice of
subjects: “What I do is take something that might sound freaky at
first and make it very normal. . . . The idea of hermaphrodites is
really symbolic of the change we all go through at puberty and the
sexual confusion that we all have at adolescence. But all I can say
is that the books I’ve written sound extreme, but they’re actually
about experiences that, I think, everyone goes through.”
Eugenides worked on Middlesex in Berlin during his fellowship
year at the Academy (2000–01) following a year supported by the
DAAD. He has stayed on in Berlin ever since, with his wife, artist
Karen Yama and their daughter, and has been a frequent guest at
the Academy. In mid May, Eugenides will return to the
Hans Arnhold Center’s podium to read from his Pulitzer-prize
winning novel. o
The Berlin Journal 21

Alumni Accomplishments
Keeping up with Our Scholars
Alumni writers and critics have been
busy. Two pieces that Jane Kramer (fall
’01, fall ’02) worked on from Berlin last
fall have been published in the New Yorker:
“Resentments,” a ‘Talk of the Town’ piece
reporting on the outcome of the German
elections, and, this January, “Refugee:
an Afghan Woman who Fled Tyranny on
Her Own.” Back in New York from his
recent stay in Berlin, Alex Ross (fall
’02) has resumed writing music criticism
for the New Yorker. A major feature
discussing Adorno and the musical
“ghosts” that have haunted Germany since
the Nazi period appeared in late March.
Other pieces this year have discussed
the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, the life work
of composer Lou Harrison, the recent
premiere of Nicholas Maw’s opera
Sophie’s Choice in London, and productions
in Berlin and New York of Janacek’s
opera Jenufa.
Susan Sontag (Distinguished Visitor,
fall ’01) has just published a new book on
photography, Regarding the Pain of Others.
Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times
this March called it “a nuanced – even
ambivalent – book. A revisionistic coda of
sorts to On Photography.” (Excerpts were
included in the fall 2001 issue of the Berlin
Journal and published in the New Yorker.)
Sontag’s “Argument about Beauty” came
out in the fall 2002 issue of Daedalus.
Other articles have included “How Grief
Turned into Humbug” in the New Statesman
and an interview with German actress
Hanna Schygulla in the Village Voice.
Rowohlt Verlag will publish a German
edition of the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex
by Jeff Eugenides (2000–01) next fall.
In February, Aris Fioretos (spring ’02)
read at the Literarisches Colloquium
Berlin from the German translation of his
recent novel The Truth about Sascha Knisch
(originally published in Swedish). The reading
was subsequently broadcast by
Deutschlandfunk. “Stalin Dreaming,” a
short story by Ann Harleman (fall ’00),
won the 2002 Zoetrope All-Story Award, a
national contest with a prize and publication.
She continues to publish book
reviews in the New York Times and the
Boston Globe.
The Weather in Berlin, the novel by
Ward Just (spring ’99) that saw publication
last July, continued to inspire
reviewers last fall. While others praised
the book for its great plot and sensitive
depiction of Americans in Europe, the
Virginia Quarterly Review announced that
“the endless play of vision and re-vision
signaled by imagery of lenses and multiple
mirrors implicates and problematizes
… the Novel itself.”
Simone di Piero (fall ’02) will be
poet-in-residence at the Center for the
Writing Arts at Northwestern University
next fall. Ellen Hinsey (spring ’01) was
given special mention by the United Poets
Coalition for her collection The White Fire
of Time. The arts campaign has gained
international recognition for its “Poets
for Peace Reading Series” launched in the
aftermath of September 11. The Operated
Jew, a play by the Pulitzer-prize winning
poet C.K. Williams (fall ’98), received a
staged reading last year at a Traveling
Jewish Theater (ajat) in San Francisco
and was chosen for a main stage production
there in 2003. The tragic comedy set
in pre-Nazi Germany is Williams’s first
play, written during his fellowship term
at the Academy.
Recent scholarly alumni publications
include Nabokov at Cornell, edited by
Gavriel Shapiro (fall ’99), professor of
Russian literature in the same department
where the celebrated writer taught
between 1948 and 1958. Sander
Gilman (2000–01) has, in addition to
penning an op-ed for the New York Times
this December (“Plastic Surgery Goes
Prime Time”), continued to write on
books. Last fall, these included reviews of
Hal Heilman’s Great Feuds in Medicine:
Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever in the
American Journal of Psychiatry and
Gabriella Safran’s Rewriting the Jew:
Assimilation Narratives in the Russian
Empire in the Slavic Review.
Kafka scholar Mark Harman
(spring ’01) contributed another essay
to the literary journal Sinn und Form,
“Dr. Kaesbohrer and the Doll letters.”
Historian James Sheehan’s book on
German museums appeared last year
in a German translation,Geschichte der
deutschen Kunstmuseen. Von der fürstlichen
zur modernen Sammlung, and met
with favorable reviews in the Süddeutsche
Zeitung and other German papers. The
spring ’01 fellow continues his work on a
history of sovereignty in twentieth-century
Europe. Jeremy King (fall ’99) is
now a tenured associate professor in the
history department of Mount Holyoke
College. The book he worked on while at
the American Academy – Budweisers into
Czechs and Germans: a Local History of
Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 – has just
come out. Anthropologist Ruth
Mandel (fall ’00) co-edited Markets and
Moralities. Ethnographies of Postsocialism
with Caroline Humphrey.
Also newly released is the aptly titled
Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and
the Widening Divide between America and
Europe by James Whitman (spring ’00).
Other essays published this year by the
Yale legal scholar include “The European
Transformation of Harassment Law:
Discrimination versus Dignity” in the
Columbia Journal of European Law; “Long
Live the Hatred of Roman Law!” in
Rechtsgeschichte (2003); and “From Nazi
‘Honor’ to European ‘Dignity’” in Joerges
and Ghaleigh, eds., The Darker Legacy of
European Law. This May in Goettingen,
under the auspices of the Council of
Europe, Whitman will lecture both on the
topic of the absence of the European concept
of “human dignity” in American law.
The Harvard economist and London
School of Economics professor Richard
Freeman (fall ’01) is preparing several
books for publication: Visible Hands:
Labor Institutions in the Economy; The
Labor Market Comes to China; and Seeking
a Premiere League Economy (on the British
economy). He continues to pen less specialized
articles as well. His book with
Kimbery Ann Elliot on sweatshops and
western consumers is coming out this
summer from the Institute for
International Economics.
Brian Ladd (spring ’99) has recently
taught history and urban planning at
Union College and at the State University
of New York at Albany. An essay based
on Ladd’s Berlin researches, “East Berlin
Political Monuments in the Late German
Democratic Republic: Finding a place
for Marx and Engels,” saw publication
in Jan 2002 in the British Journal of
Contemporary History. Evonne Levy
(2001–02) continues work on her book
about Burckhardt’s analysis of the Jesuit
style and has simultaneously entered
other scholarly territory. Her article on
the seventeenth-century “micro-sculptor”
Ottaviano Janella was a cover story
in The Burlington Magazine last July. At
the annual conference of the Society of
Architectural Historians this April she
presented a talk on the reuse by the new
German government of Berlin’s Nazi
buildings. Art historian and comparatist
W.J.T. Mitchell (spring ’02) recently
published “The Surplus Value of
Images,” in Mosaic: a Journal for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.
The paintings and films of artist
Sarah Morris (1999–2000) have been
on view all over Europe this spring,
including the “Eight Baltic Triennial of
International Art” in Vilnius, Lithuania
and the “Painting Pictures: Painting and
Media in the Digital Age” show at the
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Vilnius is
screening her film Capital (2000), which
she worked on during her year at the
Academy. The American’s work has even
been included in the second Tate triennial
of contemporary British art this
spring. Of the film Miami on view at the
Tate Britain’s North Duveen Sculpture
Gallery, the New Statesman reported,
“What raises [the work] from documentary
to something approaching eulogy is
the silence of the film and the pulse of the
techno soundtrack, which comes to seem
an articulation of the hidden force that
everything obeys. More than a portrait,
Miami is life itself.”
The Hans & Grete video installation by
Sue de Beer (2001– 02) was on view in
New York at the Postmasters Gallery this
February. The piece, which de Beer
created in Berlin, travels to the LA gallery
Sandroni Rey in May and will come to the
Kunst-Werke Berlin in the early fall. The
video will also be screened, alongside
other work of de Beer’s, at MoMA during
the 2003–04 season and will be included
in the “Adolescence and Contemporary
Art” show at the Reina Sofia Museum in
Madrid. Stephanie Snider (2000–01)
returned to Berlin in April for a vernissage
22 Number Six | Spring 2003

of her paintings and drawings at the
Einstein Forum. Jenny Holzer (spring
’00) was awarded the prestigious Kaiserring
(Emperor’s Ring) by the German city
of Goslar. Cartoonist Ben Katchor
(spring ’02) participated this March in a
panel “Is Superman Jewish? Comics,
Cartoons & Jewish Identity,” with Jules
Feiffer (Distinguished Visitor, fall ’00),
Nicole Hollander, and Geoffrey O’Brien
at New York’s 92nd Street Y. Later in
the month Katchor presented his “Great
Museum Cafeterias of the Western World”
talk at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Graduate School of Fine Arts. He is
still developing a music-theater show,
The Slug-Bearers of Kayrol Island, with
music by Mark Mulcahy, to open in
New York toward the end of the year.
As always, alumni composers have
been busy, both at home and abroad. In
late January, four of them were simultaneously
in residence at the Hans Arnhold
Center and attended Berlin performances
of their works: alumni Martin
Bresnick (spring ’01), Michael
Hersch (2001–02), and Laura Elise
Schwendinger (spring ’00) joined
current composer-in-residence Kurt
Rohde. Chamber works by Bresnick and
Hersch were performed by members of
the Berlin Philharmonic on January 21 in
the Philharmonic’s Kammermusiksaal.
The next night in the same hall,
Schwendinger’s composition Celestial
City was premiered by Spectrum
Concerts Berlin as part of the ensemble’s
fifteenth anniversary concert. At the
end of the month, Bresnick’s quintet Just
Time was featured in a chamber concert
of American and European music performed
by members of the Deutsches
Symphonie-Orchester (dso) and broadcast
from the Hans Arnhold Center on
DeutschlandRadio.
John Mauceri (spring ’00), conductor
of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra,
spent an exhilarating late-winter week in
Leipzig to conduct the Gewandhaus
Orchestra in a program entitled
“American Journeys.” The first half of the
concert was devoted to the Seven Deadly
Sins, which Weill and Brecht wrote from
Paris in 1933, after fleeing Germany. The
second half offered works by Hollywood
legends John Williams, Ennio Morricone,
John Barry and Elmer Bernstein, among
others. Mauceri’s recording of Weill’s Der
Protagonist, which he worked on while
resident at the Academy, just won the
Cannes Classical Music Award.
“Lovaby,” an excerpt of Betsy Jolas’s
opera Schliemann, was recently performed
in Nice. In November, Jolas (fall
’00) taught a masterclass at Yale, and she
will be a visiting professor of composition
next fall at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. From his home in
New York State, composer George
Tsontakis (spring ’02) continues to
work on two pieces that he brought with
him to Berlin last year, his Violin Concerto
No. 2 (for concertmaster Steven Copes
with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra)
and a piano concerto for Stephen Hough
with the Dallas Symphony (as well as the
dso and the Athens State Orchestra).
While composer alumni enjoyed
a busy season at home and in Europe,
Harvard musicologist and Bach scholar
Christoph Wolff (spring ’01) was
awarded the Adams University Professorship,
one of the university’s most prestigious
chairs.
Several alumni have returned to this
side of the Atlantic for further work and
study. Economic historian Gerald
Feldman (1998–99) received a triple
helping of support from Berlin’s leading
academic institutions for the 2002–03
year. He was awarded the Alexander von
Humboldt Fellowship for the winter
semester at the Freie Universität Berlin, as
well as fellowships from the Friedrich-
Meinecke-Institut für Neuere Geschichte
and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
(wzb). Walter Laqueur
(Distinguished Visitor, spring ’02) is
spending a year as a fellow at the nearby
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. After his
semester at the Academy, legal scholar
Paul Schwartz (fall ’02) stayed on in
Europe, working at the German Marshall
Fund’s new transatlantic center in
Brussels on his comparative study of data
protection and security after September 11.
Journalist Nina Bernstein (fall ’02)
has filed several stories with the New York
Times from Berlin this spring. Her report
on the perception of America by Berlin
youth ran in mid March, at a time of
widespread German public criticism of
the Bush Administration’s handling of
the situation in Iraq. Bob Kotlowitz
(fall ’98), who is honing a documentary
project about Berlin produced by New
York’s Channel 13, was also in town
this winter.
Joining the Academy’s selection committee,
which met this January to select
the class of 2003–04 fellows from among
some 140 applications, were historian
Ronnie Hsia (fall ’00) and anthropologist
Vincent Crapanzano (fall ’01 and
fall ’02). (See our “Sneak Preview” of
next fall’s fellows on page 29.) Many
alumni made valuable contributions to
the fellow selection
process by providing evaluations
of applications.
There is much to
report on former Bosch
fellows as well. Barbara
Balaj (fall ’01) published
an article on rebuilding
Afghanistan for the May
2002 edition of
Internationale Politik,
reprinted in English in
Transatlantic Internationale
Politik and in a special
Russian language
edition as well. Paul
Hockenos (spring ’00) is
now a senior analyst at
the European Stability
Initiative, a Berlin-based
think tank that concentrates
on South Eastern
Europe. His book
Homeland Calling: Exile
Patriotism and the Balkan Wars is forthcoming
this year. Chris Kojm (spring
’01) is currently serving as deputy director
of the staff of the commission investigating
September 11, 2001. In 2002,
Richard Morris (spring ’00) was
appointed senior advisor on technology
to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for
Public Health Emergency Preparedness
(oasphep) at US Department of Health and
Human Services, working on a national
strategy for public health preparedness.
Julianne Smith (spring ’00) recently
took up post at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies (csis) in
Washington. She is deputy director and
fellow of the International Security
Program there.
Architect Hilary Brown (spring ’01)
modestly demurred when in January 2002
Metropolis Magazine credited her with the
“greening” of New York City. Nonetheless,
the comprehensive green building guidelines
she drafted for the city’s public buildings
and projects in 1999 constituted a
“great green step forward.” Her recently
founded private firm New Civic Works
now consults with government agencies,
universities, and institutional clients to
integrate environmentally responsible
practices into their building programs.
Clients include municipalities as far from
New York City geographically and environmentally
as Salt Lake City. Brown has
also been much in demand as speaker
across the country.
Finally, a noteworthy Meldung came
this January from Mark Bassin (spring
’02) and his wife Ania Stawinska announcing
the birth of their very own “Berlin
Prize” – the first Academy baby, Dorian
Jacob Basin. Mark’s next “baby,” a book
about Germany and geopolitics, is in
the works.o
Three untitled works by Stephanie Snider (mixed
media on paper, 2003), on view at the Einstein
Forum in Berlin this spring.
The Berlin Journal 23

Trustee Profile: Karl M. von der Heyden
Giving Something Back
By Michael Meyer
The student Karl von der Heyden with
Henry Kissinger in fall 1961, after a lecture
Kissinger had given at Duke. Von der
Heyden recalls:
I asked him why the US government
had not done anything to prevent the
Berlin Wall from going up. He responded by
saying that the action by the East Germans
had caught the US government
by complete surprise, which I found hard
to believe. That August in Berlin, I had visited
a refugee camp in West Berlin with a
fellow student. Some 4,000 refugees a day
were fleeing East Germany at the time.
When we asked them about this sudden
increase in the number of refugees, they
looked at us, puzzled: ‘Don’t you know
they are about the seal the border?’
The issue remains murky to this day.
If Dr. Kissinger was right, it would indicate
a colossal failure of US intelligence. Some
people believe that the US knew about the
East German intentions and let the Wall go
up unimpeded so as not to jeopardize the
status quo. Nevertheless, within days of
August 13, 1961, US and Soviet tanks were
facing each other across Checkpoint
Charlie. It took another 28 years for the
Wall to fall.
24 Number Six | Spring 2003

Karl von der Heyden, the former
chairman of rjr Nabisco, is known for
building great companies. Another of his
passions, though, has always been books,
which helps explain why we’re sitting in
the library of the University Club in New
York, talking about how he got from a boyhood
in Germany to the top of corporate
America. The tale has a lot to do with a
life-long love of learning, and with Duke
University – to which he recently gave
$4 million to help refurbish its famous
Perkins Library. Why? “Gratitude,” he
says. “Duke was my awakening, I loved it
there. It started me on life. It’s important
to give something back.”
The airlift fascinated him.
“I knew every plane, how
much cargo they could
carry. It made me and my
generation deeply pro-
American.”
Flash back to 1957. Karl is just 20,
finishing a bank training program after
getting his high school degree in Berlin,
wondering what to do next. It had been
a tumultuous youth. His father had been
away with the Wehrmacht. His family
had left Berlin during the bombing to live
with relatives in the east, in what is now
Poland, only to flee west again just days
ahead of the advancing Soviet army. They
ended up in the Berlin suburb of Spandau,
their home all but destroyed. To this day,
he remembers the allied air lifts into the
city. “I knew every plane, every model,
how much cargo they could carry. It was
fascinating, and it made me and my generation
deeply pro-American.” One day
his older brother, a lawyer working on
Jewish restitution claims, wrote from
New York. ‘Why not come over, improve
your English, go to university?’ Why not,
indeed, he thought. He applied to Harvard,
Yale, Michigan and a handful of other colleges.
He was accepted into most. “Duke
was the only one to give me a scholarship.
So there I went.”
What a contrast. From gray, depressed
postwar Berlin to an Eden of the old south,
fragrant with rhododendron and magnolia.
Karl was swept away. The campus
was beautiful, the library magnificent.
Wandering among the stacks, he discovered
one of its many treasures – a trove
of German newspapers from the 1930s,
including the Völkischer Beobachter, the
Nazi party’s propaganda organ. It was all
there in the papers. “Appalling stuff,” he
recalls. The anti-Semitic language. Hatespeech.
Much of it crude, if not outright
vicious, but also at times insidiously
clever disinformation. But it was also eyeopening.
“German schools then did not
teach any of this. It was totally taboo. For
the first time,” he says, “I understood
Duke was still segregated.
“And here I was, this kid
from Berlin, being treated
so well. While his own kid
could not go to this
school.”
how it was done, how the Germans had
become so misguided.”
He was surprised, too, by what he soon
discovered about his adopted society in
America – outwardly so idyllic but with
its own ugly secrets. “I hadn’t known
before I arrived, I hadn’t even imagined.
But Duke, then, was still racially segregated.
So was the entire South.” To make
ends meet at Duke, he worked a variety of
odd jobs – waiting on tables in the cafeteria,
doing dishes, putting ice in bathroom
urinals. Often he would take his breaks
with the black cooks in the basement.
Among the friends he made in this manner
was an older black man who loved
to talk about the athletic feats of his son,
a professional baseball player for the
Cincinnati Reds. “I found it very strange.
Here was this guy, a veteran of World
War II. He fought in the Pacific. And here
I was, this kid from Berlin – a Nazi, for all
he knew – being treated so well. While his
own kid could not go to this school.”
There were many lessons there, Karl
knew, but one has served him ever since.
He has come to consider it an essence of
leadership. Back then, when students at
Duke were beginning to agitate for change
and the civil rights movement was gaining
force, the university’s president and
board of trustees resisted. “They were
slow to change,” he recalls. “They sought
to preserve the status quo.” Now he is on
Duke’s board, and he keeps that experience
in mind. “It taught me something –
that you have to lead, that you can’t follow.
If you are on a board, you have to
know what’s going on in the world. You
have to be at the forefront of change, not
resist it.” Almost parenthetically, he adds
that Duke today is one of the most culturally
diverse universities in the country.
“Close to 11 percent of our students are
African-Americans,” he says, with the
faintest touch of pride. “I think that’s one
of the highest percentages among major
research universities in America.”
To guide change, rather than react to
it. People who have worked with him over
the decades cite this as one of his distinguishing
traits. His arrival at rjr Nabisco,
for example, coincided with one of the
rockiest moments in the company’s history.
He was brought in by the ceo of the
time, Louis Gerstner, shortly after the
infamous 1989 takeover by Kohlberg
Kravis Roberts & Co. To finance the acquisition,
these leveraged buyout artists borrowed
heavily against rjr’s assets.
As chief financial officer, he instilled
strict fiscal discipline. By 1991, he had
stabilized rjr’s finances and restored its
debt to investment grade quality. No
mean feat, as anyone on Wall Street
can attest.
Karl was named co-chairman of rjr in
1991 after Gerstner resigned to head ibm.
Later that year, he left to become the president
and chief executive of Metallgesellschaft
Corp., the American arm of the
giant German commodity trading conglomerate,
which had to be restructured
after a major scandal resulting from speculation
in oil futures. In 1996, he joined
PepisCo as vice chairman of the board,
with a brief to undertake a strategic
restructuring of the enterprise. As at rjr,
he played a central role in refocusing
PepsiCo on its core business – beverages
and convenience foods – and spun off
operations that were fringe, among them
the company’s restaurant chains. He
reined in its flashy, spendthrift culture.
Profits and cash flow surged. PepsiCo’s
stock thrived. “Karl is one of the sharpest
minds in business,” says PepsiCo’s chairman,
Roger Enrico, praising his ability to
quietly work what can only be described
as a wholesale revolution in the way an
entire company managed itself.
He’s an interesting mix of contraries,
this man. In an era of swaggering ceos,
where business leaders often seem to take
pride in how many people they can fire,
or too often seek short-cuts to maximize
short-term profits and inflate their own
pay, Karl is a breed apart. Soft-spoken,
modest almost to the point of diffidence,
confident of his own judgment while considerate
of others, he is one of those rare
executives that you immediately and
instinctively trust. Duke University president
Nannerl Keohane describes him as
“one of the most thoughtful, sophisticated
and community-minded leaders in
American industry.” He has retired now
from PepsiCo but remains on the boards
of half a dozen companies and non-profit
organizations:aramark,Exult, Federated
Department Stores, AstraZeneca Group.
But he reserves a special affection for
Duke, where among other things he
chairs the library’s capital campaign
committee, naturally. And, of course,
for the American Academy in Berlin.
The Academy is lucky to have him. He
is an accomplished fund-raiser, and for
all his quiet manner he is a forceful voice.
The fact that he’s there at all owes much
to Richard Holbrooke, like so much else.
“When he was ambassador to Germany,
he invited me to a ceremony marking the
departure of American troops from
Berlin,” says Karl. Dinner had scarcely
been served when Holbrooke grabbed
him by the elbow. “‘Can I talk to you for a
minute,’ he asked? He grabbed a few
other people, too, and told them about
this idea to create what he called a ‘German
American Academy in Rome.’ ‘Sure,’ we
all said, not thinking it would amount to
anything. And so here we are.”
It has been a rewarding experience.
“Since I left for the US, I’ve had few connections
to Germany,” he says. “So for
me, the Academy has been a way of completing
the circle.” He is full of praise for
Holbrooke and the Academy’s direction
for “really putting this program on the
map, in a big way.” He is also impressed
by the caliber of the fellows the Academy
has been able to attract. In the long run,
he hopes to see more artists, writers, and
archeologists in the program. “Berlin,”
he says, “is above all a city of culture.”
According to Karl, serving on a
transatlantic board of trustees has
its own challenges. There is something
of a “culture clash,” he explains. Half
After all, the Academy
is a privately funded
institution. If you want
to get money, you have
to ask for it.
German, half American, the Academy’s
board functions very differently from
what he is used to dealing with in the US.
Some of his German colleagues are surprised,
even offended “when, for example,
someone says, ‘Well, one of the roles
of the board is to go out and raise money.’”
The idea of actually calling people to ask
them for money is still foreign to the culture
of German philanthropy. “As a chairman
of a finance company, I chuckle about
this. After all, the Academy is a privately
funded institution. If you want to get
money, you have to ask for it.”
In case you’re not reading closely,
that’s another quality that distinguishes
Karl – directness. As he sees it, joining a
board brings with it responsibility. Many
people consider such an appointment to
be an honor; to the contrary, he says, it
confers a duty. Prestige works “the other
way around.”
Tough words, however softly spoken.
And they go right to the heart of Karl von
der Heyden’s conception of “giving back,”
with which we started this conversation.
When he decides to help, it’s not just by
opening a checkbook; it’s by bringing
to bear all the qualities that made him
an outstanding ceo. For those interested
in building up the Academy, that’s
a godsend.o
Michael Meyer is European editor
of Newsweek. He was a Fellow at the
American Academy in Berlin in the
spring semester of 1999 and is completing
a book about the 1989 revolutions in
Eastern Europe.
The Berlin Journal 25

LIFE & LETTERS at the Hans Arnhold Center
Profiles in Scholarship
Introducing the Spring 2003 Fellows
By Miranda Robbins
Foreign policy expert Adam Garfinkle took
up a short-term Bosch Fellowship at the
Academy in mid March. Editor of the
conservative Washington-based monthly
the National Interest, he has published a
number of book-length studies of Israeli
politics, diplomacy, and society, as well
as Telltale Hearts: the Origin and Impact of
the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, which was
named a notable book of the year (1995)
by the New York Times Book Review.
Garfinkle contributes to a range of journals,
reviews, and newspapers and is a
frequent guest on television and radio
talk shows and news programs. While in
Berlin, he plans to write a piece for the
National Interest on the use and display of
political symbols in Germany since
unification. A self-styled “American conservative
realist,” who distinguishes his
conservative views on security, social,
and economic issues from those of the
American Protestant evangelical conservative
mainstream, Garfinkle is looking
forward to sharing his views with a
European audience.
Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow and Harvard
Professor James Hankins is at work on a
history of the soul in the Renaissance and
early modern periods, from the time of
Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) through that
of Leibniz (1646–1716). According to
Hankins, these two and a half centuries
saw a seismic shift in the understanding
of human nature. Where pre-modern
Renaissance thinkers considered body
and soul to be extrinsically united (with
the soul leading all other faculties), seventeenth-century
theorists like Leibniz
and Spinoza rigorously distinguished the
two. Hankins’ book will situate this shift
in human psychology within a context of
theological, social, and scientific change.
Developments in medicine, for example,
supported a mechanistic view of the
body’s functions, undermining the soul’s
hegemony. This, in turn, helped revise
the notion of hierarchy in general – with
no small repercussions for political philosophy.
As Hankins writes, “if one no
longer constructs the good of the soul as
a condition [in which] reason regulates
the passions and appetites, one will be
less disposed to understand politics in
elitist terms, as the control of a society by
its most rational members.”
The September 11 attacks highlighted
the critical ways in which security and
immigration concerns overlap; within
a remarkably short period, the entire US
Immigration and Naturalization Service
was brought under the aegis of a newly
created Department of Homeland
Security. Robert Leiken, director of immigration
and national security at the
Nixon Center in Washington, brought
his extensive expertise in immigration
and foreign and security policy to Berlin
for several weeks as a short-term Bosch
Fellow this spring. The Central America
expert, who has published widely on
Mexican immigration and Nicaraguan
politics, has temporarily shifted his focus
to include both hemispheres. He is currently
comparing European and US perspectives
and policies toward a variety
of matters regarding immigration and
security. Not least among these is the
question of how, in the post-September
11 world, integration of immigrants can
serve “homeland security” on both conti-
nents. Leiken publishes widely in the foreign
policy press as well as in a range of
more popular reviews, magazines, and
newspapers.
Architectural historian Wallis Miller is
writing a history of architectural exhibitions
in Berlin from the late eighteenth
century through the Weimar period.
Such displays, she says, “were not derivative
events but independent forms of
architectural practice, significant in their
own right.” They involved media that
ranged from models and plans, to
demonstrations of construction techniques,
and even full-scale architectural
projects, all of which allowed for “the
exploration of issues hard to address in
buildings, texts, and other media.”
Architecture shows were important public
occasions for showcasing not only new
research but also contemporary aesthetic
ideas. The associate professor at the
University of Kentucky College of
Architecture specializes in the architecturally
explosive Weimar years, whose
most noted practitioners were Mies van
der Rohe and the founders of the
Bauhaus. Reaching backward from her
Weimar work – and especially her dissertation
on the landmark German Building
Exhibition of 1931 – Miller’s book begins
with Schinkel’s generation and covers the
subsequent development of architecture
exhibits in Berlin and beyond.
Writer and journalist David Rieff, who
inaugurates the Haniel Fellowship in
History and Public Affairs, has spent the
last ten years covering wars and humanitarian
emergencies around the world. In
1992, he was in Berlin working on a book
on immigration in Western Europe when
he was “highjacked” by the Balkan wars
and instead wrote a book on the Bosnia
conflict. His most recent book, A Bed
for the Night, addresses the dilemmas of
international aid. To the question, Does
humanitarian aid harm or help? Rieff
answers that it can help, but only when
carefully separated from both human
rights work and political entanglements.
A sometime supporter of military intervention
on political grounds, most
recently in Afghanistan, he is vigorously
opposed to justifying war on humanitarian
grounds. His current project grapples
with terrorism, counter-terrorism, and
state power. It reviews the notions of
“just war” and “dirty war” and asks,
What, in the current circumstances, is
the potential role of international law?
“People are confused, particularly in
the US,” Rieff wrote in his project proposal.
“They need tools, and while international
law is a poor light, it may be all
we’ve got.”
26 Number Six | Spring 2003

As Kurt Rohde studied viola at the Curtis
Institute of Music in the 1980s, he was
also cultivating his substantial talent as a
composer. His musician’s experience has
given him a rare understanding of the
orchestra as musical instrument, a sensitivity
that impressed conductor Kent
Nagano early on. The maestro began supporting
his work in the mid 1990s, and
Rohde brings two new commissions with
him to Berlin this spring: a viola concerto
and an oratorio. Under Nagano, the concerto
will receive a transatlantic premiere
in the 2004-5 season, first in Berlin with
violist Igor Budinstein and the Deutsches
Symphonie-Orchester and later with
violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama and
the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. The
oratorio Bitter Harvest, written for the
BSO and tenor John Duykers with a
libretto by Amanda Moody, addresses
the growth of the militia movement in
rural America. For his first piece for vocal
soloists and a chamber choir, Rohde has
conceived of speaking and half-spoken
parts to compliment Duykers’ singing
voice – including “occasional vocal and
dramatic outbursts” on the part of the
instrumentalists.
Economist Howard Rosen, who took up a
short-term JPMorgan Prize in late
February, is preparing a comparative
study of US, German, and Japanese workers
displaced by the upheavals of the
global economy. While in Germany he
organized a conference at the Friedrich-
Ebert Stiftung examining US strategies to
counter unemployment and how
Germany might learn from the US experience.
An economic consultant, primarily
on projects for the US Agency for
International Development, Rosen was
minority staff director at the Joint
Economic Committee of the US Congress
between 1997 and 2001, serving as a consultant
to the US Senate Finance
Committee that same year. He has published
widely on domestic and trade and
labor issues; on economic relations
between the US and Israel; and on the
economic issues associated (in the 1990s)
with the Israeli-Arab peace process. A
close observer of the domestic effects of
America’s engagement in the global economy,
Rosen is concerned that the nation’s
social and economic infrastructure be
updated so that workers and communities
affected by displaced trade do not get
left in the lurch. No one group should
“bare an inequitable share of the burden.”
Columnist and financial journalist Amity
Shlaes’ twice-weekly comments on economic
policy in the Financial Times take
on everything from domestic tax matters
– a topic on which she has published a
book – to the state of the German economy.
On leave from the FT this year, she is
preparing her third book, a history of the
Great Depression in America. The book,
intended for a broad non-specialized
readership, will pick apart some of the
“myths” that Shlaes sees adhering to the
New Deal. Among other things, she
debunks the notion that it was government
aid that got most Americans
through the hard times and argues that
the historical credit due to FDR has more
to do with his “spiritual leadership” than
with sound fiscal policies. At the
Academy for the first two months of the
spring semester, the JPMorgan Prize
recipient used her time in Berlin to
explore the similarities and differences
within the American and German
Depression experiences.
With a background in theoretical linguistics,
Yale law professor Henry Smith knows
that the relation between words and the
things they refer to is arbitrary. Law, too,
is a system marked by arbitrariness. This
spring, Smith intertwines his two fields
within a comparative study of German
and American property law. He will also
look at the distinctions between property
law (which tends to be standardized but
is particularly explicit in Germany) and
contract law (which is far more flexible).
More broadly, Smith continues to
explore the problem of how legal relations
are communicated to different
audiences. It has long been understood
that context is crucial to the interpretation
of messages. But audience is, “in
both law and linguistics, the less-studied
side of communication.” Different
groups process information at different
“cost,” and any communication system
faces a “tradeoff ” between information
intensiveness and information extensiveness.
Thus, one reason why property law
is so standardized is that it must impart
information to a wider and more heterogeneous
audience than, say, contract law.
The tradeoff, he suggests, may help
explain several other aspects of American
and German law, including intellectual
property and contract interpretation.
For his current book, Hegel scholar and
philosophy professor Allen Speight is
examining the development of the concept
of conscience. Tracing a shift within
the idealist period from Fichte’s notion of
an inner “ethics of conviction” to the concept
expressed by the mature Hegel in his
Philosophy of Right (1818), Speight seeks
to examine the role of the intersubjective
context in which claims of conscience are
made. He will also sketch how the concept
of conscience has informed contemporary
philosophical concerns with
ethics and morality, in particular the
notions of responsibility and forgiveness.
With this project, the assistant professor
of philosophy at Boston University and
current Berlin Prize Fellow is following
up on an earlier book on Hegel, literature,
and the problem of agency. Two
soon-to-be-published essays are “The
Reappearance of the Beautiful Soul:
Hegel and Colin McGinn on Ethics and
Literature,” and “Hegel and Butler on
Conscience and Forgiveness.”
When Karen Yasinsky stopped painting in
1999 and turned to animation films, she
brought to her new medium a painter’s
interest in framing and texture, drawing
and collage. Most importantly, she
brought her fascination with the ambiguities
of human relationships. One could
call her short films animate paintings.
Her method, shooting 24 still frames per
second on16 mm film, is painstakingly
slow. So, too, are the finished films.
They star a small cast of carefully clothed
clay, wire and foam dolls. Their mute
faces and jerky, muffled gestures mirror
human emotions: tenderness, puzzlement,
anxiety, loneliness, aggression,
arousal. Yasinsky tellingly refers to her
figures as “models,” “props,” and “transitional
objects.” If even she occasionally
calls them characters, even actors, there
is no doubt that they are purposefully
limited beings. This lack of depth, along
with the real-time pace, produces an
intentionally discomfiting effect.
Yasinsky is familiar to the German art
world. A one-woman show opened this
March at the Philomene Magers Gallery
in Munich, and a show at Berlin’s
Künstlerhaus Bethanien will run from
June 19 through July 6. The Philip Morris
Fellow’s current film project, Hunted,
explores animal behavior and the
psychology of violence. The narrative
draws on Grimm’s fairy tales and her
setting is based on the dioramas at the
natural history museums in Berlin and
New York.uu
Portraits: Mike Minehan
The Berlin Journal 27

Fellow Profile: Hayden White
A Historian for the Present
“If philosophers are not always historians,”
wrote Edward Gibbon in his 1764
Essay on the Study of Literature, “it were at
least to be wished that all historians were
philosophers.” Hayden White,
DaimlerChrysler Fellow at the Academy
this spring, is a metahistorian – a thinker
concerned with the philosophy of historical
study. He is also a literary theorist, a
historian of society, and an outspoken
social critic. It is thus not surprising that
White has recently held chairs in two different
disciplines: comparative literature
at Stanford, where he is Bonsall Professor,
and history of consciousness at the
University of California at Santa Cruz,
where he is University Professor Emeritus.
That Hayden White is a man of
catholic interests is perhaps appropriate
for someone who started with a doctorate
in ecclesiastical history. Seventeen years
later, in 1973, he published Metahistory:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe, a book that remains a
fixture on graduate school reading lists
across the humanities. Metahistory made
a careful study of the nineteenth century’s
great historians, historiographers,
and philosophers of history. But it also
delivered a challenge to all historians
claiming to practice under the banner
of “impartiality.” White was not the
first to observe that history is a social
science rather than an exact one, but
his literary critical analysis of historiography
sparked a minor revolution in
the discipline.
Drawing on a battery of disciplines –
linguistics chief among them – White
pointed out that every apparently selfcontained
“history” contains a host of
choices on the part of its author. His
chapters on the great “realist” historians
(Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and
Burckhardt) proposed that each writer
“emplotted” his “narrative” in a particular
mode: Romance, Comedy, Tragedy
and Satire, respectively. In other words,
the great histories contained as much
rhetoric as realism – a rhetoric with
decidedly varied political, ideological,
and conceptual foundations. Some of
White’s critics took the statement to its
extreme, suggesting that this thesis
essentially equated history with fiction.
White’s point, however was more subtle –
and far more interesting: that writers
of history and writers of fiction share
many of the same tools, and that the
techniques used by literary critics to
analyze literature may also be applied
to historiography.
If anything, Metahistory’s influence on
historians, literary critics, art historians,
and social scientists has grown in the
three decades since it was published. His
other books picked up many of its
themes. These include Figural Realism:
Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999), The
Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (1986), and
Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism (1978).
This spring, White is preparing a
study of how history is presented not in
writing but in museums. Historical museums
draw on many of the usual tools of
the historian’s trade. But in museums,
representation is as much a matter of
space itself as of historiography. White’s
study will take up “questions of exemplarity,
sequencing, spatial placement,
contexualizing, presentation, and dramatization”
in historical museums. It will
also probe what he calls the “ethics of representation.”
The question of the museum’s
audience presents one complex
aspect of this.
Since coming to the Academy, White
has been a keen explorer of Berlin’s many
museums. It may be argued that no city
in Europe is trying harder to come to
terms with its history – or, indeed, the
representation of it. The new Jewish
Museum, the soon-to-be-opened Berlin
Historical Museum, the improvised
“Topography of Terror,” built among
the ruins of old SS-headquarters, are all
of especial interest to the metahistorian.
We are accustomed to questioning
books; less so buildings. How can contemporary
curators of historical exhibitions
embed questions – instead of just
answers – into display cases, wall-texts,
multi-media programs? Is there room
for theory and self-criticism among the
wealth of information presented as
“fact”? If the historical museum’s purpose,
traditionally didactic, has, in
recent years, become more complex,
we have, in part, Hayden White to
thank for it. o
28 Number Six | Spring 2003

Katchor drawing
On the WATERFRONT
One Frame at a Time
Karen Yasinsky at Kunst-Werke
Gaffer? Best boy? It is usually hard
to read all the names that roll by in a
film’s credits. Fear, however, is a
short film without credits. Karen
Yasinsky is responsible for all of it:
direction, cinematography, screenplay,
make-up, set design, and costumes.
And because the American
prefers to work alone, she creates
her actors, too, fashioning their
Up from
the South
William Styron on Racism
and Writing
“I’ve known William Styron for
thirty years. He and Arthur Miller
are neighbors in Connecticut,” said
film director Volker Schlöndorff
last Wednesday [December 18] as
he introduced him at the American
Academy. Styron, author of Sophie’s
Choice and the award-winning novel
The Confessions of Nat Turner, lives
in the small town of Roxbury. The
Distinguished Visitor to the Hans
Arnhold Center read passages from
his story “Shadrach,” published in
his collection A Tidewater Morning:
Three Tales from Youth.
“Shadrach” is the story of an old
slave who returns to his former
master’s plantation to die. As a preface,
Styron spoke of his “obsession”
with slavery and traced it to his own
childhood in the American South.
At the time of the civil war, “my own
grandmother (she was not a greatgrandmother
or a great-greatgrandmother)
… had two little slave
girls. They were her own property.”
The lives of blacks in America has
improved since the civil war, but
Styron is quick to say that “there are
still terrible iniquities.”
“The racism I grew up with was
appalling. That blacks were once
forced to sit at the back of the bus is
preposterous.” He recounted a
chance meeting with Vernon Jordan,
the African-American civil rights
activist, at a recent party. “How
have things been, Vernon?” Styron
asked his old friend. “White man
still ahead!” Jordan retorted wryly.
heads from baked clay, their bodies
from wire, and designing their sleek
and elegant costumes. (“Prada,” she
laughs, “not Chanel.”) These ideal
actors, standing just thirty centimeters
tall, are bursting with pop culture.
The lead in Fear brings to
mind Barbie’s Ken. The animation
technique is instantly recognizable
as the same used in Wallace and
In the discussion that followed
the reading, Styron ruminated on
man’s desire to dominate his fellow
humans. Styron reflected on the
dawn of a new century. When asked
what he expected, he immediately
replied, “More holocaust … I don’t
see any end to it. But I don’t want to
talk about that. It scares me.”
Styron also discussed the craft
of writing. In the mid 1980s he fell
into the “monstrous depression”
that inspired his memoir Darkness
Visible. Though he denies ever having
been an alcoholic, he acknowledges
that he did abuse alcohol
“in a vigorous way.” After working
hard, he frequently drank hard.
“But I never touched a drop before
writing.” Styron also mused on the
role of facts in historical novels; an
excess of facts is more likely to
destroy a historical representation
than contribute to it. It is far more
important for a book to be honest
to the Zeitgeist than to be meticulously
researched.
Styron called Albert Camus’
The Stranger “one of those landmark
books for me. I had never seen such
a bleak and desperate view of life
expressed with such precision and
beauty. I was awestruck by this bold
vision of the universe, a bleak,
brave apprehension of man’s
condition. … but I became very
attached to a great deal of his
work. Before that [in college], I was
reading volume after volume of
great European writers, … the great
master Flaubert especially … To
this day, the European spirit
flows very strongly in my veins.”
By Anja Popovic
From Die Welt
December 20, 2002
Gromit and MTV’s Celebrity Death
Match. But Yasinsky harnesses the
Zeitgeist, too. Her procedure is
called stop-motion animation, in
which each individual puppet limb
is bent into position, and each further
position is subsequently filmed,
frame by frame. The effect is a lyrical
lethargy, a desperate yearning
embodied in the abrupt and mechanical
movements of her figures. The
silent films of Buster Keaton or
Robert Bresson are another influence
on her work. It is a surreal puppet
show in crystal-clear 16-mm quality,
as light and lonely as real life.
Fear, on view at the Kunst-Werke
Berlin through March, depicts on
two separate screens a man and a
woman, first in a moon landscape,
then in an airplane with a 1950s
interior. They do not interact with
Karen Yasinsky, No Place Like Home, dvd projection stills, 1999.
Sneak Preview
Look Who’s Coming Next Fall?
An impressive group of Academy
Fellows will take up residence at
the Academy next fall. Wendy
Lesser, editor of the west-coast literary
journal the Threepenny Review
has been awarded the Holtzbrink
Fellowship in Journalism. Svetlana
Boym, Curt Hugo Reisinger
Professor of Slavic Languages and
Literatures and professor of comparative
literatures at Harvard
holds the inaugural Gillette
Fellowship. Timothy James Clark,
the George C. and Helen N. Pardee
Professor of Art History at the
University of California at Berkeley
will inaugurate the Citigroup
Fellowship. The JPMorgan
Fellowship will be held by Walter
Mattli, professor of political science
at Columbia. Dana Villa, visiting
associate professor of government
at Harvard and associate professor
of political science at the University
each other. She remains on the left;
he on the right. The few minutes of
melancholy, silent narration are
enhanced by the jointless lassitude
of the figures; they seem awkward,
almost helpless. “Sometimes it
takes three days of preparation until
two figures actually meet,” she says.
“During this time I think of what
goes on in their heads and, only
then, do I know how their scene will
end.” Their personalities develop as
she assembles the puppets and sets;
the story evolves as she films. “I
form the characters with my
hands,” she says – a method that
rules out collaboration with actors,
who “want to know in advance what
they are supposed to do.” Yasinsky
says the biggest compliment she can
get is when the audience thinks it
sees changing expressions on the
of California at Berkeley will hold
the Haniel Fellowship in History
and Public Affairs.
Berlin Prize Fellows will include
Phillip Bohlman, professor of music
and Jewish studies at the University
of Chicago; Pierre Joris, professor
of English at suny Albany; historian
Michael Steinberg of Cornell
University; and art historian Anne
Wagner, who is professor at the
University of California at Berkeley.
The Kellen and Gorrison Fellows
will be named from this pool of
candidates.
Next fall’s short-term Bosch
Fellows are Jamie Metzl, deputy
staff director and senior counselor
to the US Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations; Legal scholar
Mary Anne Case, who is a professor
of the University of Chicago; and
law professor Paul Carrington of
Duke University.
static, clay faces of her figures.
The 37-year-old artist will be the
last Philip Morris Emerging Artist
at the American Academy. After
four years, the company is ending a
collaboration that brought artists
Sarah Morris, Stephanie Snider,
and Sue de Beer to Berlin in previous
years. Karen Yasinsky, who
began her career as an art historian
and computer programmer, turned
to painting but found she was doing
“the same image over and over
again.” It was not an exclusive passion
for film that led her to where
she is today. “Film,” she says, “combines
all my interests.” And it constantly
calls for a new image.
By Moritz Schuller
From Tagesspiegel
March 3, 2003
The Berlin Prize Fellowship
appointments were made by an
independent committee that
included: Anthony Appiah of
Princeton University; Carolyn
Abbate, also of Princeton; Paul
Baltes of the Max-Planck-Institut
für Bildungsforschung; Stephen
Burbank of University of
Pennsylvania Law School; Vincent
Crapanzano of the City University
of New York Graduate Center;
Michael Fried of Johns Hopkins
University; Benjamin Friedman of
Harvard University; Ronnie Hsia of
Pennsylvania State University;
Stephen Nichols of Johns Hopkins;
and Leon Wieseltier, editor of the
New Republic. Historian Charles
Maier of Harvard University, who
has chaired the annual committee
since the first Berlin Prizes were
awarded in 1998, retires from the
post this year. He will be missed.o
The Berlin Journal 29

30 Number Six | Spring 2003

When a Diplomat Dreams
Richard Holbrooke’s Pragmatic Vision
Richard Holbrooke has a Dream.
The “I Have a Dream” page in the Leben
section of Die Zeit gives celebrated artists,
statesmen, and personalities the opportunity
to conjure up a world free of reality’s
constraints. Here the American
Academy’s founding trustee Richard
Holbrooke spoke to journalist Christine
Brinck about his vision of finding diplomatic
solutions to the world’s thorniest
problems.
Richard Holbrooke, 61, is widely regarded as
a leading authority on Europe in the United
States. After serving as US Ambassador to
Germany in Bonn in 1993–94, he was
Assistant Secretary of State for Europe in
the Clinton Administration. He became well
known through his work as the US Balkan
representative and architect of the 1995
Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war
in Bosnia. Until early 2001, Holbrooke was
the US Ambassador to the United Nations.
He works today as an investment banker in
New York and is committed to several nonprofit
organizations and causes, most notably
aid for refugees and the battle against AIDS.
As a young man, I was in Vietnam and
took part in the Paris Peace Talks. I
directed the Peace Corps in Morocco.
During the Yugoslavia conflict, I saw
horrific tragedies and negotiated directly
with Milosevic. At the United Nations, I
sat among dictators and charlatans. All
the wickedness I have seen should make
me a cynic, but I have not stopped dreaming.
I dream of a world in which people
have more consideration for each other’s
problems and fears – of a world in which
people are not satisfied so long as
inequality remains widespread. I dream
of seeing the gap between the rich and
the poor begin to close.
Instead of this, I see a world increasingly
divided – into north and south, rich and
poor, developed and underdeveloped.
More and more people find themselves
living in hopeless conditions. When I was
growing up, diseases like smallpox, polio,
and malaria were being eradicated. True,
smallpox has not returned, but polio and
malaria are not yet conquered, and tuberculosis
has come back with a vengeance.
At a time of amazingly rapid medical
advances, how can general health conditions
be deteriorating so drastically?
It is a frightening surprise.
My father was a doctor, and he wanted
me to become a doctor too. He died when
I was a teenager. By that time I had long
since decided against a career in medicine.
But much later I realized that his
commitment to helping other people
had influenced me profoundly. His intellectual
curiosity and his humanity always
inspired me. This is why I dream of a world
of suspended egotism and increased generosity.
This can be realized with the help
of international organizations, governments,
and humanitarian NGOs. Bill
Gates’s immunization program is of
historic importance. His efforts to support
the development of vaccines have
been exemplary. We need more “dreamers”
like Gates, Ted Turner, and George
Soros. When I dream, I see rich people
spending less on jewelry and more on
humanitarian aid.
Virtually everyone is aware of these problems,
but few are actively doing something
to solve them. We sit around at
international conferences – myself sometimes
included – drink good wine, smoke
cigars, and come to the conclusion that
nothing can be done.
For me, the so-called “German-American
crisis” is not a crisis but more like a family
quarrel. Rather than wring our hands,
Europe and North America should sit
down together and try to solve the widespread
problems in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America – not to mention in the poor
neighborhoods in cities like New York
and Berlin. This is my biggest dream.
But it seems that the trends are heading
in the opposite direction. A lot of people
are ready to claim that these ideas are
unrealistic and naïve – the dreams of “liberal
softies.” To them, the world is nasty
and brutal, just as Hobbes described it.
There are articles and editorials out there
affirming that human beings are wicked
by nature and that war is the most normal
thing in the world. I don’t believe it.
I believe that the majority of humanity is
good. (Though there are some admittedly
awful types one has to deal with.) I had
a wonderful, successful time in government
service, and I am thankful for
what I was able to accomplish in Asia
and Europe, for refugees, and in the
fight against AIDS. In my dream, I get
another chance to serve the public and
make a difference.
I am not an artist, a poet, or an author.
I am practical – even when dreaming.
That’s just the way I am. I always want to
determine which dream can be made a
reality. In my dream, the US remains the
leading power, using its power and wealth
to guide the world actively in the fight
against the problems on both sides of
terror. In my dream, the US leads, and
Europe is a partner. We argue less about
trade issues and instead seek a common
strategy for helping the world’s poor.
These poor countries would no longer
be enticed or bullied or misled by charlatans
and liars – like Mugabe in Zimbabwe,
Dos Santos in Angola, Saddam in Iraq,
or Khaddafi in Libya – who have betrayed
and stolen from their own citizens.
In this dream world, people act rationally,
listening to truth instead of their emotions.
Religion would be a holy, private
matter – not state-dictated or controlled,
as it is in Iran or the Balkans. This is no
simple fantasy of “peace on earth” and
brotherhood among all peoples. It is
not a dream based on empty rhetoric or
magic. I’m still a pragmatist. War, disease,
and poverty will not disappear.
Even a dreamer knows this. I dream
that we Americans will renew our
engagement, which was so incredibly
strong after World War II but has just
faded away in the last twenty years.
The evil in Europe was defeated, the
restructuring was moving forward, and
many people were better off than before.
But somewhere along the line, the
willingness to engage in the problems
of the world disappeared and was
replaced by a sort of social Darwinism.
Text by Christine Brinck
Photography: Tim Petersen
Die Zeit-Leben
February 13, 2003
The American optimism of the 1950s and
1960s is gone. In my dream, the problems
of the world, large and small, are solved
by leadership.Then I wake up, turn on the
television, and watch the morning news.
There is one dream I will never abandon:
that in the world’s biggest conflict zones
– the Balkans, the Middle East, Cyprus,
and Kashmir – each side will eventually
acknowledge that the other side has a
point. The total victory of one side over
the other is impossible. Only when both
sides find a way to live with each other
will the people begin to realize their potential.
This potential has, for political reasons,
been denied to entire generations. I
dream that these deep ethnic, religious,
and national differences can be bridged
through understanding, and that differing
views can be taken into account. Even
if we are not convinced of one another,
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
By the way, one of my dreams has become a
reality: the American Academy on Berlin’s
lake Wannsee. After five successful years,
the Academy has come into own. It is a
dream come true – a durable institution
aimed at deepening the American understanding
of Germany and the Germans,
supported by people on both sides of the
Atlantic, like Henry Kissinger and Richard
von Weizsäcker. o
The Berlin Journal 31

Memoir of Messiaen
An Interview with Maestro Kent Nagano
By Alex Ross
An American Music Critic in Berlin
Alex Ross, 34, writes for a culture in which classical
music is relatively marginal. Serious music, subsidized
so generously in Germany, must struggle in
America to pull in private sources of funding. As
Ross said in an interview, it is not part of mainstreamculture
in America. “We have to fight, just
to keep it from dying out.”
Ross began to listen to classical music early on.
He had his own radio show as a college student at
Harvard, published his first music criticism in the
New York Times in the early 1990s, and joined the
staff of the New Yorker in 1996. For that famous magazine
he has written on rock musicians, too – like Bob
Dylan and Radiohead. Even his articles on serious
music are noticeably relaxed; here he calls Vivaldi
the favored composer of coffee bars; there he devotes
himself to describing the shift in musical tastes
inspired by September 11. The New Yorker pieces are
methodical and non-aggressive. Like the other pieces
in the magazine, they are written for intelligent readers
but never assume a specialized knowledge of
music, art history, or science.
Since his death in 1992, Olivier Messiaen has
come to be seen as a towering figure not only in
twentieth-century music but in the history of music
as a whole. Like Bach, he was a navigator of the furthest
realms of the human spirit. In his opera Saint
François d’Assise, a musician angel says to the saint,
“God dazzles us by an excess of truth. Music leads
us to God in default of truth.” Messiaen’s own music
is a demonstration of this dictum.
Kent Nagano is the world’s leading conductor of
the music of Messiaen. Since 2000 he has been the
chief conductor and artistic director of the
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He is also
the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Opera,
and for more than twenty years he has led the
Berkeley Symphony in his native state of California.
From 1989 to 1999 he was the general music director
of the Opéra National de Lyon; from 1991 to 2000 he
led the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, England.
And from the 2006–07 season on, he will be general
music director of the Bavarian State Opera and
Orchestra in Munich. He has also made significant
appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic, the
Vienna Philharmonic, and other orchestras around
the world. For such labels as Virgin, Erato, Teldec,
and Deutsche Grammophon, he has recorded music
of Busoni, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, Francis
Poulenc, and John Adams, among many others.
These projects have broadened and deepened our
knowledge of the twentieth-century repertory. His
traversal of Saint François is one of the few absolutely
essential recordings of recent years.
On October 10, 2002, Nagano led the Deutsches
Symphonie-Orchester in a rare performance of
Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus
Christ. Divided into 14 movements, the work is a
liturgy in itself, embracing furious, joyous dissonance,
riots of bird song, episodes resembling a sort
of celestial jazz, all leading toward monumental
assertions of the purest major-key tonality. In a way,
it is not only the figure of Christ that is transfigured
in this work, but also the language of music.
Two days before the performance, I had the
honor of interviewing Kent Nagano before an audience
at the American Academy in Berlin. What follows
is a transcript of our conversation.
That is where the New Yorker diverges from our own
Feuilletons, with their fondness for intimidating
readers with erudite ballast. Alex Ross takes in this
difference with equanimity, pointing out that
Germans and Americans have different ways of
debating new music, too.
From an article by Christiane Tewinkel
Die Tageszeitung
November 12, 2002.
Photography: Foto25
The Berlin Journal 33

AR: Maestro Nagano, less than an hour ago you were
rehearsing the Transfiguration with the Deutsches
Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. It is a mighty ritual
piece for orchestra, virtuoso chorus, and seven
instrumental soloists, an hour and a half long. Let’s
begin here, on one of the summits of Messiaen’s
magnificent oeuvre. Where does this work stand in
his output, and what does it mean to you?
KN: La Transfiguration has a special meaning for me
because it was through this piece that I first met
Messiaen. Those of us who are heavily involved with
his music tend to regard it as his first indisputable
masterpiece. Messiaen had several periods of composition
during his life. He had a great moment of
self-discovery while he was being held at the
German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIIIA during
World War Two; there he wrote the radical and
beautiful Quartet for the End of Time. In the 1950s, he
began exploring Greek rhythms, Indian rhythms,
and, above all, birdsong. That opened the doorway
into the 1960s where he took his kaleidoscopic
structures much further than before. In a way, La
Transfiguration was the synthesis of all of this language,
or syntax. It is a sophisticated, profound,
spiritual work, and the spirituality of the piece can
only resonate if everything within the structure and
the form is well balanced.
When I began my studies – and this may seem a
little bit difficult to believe – I had a serious problem
with contemporary music. I could not find any rapport
with it. I was living in Boston at the time, working
at the opera company, and since I was not very
well paid, traditional forms of entertainment were
simply out of the question for me. So I spent my
hours in the public library. But the
public library, fortunately, had the
complete works of Messiaen. The
first piece that I took out was one of
the volumes of the Catalogue
d’Oiseaux, that great, huge compilation
of studies of birdsong. It was
fiendishly difficult to play. I was
embarrassed to find that I couldn’t even read it. I
was working on La Traviata at the time, and to open
up this musical book of birds – to use a California
expression – blew my mind. I decided, in a very
stubborn way, that I would play the entire Catalogue
from note one until the end just because it was so
difficult. And when I got to the end it was clear to
me what an incredible composer Messiaen was.
Later, when I was conducting the Berkeley
Symphony, I decided to do a cycle of his pieces and
included La Transfiguration in the cycle. That was
how I came to Messiaen’s music – in the most
difficult, slowest way possible.
AR: You sent Messiaen a recording of one of the
performances?
KN: What happened was this. I read as much as I
could and analyzed all the pieces, but I felt something
was missing. I looked for somebody who
could teach me more. That search took me to graduate
schools in Toronto, professors in Boston, professors
in Los Angeles, professors in San Francisco. No
one could help me. They could tell me things I
already knew, but they could not help me with the
essential question, which was, ‘What is the style of
Messiaen?’ So out of frustration I took a broadcast
tape, put it in an envelope, and mailed it to Maître
Olivier Messiaen, Conservatoire de Paris, Paris,
Airmail. In the little packet I put a note saying: ‘Dear
Maître Messiaen, you don’t know who I am, but my
name is Kent Nagano. I live in San Francisco.’ I
asked him to please be so kind as to give me a few
criticisms as we embark on a cycle of his works. You
can imagine my surprise that I got not only a
One of the chords, I remember,
was lime green with white,
whipped-cream-like splotches,
in a general hue of orange.
response, but a five-page, single-spaced, typewritten
letter containing pages and pages of criticisms. I
took it all very much to heart. The first piece on the
tape was Poèmes Pour Mi, and the first thing
Messiaen said was, ‘In the last movement you’re
going twice too slow.’ A small oversight. I was using
an old edition.
That was how our overseas correspondence
began. When I finished each work in the cycle I
would send him a broadcast tape. He would listen to
it and send back comments, and over time the sheets
of criticism began to diminish. After sending [a
recording of his] Turangalîla-symphonie, I got back a
hand-written note that said, ‘There’s nothing to criticize.
I can’t criticize you. It’s a wonderful performance.
I’m sure, however, that if I were to observe you
working live, I could offer you more guidance.’ He
added, ‘By the way, you might consider using my wife
as soloist. She’s not so bad.’ With the help of the
French Embassy, we invited Messiaen and Yvonne
Loriod [his wife] to San Francisco to help perform La
Transfiguration. The orchestra was well prepared, but
the chorus was completely amateur, since our budget
did not allow for a professional choir. I knew I was in
trouble when the chorus master told the singers,
‘Don’t worry about the pitch. The tam-tam will give
it to you.’ They couldn’t get through two bars without
having what we call in the music business a train
wreck. I called extra piano rehearsals and conducted
them myself. Then Messiaen showed up, expecting
to see his new friend Kent Nagano with his brilliant
orchestra and his brilliant choir. We went through
one of the numbers and, sure enough, after three
bars, train wreck. Another couple of bars, major disaster.
We finally limped through the whole
movement and I looked at Messiaen. He was
very quiet, staring at his music. Eventually, he
said, ‘Well, maybe we should go on.’ Somehow
his presence was such a serious, fear-generating
factor that the choir became quite animated
and demanded more rehearsal time from their
conductor. Within three days they learned the
34 Number Six | Spring 2003

piece. I didn’t think it was possible. The performance
was part of the inaugural season of Davies Hall
in San Francisco, which only added to the pressure.
But it turned out to be one of those transfigurative
performances, and the choir found inspiration from
who knows where. I think Messiaen knew where. He
went home and wrote a small book about the
transfiguration of the chorus in San Francisco. A
month later he spoke with the Opéra de Paris and
asked that I be invited to work on Saint François, in
advance of the world premiere in 1983.
AR: How do you go about communicating Messiaen’s
mentality to a group of musicians who may be unfamiliar
with his music?
KN: I never say too much about the content of the
music. Musicians are extraordinary people, and
professional musicians are even more extraordinary.
They are able to articulate with their instruments
the most abstract concepts at the highest
level. The sensitivity of a professional musician is so
keen, so very much alive, that he doesn’t really need
to be told that a work is of such tremendous value or
that it has so much depth. Usually, I just help an
orchestra or choir appreciate the music as it is written
on the page. I may explain a little bit about the
text. La Transfiguration is in Latin, for example, and
not everyone speaks Latin. Sometimes, I’ll explain
structurally why I’m doing a certain transition from
one passage to another. But, primarily, I try just to
get the orchestra and the choir to get to know the
music as it really should sound. For there is a distinct
danger with Messiaen’s work – if you play it out
of style it can take on horrific qualities. It has a
strong emotional content, but emotion alone doesn’t
help the piece stand on its feet. You must find a balance:
some physical reality, some spiritual reality,
some intellectual reality, some emotional reality.
With all this in balance, the piece can resonate on its
own. My task is to introduce it to the orchestra in
the proper way so that they will understand it and
fall in love with it. This has never failed to happen.
AR: When you talk about the danger of the music
being played in the wrong way, I think about those
shockingly simple chords that might sound saccharine
if played too flamboyantly. He loved, for example,
the triad with that added sixth, which appears so
often in popular music. And it occurs to me that
Messiaen also uses formidable dissonances, and perhaps
the trick is to play them as if they are sweet triads.
In Messiaen, dissonances can be joy and familiar
harmonies can have an almost terrifying effect.
KN: Yes. You’re absolutely right. I remember that
Messiaen once gave a master class in which he frustrated
everyone with his very simple, straightforward
answers. If he didn’t know the answer to a
question, he would say, ‘I don’t know.’ And that
drove everyone crazy. At one point, he was explaining
a new compositional technique that he had
found in Saint François d’Assise. In a certain passage,
the string players were asked to play a pizzicato with
their left hand. Another time they were asked to
play on the other side of the bridge of the stringed
instrument. One of the students said, ‘Maître, this
has been going on for years. You are so naïve.’
Messiaen answered, ‘Yes, it’s true, I have spent my
whole life working hard to stay naïve.’ That was such
a wonderful answer, because if you lose your innocence
or the good sense of naiveté, you succumb to
cynicism. So, yes, these chords are simple, and if
you violate them by using the wrong kind of rubato
or by overplaying, you can’t really hear what the
harmonies are. The composer and conductor Pierre
Boulez, in his student days, published an article
denouncing the Turangalîla-symphonie as nothing
better than “bordello music.”
And if Turangalîla-symphonie
is really played over the
top, without true feeling for
the style, it does sound like
bordello music.
AR: Not wanting to give in
to cynicism or to invite
scurrilous gossip, I have to ask whether there were
moments when you saw some other side of his character,
beyond the saintly, naive façade that we know.
KN: I didn’t mean to imply that he was saintly at all.
He was a very accomplished sinner, like the rest of us.
I have favorite story about this. Friday dinners were
always special because the Messiaen house was very
devout. One evening I thought I’d surprise Madame
and Maître Messiaen with one of their favorite tarts.
I knew that Messiaen was particularly fond of pear,
but when I got to the bakery it was a bit too late and
all of the normal-sized tarts had been sold. All that
was left was a tart about the size of a pizza pan. I took
it, and brought it to the apartment, and Yvonne said,
‘Oh, Kent! Aren’t you nice! In fact, I bought a tart,
too.’ I offered to go back to the bakery and exchange
it for something else.’ She answered, ‘No, no. We’ll
eat both of them.’ I thought she was just being polite
– that we’d take a little sliver of her apricot tart and a
little sliver of my pear tart and have a sort of tart tasting.
But after dinner, Yvonne proudly announced the
arrival of the two tarts, and Messiaen’s eyes got very
big, very bright. ‘Let’s eat them,’ he said. The three of
us ate two entire tarts. That was not too saintly.
Serious overindulgence! He was quite a normal
person, actually. I learned my French from him. He
was very much like an uncle or a father figure. He was
very human.
AR: Well, if the oversized pear tart was the extent of
his sinning…
KN: As I said, I learned French from him, and that
includes some bad words, too!
Messiaen was very, very private,
particularly with spiritual
thoughts, spiritual revelations,
spiritual references.
The Berlin Journal 35

AR: Let’s delve further into the spiritual side of the
equation, the belief system behind Messiaen’s music.
In my introduction I quoted what the Angel says in
Tableau 5 of Saint François: “God dazzles us with an
excess of truth. Music takes us to God in default of
truth.” [Dieu nous éblouit par excès de vérité. La
musique nous porte à Dieu par défaut de vérité.] It
feels almost like a motto for Messiaen’s career. It
occurs at that inexpressibly magical moment in the
score, just before the three Ondes martenot [keyboard
instruments] trace out their melody over a C-
major triad in the strings. Could you possibly put into
words what that line meant for Messiaen and what it
means for his music?
KN: Dramatically it makes a lot of sense. François
feels this tremendous conflict. He’s been confronted
with awful trials and yet somehow he gravely doubts
whether or not the path that he has chosen to follow
is leading him in the way God wanted for him. So
when the angel plays this music, he offers a handle
for François to be able to go on and learn how to
speak with the birds in Tableau 6. This moment had
a direct reflection, I think, in Messiaen’s own life.
During the whole rehearsal period of Saint François,
he would often get quite melancholy, almost
depressed. He would say, ‘This is my last work. I’m
not going to write after this piece. My life’s statement
has been done.’ He said it in such a way that he
seemed to be referring to the end of his life. You
have to recall that I was a true Californian at that
time, so I tried to lighten up the situation by saying,
‘C’mon, Olivier. It can’t be that bad.’ He didn’t find
this amusing at all. He said, ‘No, no. I’m serious. I
feel something is happening. I’ll tell you honestly,
Kent. If I live long enough to hear the first orchestra
rehearsal, I’ll be happy.’ So I said, ‘Olivier, of course
you’re going to live long enough to hear
the first rehearsal.’ Three months later, the
first orchestra rehearsal happened, and he
was fine. I breathed a tremendous sigh of
relief. But that night after the first rehearsal
Olivier was again depressed and said,
‘You know, I just wish I could see a rehearsal on
stage. Then I’ll be happy.’ And so on, through the
first stage rehearsal, the first orchestral rehearsal,
the first performance. All the time he thought he
could not go on. It was almost as if his feelings were
so strong that he was waiting for something cataclysmic
to happen. But it was not the end. He
emerged in remarkably good health. He was in
extraordinary shape, renewed by the experience.
He had gone through a trial of his creative soul.
Afterward, we waited and waited for something
new. I was very close to Messiaen’s student George
Benjamin, and we would call each other regularly,
once a week, to see what was going on. Nothing, no
news, no new pieces. Only ten years later did the
huge final piece for orchestra, Eclairs sur l’au-delà,
emerge. Out of the blue, Messiaen called me and
said, ‘I just wanted to let you know that just last
night I completed my new piece.’ I was overjoyed
and also furious. I called Benjamin and said,
‘George, why didn’t you tell me Messiaen was writing
a new piece? ‘And George replied, ‘I just got a
call last night, too. I didn’t know about it.’ He was
furious, too. He demanded to speak with Yvonne
Loriod and said, ‘Yvonne, why didn’t you tell me
that Maitre Messiaen was writing a new piece?’
And Yvonne said, ‘I didn’t know either.’
Messiaen was very, very private, particularly
with spiritual thoughts, spiritual revelations, spiritual
references. He had a private set of rooms where
he worked. The Messiaens lived in an apartment
house in an unbelievably unfashionable part of
Paris. At first, Messiaen had only been able to buy
a one-room apartment. Then, as his fortunes
changed, rather than move, he simply bought more
apartments. So, by the time I got there he had six
Curiously enough, he also spoke
often about Wagner, whom he
absolutely, passionately loved.
one-room apartments put together. I remember that
to take a bath you had to go out into the public corridor
and walk down it to another apartment that had
a bathroom and walk back down through the hallway
to one of the other apartments. He had two
more apartments upstairs. One was his composition
room and the other room was his organ room,
where he practiced. Neither I nor Yvonne were ever
allowed into those rooms. No one was allowed into
the rooms.
I’m not sure what exactly took place in those little
rooms upstairs, but what came out of them was
final. He never, in all the years that I knew him,
changed his scores. I recall that during the preparation
of Saint François d’Assise a clarinetist had a fit
during rehearsal. ‘This is unplayable,’ he said. He
stood up and started waving his arms around, shouting
that the music was nonsense, that the composer
did not know how to write for the instrument, that he
could not stand for this. Messiaen went up to the
stage, and the clarinetist, still red in the face, still very
agitated, said to him, ‘Cher Maître, I’m sorry, but
clearly you do not play the clarinet. You have written
things that we cannot play.’ Messiaen said, ‘I’m terribly
sorry, but I thought if you put your third finger
there and your fourth finger there and blew a little
higher so the first overtone would come out, it would
produce this note.’ And, of course, out came the note.
Messiaen looked relieved – not so much that the
clarinetist had been put in his place, but because he
didn’t have to change his score. He had written the
right note at the right time.
AR: Did you visit the rooms after his death?
KN: No, never, I felt it was inappropriate. Yvonne
went in, after his death, and discovered the manuscripts
and sketches from which the
Concert à Quatre was assembled.
Question from audience: Many years ago
at a festival I spent most of the afternoon
in conversation with Messiaen. My imp-
36 Number Six | Spring 2003

ession was that he belonged to a tiny percentage of
humankind afflicted – or blessed – with the condition
known as synesthesia. The person who has this automatically
sees colors when hearing music. In the time
that you spent with him did he ever talk about this?
KN: Yes. I remember before we met, when I was
looking at his commentaries on his music, I read
with a certain combination of astonishment and
horror his description of what chords meant in
terms of color. One of the chords, I remember, was
lime green with white, whipped-cream-like splotches,
in a general hue of orange. This is a really nineteen-seventies
moment if you think about it. I didn’t
know what to make of it at the time. This condition
of associating sound and color is a fairly widespread
one, but in a much milder form. Most musicians
have it in some degree. When I think of D Major, it’s
basically cream colored. F Major is a kind of dark
yellow. The key of A Major is a deep-hued cross
between black and purple. B Major is obviously
navy blue. For Messiaen, all I can say is that – boy –
when I walked into his house and I saw the color
scheme for the first time, I was really, really amazed.
As we worked on François together at the piano, I’d
ask, ‘Are there any hidden colors that I should try to
play?’ And he said, ‘Yes, there are.’ But he said that
he didn’t expect other people to play the music in,
say, a lime-green way. He just wanted to share what
colors that he had in mind so that people could have
the general idea of a brilliant painting as they listened
to the music. People have written, rather
meanly, about the clothing that Messiaen wore. He
had a very special way of dressing. He loved loud
colors. His favorite shirts were paisley, primarily
orange or baby blue. Over these shirts he would
wear a plain gray suit and a plain tie. But the shirts
were to die for.
Question: What was his relationship with or attitude
toward Schoenberg and Stravinsky?
KN: He was aware of Schoenberg, of course, but he
didn’t feel a particular closeness to him.
AR: He said, I think, that Schoenberg sounded gray.
KN: He felt much closer to Berg. Curiously enough,
he also spoke often about Wagner, whom he absolutely,
passionately loved. He attacked Stravinsky
aggressively in this youth, but, later, he would only
speak politely about him. He was not one to hand
out stern judgments. He was quite humble about his
gifts. He would speak with admiration of composers
or conductors or musicians who could hear things
he couldn’t. He said of Boulez: ‘He is greater than I
will ever be, and he is greater than most of the world
will see.’ He was fiercely insistent, however, that performances
of his music remain true to his inspiration.
For example, I was under tremendous pressure
to cut Saint François before the premiere. I was
taken out to dinner by authorities from the Opéra,
who said, ‘Please, Kent. You’re a pal of Messiaen.
Get him to cut about 45 minutes.’ I said I would
mention it, though I didn’t see how it could possibly
be cut, since its dimensions are perfect. Messiaen
was furious, of course. He would not hear of it and
said that if they cut the opera he would withdraw.
Question: How do you approach the religious question
of Messiaen? Few other composers I can think of that
are so saturated with Catholic mysticism in their
music. To me that is often an alienating aspect. It is
just so foreign to my own experience and sense of
spirituality. How does that play a role for you as an
interpreter?
KN: As I mentioned before, Messiaen was often
asked that question. It is a legitimate
question because he was so
demonstrative about his religion.
He wrote religious quotations as
title headings for every movement.
But, again, his answer was that the
beliefs that he cited were personal
ones, that they gave him the inspiration
to write the work. Interpreters
are expected to invest themselves
in an honest way and bring
their own experiences to bear. To subscribe to a particular
religious doctrine has no importance at all.
Once, when we were discussing a religious quotation
in Des Canyons aux étoiles, Messiaen asked me, ‘Are
you religious?’ I said, ‘I’m a Presbyterian.’ And he
asked, ‘What’s that?’ I explained that it derived from
the Church of Scotland. He said, ‘So you belong to
the Church of Scotland?’ I said, ‘No, no. It’s a
Protestant denomination, like Methodist or
Lutheran.’ And he said, ‘Oh! You’re a Protestant.’
He nodded, and we went on talking about the music.
He could not possibly have been less dogmatic on the
issue.
AR: Thank you so much, Kent Nagano, for making your
way out to Wannsee after a long day of rehearsal. o
The angel in Saint François says,
“God dazzles us by an excess
of truth. Music leads us to God
in default of truth.” Messiaen’s
music demonstrates this.
The Berlin Journal 37

On Realpolitik and the Misuse of History
An Interview with Fritz Stern
By Reinhard Meier
This text is drawn from an interview
published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on
March 17, 2003.
Professor Stern, you live in New York
and are at the same time very familiar
with Europe. In your opinion, what are
the fundamental differences in public
opinion on either side of the Atlantic
regarding the Iraq conflict?
First of all, there is no such a thing as a
uniform America. A broad spectrum of
opinions and differences with relation to
the politics over Iraq is discernible in the
United States, too. And recently these differences
appear to be deepening. I get the
impression that opinions in Europe are
also sharply divided but simultaneously
vacillating. I recently had a discussion in
France with an old friend – a man with an
extensive grasp of politics. He has come
out decidedly in favor of Bush’s Iraq politics,
whereas most of the French have
expressed quite a different opinion.
What do you think is Bush’s most important
motive for pursuing this war?
I believe his fundamental philosophy is
his profound conviction in America’s
unrivaled power. Bush separates the
world very definitively into Good and
Evil, which is related to his oft accentuated
religious background. He is convinced
that it is his duty to dispossess evil of
power. But the notion linked to this
conviction– that the war against Iraq
will change the entire Middle East for
the better and will pave the way for widespread
democratic development – is
hardly realistic.
Had George H.W. Bush been president
after September 11, 2001, do you believe
that he would have pursued a different
policy toward Iraq? Even if the elimination
of the Saddam Hussein regime were
one of his priorities, would he handle
it differently?
The generational difference undoubtedly
plays a role here. Bush Sr. grew up in a
different America and he had already
had his own foreign policy experiences
before becoming president. I am convinced
that had he been in the situation
that we see today, Bush Sr. would have
acted quite differently.
What we are now experiencing is the
complete failure of diplomacy and the
disregard for diplomatic customs and traditions.
Bush Sr. was much more adept at
forming coalitions. More importantly, he
was convinced of the necessity of actively
forging coalitions. Bush Jr. and several of
his closest associates tend to believe that
America can better and more efficiently
look after its interests by means of unilateral
action.
Does it surprise you that the disagreement
over the Iraq question between
Germany and France on the one hand
and the US on the other hand is currently
being carried out in public so brusquely
and obstinately?
First of all, I would like to make a personal
observation. For my entire adult life –
for personal and professional reasons, as
well as for reasons or realpolitik – I have
always hoped that the transatlantic relationship
would prove its mettle, and that
it would truly represent values that must
be defended. There have always been
crises in this relationship. But I believe
the current crisis is something fundamentally
different – it is much more profound.
And what worries me is that it
seems to be intensifying and hardening
with each passing day.
Was it wise of Chancellor Schröder
to come out so prematurely and so
emphatically against any form of
German participation in a military
intervention in Iraq, regardless of a
UN resolution backing action?
No. This is yet another example of the
failure of the diplomatic craft. Schröder
also spoke of a “deutscher Weg” in the
election campaign last fall. Perhaps it was
tactically successful with regards to the
election, but in principle it was a great
mistake. One of the basic rules of diplomacy
is that one should never unnecessarily
close a door for good. Nonetheless,
I do not believe that Schröder’s observation
at the time was meant to indicate a
fundamentally new direction. There cannot
be a constructive German way. Only
a European one.
The term “anti-Americanism” has
appeared again and again in the controversy
over Iraq. Is anti-Americanism in
Europe stronger today than it has been
in previous decades?
In a certain sense, yes. There is an historical
anti-Americanism, which I studied,
for example, in Jacob Burckhardt. One
can see that a general prejudice was
already projected upon America in the
nineteenth century – America as the
embodiment of the purely materialistic
ambition, the uncultured mass society.
This is a critical prejudice that is completely
missing from Tocqueville.
Tocqueville had already understood
America to be the country of the future,
the epitome of modernity. I consider
Tocqueville to be one of the greatest
historians. He clearly recognized the
fundamental significance of the
American development for the rest of
the world, with both its strengths and
its weaknesses.
But in speaking of the prejudices and
the criticism of America – in part wellfounded,
in part unintelligent – one cannot
overlook the fact that such criticism
is also articulated in America itself. The
US has always excelled in self-criticism,
which is a great credit to it. Therefore one
should not categorize every criticism in
Europe as anti-Americanism. I am critical
of the politics of the Bush Administration
today because I am concerned that in the
transatlantic relationship, much of what
has been built up over the last fifty years
is being gambled away. To say nothing
of the American traditions in domestic
politics. But that certainly is not an anti-
American position.
In making the case for an intervention
in Iraq, President Bush has argued that
functioning democracies developed
after military occupation in both
Germany and Japan. Why can’t this
model succeed in Iraq?
I consider this absurd, a typical example
of ahistorical comparisons. After all, in
Germany there was something of a democratic
tradition upon which one could
build a democratic society after the war
in the territory occupied by the Western
powers. I see no such tradition in Iraq.
One must also take into consideration
that between 1945 and 1949 about half a
million American soldiers were stationed
in Germany in rotation. Does the Bush
Administration believe that 500,000
American soldiers or even 300,000
should stay in Iraq for five years? An even
more essential issue is how the Muslim
world and the Middle East would react if
a large American military force were to
establish itself in Iraq. Surely this would
arouse heavy opposition and resentment.
Let us return to historical comparisons.
In the debate over Iraq, parallels are
also frequently made with the appeasement
politics of the 1930s. How do you
view this correlation?
In Munich, a significant portion of another
country was ceded to an aggressive
conqueror and dictator. Czechoslovakia
was betrayed. And Hitler was tremendously
strengthened in the process.
It was a capitulation. The situation in
Iraq is different. The comparison with
Munich would only be appropriate if
opponents of war argued, for example,
that one should relinquish Kuwait to
Saddam to pacify him. But no one is making
this argument. The comparison with
Munich is yet another political misappropriation
of history.
Nevertheless, in 1936, before the
betrayal of Munich, the Germans did
march into the de-militarized Rhineland.
At this moment the Western powers
should have immediately offered resistance
to Hitler. But at the time there was
a widespread illusion that this augmentation
of power was, after all, within
Germany itself.
In light of the deteriorating situation,
why doesn’t Bush invite Schröder,
Chirac, Blair, and Putin, as well as the
Chinese, to Washington to continue to
try to find a consensus in the Iraq controversy
with direct talks? Is this idea
so far-fetched?
Unfortunately heads of state rarely discuss
the situation all together, preferring
to talk two at a time. Today the positions
are already far too inflexible. And if one
differentiates so radically between Good
and Evil, as Bush does in the case of Iraq,
then there are hardly possibilities for
such a conference at the last minute.
On the other hand, Chirac’s recent
condescending remarks about Eastern
Europe belong to the incomprehensible
mistakes that have been made in Europe.
They are unfathomable. I get the impression
that over the last several months,
political irrationality has not only
increased tremendously, it has become
contagious.
Translated by Daniel Huyssen
38 Number Six | Spring 2003

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The Commodity Curse
The Tyranny of Wealth and the Wealth of Tyrants
By Amity Shlaes

© Getty Images
W H AT D O V E N E Z U E L A , Sierra Leone, and Iraq have in common? One
answer of course, is that they each, in their way, represent an international
threat. Sierra Leone is mostly a potential threat. Venezuela is already
palpable trouble, a source of instability in its region. Iraq has been highgrade
danger, simple and outright.
But the three also share something else. They all suffer from
what we will call the commodity curse. They are rich in a commodity –
oil in two cases, diamonds in one – and that fact has hurt them, not
helped them.
The thesis of the commodity curse says that commodity wealth is
different from other wealth, different in a way that makes it politically
destabilizing. One might go on to say that natural resources generally are
the curse of the less developed world, retarding the rise of democracy and
the pursuit of prosperity.
In Venezuela’s case, we often hear that the current standoff
between striking citizens and the Chavez government is about whether
citizens believe in free markets or not. But the conflict is not really about
that. The fight is really, to a great degree, about damage wrought to the
economy through state control of the nation’s oil.
Sierra Leone’s diamond mines have caused enormous trouble.
They became the centerpiece of a domestic war – one that eventually
pulled in Liberia’s undemocratic leader, Charles Taylor. Now the US state
department is investigating whether millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds
from Sierra Leone were sold to an entity – Al Qaeda – that badly
needs untraceable, tradable, goods to traffic in.
Then there is Iraq and its context: the Middle East. Radical Islam is
usually blamed for the region’s instability. But there is another, more
obvious, fuel powering dictators and terrorists: oil. Without the existence
of state-owned oil, Osama bin Laden’s family in Saudi Arabia would have
found it harder to become rich and he could not have funded Al Qaeda.
Without state-owned oil, the Iranian regime could not nurture radical
Islam. Without oil or oil cash, sheiks, mullahs and warlords would have
less power. Without oil, Saddam’s peculiarly brutal regime in Iraq would
not have the cash to fund its weapons programs.
The idea of a commodity curse fits very well on the political left –
the classic argument and caricature being that the nasty imperialist
power exploits the poor third world for its rubber, cotton, or gold. The
commodity curse thesis does not, however, fit comfortably into standard
development economics, which holds that any form of wealth gives a
nation something to trade, yielding prosperity. Modern mainstream
economists have generally tolerated as a lesser evil the idea of governments
owning or controlling those resources, at least for a while. After all,
according to the reasoning, the state must be a better custodian of this
public good than a nasty warlord or an empire’s colonel. Natural
resources are supposed to be good for countries, and not necessarily corrupting.
And certainly that has been true in some democracies, where
other forms of wealth were around to compete with the state’s commodity
wealth – or with private holdings. Norway’s state-owned oil reserves
may not have helped the country as much as was once imagined they
would, but they have not ruined the country either.
Western economists and free marketeers ought to reevaluate their
thinking. For in places that do not yet have democracy or a culture of
The Berlin Journal 41

private property, natural resources can indeed be a curse. That is not,
however, because of pressure or exploitation by foreign governments or
companies. It is because natural resources lend themselves to monopolies
and therefore exploitation from within. After all, whoever captures control
of the oil field or the diamond mine in an otherwise poor nation
also captures the nation. The glitter of commodity wealth is so great that
it is near impossible for any citizen to see beyond it. Comity disintegrates,
civility disappears; life degenerates into a bitter scramble for a share of
the treasure.
In colonial times, it was easy to know whom to blame for such trouble:
the colonizer, the man who sat beside the gold mine, or the oil field,
with his gun. The fact that he was a European, and his poor subjects
native Africans, Indians, Arabs, or Asians, seemed to be the source of the
injustice. Put the commodity in the hands of the local people, the argument
went. A man would not exploit his fellows.
But this has turned out not to be
the case. In dozens of countries, socialists
and nationalists – politicians and
colonels alike – seized the valuable treasure
in the name of the people. And they
did not prove any better at managing the
situation.
It emerged that idealists schooled
in Paris or at London’s School of Economics
were just as susceptible to corruption
as the worst colonial mercenaries.
Natural resources got in the way of
postcolonial progress. That is because
the prize of diamonds or oil is so valuable
that it corrupts governments who control
it. Their treasure is so valuable that they,
those who have won it, will do just about
anything to protect it. They will continue
the case for the necessity of state socialism,
even when economics have shown that the private sector is more
efficient. They will form cartels, such as the opec, the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries, in an effort to sustain their treasure’s
value. (It is telling that the ‘country by country’ descriptions posted on
opec’s website include a category that applies to all opec members:
“national oil company.”) In effect, the possession of commodity power
helps convert a democratic anti-colonialist into an autocratic warlord.
One can make a solid argument, as has the Nobel-prize winning
economist Ronald Coase, that things would be far better if private businesses
controlled the resources – but only if those private businesses are
not allied with governments. This, however, is almost never the case, for
leaders of commodity-rich states are notoriously reluctant to give up their
commodity treasure – or, indeed, to give up power at all. As Bassam Tibi
of the University of Göttingen has pointed out, one can count how many
leaders of nations in the oil-rich Middle East have voluntarily left their
jobs when their “terms” were up: none. The “soft” commodity lords will
take “soft” measures to preserve their power. These include rejecting
denationalization, or using cash from commodity sales to sustain a lavish
«»
Natural resources
are the curse of
the less developed
world, retarding the
rise of democracy and
the pursuit of
prosperity.
state and postpone needed reform. The “hard” commodity lords will use
their power to oppress their citizens, denying them freedom, the chance
to export, good schools. The idea here is to prevent the development of
any competing form of private sector wealth within their countries’
borders. A worker who thinks that the only wealth in his country comes
from the oil mine or the diamond mine will not write software.
The American hemisphere has seen its share of the commodity
curse. To understand this, one need only take account of Venezuela’s current
crisis and troubled past. The Venezuelan Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo,
one of opec’s founders, became so disillusioned with his life that in his
later years he called oil “the excrement of the devil.”
But as energy expert Daniel Yergin reminds us in his documentary
film Commanding Heights, the Soviet Union and its successor states also
provide a wonderful example of the problem with commodities. Back in
the 1960s it looked as if the Soviet economy would weaken. Then two miracles
occurred. The first, Yergin notes,
was the discovery of vast new oil reserves
in West Siberia. The second was the
quadrupling of oil prices in the 1970s.
The cash that resulted added decades of
life to a sclerotic regime. Yergin cites
statesman Yegor Gaidar on oil: “It created
the ability not to think about the crisis
for a decade and a half.” Then of
course, when oil prices dropped, the
Soviet Union was hurt – fatally. “The
Soviet system had many weaknesses,”
says Yergin, “but reliance on oil and
commodity prices proved to be among
its deadliest vulnerabilities.”
Going back a little farther in its
history, it may be argued that America
experienced its own version of the commodity
curse. Through the institution of
slavery, Southern plantation owners monopolized agricultural commodity
wealth. This smothered individual enterprise (to say the least). As
Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “on the right bank of the Ohio everything is
activity, industry, labor is honored. Pass to the left bank and the enterprising
spirit is gone. There, work is not only painful; it is shameful.”
Can we go so far as to argue that the absence of commodities is a
blessing? Governments of countries that do not have an obvious hoard to
sustain them have to hunt for other sources of revenue; they must tax
labor. Their interest is therefore in creating a freer environment in which
individuals feel they have something to gain by developing other forms of
capital. Nowadays, especially, this takes the form of brainpower.
Resourceless Hong Kong, for example – a piece of rock surrounded by
water – had to become an attractive low-cost port city. No other use was
available to it. It is no accident that Israel, with little more than Dead Sea
salt to sell, has turned out to be the Middle East’s only democracy.
This brings us back to the problems of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and
instability in the Middle East in general. The commodity curse thesis
does a lot to explain why so many Middle Easterners do not seem eager to
42 Number Six | Spring 2003

hammer swords into ploughshares, or trade in Kalashnikovs for
“Windows XP.” Subjects of Saudi Arabia or the youth in Iran have little
hope of collecting huge material rewards from their own labor in their
own lifetime. They will not get part of the oil wealth. That is why some
embrace Islam’s paradise, Koran school and suicide hijacking. And this is
why many in Iraq work loyally for Saddam.
In such hope-free zones, radical Islam has an added attraction; it
offers followers and junior warlords a chance to be part of the next power
grab. In other words, bin Laden’s game plan may have been, as many say,
to topple the Saudi sheikhs and gain control of the biggest commodity
prize of all: Saudi oil reserves.
The commodity curse thesis has radical implications for the West’s
policy toward the Middle East. It contains, first of all, two warnings. The
first is that European diplomats are right when they say that clearing a
fraction of Afghanistan of the Taliban, while leaving the rest of the land in
the hands of warlords, is simply not enough. It suggests too that even
ousting Saddam is not enough. American and Britain will have to push
their allies to implement democratic reform and, crucially, to establish
the rule of law, including property rights. By itself, a war against terror
will do little to assuage the commodity curse.
This notion will be dismissed as ludicrous by defenders of the policy
of containment for the Middle East (a number of whom live in Europe).
Nor will it be welcome to those who wish, naturally enough, that the
looming war with Iraq would evaporate without action on America’s part.
After all, in the case of oil, for example, it is easier to blame opec’s clients.
That is what we see when, for example, the US is blamed for the war that
now threatens the Middle East. But one can also interpret the picture
another way. Maybe this time it is the local autocrats and dictators who
are to blame. Maybe this time the problem is with the commodityhogging
regimes.
But there are also two hopeful points that emerge from the theory
of the commodity curse. The first is that the problem in the Middle East is
not an entirely cultural or religious problem. Islamic extremism, one can
argue, is as much symptom as cause; it would diminish if economic hope
were greater.
The second cause for hope is the fact that the forces advocating
democracy and property rights possess a new and powerful weapon. In
the days of the Malay rubber plantation, the worker had no chance of
doing anything in his life but harvesting rubber. Today all the world’s citizens,
even those who live impoverished on desert terrain, do have a kind
of capital they can develop and sell: intellectual capital. If democracy, the
rule of law, and the rudiments of functional markets can be established in
their homelands they have a shot at stable lives. Here the new middle
class in India provides an example. In other words, it is easier to establish
democracies today than it was in the old days. One reason extremist leaders
in the Middle East are so desperate is that their citizens – through television
and via the internet – are beginning to realize that they can escape
the local commodity curse. All they need do is find a way to develop a
competing form of wealth.
In any case, it is important to ask; who are the people who are
oppressed by a Saddam, manipulated by a Latin oil autocrat, or terrorized
by a diamond-mine lord? The globe’s best hope lies in proving to
such people that commodities are not destiny. o
Amity Shlaes first outlined this thesis in her bi-weekly
Financial Times column.
Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin
Ausstellungen 2003
Die Azteken 17. Mai – 10. August 2003
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele und Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum
Ermöglicht durch die Beauftragte für Kultur und Medien, den Hauptstadtkulturfonds, die Kulturstiftung der Länder und das Auswärtige Amt
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Veranstalter: Botschaft der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und Berliner Festspiele • Mit Unterstützung von KODAK
Berlin-Moskau/Moskau-Berlin 1950–2000 28. September 2003 – 5. Januar 2004
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele und Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie
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Berlin Journal 43

The Bunker
By Jeffrey Eugenides
44 Number Six | Spring 2003

we hadn’t been installed more than three days before we heard
about the bunker. It was right under us, apparently, directly beneath the
elegant lakeside villa that had once housed a Jewish banking family – the
Hans Arnholds – and that now housed us, a small group of scholars and
artists staying at the American Academy in Berlin. Well, this was
Germany, wasn’t it? Across the lake stood the Wannsee Conference
House, where the Final Solution had been formulated over coffee cake. In
such a neighborhood, why be surprised to find a Nazi bunker in your
backyard?
Nevertheless, we were. The villa had been recently renovated. A
Francisco Clemente – on loan – hung in the living room. Also a
Rauschenberg. During media events when politicians showed up, movie
screens unscrolled from the ceilings. Glittery, Klimt-like tilework decorated
the tympanum of the dining room. The paneled library might have
been Bruce Wayne’s.
This hotel or conference center gloss was only the latest transformation
of the old house, however. During the 1930s Hans Arnhold had
taken his family out of Germany, and the villa, like many mansions in this
affluent part of Berlin, had been seized by the National Socialists. Hitler’s
economics minister, a man named Walther Funk, had lived in the house
until the end of the war. After that the villa had been occupied by
American officers, serving as a recreation center for American troops.
It was Herr Funk who had put in the bunker. In her memoir of
those years, The Past is Myself, Christabel Beilenberg makes clear that this
sort of home improvement was a fad at the time: “It was common knowledge
that the party bigwigs were building air raid shelters under their
lakefront mansions.” Hitler himself had inspected the bunker under
the Academy.
Over that fall and early winter, we talked about the bunker constantly
at dinner. We asked the Academy’s executive director, Gary Smith,
to describe it for us. “I’ll show it to you sometime,” Gary promised. But
with one thing and another he never did. And so we stopped talking
about the bunker. And then a week later somebody brought it up again
and we started asking the usual questions: How big was it? How deep?
What did it look like inside?
Sometimes while working I would look out of my office at the sloping
lawn that led down to the lake. There was a large drained swimming
pool on one side of the property. The grass itself was browning or weedy
in spots. Gatsby would have had a bigger staff of gardeners, but there
were still a few around, mowing and pruning, digging. Sometimes a frog
hopped past my glass door. Impressive clouds, somehow Prussian, boiled
and marched over the lake. The lake itself was gray most days but could
suddenly fool you and turn blue. Ferries plied the water. The American
Yacht Club was right next door, as was, rumor had it, a brothel patronized
by business executives. My attention would be taken up by all these
things and then, often enough, I would lower my gaze from the dramatic
sky to look at the grass and think about the bunker below.
Our obsession with the bunker came partly from the word itself.
You can hardly say the word “bunker” without adding a certain name
before it: “Hitler’s bunker.” Bunker and Hitler are inseparable. (I suspect
it was the fascistic connotation that led Norman Lear to name his great,
bigoted character “Archie Bunker.”) But if you think about it a minute, it’s
clear that there is nothing especially historic or significant about a
bunker. As Christabel Beilenberg pointed out, a bunker is nothing but an
air raid shelter. How many WWII-era bunkers must there be in Berlin, in
Germany, or in all of Europe for that matter? Winston Churchill had a
bunker of his own beneath the streets of London. He prosecuted the
Second World War largely from underground. Still, the image we have of
Winston Churchill isn’t subterranean. Churchill descended to the underworld
during the winter of life. Down there he overcame death and
returned above ground, like spring wheat. Hitler didn’t. Down in the
bunker was where he perished. Something about this appeals to the imagination.
It feels right. Down in the dirt, down with the earthworms and
the creepy blind unsunned moles, down where corruption takes place,
that’s where Hitler belongs.
Then one night a terrible thing happened. August Kleinzahler, the
poet, got to see the bunker all by himself. One evening, as I arrived for
dinner, Michael Meltsner grasped me by the lapels. “Gary took August
down to the bunker,” he told me in a grave tone. Was this true? I found
Kleinzahler in the library, sitting in his usual armchair. He looked shiny
cheeked, pleased with himself.
“You saw the bunker?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s not much.”
“Is it true that Hitler was down there?”
Kleinzahler gave me a level stare. “I didn’t see him,” he said.
Over the fireplace, not far from Kleinzahler, hung a portrait of
Hans Arnhold. Arnhold’s daughter, Anna-Maria, and her husband
Stephen Kellen, are the primary benefactors of the American Academy in
Berlin. Anna-Maria Kellen had grown up in this very house. When the
idea arose to start an American Academy in Berlin, the Kellens had been
the first to give financial support. She had been kept apprised of the
progress, was told that a building had been found and that it would be
renovated. Only later did she discover that, by an amazing coincidence,
this building was her childhood home.
Anna-Maria Arnhold became an American. In the early 1950s,
after her marriage, she came back to Berlin with her husband. The plane
coming into Tempelhof flew in low over the Wannsee. Anna-Maria
The Berlin Journal 45

looked out the window to try and find her old house. The woman seated
next to her then spoke.
“Do you know that house, too?”
“Yes,” answered Anna-Maria.
The woman smiled. “My husband and I spent many wonderful
nights there. Herr Funk used to throw wonderful parties.”
It was from her seatmate that Anna-Maria Kellen learned about the
bunker. After landing in Berlin, she and her husband drove out to the
Wannsee. The old family gardener was still there. He had been Funk’s gardener,
too, throughout the war. Coldly, he showed the Kellens around the
house. When they asked to see the bunker, he took them down.
After they had come out, as they were driving away, Mrs. Kellen
said to her husband, “You know, that gardener could have shut the door
behind us. No one would have ever found us.”
“I know, my dear,” Stephen Kellen replied. “That was why I made
sure to walk behind him.”
I went on with my work. Weeks passed. The plane trees lost their
leaves, revealing their stunted, twisted arms. A winter fog began to cover
the Wannsee. One night there was a lecture. When the guests had gone,
we went into the library to talk and smoke. Reinold, the chef, brought out
a tray of liqueurs. A plum-flavored schnapps began making the rounds.
There were eight of us, two historians, one linguist, one novelist,
one poet, a composer who lived in Paris, a Harvard law professor, and a
visual artist. We were talking, that night, about a bad smell that had been
gathering in the basement where our studios were. It had started in Milad
Doueihi’s office.
“I can’t even work there anymore,” he complained.
“They think it might be coming from under the kitchen,” one of the
historians said. “There’s a tube where all the fat drains out. Maybe it’s
clogged.”
“It’s the schmaltz!” said Augie. “I knew it.”
“It’s not the schmaltz,” I said. “It’s the bunker.”
In the next moment, providentially, the executive director entered
the room.
We were on him at once.
“When are you going to show us the bunker, Gary?”
“You promised you’d show it to us!”
“How come Augie got to see it and we didn’t?”
We were unstoppable, fueled by Pomeranian schnapps. We had
eaten an obscure Baltic fish for dinner. We had been living and working
on top of a Nazi bunker for nearly three months and we wanted to see it.
Tonight was the night.
Gary knew there was no putting us off. The signal was given.
Reinold lit candelabra and handed them around. We crossed the dining
46 Number Six | Spring 2003

oom and entered the kitchen. At the back a door led to a flight of stairs.
Laughing, fluttery, already making cracks, we each held a candelabrum
and followed our leader down the dark stairs into the earth.
“I’m trying to raise the money to build a health club down here,”
Gary joked.
“Ve haf vays of making you get in shape!”
“How come you know this place so well, Reinold?”
“We keep the Riesling down here.”
“Ah, it’s not a bunker. It’s a wine cellar.”
Candle flames streamed backward, thinning as we moved. We were
in our dinner clothes, the women wobbly in high heels. Right in front of
me was Meltsner. Usually he wore sweatshirts. Tonight he was in a blue
blazer and white shirt. Even a tie. Finally, at the bottom, we came to the
bunker door. We grouped there, silent, staring at it. The joking stopped.
The door to the bunker was slightly convex, like the hatch of a tank.
Greenish gray, cobwebby, rusted at the edges. The glass spyhole was protected
by a metal shield. Bullets wouldn’t have penetrated it. At length,
Reinold pulled the door open and we went inside.
Kleinzahler was right. It wasn’t much. No artifacts remained, no
furniture. The ceiling was low, the walls chalky. There were two or three
long, narrow rooms. At the end another door led up to the back lawn. We
might have been in a basement anywhere.
Only one thing showed the underground space for what it had
been. Just inside the front door was a small engineering room. Here were
the controls for ventilation and plumbing. Elegantly designed manifolds
and valves, the height of modernity back in 1942, lined one wall. Each in
slanting Fraktur script proclaimed the element it brought into the
bunker: Luft. Wasser.
What did we expect to find? What do we seek by going to the sites
of atrocity? There was no difference, at bottom, between our trip to the
bunker and a visit to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, outside
Berlin. We wanted to draw near to historical evil, to see and touch it if we
could, and somehow comprehend it. Such ghoulish sightseeing has
become a kind of perverse pilgrimage, marked by required stops and ritualized
thoughts. Therefore, I couldn’t help staring at those beautifully
designed controls and thinking about “the rationality of evil” or “the
mechanization of the death camps.” All true, no doubt, but not my
thoughts. Only borrowed, recited like a litany.
It was cold down there in the bunker. Meltsner had backed into a
wall. His blue blazer was all white behind. I slapped his back. Meltsner
grew up in New York and became one of the big civil rights lawyers. He
defended Muhammad Ali when they tried to take his heavyweight title
away. Now this Meltsner, originally from the Upper West Side, was down
in the Nazi bunker with me, and I was pounding him on the back.
“You’ve got white stuff all over,” I said.
The white dust flew up. It sparkled in the light of the candles we
had brought down with us. o
Photography: Bernhard Moosbauer (zeixl)
Jeffrey Eugenides (Berlin Prize Fellow 2000–01) is the author of The
Virgin Suicides and, most recently, the novel Middlesex. His description of
the bunker beneath the American Academy in Berlin was originally published
in Tin House.
The Berlin Journal 47

Photography: Bernhard Moosbauer (zeixl)
Soda Water With A Boyhood Friend
He is in the canals behind your forehead,
paddling,
or in the high, vaulted rooms
your speech rays round itself,
still and alert as a hunter in the blind,
taking measure if that, yes, it really is you,
against what he was down
in the log of his remembering
over a cigar and club soda. Ah,
the good bogs and rushes,
the forest beyond with its tweet tweet tweet,
cranked to a blur, a hum,
a time-lapse cavalcade of scene
fade scene dissolve scene spilling across the wraparound
screen and soaked in by the multitudes,
multitudes of kindled selves.
––August
Kleinzahler
48 Number Six | Spring 2003

Donations to the American Academy in Berlin
January 2002 – April 2003
Even in the most demanding times,
people will rise to a noble challenge.
This year has proven to be no exception.
Today, we are pleased to share
with you examples of the generosity
inspired by the challenges – economic,
political, and, importantly, philanthropic
– facing the American Academy
in Berlin and its supporters.
Last November, Stephen M. and
Anna-Maria Kellen and the descendants
of Anna-Maria’s parents, Hans
and Ludmilla Arnhold, challenged
the Academy to bring more corporate
donors into the fold. Less than six
months later that goal is within
reach. Listed here in the Academy’s
growing President’s and Trustees’ circles
you will see the names of those
who have already responded.
Now in its fifth year, the
American Academy in Berlin has
blossomed into an important intellectual
presence in Berlin. The Academy
provides a forum for enriching
cultural life, sharing critical ideas,
and building enduring relationships
on both sides of the Atlantic. We
deeply appreciate the generosity of
our donors, who provide the support
that makes these programs possible.
Founder’s Circle
$ 1,000,000 and above
Anna-Maria & Stephen M. Kellen and the
descendants of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold
Chairman’s Circle
$ 500,000 and above
Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
Trustees’ Circle
$ 100,000 and above
Mr. & Mrs. Henry H. Arnhold
Axel Springer Verlag
Robert Bosch Stiftung
DaimlerChrysler AG
DaimlerChrysler Fonds im Stifterverband für die
Deutsche Wissenschaft
Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband
Fidelity Investments through the Fidelity Foundation
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
Lufthansa AG
Philip Morris
Robert Mundheim
Alberto Vilar
Trustees of the American Academy in Berlin to
endow the Stephen M. Kellen Lectureship
President’s Circle
$ 25,000 and above
American Express Company
Citibank Privatkunden AG
Citigroup Foundation
Credit Suisse First Boston
Dürr AG
Werner Gegenbauer
The Gillette Company
Haniel Stiftung
Richard C. Holbrooke
J.P. Morgan AG
kpmg Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft
Marsh & McLennan Holdings GmbH
Porsche AG
Schering AG
Siemens AG
Kurt & Felicitas Viermetz
Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Benefactors
$ 10,000 and above
Anonymous
Verlag C.H. Beck
Julie Finley
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
Claus M. Halle
Karl M. von der Heyden
Kissinger Foundation
Körber Stiftung
John C. Kornblum
Joseph Neubauer
Heinrich & Annette von Rantzau
Rafael J. Roth
Shearman & Sterling
White & Case, Feddersen
Patrons
$ 2,500 and above
Gahl Hodges Burt
Deutsche Bank Region Ost
EMES, Ltd.
Jonathan F. Fanton
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Dr. Schmidt AG & Co.
All other contributors
Benjamin Barber
Hansjoachim Bauch
Günter & Waltraud Braun
Leopold Bill von Bredow
Gerhard Casper
Christie’s Deutschland GmbH
Caroline Flüh
Hans-Michael & Almut Giesen
Carl H. Hahn
Klaus & Lily Heiliger
Roe Jasen
Karl Kaiser
Jörg & Eva Kastl
Klaus Krone
Renate Küchler
Enzio von Kühlmann-Stumm
Landeszentralbank Berlin
Peter Lawson-Johnston
Yasmine Mahmoudieh-Kraetz
Charles Maier
Jerome Marak & Andrea Lawrence
The McGraw-Hill Companies
Barbara Monheim
Albert J. Raedler
Virginia Schulte, Culture Trip GmbH
Kenneth E. Scott
David & Marjorie Sievers
Gary Smith
Hans George Will
T HE
A M E R IC A N
AC ADE M Y
I N B E R LIN
HansArnholdCenter

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