Summer 2001 | Issue 2

The Berlin Journal
A NEWSLETTER FROM THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN • NUMBER TWO • SUMMER 2001
IN THIS ISSUE
Jenny Holzer
on her Permanent
Exhibition of Maxims
in Berlin’s Neue
Nationalgalerie
plus:
Gerald Feldman
Richard Holbrooke
Charles Maier
Ward Just
ATTILIO MARANZANO

The
American
Academy
in Berlin
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 Kissinger
Horst Köhler
John C. Kornblum
Otto Graf Lambsdorff
Nina von Maltzahn
Klaus Mangold
Erich Marx
Robert H. Mundheim
Robert Pozen
Volker Schlöndorff
Fritz Stern
Kurt Viermetz
Alberto W. Vilar
Richard von Weizsäcker
Klaus Wowereit
The 20th Century is disappearing
into History.
But did it begin in 1900
and span 100 years?
Or did it start with WWI
and end with the Fall of the
Wall? Historian Charles Maier
Letters of Hans Arnhold
are a rare discovery made by
Fellow Gerald Feldman. In
January 1948, Hans Arnhold
received a letter from a Weimar-period
colleague – and
fomer Nazi Reich Economics
Jenny Holzer’s dramatic
installation this spring at
the Neue Nationalgalerie
was such a success that it
will return to the museum
this fall as part of the permanent
collection. Here,
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
A Record of Ideas
and Visions
As we launch the Hans Arnhold
Center’s fourth exhilarating year,
we continue to seek ways of making
the Academy’s activities known to
a largercommunityofcolleagues,
media, benefactors, and interested
members of the public. We’ve conceived
The Berlin Journal to complement
both our website www.americanacademy.de
and the traditional
fall publication of a Tagesspiegel
supplement, showcasing the work
of upcoming Berlin Prize Fellows.
More substantial than a conventional
institutional newsletter, our
»newsletter as journal,« is a selective
and subjective record of life and
letters at the Academy. We will report
on the accomplishments of our
Richard Holbrooke
Reflections on the vicissitudes of
humanitarian intervention Page 10
The Notebook
of the American Academy Page 4
Life and Letters
at the Hans Arnhold Center Page 7
In this Issue
fellows, the brilliant array of scholars,
artists, and policy makers who
visit us each year – from recent Berlin
exhibitions of work by Jenny
Holzer and Sarah Morris to the
many scholarly colloquia and lectures
by Academy scholars.
Finally, each issue features substantial
and original texts, many of
them inspired by the eighty or so
evenings of lectures, readings, and
discussions that take place on the
Wannsee each year. As a journal of
ideas and information, we hope
that The Berlin Journal provides an
inspiring glimpse into the dynamism
of our young institution and
will motivate its readers to support
its mission.
argues that the modern
worldis better demarcated
by examining the years
1860 to 1980, a period with
more historical coherence
than the notion of the
»short century.« Page 12
Minister – Kurt Schmitt. A
remarkably frank and short
correspondence followed.
Gerald Feldman presents the
fascinating exchange, places
it in its context, and reads
between the lines. Page 17
in conversation with Henri
Cole, she shares some of
her thoughts on Mies van
der Rohe’s building and
how she conceived the
work during her year at
the Academy. Page 15
Ward Just
Preview of a novel-in-progress
he began to write in Berlin Page 26
On the Waterfront
Press reviews of our program Page 21
Sneak Preview
The Fall 2001 Fellows Page 25
The BerlinJournal
A Newsletter from the American Academy in Berlin
Published at the Hans Arnhold Center
Number Two · Summer 2001
Edited by Gary Smith
•
Managing Editors:
Teresa Go · Miranda Robbins
Contributing Editors:
Becky Gilbert · Heidi Philipsen
Illustrations: Natascha Vlahovic
Design: Hans Puttnies
Advertising: Renate Pöppel
Subscription Manager: Christian Oelze
Email: journal@americanacademy.de
Subscriptions: $15 per annum
All Rights Reserved
Contributors
to this issue
Henri Cole is Fannie Hurst Poet-in-Residence
at Brandeis University. He was a Berlin Prize
Fellow in the fall of 2000. Artist Jenny Holzer
lives and works in Hoosick, New York.
Gerald Feldman who was a Berlin Prize Fellow
in 1998, directs the Institute of European
Studies at University of California, Berkeley.
He is preparing a major study, History of the
Allianz Insurance Company.
Richard C. Holbrooke has served as USPermanent
Representative to the UN and Ambassador
to Germany. He is partner and Vice
Chairman at Perseus LLC, and Chairman of
the American Academy.
Ward Just lives alternately in Vineyard
Haven and in Paris. The political novelist
and former foreign correspondent was a
Berlin Prize Fellow in the spring of 1999.
Charles Maier is Krupp Professor of European
Studies and Director of the Center for European
Studies at Harvard University and
chairs the Academy’s Berlin Prize Committee.
The American Academy
in Berlin
Executive Director
Gary Smith
Office Manager, N.Y.
Jennifer Montemayor
External Affairs Director
Renate Pöppel
Program Director
Paul Stoop
Fellows Services Director
Marie Unger
Fellows Selection Coordinator
Teresa Go
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

AMERICAN ACADEMY
The Notebook of the Academy
Leadership in New York
The Academy Welcomes Robert H. Mundheim
hen founding President Everette Dennis left to help establish a
W new foundation, the American Academy was poised to enter its
second phase, a period of consolidation. Our new President, Robert H.
Mundheim, is impeccably qualified to help us meet the challenges ahead.
These include sharpening our academic profile through a refinement of
the prize selection process, professionalizing the entrepreneurial management,
and making the institution, which has already received major
President Robert H. Mundheim
media coverage, even more familiar
to academics, cultural leaders, and
professional decision makers.
It was Lloyd Cutler who proposed
drafting Bob Mundheim, a distinguished
attorney and financial
expert whom he had worked with
during the Carter Administration
(and unsuccessfully tried to recruit
into his law firm several times over
the years). Their closest collaboration
had been in the wake of the
Iranian hostage crisis, as part of a
team that had improbably »negotiated
the return of our Iranian hostages
on honorable and advantageous
terms in the most complex, delicate,
and exciting financial transactions
of modern times.«
An Ideal
Spiritus Rector
Mundheim had become an equally
effective Dean of the University of
Pennsylvania Law School, where he
has taught since 1965, and a much
sought after general counsel, who
after 1992 participated in the turnaround
of Solomon Brothers.
Mundheim’s career is marked
by accomplishment in the private
and public sectors as well as in the
academic world – thus making him
an ideal spiritus rector for an institution
that demands keen intellectual
sensibilities as well as the ability to
deploy the considerable corporate
and governmental experience of its
Board of Trustees.
Born in Hamburg in 1933, Robert
Mundheim’s career as an attorney
has spanned over forty years since
his graduation from Harvard Law
School in 1957. Those years included
an early stint in the Kennedy
Administration as a special counsel
to the Securities and Exchange
Administration, many years as the
University Professor of Law and
Finance at the University of Pennsylvania,
General Counsel to Treasury
Secretaries Michael Blumenthal
and William Miller in the Carter
Administration, and Co-Chairman
of the New York law firm Fried,
Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.
Currently Of Counsel at Shearman
& Sterling – a law firm with four offices
in Germany – Mundheim has
always committed a significant
amount of time to supporting nonprofit
institutions in leading roles.
At present he is President of the
Appleseed Foundation, a trustee
of the New School University, and a
director of the Salzburg Seminar.
He himself says that he has »always
felt that it is important for active
practitioners to find time to give to
public interest work.«
Academy Chairman Richard Holbrooke,
himself a negotiator of fabled
ability, stated that »there is no
question that the American Academy
in Berlin has made a coup of
major proportion by bringing a
man of Bob Mundheim’s ability
and background to help negotiate
the next phase of its existence. His
vast experience and talents will
help ensure that the American Academy
becomes the preeminent, and
certainly most effective voice in
transatlantic cultural and intellectual
affairs.«
4

American Generosity
Resounds in Berlin
Arts Patron Vilar Endows Music Fellowship Program
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
our months after delivering
a talk on philanthropy
F
and opera at the Hans Arnhold
Center, Alberto Vilar has joined the
American Academy’s Board of
Trustees and underwritten a longterm
music fellowship program.
Presenting his generous donation
of over four million dollars, Vilar
said that his »goal is to extend the
reach of the classical performing
arts and make them available to a
larger audience than ever before.
Through this gift, I hope to introduce
a new generation of outstanding
American artists to Berlin’s
musical audiences. At the same time,
I am confident that the American
musical repertoire will benefit immensely
by having some of its best
and brightest stars learn from and
exchange ideas with the luminaries
of Berlin’s musical scene.« Beginning
this fall, the Alberto Vilar
Music Fellowships will bring exceptional
American composers of classical
music, performing artists, and
experts working in music and technology
to Berlin each semester.
In addition, an annual Alberto
Vilar Distinguished Fellowship will
be awarded to a performer or composer
for a short-term residency in
Berlin to work with a major Berlin
orchestra or other musical venue.
Both programs will deepen the
Academy’s relationships with Berlin’s
major musical institutions. An
outstanding selection jury – including
Michael Kaiser of the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts, Lorin Maazel of the Bavarian
Alberto Vilar and Conductor Daniel Barenboim
in the Academy’s Library
Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tod
Machover of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Marta Casals
Istomin of the Manhattan School
of Music, and Gary Graffman of the
Curtis Institute of Music – will ensure
the program’s success.
Alberto Vilar founded Amerindo
Investment Advisors, Inc. in 1980
to manage institutional portfolios
exclusively invested in emerging
technology growth stocks. No one
would have known at that time how
auspicious this would be for the future
of classical music. Many of the
companies Amerindo significantly
invested in – Microsoft, Oracle,
Cisco, America Online, Yahoo!, and
ebay – became household names.
Continued on Page 20
MIKE MINEHAN
ichard C. Holbrooke’s
R
return as Chairman of the
American Academy in Berlin has
brought two immediate benefits.
First, Ambassador Holbrooke provides
the Academy with remarkable
visibility within the highest
echelons of the political, diplomatic,
and corporate worlds. He is,
moreover, an energetic and effective
champion, recently cementing
an agreement with the philanthropist
Alberto Vilar to ensure that
music will be a cornerstone in the
Academy's program.
Ambassador Holbrooke has had
a distinguished career in public service.
In the past decade, he has served
as the United State’s Ambassador
to Germany (1993-1994) and the
U.S. Permanent Representative to
the United Nations, a post from
which he stepped down early this
year. A cabinet member in the Clinton
administration, he played a
A Foreign Affair
Founder Richard C. Holbrooke Returns
as Academy Chairman
5
central role in shaping American
foreign policy as well as the nation’s
response to such humanitarian crises
as AIDS. As Assistant Secretary
of State for Europe (1994-1996), he
was the chief architect of the 1995
Dayton Peace Accords that ended
the war in Bosnia, later serving as
President Clinton's Special Envoy
to Bosnia and Kosovo. As a private
citizen he also served as a pro-bono
Special Envoy to Cyprus.
In the corporate world, Ambassador
Holbrooke has held senior
positions at two leading Wall Street
firms, Credit Suisse First Boston
and Lehman Brothers, in addition
to an important position at American
Express. This year Ambassador
Holbrooke has taken on several
major tasks in both the private and
public sectors.
He is building upon his Wall Street
experience in joining Perseus LLC,
the Washington-based merchant
bank founded by financier Frank
Pearl, as partner and Vice Chairman.
He also joined the board of AIG and
the advisory councils of Coca-Cola
and AOL Time Warner. Ambassador
Holbrooke continues to lead in
the fight against AIDS, an issue to
which he gave priority during his
tenure at the U.N, as the unpaid
President and CEO of the Global
Business Council on H.I.V. & AIDS.
He belongs to several major nonprofit
boards, including the National
Endowment for Democracy,
the Museum of Natural History in
New York, the International Rescue
Committee, and Refugees International,
chairing the latter two. He is
also a Counselor at the Council on
Foreign Relations, where he is preparing
a book-length study of American
diplomacy.
Ambassador Holbrooke’s visit to
the American Academy this Spring
was accompanied by a flurry of interviews
and raised a host of foreign
policy questions affecting European-
U.S. relations. Among these were
missile defense (covered in the Berliner
Zeitung and on wire services);
the torpidity of the E. U. bureaucracy
(The Financial Times); and the
implications for Europe of the new
Bush administration’s foreign policy
(Der Spiegel). In a public interview
held at Continued on Page 25

Capital Infusion
J. P. Morgan Underwrites
Financial Policy Focus in Berlin
s the American Academy
A
enters its fourth year, public
policy issues will become an increasingly
important part of its profile.
It attained a major step toward defining
this profile when it announced,
together with the global investment
bank J. P. Morgan, the establishment
of the J. P. Morgan International
Prize in Financial Policy
and Economics.
The annual prize is the first of its
kind in the realm of finance. It will
allow American economists and financial
professionals to pursue a
research project and interact with
German corporate and government
officials on significant financial policy
issues facing Germany, Europe,
and America.
While in residence at the Hans
Arnhold Center for terms ranging
from four weeks to one semester,
J. P. Morgan Fellows will lecture and
help the Academy expand its forum
for economic and financial policy
issues. Announcing the new fellowship
program at a press conference
on Wall Street in February, Academy
Chairman Richard C. Holbrooke
underscored both the Academy’s
mission of strengthening German-
American relations and the prize’s
ability to forge a much needed link
between academic knowledge and
practical relevance.
»We are very pleased that J.P.
Morgan has taken the lead in supporting
this initiative, as we feel it is
important to recognize the contribution
made by those in the field of
finance to our social and cultural
environment. By bringing such expertise
to Berlin on a regular basis,
we are underscoring the increasing
role of Germany’s capital in establishing
policy in these areas for
their nation as well as the European
Union.«
Walter Gubert, Chairman of
the J.P. Morgan Global Investment
Bank, articulated the strategic relevance
of the fellowship for the bank’s
intellectual self-understanding:
The Hans Arnhold Center hosted a symposium
which brought a team of medical experts from the
Mayo Clinic together with leading health care experts
from throughout Germany. Co-moderated
by the President of the German Science Council,
Prof. Karl Max Einhäupl, and Mayo Trustee Prof.
Rolland E. Dickson, the symposium had two ambitions:
first, to articulate the Mayo Clinic’s particular
health care opportunities for a German specialist
public, and second, to create a high-level transatlantic
dialogue in key policy areas.
During the day-long convocation, initiated and
generously made possible by the Anna-Maria and
Stephen Kellen Foundation, the visitors engaged
around seventy specialists on issues such as the division between the private and public
sector; the need for strategies of interaction between research, education, and health care;
the implications of research in aging and geriatric health; and a host of diagnostic, therapeutic,
and ethical issues raised by genomic practice.
The differences in American and German frames of reference was emphasized by Prof.
Stefan Mundlos (Humboldt University, Institute for Medical Genetics), who referred to the
lessons of Germany’s specific history, and warned of the potential stigmatization of certain
groups as they become more defined by shared genetic traits. The intense and productive
exchanges during the symposium underscored the importance of continuing to focus on
health policy questions in transatlantic dialogue.
AMERICAN ACADEMY
»Creating this prize extends our
expertise in finance from client activity
to the public and academic
realms in Germany. As a worldwide
investment bank we recognize the
effects of increased globalization
and the importance of bringing
countries in Europe and America
closer together in all aspects.«
Academy President Robert Mundheim
especially thanked Kurt Viermetz
– a founding trustee of the
American Academy who, in his
many years at J.P. Morgan, has been
the most important German in U.S.
banking – for his help in bringing
about an especially timely and promising
collaboration.
Possible projects might compare
Anglo-Saxon and continental models
on regulatory issues, for example
or investigate other areas of direct
relevance to Berlin policymaking,
including global and transatlantic
exchange rates; the convergence of
European capital markets and stock
exchanges; national and pan-European
tax and pension reform; competing
policy models for economic
restructuring; and European integration.
A distinguished panel of experts
reviews applicants for the prize.
It includes: Rüdiger Dornbusch of
the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology; Benjamin Friedman
of Harvard; Richard J. Herring, of
the University of Pennsylvania’s
Wharton School; Horst Siebert,
of the Kiel Institute of World Economics;
and Charles Maier, of
Harvard University.
Trustees On Board
Gregorian, Kornblum, Pozen, and Vilar Elected
our new board members
F
– Vartan Gregorian, John C.
Kornblum, Robert C. Pozen, and
Alberto Vilar – will strengthen the
American Academy’s Board of Trustees
and support its efforts in the
academic, foundation, business
and philanthropic communities.
Each of the new trustees has a history
of commitment to non-profit
institutions as well as considerable
leadership experience. Vartan
Gregorian, President of the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, and former
president of both the New
York Public Library and Brown
University, brings to the board his
invaluable background in cultural
and academic institutions, in addition
to an intimate knowledge of
foundations.
John C. Kornblum, a former career
foreign service officer and an
abiding supporter of the Academy
during his term as U.S. Ambassador
to Germany, will continue to
advise the Academy on public policy
and business matters from Berlin,
where he will remain as Chairman
of the investment bank Lazard
& Co. GmbH. Ambassador Kornblum
recently contributed a collection
of four hundred volumes to the
Hans Arnhold Center’s library.
Robert C. Pozen, a chief investment
executive of Fidelity Investment,
brings an experience in different
worlds that is extremely attractive
to the Academy. He taught
law at New York University, served
as associate general counsel to the
Securities & Exchange Commission,
and practiced law in Washington
before joining Fidelity Investments.
The philanthropist, music lover,
and financier Alberto Vilar, has
already made an contribution of
lasting impact to the Academy.
Vilar, founder of Amerindo Investment
Advisors, recently donated
four million dollars to establish a
long-term program for classical
music. The gift has been reported
extensively in the German press
and is eagerly looked forward to
by Berlin’s musical community.
6

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Life and Letters at the Hans Arnhold Center
Profiles in Scholarship
The Berlin Projects
of the Academy’s Springtime Fellows
The Class of Spring 2001 (from left): Ellen Hinsey, Christoph Wolff, Margaret L. Anderson,
Stephanie Snider, James Sheehan, Kathleen N. Conzen, Mark Harman, Hillary Brown, Caroline
Fohlin and Jeffrey Eugenides.
Margaret L. Anderson
After extensive work on the political
history of imperial Germany,
including the themes of Kulturkampf
and democratic institutions, historian
Margaret Lavinia Anderson of
the University of California at Berkeley
found a new theme in an unlikely
source: a historical novel by Franz
Werfel. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
(1933) fictionalizes the attempt of
the German Protestant pastor, Johannes
Lepsius, to prevent the destruction
of the Armenians during
the First World War by pleading
with Enver Pasha, the Ottoman
War Minister. Lepsius, who later
edited a forty-volume documentation
of German foreign policy, had
a long history of commitment to
the Armenian cause. While at the
Academy, Anderson drew on extensive
archives in Berlin and Halle
to document Lepsius’s efforts on
behalf of the Armenians. Her study
explores both the history of the early
human rights movement and its
entanglement with imperialism
and decolonization.
MIKE MINEHAN
7
Martin Bresnick
Composer Martin Bresnick,
whom Fanfare Magazine has called
an »eminence grise to some of the
more successful younger composers
around« and »a champion synthesizer
of disparate materials,« took a
leave from the Yale School of Music
in 1998, when he received the first
Charles Ives Living Award, a threeyear
grant from the composer’s
estate, administered by the American
Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bresnick’s Berlin residency coincided
with the release of a two-disc
set of his works, which the New York
Times described as »tough, thorny,
clear, elegant, thoughtful, and difficult
to pin down.« Bresnick’s Berlin
Prize also brought his musical »significant
other« to the Hans Arnhold
Center: Australian concert pianist
Lisa Moore, a gifted interpreter
of his composed work, who gave
several performances while at the
Academy. She also performed an
evening with poet-in-residence
Ellen Hinsey.
Hillary Brown
Architect and native New Yorker
Hillary Brown used her Bosch Public
Policy Fellowship at the American
Academy to study European environmentally
progressive building
legislation and administration. In
recent years, Germany has led Europe
in setting forward models of
sustainable development, among
them the ecological approach to
the design and construction of
buildings. A sophisticated suite of
public policies, performance standards,
and regulatory measures are
influencing the form, techniques,
and aesthetics of architecture.
Though the United States lags
significantly behind Europe in promulgating
equivalent policies,
Brown herself has fought hard to
increase awareness of them. She is a
founder of the Office of Sustainable
Design and Construction in New
York City, which works to introduce
energy- and resource-efficient features
into the city’s public facilities.
Brown brought to Berlin her fifteenyear-long
career in city government,
a decade of professional architecture
practice, and years of teaching
at the Yale and Columbia graduate
schools of architecture.
Judith Butler
Philosopher Judith Butler, a leading
theorist on gender and identity
issues, returned to Berlin this spring
as a Distinguished Senior Visitor at
the Academy. In a talk at the Hans
Arnhold Center she probed contemporary
debates on new forms of
kinship and gay marriage. She also
lectured on »intersexual allegories«
at the Freie Universität Berlin and
held a public conversation with
choreographer Sasha Waltz about
the piece »Bodies« performed at
the Schaubühne. Butler is a professor
of comparative literature at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Her most recent book, Antigone’s
Claim has just been published in
German by Suhrkamp.

Kathleen N. Conzen
In 1817, American Secretary of
State John Quincy Adams warned
potential German immigrants that
they »must cast off the European
skin, never to resume it, or be disappointed
in every expectation of
happiness as Americans.« University
of Chicago historian Kathleen
N. Conzen has dedicated her career
to examining the acculturation of
the six million Germans who arrived
in the United States before 1916.
In particular, she studies the extent
to which areas as diverse as religious
life, agrarian ideology, urban
mass culture, and political attitudes
were influenced by German culture.
Two published works, Immigrant
Milwaukee: Accomodation and
Community in a Frontier City, 1836-
1860 and Making Their Own America:
Assimilation Theory and the German
Peasant Pioneer are case studies
in the cultural cross-fertilization of
mass immigration. While at the
Hans Arnhold Center, Conzen collaborated
with Willi Paul Adams
of the Freie University’s Kennedy
Institute on a compendium of texts
documenting German-American
political debates between the American
Revolution and 1916.
Jeffrey Eugenides
When writer Jeffrey Eugenides
came to Berlin two years ago under
the auspices of the DAAD, the success
of his 1993 debut novel was
still fresh. Even J. K. Rowling, author
of the famed Harry Potter books,
revealed that »the last great book I
read was The Virgin Suicides,« one
encomia among many for a novel
that had already won distinguished
fiction awards from the Whiting
Foundation, and the American
Academy of Arts and Letters among
others. New York Times critic Michiko
Kakutani described the novel as
»by turns lyrical and portentous,
ferocious and elegiac« and called it
»a small but powerful opera in the
unexpected form of a novel.« His
stories were included in Granta’s
collection Best of Young American
Novelists and in The New Yorker’s
special issue Twenty Writers for the
21st Century. During Eugenides’
time in Berlin, the new German
capital has begun to insinuate itself
into his work, both in review essays
and short stories. His soon-to-becompleted
second novel takes the
reader far beyond the city, but the
plot’s genetic underpinnings were
time and again at the forefront of
public discussions at the Hans Arnhold
Center during his year at the
Academy.
Caroline Fohlin
That financial systems are shaped
in part by the influence of political
and legal environments and
even historical accident is a key premise
underlying the research of Cal-
Tech economist Caroline Fohlin.
Since completing her doctorate at
Berkeley in 1994, she has published
widely on the history of German
banking during industrialization.
Most recently she expanded her
research on the rise of interlocking
AMERICAN ACADEMY
directorates in imperial Germany
into a database that details relationships
in corporate governance
between German industry and
commercial banking in Germany
between 1895 and 1912. She simultaneously
pursued a broader historical
study of the implications of
financial system design.
While at the American Academy
she worked on two monographs,
New Perspectives on the Universal
Banking System in the German Industrialization
and Financial System
Design and Industrial Development:
International Patterns in Historical
Perspective.
Mark Harman
Reading great literature in translation
is an act of faith; one must
trust that the work is true both to
the author’s language and spirit.
The finesse required of the translator
is perhaps most appreciable
when two markedly different interpretations
of the same text are compared.
Translator and literary scholar
Mark Harman spent two terms
Martin Bresnick and Lisa Moore
Break in our Bösendorfer
ELLEN HINSEY
at the Academy pursuing the enigma
of Franz Kafka, an author to whom
he had already devoted considerable
attention. Harman’s translation
of The Castle was hailed by The
Boston Review as »truer to Kafka’s
imagination than the earlier version,«
and he received the first Lois
Roth Award from the Modern Language
Association in 1999 for his
translation work.
A professor of German and English
at Elizabethtown College, he
has published critical essays on
other modernists as well, James
Joyce not least among them. At the
Academy, Harman shared his
theory that a rich »autobiography«
of Kafka may be gleaned through
an attentive and critical reading of
his fiction.
Ellen Hinsey
Paris and Berlin are cities of abiding
resonance for American writers,
and to some, they serve as portals
to other destinations as well.
Paris-based poet Ellen Hinsey,
whose poems are marked by a preoccupation
with Eastern European
literature and a passion for travel
and languages, used her stay at the
Hans Arnhold Center to work on a
first novel.
Hinsey’s poems have appeared
in numerous newspapers and journals,
among them The New Yorker,
New York Times, The Paris Review,
and The Missouri Review. Her first
volume of poetry Cities of Memory
won the Yale Younger Poets Prize
in 1996. Fellow-poet James Dickey
has written admiringly: »with her
quiet and deep involvement in
other places and tongues, her truerunning
imagination, Ellen Hinsey
comes to rest in many ways and
places. Though not native-born to
these, she is at the center of them
just the same, by virtue and talent
one of the best kinds of human
being: the perceptive voyager, the
sympathetic and vivid stranger.«
Her second volume of poetry,
Vita contemplativa, is forthcoming
this fall.
8

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Christopher Kojm
It has become commonplace for
Europeans to question America’s
dominant role in international affairs.
The nation’s economic, technological
and military advantages,
not to mention its cultural influence
on adversaries and allies alike, are
impressive – and unsettling – to
many. As a Bosch Public Policy Fellow
at the Academy, Christopher
Kojm investigated European perceptions
and responses to this
American hegemony and its implications
for American policymakers.
Mr. Kojm, a former Bosch Fellow
with extensive policy experience in
Washington, currently serves as
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
for Intelligence Policy and Coordination
in the State Department’s
Bureau of Intelligence & Research.
Kojm’s study is especially timely
given the recent change of administrations,
which has dramatically
effected the European view of American
power and altered its perception
of the degree to which the
European Union and European
governments influence American
foreign policy.
Colette Mazzucelli
Philosophers, writers, and policy
makers have debated the geopolitical
potential of cyberspace almost
since the term was first coined by
William Gibson in 1984. Bosch
Public Policy Fellow Colette Mazzucelli
draws on this debate and
applies it to a strategic area of government
interest in her project
Educational Diplomacy via the Internet:
Defining the American Interest
within a Transatlantic Policy Dialogue
on Kosovo.
Mazzucelli holds a doctorate
in comparative government from
Georgetown and serves as Co-President
of the Robert Bosch Alumni
Association. Her seminar at the
Hans Arnhold Center provided a
glimpse into how state-of-the-art
technologies such as video conferencing
and internet streaming
OBrother,WhereArtThou
Sander L. Gilman in Search of Jurek Becker
The life of Jurek Becker spanned six decades of sweeping political changes
in his homeland and in Germany. Born in Lódz, Poland in 1937, Becker
witnessed major events of the twentieth century; among the defining phases
in his life were his childhood in the Lódz ghetto, the concentration camp at
Ravensbrück, life in post-war East Berlin, and West-German exile.
By the time of his death in 1997, Jurek Becker had authored numerous
novels and screenplays, including his best-known work, Jacob the Liar, published
in 1968 and acclaimed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Becker was
a friend of Berlin Prize Fellow Sander Gilman, who spent his year at the
Hans Arnhold Center preparing a biography of him. Gilman’s investigation
adds a personal dimension to his scholarly work.
The cultural and literary historian Sander Gilman is himself a prolific
writer, to date the author or editor of over sixty books. His most recent monograph,
Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery was
published by Princeton University Press in 1999.
For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties
at Cornell University and for six years of the faculty of the University
of Chicago. Since Fall 2000 he has been Distinguished Professor of the Liberal
Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Director
of its Humanities Lab, a new type of structure that will further collaborative
research and training in the humanities.
Fiona MacCarthy characterized Making the Body Beautiful in the New York
Review of Books as »a strange, macabre and often richly comic story of shifting
desires. His book shows a dazzling European erudition.« The breadth
of Gilman’s knowledge was not lost on his colleagues at the Hans Arnhold
Center, who nicknamed him »The Internet« because of his uncanny ability
to answer questions intelligently on any subject. The biography of Becker is
due to appear next fall.
9
MATTHEW GILSON
enable colleagues in cities from
New York to and Pristina to confer
on breaking crises, specifically the
recent escalation in Macedonia.
Adam Posen
Adam Posen, Senior Fellow at the
Institute for International Economics
in Washington (IIE), has been
involved in the study of the German
economy since working at the
Bundesbank and Deutsche Bank as
a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow
in 1992. This year, as a Bosch Public
Policy Fellow at the Academy, he
completed an investigation of Germany’s
persistently high rate of unemployment
and the degree to
which this problem has influenced
German international economic
policies. Before joining the IIE, Posen
spent three years at the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York, analyzing
German economic developments
for Federal Reserve Board
members and top management
there.Mostrecently,hehasauthored
Restoring Japan’s Economic Growth
and co-authored Inflation Targeting:
Lessons from the International
Experience. Another work, Disciplined
Discretion: Monetary Targeting
in Germany and Switzerland (coauthored),
is the most widely-cited
study in English of German economic
policy and has been excerpted
in Bundesbank publications. The
monograph resulting from his stay
at the Hans Arnhold Center, Germany
in the World Economy after
EMU, will be presented this fall at
the Academy.
James Sheehan
Distinguished Stanford historian
and DaimlerChrysler Fellow James
Sheehan has already turned two
previous fellowship years in Germany
into major works: German
History 1770-1866 (supported by
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)
and Museums in the Modern Art
World: From the End of the Old Regime
to the Rise of Modernism (Humboldt
Prize). Continued on page 24

AMERICAN ACADEMY
Mission Possible
Peacekeeping and the United Nations
By Richard C. Holbrooke
Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, returning in
May 2000 from a UN tour of Africa – including the
Congo, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia – stopped by
Germany to make the case for humanitarian intervention.
Indeed, it is among the most urgent issues
in foreign policy today and will become a public
policy focus in future programs at the Academy.
O
ne of the new issues that will bind
our countries together is our mutual
interest in peacekeeping. Peacekeeping,
especially UN peacekeeping, is being challenged
today in a fundamental way.
I arrived here directly from Asmara, Eritrea
and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia after an intense,
grueling eight-day, eight-nation UN Security
Council Mission to seven African states. Our main
objective on the mission originally was to assess
the prospects for deploying UN peacekeepers in
the Congo, but it was framed by two other crises
– in Sierra Leone and the Horn of Africa. I will
assert that what happens in this part of the world
cannot be ignored by Americans or by Europeans
and that a little bit of effort early is a lot better
than a lot of effort later.
Many say that while such crises are terrible,
there is nothing we can or should do about them.
But I believe that on every level – political, humanitarian,
strategic, financial, moral – we cannot
turn away. Financially the cost of the consequences
of a war – famine, the need for refugee
relief and reconstruction, and the grave threat
of spreading disease – is much greater than the
cost of trying to prevent it. From a moral and
humanitarian point of view, we cannot turn
away. From a political point of view, we can
make a difference if we engage.
The UN is many things, but it was conceived
in the ashes of the war that destroyed Europe to
be primarily and centrally a conflict prevention
and conflict resolution organization. This is still
the core responsibility of the UN. The stakes are
very high in Sierra Leone and the Congo and Kosovo
and East Timor. How the UN and the world
community respond to the situations there will
have huge ramifications for peacekeeping
throughout the world and determine whether
whether the world looks to the UN at all to do
peacekeeping. There has been extensive criticism
of the UN effort in Sierra Leone. Both policy
makers and the press are asking tough questions
about whether the UN was prepared for the crisis.
Sierra Leone, like Bosnia before it, is an example
of what happens when the parties to a peace
settlement violate that settlement, wreaking
havoc on everyone – peacekeepers and civilians
alike.
The question is even more fundamental: what
is the future of UN peacekeeping? The world has
a choice in Sierra Leone. And, what happens
there will also affect the UN’s approach to the
Congo, although I believe that decisions on the
Congo should be made independent of, while at
the same time drawing lessons from, the crisis in
The longer the United
Nations fails to live up to its
potential, the longer the
innocents will suffer, the
greater the danger that we
will be sucked in later
Sierra Leone. I want to be clear on another point:
Sierra Leone, the Congo, or Ethopia/Eritrea, appalling
as they are, cannot be viewed as a metaphor
for all of Africa. Despite these legitimately
well-publicized disasters in Africa, there are
plenty of success stories, for example ECOWAS
in the West African states, and the South African
Development Council in Southern Africa.
All of this – the good, the bad, the ugly –
needs to be drawn on in the difficult coming days
and weeks of policy making for the international
community. This a continent which, from a distance,
seems to be aflame from across its entire
breadth but, in fact, is dealing with separable,
discreet, and identifiable crises.
We specifically need to address the Congo,
where history – from King Leopold's ghost to
10
Mobutu’s legacy – hangs heavy over the country.
Perhaps no African state has had more difficulty
in overcoming its past. Last year, under
the leadership of President Chiluba of Zambia,
eight nations came together in his capital, Lusaka,
to sign the Lusaka Peace Accords. It is a good
agreement, an African solution to an African
problem. The UN has committed itself to supporting
it, and part of that commitment will involve
peacekeeping troops.
I certainly do not disagree that UN peacekeeping
has fundamental problems. In Sierra
Leone the UN deployed a force that was too inexperienced
and insufficiently capable. Deployments
were very slow. This troubles me greatly
in regard to the Congo, where both President
Museveni of Uganda and President Kagame of
Rwanda have urgently called for UN troops to
take over Kisangani.
I remain committed to trying to make UN peacekeeping
effective, which if done right, is vital.
It can be successful. We have many examples:
Cyprus today, still divided and beginning the
process of accession to the EU, would not be the
peaceful (but tense) island it is today were it not
for UN forces. The UN peacekeepers played indispensable
roles in bringing stability, independence,
and progress to other areas like Eastern
Slovenia and Croatia. They played critical roles
in Namibia, Macedonia, Mozambique, and I
commend them highly for the work they are
doing in East Timor.
The UN is certainly not going to be the answer
to every crisis. Sometimes as in Bosnia, the bulk
of the forces are not UN. The initial deployment
in East Timor, for example, was not a UN peacekeeping
deployment. Although authorized by
the UN, it was a regular military force led by a
very powerful Australian contingent, backed up
by British, French, American, Philippine and
Korean troops. When they had things under
control, they transitioned from a multinational
force to a UN force. Some of the same troops
stayed and put on blue berets.
The UN and regional leaders should and must
work hand in glove. Sometimes regional organizations
should take the lead with UN support,

as in East Timor. In other cases, the UN should
lead with regional support. Among the world's
regional organizations, there is no doubt about
which one is the most powerful and the most
effective. It is NATO. The Atlantic Alliance remains
indispensable to stability.
The question for us is not whether or not that
Alliance is strained. It is not. It is a strong organization
and the strongest strategic relationship
in the world. It has survived every challenge of
the Cold War and made a transition to a post-
Cold-War context, adding three new members
and taking on incredibly difficult responsibilities
in Bosnia and Kosovo. There are many crises
in the world. The Atlantic Alliance is not one of
them. On the contrary, Bosnia is one of the great
success stories of international peacemaking
and peacekeeping. The United States, Germany,
France, and the United Kingdom – and
even Russia in the Contact Group, in the Dayton
negotiations, and in the subsequent period –
have kept the peace for five years with no casualties.
Much more slowly than we want but unmistakably,
the country is beginning to knit together.
Germany has, as a result of that effort,
been able to see a sharp reduction in the number
of refugees from the Balkans, so the benefits far
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
outweigh the costs so generously undertaken.
Kosovo, of course, is a much more difficult situation,
but it is much earlier in the process, and a
similar commitment by all the countries involved
is essential for it to succeed. Peace in Kosovo
is far from assured at this point as an enduring
outcome. But, if the United States, Germany,
and our NATO Allies make the commitment,
I am sure that we will be able to persevere.
Africa is not part of the NATO area of responsibility.
Africa is more difficult. It is far away.
Its logistics are harder. The Congo, for example,
is about two-hundred times the size of Kosovo,
and there are no roads. The rivers have silted up,
and there are few communications. No amount
of external United Nations or international forces
can ever bring peace to the Congo. It has to
be the parties themselves, assisted by the international
community. No one is arguing that a
Bosnia/Kosovo-type operation would be desirable
or possible in the Congo. Nonetheless, we
cannot turn away from it. In order to make it
work, the UN Secretariat is going to have to do a
better job.
We will propose to the UN far-ranging reforms
for the way its peacekeeping office is financed,
structured, and administered. Absent the
reform, UN peacekeeping will be on a collision
course. But reform, if carried out, should be
able to deal with the simple fact that demand for
peacekeeping is far outpacing the UN's capacity.
Reform cannot wait. The talk about peacekeeping
reform brings to mind Bismarck’s
famous observation that conquering armies –
or rebel groups for that matter – will not be halted
by the power of eloquence. Words are important
and have meaning, but the time is here
for action.
We should remember that peacekeeping in its
core, whether it is in Bosnia or Kosovo or Cyprus
or East Timor or Africa, is about more than
maintaining the credibility of the great powers.
It is about protecting innocents from suffering.
It is about providing people with the opportunity
to reach reconciliation and rebuild their
lives. It is about people.
The longer the United Nations fails to live
up to its potential, the longer we allow peacekeeping
shortcomings to go unfixed, the longer
the innocents will suffer, the greater the danger
that we will be sucked in later – in a more costly
way. I hope we will not turn away from the
daunting tasks ahead of us at this particularly
challenging moment.

AMERICAN ACADEMY
NATASCHA VLAHOVIC
H
How Long was the Twentieth Century?
ow will historians deal with the century that has
just concluded? What narratives or interpretations will they
construct to make sense of the last hundred years? Will the twentieth
century cohere as a historical epoch? Twentieth-century history as
such, I believe, will serve as a framework for what I call moral narratives
but not as a chronological framework for thinking about politics and society.
The problems it presents do not arise just because of ragged beginning
and end points, such that 1914 and 1989 seem to open and close the political
story, at least of Western history. Nor is the difficulty
a result of the fact that internal caesuras, such
as the defeat of fascism and the end of the world wars,
might be viewed as so deeply dividing the Western
narrative, at least, that the 1900s as a whole retain
little»structural« unity. Rather, to focus on the twentieth
century as such obscures the most encompassing
Modern Times began around 1860 and fell apart in the late 1960’s
By Charles S. Maier
Charles S. Maier, Krupp Foundation Professor
of European Studies and Director of the Center for
European Studies at Harvard University, chairs the
Berlin Prize committee of the American Academy in
Berlin, where he delivered this paper in a seminar.
12
or fundamental sociopolitical trends of modern world development,
these have followed a different trajectory through time, providing the territorially
anchored structures for politics and economics that were taken
for granted between 1860 and 1980, but have since begun to decompose.
To focus on the twentieth century as a historical era obscures important
developmental patterns that are better understood as products of a
chronological period that began deep in the nineteenth century and then
effectively concluded two to three decades before the century formally
ended. As an argument about periodization, the
thesis thus proposes that a cluster of developments
I label territorialization and deterritorialization
claim a degree of significance usually taken for
granted. But, the twentieth century will not disappear
as a historical reference point. Historians
of the physical sciences, of music, of painting and

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
a resource for governance; third co-opted the
new leaders of finance and industry, science
and professional attainment into a ruling cartel
alongside the still powerful but no longer supreme
representatives of the landed elite; and finally,
they developed an industrial infrastructure
based on the technologies of coal and iron as
applied to long-distance transportation of goods
and people, and the mass output of industrial
products assembled by a factory labor force.
Indeed, it was probably this technological tranarchitecture
certainly use the label 20th-Century
– validly so, given the fundamental innovations
in all these fields between about 1905 and 1910.
Perhaps most indelibly, the twentieth century
has become synonomous with the narratives of
moral atrocity that continue to transfix intellectuals
and the public alike. For western intellectuals
the twentieth century does not refer primarily
to a chronological unit. Rather it constitutes
a sort of moral epoch, a passage of time
fundamentally characterized by war and viollence,
i.e. by political killing, or, as Isaiah Berlin
summarized it, as »the worst century there has
ever been.«
How Long Was
the Nineteenth Century?
This essay takes up, however, not the moral
narrative of the twentieth century but the more
structural theme of territoriality, which spills
across the century’s chronological limits. When
cited by historians, centuries are like Procrustes’
famous bed: the Greek innkeeper either
stretched his guests if they were too short or
chopped them down if they were too long for
the sleeping accommodations that were offered.
By and large, historians of the West have
stretched the 1800s into the »long nineteenth
century,«extending it until WorldWar I.
Europeanists, at least, have conceived of it as
the century marked by industrial development,
the triumph of the modern nation state, the advent
of mass democracy, the partition of much
of what would later come to be called the Third
World, and finally by a superb confidence in economic
and moral progress. As a pendant to this
»long nineteenth century,« finally terminated
by World War I, Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of a
»short twentieth century« offers the advantage
of accommodating the long nineteenth although
it stops a decade ago in 1989. But European narratives
serve less well the chronologies of African
and Asian histories, whose caesuras have to do
either with the impact of the West or indigenous
developments that followed diverse rhythms.
The twentieth century as such is not very useful,
in fact, for understanding world historical
development. I would propose instead that a
coherent epoch of world development began in
the sixth and seventh decades of the last century
– say for the sake of simplicity around 1860 –
and that its technological, cultural, and sociopolitical
scaffolding began to corrode and fall
apart in the late l960s, initiating a process of
profound transformation in which we are still
caught up.
In a work that has fallen into undeserved oblivion,
the historian Robert Binkley took account
of this global transition sixty-five years ago in
Realism and Nationalism, 1852-1871. Here he
pointed out that political territories or national
units had undergone a great crisis of confederal
organization, abandoning – in a process of widespread
civil wars – their traditional decentralized
structures of politics for more administratively
and territorially cohesive regimes. In the United
States of the Civil War era; in Meiji Japan; in the
German Confederation and the states of Italy; in
the emerging halves of the Habsburg empire; in
the British organization of India; in Canada,
Mexico, Thailand, and later in the Ottoman empire;
national societies were reforged in a rapid
and often violent transformation; which first
strengthened central government institutions
at the expense of regional or confederal authority;
second required that internal as well as external
military capacity be continually mobilized as
13
NATASCHA VLAHOVIC
sition that was responsible for the simultaneity
of such geographically dispersed changes.
What historians and political scientists have
tended to take for granted until recently was
that, common to all these national reorganizations,
was an enhanced concept of territory as
a source of national energy and power, administrative
cohesion and economic resource. Not
that historians have not dealt with frontiers,but
they have done so primarily for the Roman Empire
or in the context of the post-Westphalian,
seventeenth-century state system, which secured
the principle of sovereignty and renewed the
preoccupation with fortified frontiers that had
marked antiquity.
Western statesmen and publics of the late
nineteenth century believed that they must
reinforce the frontiers anew. And not only geographical
frontiers. Social and class upheaval at
home as well as renewed international competition,
compelled a renewed fixation on social
enclosures of all sorts: boundaries that separated
nation from nation, church from state, public
from private, household from work, alleged
male from reputed female roles.
Modernity
Came Through Energy
But what further characterized mid-nineteenth
century development was that, even as a
new class of political leaders believed they must
reestablish frontiers anew, they also emphasized
that national power and efficiency rested on the
saturation of space inside the frontier. The major
concept was that of »energy.« National space
was to be charged with »energy«, with prefectural
presence, new railroads and infrastructure,
mass-circulation newspapers, telegraphic communication
and the possibilities of electrical
power in general. The metaphors of contemporary
physics provided a conceptual analogue. By
the 1870s James Clerk Maxwell’s equations related
electrical and magnetic fields and assigned
every point in space a quantity of energy that
emanated from the center. Territories, too, had
a center: the national capital from which political
and economic energy radiated outward. (In contrast,
today’s metropolises are wired to each other,
not their national hinterland, and conceived as
suspendedinaworldnetworkofcapitalandlabor.)
What were the resources of territoriality?
First, quite simply, extent. Indeed, by the end
of the century, territorial ambitions were extended
to overseas empires, and geopolitical theorists
divided over whether maritime or landed

AMERICAN ACADEMY
extension offered more power. Population was
obviously a resource and so, too, was economic
development.
I cite these developments because they
proved fundamental to the collective organization
of economics resources and political power
for over a century – not the twentieth century,
but rather the hundred or so years extending
from the 1860s to the 1970s.
The era of economic nationalism and protective
tariffs starting in the l870s; the subsequent
drive to annex overseas territory; the formation of
long-term alliances during peace time, and the
ratcheting up of the arms race that preceded the
First World War; the ideological polarization
between a Marxist Left and a militarist Right,
thereafter between communism and fascism,
and finally between Soviet power and its Atlantic
alliance. These were the stages of historical development
within this long era of territoriality.
Identity Space and Decision Space
Are No Longer Identical
It is true that the Marxist Left sought to challenge
the premises of territoriality and appeal
to a revolutionary internationalism. Eventually,
however, Communists achieved power only by
accepting the premises of territorial power and
development and building socialism within
individual countries or by virtue of a new sort
of imperial organization. Social Democrats
emerged from their inter-war defeats convinced
that the nation-state offered an appropriate fulcrum
for democratic emancipation. They benefited
from the fact that, by the 1940s, representatives
of the industrial working class were co-opted
into the power-sharing arrangements from
which they had been largely excluded before.
Common to all the changes that took place
from the 1860s on, up through and beyond the
admittedly important critical divides of 19l4
and 1945, however, remained perhaps the fundamental
premise of collective life, namely that
what we can term »identity space« was coterminous
with »decision space«; that is, that the
territories to which ordinary men and women
tended to ascribe their most meaningful public
loyalties (indeed thus superseding competing
supranational religious or social class affiliations)
also provided the locus of resources for assuring
their physical and economic security. This once
familiar congruence no longer exists. Identity
space and decision space are no longer seen as
identical. Territoriality no longer suffices as a
decisive resource; it is a problematic basis for
collective political security and increasingly
irrelevant to economic activity. Of course there
are fierce exceptions where ethnic groups insist
on hegemony. But renunciation of the Golan is
probably more the sign of the times than claims
for Kosovo.
When and why did the territorial imperative
loosen its grip? The coordinates of political and
economic coordination created in the l860s
began to dissolve in the l970s, a process that
social scientists endeavored to grasp then as
»interdependence,« and more recently as »globalization.«
The processes that undermined the
earlier epoch of territoriality were marked by
a succession of world-wide crises beginning in
the late l960s: the United States’ involvement
in the Vietnam war and the protests it unleashed;
the American unwillingness to continue
upholding the international monetary regime;
the emergence of new economic contenders
whether through industrialization or the exploitation
of their hold on world oil supplies; the
breakdown of relatively easy collaborative industrial
relations in Europe and the Americas; and
shortly thereafter, the emergence of militant
social movements among students, women
and anti-nuclear protesters; and finally by the
collapse of state socialism and planned economies
during the 1980s, systems even more vulnerable
to the seismic changes underway than the
market economies that enjoyed a renewed vigor
on a post-territorial and post-Fordist basis.
14
NATASCHA VLAHOVIC
Indeed, the collapse of communist regimes
in 1989-90 and the end of the Cold War rivalry
can be seen as the most spectacular political
consequence of the weakening of territorial
politics. It had been the state socialist regimes,
after all, that were most committed to controlling
politics, economics and ideology on the
basis of territory and frontiers (most tangibly
in East Germany), and also most heavily invested
in the aging processes of heavy industry that
had characterized the territorial era.
For just as a qualitative change of technological
possibilities for mastering space and its extension
had facilitated the political transformations
of the century after 1860, so the very technological
transformations of the last thirty years have
tended to make physical space a less relevant
resource. The age of coal and iron, and then, too,
of hydrocarbon chemistry, of oil and electricity,
of aluminum and copper as well as steel – all
still epitomized even in the l950s and l960s –
was overlaid in fact, and in the public imagination
– by the technologies of semiconductors,
computers, and data transmission – with a
new accepted basis for creating private wealth.
The concept of hierarchically organized Fordist
production (based on a national territory) was
supplanted by the imagery, if not always the
reality, of globally co-ordinated networks of information,
mobile capital, and migratory labor.
Our Fin-de-siecle
came sometime after 1968
The political result has been to transform
the major political division of our times. This
separates those who envisage their future prospects
based on non-territorial markets or
exchange of ideas, and those who insist that territoriality
can be reinvigorated as the basis for
economic and political security – whether on
the basis of provincial regionalism, or supranational
organization, or by harsher measures of
ethnic homogeneity or territorially and religiously
based politics. As is so often the case in
history, the outlines of an earlier epoch become
visible only as they dissolve: the famous owl of
Minerva takes wing at dusk.
My claim is that the fundamental transitions
historians associate with modern history were
based on the consolidation – and then the ending
or at least a profound crisis – of territoriality.
The century familiar to those of us who are at
least middle aged began shortly after the midl800s
and began to decompose, I believe, a generation
ago. Sometime between l968 and the end
of the l980s, we lived through our own fin de siècle.

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
MIKE MINEHAN
Flesh Against Steel
The Art of Inscribing Maxims in Mies van der Rohe’s Museum without Walls
A Conversation between Henri Cole and Jenny Holzer
As Berlin Prize Fellows in Spring 2001, artist
Jenny Holzer and poet Henri Cole had many
late-night conversations in the library of the
Hans Arnhold Center. The following is an excerpt
of a public conversation held in February.
Their main subject is Holzer’s site-specific
installation in Mies van der Rohe’s Neue
Nationalgalerie, a work consisting of amberlighted
digital text. Holzer was the first Philip
Morris Distinguished Artist at the Academy.
Cole contributed an essay to the forthcoming
catalogue of the show.
Henri Cole: When you undertook the installation
at the Neue Nationalgalerie – a project so large in
scale, cost, and logistical complexity – what was the
most you hoped for?
Jenny Holzer: I began because I wanted to see
the artwork. I was afraid of the project immediately
because the building was perfect, utterly
self-sufficient, and didn’t seem to need me at all.
After many site visits, I was able to imagine the
installation, and I persevered because I wanted
to know if I was accurate in my imaginings.
I never have a chance to practice my installations,
and as a result I don’t see my works until they’re
done. I am happy that the building was generous
with me.
Did you start by writing a text or think in terms of
space?
In Berlin, I saw the space first. I could tell that
the building would be fine once the museum
was cleared of temporary walls. After a month
of visits, I thought I could do something with the
ceiling because – slow student that I am – I’d
finally realized that the roof dominates. When I
recognized the roof, I thought this was the place
where I could join the architect. This was the
15
place he was strongest, the place I could salute
him and not be killed. So, I understood something
of the space, and then spent much time
avoiding the new text. You helped me complete
the writing finally. The text was done about five
days before it had to go up.
Are you more comfortable visualizing space
than writing?
I can see space; I barely can write.
Since you are not a painter or a sculptor in any
traditional sense, it’s hard for me to picture you
working in a studio. How did you work in Berlin?
I was delighted by the invitation to work at the
Neue Nationalgalerie, but the pleasure was followed
by fear and much walking around the
building. Most mornings I would try to write in
the peace of the Academy. At my New York farm

I practice my habit, which is the addiction to office
work. I answer e-mails, put paper in the fax,
bother my good staff, organize, find materials,
anything other than write. This habit can be useful
because my projects require much management.
Eventually I return to writing. In Berlin,
I went to the museum at least thirty times early
on. Later I could revisit the space by closing my
eyes. Strangely enough, I can see in 3-D. I’d go
somewhere quiet, shut my eyes, patrol the museum
again and check my notions. For this project,
I lost my nerve and resorted to computer graphics
in case I was dead wrong.
Did the computer graphics accurately reproduce the
image in your head?
The computer graphics were so good that I was
anxious that they would be superior to the exhibition.
Eventually I thought the installation was
better because it changes itself and its environment,
it moves and the movement can be liquid.
At times, the installation is quite rigorous, logical
and linear, and at other moments it is a lazy river
with eddies, and this wasn’t entirely possible in
the computer.
AMERICAN ACADEMY
Do you want your texts to make a stronger claim on
the viewer than the physical presence of your installations?
Or to put it another way, should the viewer
be reading or looking first?
Sometimes reading can be all-important, and
here in Berlin, I would have guessed that the text
would be co-equal with the formal and the material
parts of the installation, but I am not certain it
is. It is embarrassing for me to talk about my
own work, so I squirm now, but in the museum,
it felt as if something was passing over the skin or
acting on the whole body, more than an act of
plain reading. So the text was necessary but
perhaps subordinate.
When I am teaching poetry, I always hope my students
will respond to the formal body of a poem, by considering
its music, its arrangement on the page and the
drama of language, before they reduce it to theme
and content. It seems to me a museumgoer can respond
similarly when viewing your installations.
Because I don’t have great facility with language,
I need to have part of the meaning and the experience
come from the space, from the motion and
the color, as well as the words.
I have two questions in connection with the text,
»OH,« presented in the Nationalgalerie. Firstly,
was it intentional to have a warm, personal text
about motherhood to contrast with Mies van der
Rohe’s cool, steel and glass structure? And secondly,
did you hesitate at all to use such extremely personal
material in a large public piece?
I barely had started »OH« when I came to Berlin,
and wasn’t certain what to do with it, but after I
decided to work on that ceiling, it made sense to
show this text and others that treat flesh against
the steel. I wanted writing about people on the
black metal. Even though the new text isn’t purely
autobiographical, there’s enough of myself that I
thought somewhere between twice and a thousand
times about even finishing the writing, much
less displaying it.
Do you feel this text is different from others? I heard
someone say at the opening that it was more »written,«
as opposed to »spoken.« Is this true?
It probably is. A lot of my other texts were, well,
blurted rather than written. I used to sit at the
Academy and imagine you working for hours at
your desk in your room, and I thought this the
most frightening thing in the world: to be alone
in a room trying to write. I wondered what would
happen if I attempted that instead of practising
one of my avoidance activities. Maybe it’s not
good when someone who is not a writer spends
more time writing.
When Jenny Holzer received the Academy’s
first Philip Morris Distinguished
Artist fellowship in the fall of 2000, she intended
to use Berlin as a geocultural vantage
point for already-commissioned current
work. She soon found inspiration in
Berlin itself, however, specifically in the
architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s
Neue Nationalgalerie.
Last February’s dramatic installation inscribed
the ceiling with thirteen beams of
moving electronic texts. At night, it illuminated
a previously dark corner of Berlin’s
Kulturforum. The ocher letters of her
text, »OH,« shone from Mies’ glass building
and seemed to run into the sky, and
Holzer’s text – always at the forefront of
her art – competed with the sheer beauty
of illuminating the architectural masterpiece.
During the exhibition’s opening
week, Holzer also projected texts on
Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie as well as
on a number of important new Berlin
buildings by Renzo Piano, Axel Schultes,
and Daniel Libeskind.
A great success, the installation was
bought by the Friends of the Neue Nationalgalerie
and will return to Berlin in January
2002. At that time a catalogue documenting
the work will be published by Dumont
and The American Academy. The book is
supported by Philip Morris Kunstförderung,
which also helped underwrite the
exhibition.
ATTILIO MARANZANO
You’ve said that your preferred themes are sex,
death and war. Would you add anything to that list
today?
I don’t know whether those three are the preferred
themes, but they come back time and again.
This is embarrassing to say in public, but I believe
I’m also sneaking up on love. That gives me pause.
Did you intend for there to be a dialogue between
your works at the Neue Nationalgalerie and the
Reichstag?
At the Reichstag, I was given the politicians’ entrance,
but I couldn’t imagine what to show parliamentarians
going to work. I reviewed my writing
and also considered composing something
new, but then said no. Eventually I thought to present
many speeches delivered since the first discussions
of whether to construct the Reichstag,
all the way through Bonn debates about whether
it would be right to return to the building. Once I
had that concept, I made a long, thin electronic
column with text on four sides. One side faces
out so that anyone walking by can see speech. The
Reichstag piece is different from the work for the
Nationalgalerie. Continued on page 23
16

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
T
Two German Businessmen
he National Socialist regime was not only criminal
but also revolutionary. One of its revolutionary »achievements«
was to destroy a bourgeois big business culture and order
which, however badly shaken by Germany’s dismal history between 1914
and 1933, was nevertheless still intact when the National Socialists came
to power. Berlin was surely its most important center, and here Jewish
bankers and bankers of Jewish origin played a distinguished and respected
role as business leaders and men of affairs.
One such banker was Hans Arnhold (1888-1966), the fourth of the five
children born to Georg (1859-1926) and Anna (1860-1917) Arnhold. The
banking house Gebr. Arnhold was formed in Dresden in 1864 by Ludwig
Philippson and Max Arnhold. The firm prospered as the leading private
bank in Saxony, opened a branch office in Berlin in
1907 and eventually as Gebr. Arnhold Dresden–
Berlin became one of the largest five private German
banks. While Max Arnhold had no children, the
four sons of his nephew Georg Arnhold – Adolf
(1884-1950),Heinrich(1885-1935),Kurt(1887-
1951) and Hans (1888-1966) – joined the firm as
The Postwar Correspondence of Hans Arnhold and Kurt Schmitt
By Gerald D. Feldman
Gerald D. Feldman, who was a Berlin
Fellow in 1998, directs the Institute of European
Studies at University of California, Berkeley.
He is preparing a major study, History
of the Allianz Insurance Company.
17
partners. Hans, the youngest brother, took over the increasingly important
Berlin office, after receiving his training as a banker, both in Hamburg and
the US. It was in the 1920s that Hans Arnhold built the Wannsee villa which
now houses the American Academy in Berlin.
Thanks to its solid and skillful management, Gebr. Arnhold weathered
the great inflation of the postwar years and kept its doors open in the banking
crisis of 1931. Indeed, Gebr. Arnhold expanded by entering into an
community of interest (Interessengemeinschaft) with the banking house
of S. Bleichröder, rescuing it in the process. Not surprisingly, Hans Arnhold
was a trusted figure, active in the big business and high politics of
Germany’s capital city. He was involved in important transactions, for
example, for the Allianz Insurance Co. and collaborated with its General
Director, Kurt Schmitt. He also had the confidence
of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who asked him
in 1931, in the midst of the great economic and
political crisis, to approach Kurt Schmitt about
Hans Arnhold with wife Ludmilla and daughters Ellen
Maria and Anna-Maria in the 1920s at the entrance to
his Wannsee villa, today The Hans Arnhold Center.

taking over the position of Finance Minister.
Schmitt declined the invitation, but the role assigned
to Hans Arnhold is some measure of his
high status.
All this ceased to matter after 1933. To be sure,
Kurt Schmitt, who served as Reich Economics
Minister from June 1933 until the summer of
1934, believed he had secured Hitler’s agreement
to the principle »there is no Jewish question in
the economy,« but found that the Party was not
willing to respect such principles. Reichsbank
President Hjalmar Schacht replaced Schmitt
after the latter became ill,serving until 1937. He
too opposed anti-Jewish measures in the economy
on the grounds that they would hurt the recovery
at home and Germany’s economic relations
abroad.
Forced Departures
and Fellow Travellers
Nevertheless, the forces working to expel the
Jews from the economy were hard at work from
the beginning. In January 1934 the Saxon Nazi
Leader, Gauleiter Mutschmann, who felt a particular
hatred toward the Arnholds because he
had been denied credit in earlier years in view of
his questionable reputation, used trumped-up
charges to indict Adolf and Dr. Heinrich Arnhold
of fraud and bribery. It was made clear to the
Arnholds that if they did not abandon their
Saxon business, Mutschmann would spare no
effort to force them to leave. Heinrich Arnhold
died as a consequence of this persecution. Both
the lower and higher courts exonerated the brothers
in every respect. By the end of 1935, Gebr.
Arnhold was driven from Saxony by the regional
Nazi leadership, and the Dresden based
business was sold to the Dresdner Bank.
Unhappily, however, the family still thought
it had a future in Germany and chose to concentrate
its efforts in Berlin. By 1937, Kurt Arnhold
was the only brother still active in running the
remaining firm in Berlin. By 1938, it became
apparent that to maintain a normal business
was impossible. He was forced to sell the assets
of the Banks to the Dresdner Bank and finally
fled as the last member of the family at the end
of November of 1938 across the border to Holland.
Hans Arnhold had already left Germany
for France in 1933 and escaped to the United
States after the outbreak of the war, where he
continued the tradition of the family by building
up the Investment Banking firm Arnhold
and S. Bleichroeder, Inc. His house on the Wannsee
was taken over by Schacht’s spineless successor,
Walther Funk.
AMERICAN ACADEMY
Kurt Schmitt’s fate was a very different one
from that of Hans Arnhold. His brief career in
government was not a happy one. While not free
of anti-Semitic sentiments when it came to Jewish
journalists and lawyers, he found the anti-Semitic
measures of the government distasteful and
increasingly dangerous and felt a strong bond
with some of his Jewish colleagues, especially
the banker Otto Jeidels of the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft,
who fled to America and later became
a Vice-President of the Bank of America.
Also, he seems to have worried that the regime
was driving Germany toward war, a policy he
viewed as mistaken, despite his nationalist sentiments,
his honorary appointment as an SS Brigadeführer
and an odd enthusiasm for wearing
the uniform on certain official occasions.
Whatever the case, the American Ambassador
WilliamE.DoddreportedfavorablyonSchmitt’s
views in his published diaries. Moreover, Schmitt
seems to have been happy to have the excuse of
his bad health to leave public office and return
to the world of business in 1935. He became the
General Director of the Munich Reinsurance Co.
(Münchener Rückversicherungsgesellschaft),
which was closely connected with Allianz and
which he managed with great energy until the
end of the war.
A complicated personality, Schmitt continued
to have contact with Hitler and other powerful
figures in the regime, but also tried to gain the
release of Pastor Martin Niemöller and took care
of his son. While pursuing the business interests
and expansion of his company throughout the
war he also became increasingly disaffected with
the regime, feelings undoubtedly promoted by
the loss of his two sons. His very mixed record
made him a particularly difficult denazification
case. He was brought before a variety of tribunals
between 1945 and 1948, and he finally ended up
among the »lesser-implicated«. His desire to
collect testimonials was undoubtedly an important
motive in his decision to write to Hans Arnhold
on January 22, 1948 in a letter demonstrating
a peculiar mixture of obligatory sensitivity
to the delicacy of the situation along with
irrepressible self-pity:
Gut Tiefenbrunn, January 22, 1948
Dear Herr Arnhold!
By pure chance I happened to mention you
recently in a conversation about old times with
Privy Councilor Gassner of Brown Boveri and learned
of your fate. I only wish today with these lines to
say that I happily remember our common work for
Allianz. I will not bore you today with news about
18
Kurt Schmitt
my circumstances. Before I do that, I first want to
know whether you remember me. For, after everything
that has happened in these frightful years, it
would not be surprising, if you have drawn a line
under these years that lie in the past. When my
friend Otto Jeidels left Germany – I believe in 1937 –
I tried to console him with the words, »we will all
envy you yet.« I would be very happy to hear from
you, and am with best regards, Yours
Dr. Kurt Schmitt
Arnhold’s moving reply, obviously typed by
himself on a machine without umlauts – in itself
a commentary on the relationship between the
physical and spiritual burdens of even a fortunate
refugee – is a monument to the German-
Jewish bourgeois culture torn asunder by National
Socialism.
New York, March 25, 1948
Dear Herr Dr. Schmitt,
I have just received your friendly letter. I must
confess that I was very happy to receive your greetings
because they come from a person whom I have always
highly valued for his honesty and his strong
creative power and his collegiality. I also confess
that your letter made me somewhat melancholy
because it demonstrated to me that one still has a
false picture over there concerning the situation
here and especially concerning the fate of the many
refugees.
You are right that I often would like to draw a line
under the past, but when one has lived in Germany
for fifty years and has had good friends and was
attached to the beauty of Germany, then it is just not
so simple to draw this line. I was in Europe in 1946-
1947, but I did not step upon German soil because I
did not want to see the destroyed country and all the

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
misery. I also do not correspond much, and if I reply
extensively to your friendly letter, then it is one of the
few exceptions.
I say that I am made somewhat melancholy by
the remembrance of you. Today we know how much
better it perhaps would have been if you had responded
with a »yes« instead of with the words »it is too
early,« when I was commissioned in 1931 to contact
you as to whether you would accept the position of
Reich Finance Minister. Perhaps Germany would
have been spared the fearful years about which you
spoke if you had placed yourself at the disposal of the
government then instead of only doing so under the
Nazi regime in 1934. I know that you did so in the
best faith and most complete love of the Fatherland,
but it must be said that you made a mistake. Do not
take it ill if I write this and add to it that there is no
one who has not make mistakes, including myself,
and perhaps I would have also made some if I had
not been one of the persecuted.
I [would like to] say that I was also astonished.
You quote your words to Dr. Otto Jeidels »we will all
envy you some day«, and you believe that this day is
now at hand. If you mean by that the peace that Dr.
Jeidels has found in his quiet grave on the Buergenstock
far »from all partisan hate and favor,« then
you are right. But if you mean the fate of those driven
from Germany, then you have a completely false picture.
You only hear of the very few who have managed
to gain a foothold here or in other parts of the world
and believe that you can generalize their fate. Believe
me, most of them, strewn over the entire world, fight
hard from dawn to dusk for their existence, and one
hears daily about new misery on the part of many of
those who once happily lived in Germany. I know
that things are very, very bad for countless numbers
in Germany, and I try myself to help old friends there;
but I believe, that things still are much worse for the
largest portion of the refugees. Not even to mention
the unending misery that has overtaken many
through the cruel death that was the fate of many
relations left behind in Europe. The one thing that
the refugees have to be sure of is their freedom of
thought, and that is worth a great deal.
Forgive me please, dear Herr Dr. Schmitt, if in my
reply to your friendly letter I have become detailed
and somewhat serious. Please do not consider it an
unfriendliness but rather as a discussion which I –
as I said – must have sometime with a person from
whom I can expect understanding, after I have
otherwise corresponded with practically no one.
Write to me, if you so interpret my letter as I meant
it, and write to me please a bit about yourself, for it
interests me. I do not forget your friendly attitude
toward me in the years of your official activity.
With friendly greetings,
Yours, Hans Arnhold
Schmitt replied almost immediately, recounting
his own travails since 1934, his connections
with Resistance figures, and his difficult denazification
and forced inactivity. He also sought to
justify and explain his refusal of the Finance and
Economics ministries before 1933 as well as his
acceptance of the Economics Ministry post
under Hitler.
Gut Tiefenbrunn, April 1, 1948
Dear Herr Arnhold,
Your letter of March 25 has given me unspeakable
happiness. I hasten to answer it immediately.
Insofar as the picture I have of the situation in
America and above all the fate of the many refugees
is concerned, you should be convinced that I have, if
not an absolutely correct, then still an approximate
picture.Iknowhowmuchisconnectedwiththehomeland
that, to a great extent, became dear to them
and old friends, and that one cannot simply forget
one’s youth and the years of one’s creativity.
It was precisely here that one finds the insanity of
Hitler’s policy, that it refused to recognize so many
good Germans and, in its madness, did such bitter
injustice to them. But there is one thing you all have,
as you yourself say, the freedom of thought and, I may
add, of personality, while we have lived now for 15
years in a kind of prison. From the time of my withdrawal
from office in 1934, I did not know what one
intended to do with me. I took in the son of Pastor
Niemöller; I had to openly take a stand against the
policy in many matters; there was Dodd’s book, in
which I was severely compromised with the National
Socialists (I enclose an excerpt); I lost many
friends, for whom I had found places in the Munich
Reinsurance Co., on July 20, 1944. And thereafter?
I was repeatedly arrested. As a former minister, I
was [classified as] a major culprit. My assets are
blocked. Even today I may not work, not even on my
The Hans Arnhold Villa at Lake Wannsee in 1928
19
estate, although my services are necessary in every
nook and cranny. I would help with full fervor in the
creation of a United States of Europe, in whose
establishment I see the only possible basis for an
economic recovery and for a final true banning of
war inside Europe, in any case in western Europe.
But my case is still not terminated. The denazification
has been carried through in the lower court. All the
witnesses have confirmed the best about me. No
stone was thrown at me. But I was Reich Economics
Minister in 1933-34. At that time, without my
having any hand in the matter, I stupidly received
the honorary rank of an SS-Brigadeführer. I was
therefore formally declared to be »less incriminated.«
That has still not been legally confirmed
today, and my fate therefore still hangs in the
darkness described above.
You remind me of an episode that I had completely
forgotten, namely that I should have become Reich
Finance Minister in 1931. At one time Brüning himself
proposed me for the Reich Economics Ministry.
If I turned it down at that time, then it was not because
of my political position, but rather out of lack
of desire to leave my beautiful Allianz to go into politics,
but in general also because of the justified feeling
at that time, that the activity would have stood on
weak and short-term legs given the constitution of
the parties and their short-sighted egotistical fight
among themselves. When Göring offered me the
Reich Economics Ministry in the summer of 1933,
Isaidtomyself – ingeneral,afterconsultating,among
others, Jeidels, who has expressly confirmed this to
me – that what was involved was saving the German
economy from madness and international
complications. It seemed to me worth the sacrifice.
When I saw after ten months – to which many
friends have also testified under oath – that I could
not accomplish this and that my decree, which I
even managed to get from Hitler himself, that »there

is no Jewish question in the economy,« would not
be respected by his own party and its Gauleiters,
then I left again. Those are the facts.
Dear Herr Arnhold, I certainly do not take ill your
precious lines, even if you criticize me. On the contrary,
I am pleased. It is human to err. What I wanted
and the views I represented cannot be condemned by
any American.
Believe me that despite this I do not contest my fate.
I know of and suffer for the fate of so many other persons,
and I know that even my friend Jeidels had to
bear much bitterness despite all his successes.
I hope to get another letter from you soon. Even if
our connection at that time was a purely business
one and under the circumstances was not of the kind
I had, for example, with Jeidels, still your letter has
caused me to write to you today in a more personal
and detailed way. I hope to learn more about your
personal situation in your next letter and am
for today, with my heartiest greetings,
Yours Dr. Kurt Schmitt
Schmitt’s view of the politics of Weimar was,
of course, not untypical of German businessmen.
Hans Arnhold was a conservative businessman
too, and Schmitt had good reason to expect that
Arnhold would sympathize with his remarks.
What divided the two men was not politics or
Weltanschauung but history, as the next two letters
of this exchange demonstrate. Whereas
Arnhold was preoccupied, as his reply to Schmitt
shows, with trying to deal with the discontinuities
in his life and coming to terms with the
threatening and alien world that was entering
the Cold War, Schmitt found himself trying to
dig his name and honor out of the moral ruin
left by the »Third Reich«.
New York, May 4, 1948
Dear Herr Dr. Schmitt,
Your letter of April 1 just arrived along with the
enclosures, which are naturally of great interest to me.
I have read Ambassador Dodd’s Diary. The book
does not tell me anything new about the various personalities,
and I always knew about your position
during the regime, especially about the honorable
motives which led to the false step in 1934. But as I
have already written to you: Who does not at times
make a mistake? What is only important is that one
recognizes it and has the courage to admit to it, and
that you also have shown – in contrast to Dr. Schacht
who, in my view, despite his cleverness, his courage
and his fight against Hitler, has no right to be cynical
and arrogant.
I am naturally very sorry that you personally now
have such disagreeable circumstances, and if I can
help to make them easier, then please turn to me.
AMERICAN ACADEMY
I can understand that you find it oppressive to be
inactive, but I believe, that – if there is no war – the
worst times are past and the reconstruction of western
Europe will go more quickly than one assumes.
You want to hear something about me: Well,
there is not much to tell. I have tried to build up a
small banking business here under the names Arnhold
and S. Bleichroeder, Inc., but I have not really
succeeded because, first of all, I have lost something
of my strength, and second, I am not young enough
for this land, and third, because there is a great deal
of bureaucracy here also, and I am totally unsuitable
for it. I have along with this a small ceramics factory,
and even though I am no industrialist, the building
up of this factory has still given me much pleasure.
All in all, I have grown up too much in a free, individualist
capitalism to be able to go along with the
present methods, where in the final analysis everything
will be directed from the state in all the countries.
Just as the achievements of the French Revolution
have been spread about the entire world, so in
the final analysis also those of the Russian Revolution
will spread over the world. With that, I think, we
will experience a kind of state socialism everywhere,
and I only hope that it will not be bound up, as in
Russia, with terror and deprivation of freedom.
I travel tomorrow to Europe, but I do not believe
that I can decide to travel to Germany, although
many people write that I still should come.
With many friendly greetings, Yours,
Hans Arnhold
*
Gut Tiefenbrunn, July 22, 1948
Dear Herr Arnhold,
I have not acknowledged your letter of May 4th;
many sincere thanks! You were so friendly as to offer
to help me in my affair, should this be possible. It is
still not finally settled. I hope to achieve complete
vindication. Among other things, the question of my
motives in taking over the ministry plays a role, even
if a great number of witnesses, among them the deceased
Vice-President of the Bank of America, Jeidels,
have unambiguously expressed their opinions. Still,
a sworn statement from you would be very desirable.
You write in your letter that you are aware that I, to
put it simply, wanted to protect the German economy.
I was also not a member of the Party at that time,
and I only became one in the false belief that I could
strengthen my influence. The year in which I held
office was a ceaseless struggle. Already after half a
year, I recognized the futility of the situation and
this recognition led to my collapse on June 28, 1934.
I have been told from many sides, especially from
Jewish businessmen and merchants, that they have
viewed my appointment in this way and in no other
and that many hopes were buried with my departure.
That was even to be read in foreign newspapers.
I would be most obligated if you would confirm this
in the form of a sworn statement as soon as possible.
Were you in Europe or even in Germany?
Best Greetings, Yours Kurt Schmitt
The correspondence between Hans Arnhold
and Kurt Schmitt available to me concludes with
this last letter. Whether the requested testimonial
on Schmitt’s behalf was sent and whether the
two men ever corresponded again or met, prior
to Schmitt’s death in 1950, remains to be
researched.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the
granddaughter of Kurt Schmitt – Frau Vera Krainer –
for placing this correspondence at my disposal.
The material is located in the Firmenhistorisches
Archiv, Allianz AG, Munich. G.F.
Alberto Vilar
Continued from Page 5
Today, Amerindo manages around nine billion
dollars in the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S.
economy.
In the world beyond business, Alberto Vilar
is acclaimed for his generous support of education,
healthcare, and the classical performing
arts, both in the U.S. and Europe. He has supported
the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall,
the Mariinsky Opera & Ballet Company, the Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne
Opera House, La Scala, Bayreuth, Baden-Baden,
the Salzburg Music Festival, and the Vienna
State Opera, among others.
Indeed, his major donations to musical institutions
have made him into the most generous philanthropist
in our time supporting the classical
performing arts, especially opera. A frequent visitor
to Berlin in the 1970s, today Alberto Vilar
sees rich potential in the reunified city’s three
opera houses, its several world-class orchestras,
and such superb conductors as Daniel Barenboim,
Kent Nagano, Christian Thielemann, and
Sir Simon Rattle.
His donation to the American Academy reinforces
the substance of last spring’s lecture, in
which he urged a strengthening of private initiatives
and philanthropic funding of the arts. His
message that private funding must grow significantly
in Europe or the quality and quantity of
the arts will decline has resonated throughout
Germany. Invited by the German federal government,
Alberto Vilar will be lecturing this fall on
how successful joint undertakings by public and
private patronage can save the heritage.
20

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
On the Waterfront
H
»Heimat« in Exile
Bernhard Schlink lectures on Utopia
eimat is a term without
a counterpart in English. This
makes one suspect that the evervacillating
sentiments corresponding
to it are a genuinely German
concern. Nowhere does the need
for Heimat seem stronger; nowhere
is it more discredited and tainted
with shame than here. Following
1945 Germans preferred to view
themselves as citizens of the world,
who declared civil society – which
appeared free of suspicion – to be
their homeland. Or, as Hanseats,
Bavarians, and Saarlanders, they
slipped away from the pitfalls of
national identity by retreating into
a regional one. Thus Heimat became
a word primarily used by associations
representing displaced Germans
and was strongly suspected of being
revisionist well into the 1980s.
This troubling word served as
the starting point for writer and law
professor Bernhard Schlink’s lecture
at the American Academy.
Sometimes it seemed as if the special
problems associated with the
German Sonderweg had also to be
explained to an American audience.
The Academy, which arose from an
initiative by Richard Holbrooke following
the Allies’ departure from
Berlin, is a place where the worlds
of scholarship, literature, and the
arts come together. Who could be
more qualified for this »intellectual
By Jörg Magenau
airlift« than Bernhard Schlink?
With his novel The Reader, the story
of a young man who falls in love
with a former concentration camp
guard, he became the first German
author to head the American bestseller
list. On this evening, he revealed
that the concept of Heimat
will play a crucial role in his next
novel.
Situated in a villa on Lake Wannsee
formerly belonging to the banker
Hans Arnhold, and just one year
after its founding, the Academy
could be described as »venerable.«
Listeners gather in an illustrious,
salon-like,semi-privateatmosphere.
C
Morals vs. the Arts
In America, Guardians of Public Decency Threaten Public Support
an it be true?Robert Mapplethorpe’s
homoerotic photographs
are already considered
too obscene to be exhibited in the
US with the aid of public money.
When the expert Robert Brustein
came to the American Academy to
talk about the culture battle raging
the States, it sounded like a nineteenth-century
drama. Brustein,
artistic director of the American
Repertory Theatre in Cambridge,
By Claudia Keller
Theguestlistcontainsrepresentatives
from the business world, politics,
the media and culture; a cosmopolitan
Berlin not yet in existence.
Although the guests are primarily
Germans, English is the official language.
Schlink, too, gave his lecture
in English. The unfamiliarity of
the situation can also be seen as an
ironic subcommentary on the topic
of discussion: Heimat seen as homesickness,
phantom aches, and the
result of a loss can first be made tangible
in unfamiliar surroundings
and in a foreign language. And thus
»exile« was the answer to the first
question as to what the place of
Heimat might be.
Excerpt from the Berlin edition of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of
December18, 1999. Bernhard Schlink’s
Academy lecture was recently published by
Suhrkamp as Heimat als Utopie.
Massachusetts, explained that the
fight is over allocation of public support
by the National Endowment of
the Arts (NEA).
Christian factions have pressured
Congress to cut the NEA’s budget
downto$ 100 million, from $170
million. Their reasoning: a great
amount of the art it supports doesn’t
pass the »propriety-test« enacted
by law. And this in a country where
there are no limits in revealing the
intimacies of its President’s private
life! The NEA is no mere institution
of public art support in the US. It is
its very center.
The current debate turns on the
question of whether a democratic
government is responsible for creating
a sphere where the arts can
flourish independent of political
and economic reasoning. Brustein
has a solution. He suggests that arts
funding be taken completely out of
the hands of the government and
secured instead by a new concept of
Robert Brustein
royalties. Royalties should be extended
from 75 to 150 years after the
original publication of a work of
art. The gains made during the later
period should then be devoted to
supporting the arts. It is only to be
hoped that by then, fewer »guardians
of public morality« will feel
they have to protect the people
from the good, the true, and the
beautiful.
Der Tagesspiegel, June 17, 2000
BURKHARD PETER
21

AMERICAN ACADEMY
Big City Fascination
New York’s Sarah Morris Exhibits at Hamburger Bahnhof
DC
is so unsexy and unglamorous,«
declared Sarah
Morris at the press conference
announcing her show at the Hamburger
Bahnhof. The public greeted
the comment with nods of approval,
but we might hesitate before
taking her words at face value. Her
series of sixteen paintings is simply
called »Capital.«
These,andtheaccompanyingnineteen-minute
film, with its fast cuts
and hard underlying rhythms (to a
soundtrack by LiamGillick),guide
the visitor around importantsitesin
the American capital: the White
House; the green spaces in front of
The Capitol; the WashingtonPost
Building;theWatergate complex;
By Nicola Kuhn
the Dupont Circle subway station.
These are interspersed with images
of politicians, joggers, subwayusers.
There’s even Clinton landing
by helicopter.
Well,thesubjectsaren’tespecially
sexyorglamorous,butSarahMorris
surfs so elegantly over the smooth
surfacesofpowerthattheysuddenly
seem stylish and desirable, like a lavishly
marketed object of consumption.
The 33-year-old American is a
master of packaging.
Her abstract paintings reveal
nothing but the cool facades of buildings,
laconically referred to in their
titles: »L’Enfant Plaza,« »Dulles,«
»Federal Triangle.« Sarah Morris
remains persistently concerned,
HANS PUTTNIES
not with what lies behind, but with
what delicately lies before. And in
making this intelligent decision,
she fascinates even the most critical
observers. Her paintings hold out
the promise of enlightened pleasure,
skillfully mingling sensual experience
with a highly rational approach.
The New Yorker mastered an academic
vocabulary of semiotics and
structuralism before focusing on
artistic praxis. The theoretical underpinnings
are evident in her painting,
which unfolds from a sober
calculation of axes. The individual
color-fields are separated by thick
bars, marked off by cellophanetape
before they are coated with
highly glossy varnish. There’s no
trace of artistic flourish here.
Morris holds the Academy’s first
Philip Morris Arts Fellowship for
Emerging Artists and worked in a
S
Brother Aaron
Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas on Copland
omeone like American
conductor Michael Tilson
Thomas would have been perfect
for the Berliner Festspiele, which
has a culture of portraying individual
composers. He is enthusiastic
about his subject and knows how to
inspire people. But Tilson Thomas
is not among the guests, nor is
»his« composer Aaron Copland.
Hence, it is to the credit of the
American Academy that Tilson
Thomas was lured to Berlin at least
for a lecture. As part of the »America’s
Voices« series, he spoke in the
overcrowded Academy quarters on
Lake Wannsee about Copland –
and, in doing so, revealed himself
to be a brilliant entertainer.
One always has to smile, said Tilson
Thomas, when the »national
composer« Copland is played at
events like the Republican convention.
The gentlemen of the right
wing apparently don’t know whose
music they are using as a »patriotic
sound-bed.« As a »gay Jewish left
By Frederik Hansen
guest-studio in the Künstlerhaus
Bethanien. Those who hoped that
her stay in Berlin would influence
her work are bound to be disappointed.
The American remains
true to her cultural background.
We can only add that this is fortunate,
since her work is markedly
strong in this realm.
In a conversation with her cameraman
David Daniel she candidly
explains: »I guess I like to be malleable
in that way. I like things that
function across fields, for different
purposes simultaneously. I don’t
have any problems with being
produced.« Such a sentence can
probably only be understood in an
American Pragmatist context. But
the art emerging from that selfdefinition
has proved seductive
everywhere.
Der Tagesspiegel, June 2, 2001
extremist,« Copland wouldn’t
exactly have matched their target
group. He succeeded in grasping
America in his music, said Tilson
Thomas in his lecture.
Only he did it in his own way.
The result: modern, contemporary
music in which Yiddish songs are
represented, along with jazz. His
music catches the sound of New
York street life. Tilson Thomas
describes the composer as rooted
in the Jewish-American tradition,
caught in the tension between
modernism and lost tradition.
His insistence on these roots illustrate
– like his brilliantly sharp interpretation
of Copland’s Piano
Variations of 1930 – more than just
a close relationship to him as a
pupil. This conductor feels a congeniality
of spirit with the »revolutionary
and outcast.« Alas, during
this visit, his words won’t be translated
into sounding deeds in a Berlin
concert hall.
Der Tagesspiegel, September 10, 2000
22

Jenny Holzer
Continued from page 16
My response is completely formal,
which is to say that one work is horizontal
and the other is vertical.
That’s a shorter and better answer.
Also, one uses a deeply personal text,
while the other is public and political.
One is in a place where you expect to
find art, and the other is in a place
where you don’t. In the United States,
we would never expect to find contemporary
art in the Capitol. Yet both
installations contain amber light.
I know you often use other colors.
Amber came from a process of elimination.
Red is too cruel for the
museum or the Reichstag. Green or
blue would have turned both into
fish bowls. White is too ethereal,
too pure, but the yellow is warm,
somewhat neutral, and rather
like fire. Amber seemed the best
choice for each place.
You make very large public installations,
but you are not even one percent
a public person. Do you find this difficult
to reconcile?
At the very least it is bizarre, because
I would rather never get out
from under the bed.
Critics sometimes say artists have two
or three identifying markers that shape
and distinguish their work. Do you
think your work has one identifying
marker?
Though I don’t manage to say the
unspeakable well enough, finally
something is shown, revealed. A way
I work is by putting words in public
spaces. I have a sense of how to
place text in front of people on the
street or in much-frequented buildings,
and these words may recall
events that have to do with me.
And here is a marker: that women
should not be killed, not be harmed
so often.
You often use high-tech, post-modern,
industrial materials associated more
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
with news and advertising. By combining
them with your intimate, sometimes
erotic, texts, are you being ironic?
No, I don’t much like irony. The
choice of electronics has to do with
utility, in part. News appears on
electronic displays because people
tend to look at moving lights. I put
my content in signs, or project with
Xenon on buildings, because eyes
follow. If I want to address the public,
I have to be where people linger,
and these media hold people. It is
easier to discuss the practical, but
yes, the erotic or at least the sensual
is present, and I hope irony is not.
In your writing, there are many styles:
a plain journalistic style, a high biblical
style, a tender minimalist style and
a violent descriptive style.
There are funny phrases, and then
depending on the application,
I might need text that is matter-offact,
how a reporter might write. At
other times, the writing should be
inflammatory. The »OH« text has
several registers as I try to get to the
heart of the matter. I need different
styles.
Let me just give two examples from the
new text. There is the tender voice that
says something like, »You are easy to
track and fun to hunt.«
And this contrasts sharply with the
terrible harshness of, »Girls are found
awake or with eyes burst down holes
open or made new rabbit frozen or
flailing blood sneaks or ass rains ruined
on an infant with a sucker throat
gagged or mewling still love aside on
the bed waits.«
That was the terror paragraph in
the middle of an otherwise rather
soft text.
What was your greatest fear in coming
back to Berlin to build the Nationalgalerie
installation?
I was afraid I could not do the subject
justice, that I wouldn’t be able
to speak well enough about what it
is for women or for little girls to be
assaulted. That was worse than fear
of architecture.
Kunst bereichert unser Leben.
Von Symphonien zur Malerei. Vom Theater zum Tanz.
Seit über 40 Jahren unterstützt Chase die visuellen und darstellenden Künste.
Begabte und aufstrebende Talente werden ebenso gefördert wie renommierte Stätten
der Kunst. Chase glaubt fest daran, daß Kunst etwas ist, wovon die gesamte
Gesellschaft profitiert.
Chase Manhattan Bank AG, Grüneburgweg 2, 60322 Frankfurt am Main
Telefon: (069) 7158-0 Telefax: (069) 7158-2209
www.chase.com
Copyright © 2001 The Chase Manhattan Corporation. All rights reserved.

Berlin Prize
Fellows
Continued from page 9
AMERICAN ACADEMY
The project he pursued at the American
Academy, What It Means to
be a State: A History of Sovereignty in
20th Century Europe, builds upon
his interest in how contemporary
Europe is transforming itself as well
as the conviction that, both at the
beginning and end of the 20th century,
Germany was one of Europe’s
»exemplary« states.
Stephanie Snider
One measure of Berlin’s present
attractiveness may well be the circa
hundred applications submitted
for the single Philip Morris Emerging
Artist Fellowship. The program’s
appeal is enhanced by the
resources of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien,
an artists’ center with which
the Academy collaborates.
This year’s award went to New
York artist Stephanie Snider, who
received her MFA in sculpture from
Yale in 1998 and has taught at both
her alma mater and Ohio University.
Snider described her work as
»primarily about desire: its conundrums,
its tensions, my own emotional
attachment to it, and especially
the space it literally occupies.«
Her recent installations explore the
architectural ramifications of emotion,
»creating sites that map anxiety,
confusion, obsessive sorts of
love, puzzles, and the psychological
tricks our minds play on us.«
She was quite visible in Berlin during
her fellowship year, collaborating
with the artist group Berlin-
Kopenhagen in a week-long project
entitled »Wet Dreams.« Together
with artists Rodney Graham and
Mathew Hale, she publicly produced
multi-layered monotypes in a
gallery near her Kreuzberg studio.
Some of these prints have entered
the Academy’s nascent art collection.
Two exhibitions of her Berlin
work are scheduled for Fall 2001.
Alex Katz
Alex Katz’s Berlin residency as
Philip Morris Distinguished Artist
underscored both the intensity of
German interest in his work and his
ability to paint prolifically. Scores
of peers, students, and critics turned
out for his public presentations,
which included a workshop with
local artists at a Dresden gallery, a
discussion with Luc Tuymans at a
Berlin’s Galerie Barbara Thümm,
and his Academy talk, held at Berlin’s
contemporary art museum,
the Hamburger Bahnhof.
Katz painted a series of landscapes
from his window at the Hans Arnhold
Center that captured the light
and aridity of Berlin’s lakeside winter.
After returning to New York,
he presented the Academy with a
large silk-screen portrait of his wife
and muse, Ada Katz. A small exhibition
at the Hans Arnhold Center,
supported by the Philip Morris
A Regular, Renaissance Kind of Guy: Artist Alex Katz
Kunstförderung, showed a range
of portraits and landscapes. Indeed,
it has often been remarked that
Katz is »a poet’s artist,« as testified
by his long, productive filiations
with John Ashbery, Robert Creeley,
Frank O’Hara, and others (his son
Vincent is also a noted poet).
As such, he and Ada were ideal and
active members of Academy’s community
of scholars and artists. They
will surely return to Germany in
2002 for the major Katz retrospective
at the Bonn Bundeskunsthalle.
Christoph Wolff
No American scholar has had
greater impact on contemporary
German musicology than Daimler-
Chrysler Fellow and Harvard professor
Christoph Wolff. Not only
has he recently published major
studies of Mozart and Johann Sebastian
Bach, but in 1999 he rediscovered
in Kiev the vast archives of
the Berlin Sing-Akademie – a trove
of some five thousand manuscripts
said to have vanished in 1943.
The collection had been moved
from Berlin to Silesia for storage,
after which all trace of it vanished.
Wolff came across the collection in
1999 while doing research in Kiev.
The composers in the five-thousandmanuscript
trove form a Who’s who
of late-Baroque and early-Classical
German music.
Some weeks after Wolff made his
discovery known, however, the
Ukrainian conductor Blaschkov announced
that he had been acquainted
with the collection for thirty
years, and had already performed
some of its pieces with the Kiev
Chamber Orchestra.
Wolff’s work shows how a sober
scholar can extract precious knowledge
from old scores. Finding, buried
in the piles, a motet by J.S. Bach’s
uncle, Johann Christoph Bach, transcribed
in J.S. Bach’s own hand,
VIVIEN BITTENCOURT
24

THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Wolff sees this as more than a transcription,
asserting that it is the
music that Johann Sebastian selected
for his own funeral. The motet
itself is known and has been performed,
but none were aware of its significance
as funeral music: Bach
bows before his musical ancestors
for a last time.
Focused on the period between
the 15th and 20th centuries, Wolff
is using the archives as the basis for
his current research on music and
bourgeois culture in late-18th and
early-19th-century Berlin. Professor
Wolff’s term at the Hans Arnhold
Center coincided with his appointment
as Director of the Bach
Archives in Leipzig.
Highlights of his stay in Berlin included
a lecture-recital of previously
unperformed Mozart fragments
Holbrooke
Continued from page 5
theAcademy’sHansArnholdCenter
with New York Times correspondent
Roger Cohen, Ambassador Holbrooke
elucidated a vision of foreign
policy rather different from
that of the current Administration,
while remaining moderate in his
criticism. He is acknowledged in
Germany as »one of the best connoisseurs
of Europe« in America
(Berliner Zeitung). His sobriety and
erudition continue to steer the Academytowardaprogramthatreflects
urgent policy concerns.
Three years ago, it was Holbrooke
who first urged the Academy to begin
its program with fellowships
and a major conference devoted to
citizenship and migration policy.
We will continue, with his guidance,
to plan a vigorous public policy
profile, complementing the Academy’s
strong focus on the arts,
humanities, and social sciences
with special programs addressing
urgent humanitarian, political, and
environmental issues. Now, thanks
to his encouragement of Alberto
Vilar, there will be music as well.
that provide fascinating insights into
the composer’s musical plans and artistic
choices. Together with a performance
by the Manon Quartet, Wolff
discussed the composer’s method of
working by focusing on this unusually
large body of unfinished pieces.
In addition, Wolff gave a talk in
Schloß Bellevue at the invitation of
German President Johannes Rau,
and a press conference with Ukrainian
President Leonid Kuchma to
announce the return of the Sing-
Akademie archives to Berlin.
Musicologists in the audience
looked thoughtfully at the slideprojection
of the score, the elderly
Johann Sebastian’s shaky notes,
and the Ukrainian Conservatory’s
inventory-stamp, and left satisfied
with the somewhat sensational
finding.
reater emphasis on public
G affairs highlights the fourth
year at the Hans Arnhold Center.
The Berlin Prize Fellows for the Fall
2001 will include Jewish Studies
scholar Daniel Boyarin (University
of California at Berkeley), writer
Aris Fioretos (New York/Berlin),
art historian Evonne Levy (University
of Toronto), literary scholar
Richard C. Maxwell (Valparaiso
University), and poet and translator
Christopher Middleton (Emeritus,
University of Texas at Austin).
Jules Feiffer immortalized the intellectual elan he encountered while
visiting Berlin and the American Academy last fall. He came for the launch
of America’s Voices, a two-month-long American cultural festival conceived
by philanthropists Bill Rollnick and Nancy Ellison. The American Academy
and the US Embassy hosted a dozen American writers, filmmakers, performers,
and cultural notables in conjunction with the festival. The cartoonist
and writer spent a week in residence on the Wannsee.
Sneak Preview
Named Fellowships Enhance
Berlin Prize Program
This semester will also inaugurate
a number of named fellowships.
Two such fellowships will honor
the daughters of Hans and Ludmilla
Arnhold. Anthropologist Vincent
Crapanzano (Graduate Center,City
UniversityofNew York) has been
awarded the first Ellen Maria Gorrissen
Fellowship and literary scholar
Katie Trumpener (University of
Chicago) has been designated the
Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow.
Two endowments will ensure that
journalists and economists are always
in residence at the Academy.
New Yorkers writer Jane Kramer is
the first Holtzbrinck Fellow in Journalism
at the Academy. Recipients
of the J.P. Morgan International
Prize in Finance and Economic Policy
are Richard Freeman (Harvard
University/London School of Economics)
and Kenneth E. Scott
(Stanford University Law School
Emeritus).
The first Alberto Vilar Music
Fellow will be composer Michael
Hersch (New York) and the Philip
Morris Emerging Artist for the academic
year 2001-2002 is Sue de
Beer (New York). Bosch Public
Policy Fellows during the fall are
Barbara Balaj (World Bank, Washington,
D.C.), Richard Locke (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology),
and Adam Posen (Institute for
International Economics, Washington,
D.C.).
Distinguished Visitors include
sociologist Nathan Glazer (Harvard
University Emeritus), Harold
Levy, (Chancellor, New York City
Board of Education) and author
Susan Sontag (New York). The new
Fellows will be welcomed at a lakeside
reception at the Academy in
the presence of Germany’s President
Johannes Rau.
25

G
reenwood rose and stood stiffly looking beyond
the balcony to the water. A two-man scull was ghosting
alone a hundred yards out. A patch of mallards rose and
skittered away, settling on the far side of the scull. Weather
approached from the northeast, exactly as they had predicted on the
morning news, the American woman with the long legs and leisurely
diction, all the time in the world to connect the Bermuda High
with the Warsaw Low, and look what’s happening here in Atlanta.
It would be dark in thirty minutes, the sun too weak to pierce the
dark vein of cloud. Across the lake the lights came on in the villas
back on the yacht basins, the yellow glow
nervous on the irregular surface of the
water, waffling now in the breeze. The
brightlycolored sails of the yachts disappeared
as the light failed. He imagined
cooks in caps and starched aprons, and a
table laid for a family of five, grace said,
conversation slow to begin.The first few
minutes of the meal, it was so quiet you
could hear the clocks tick. People in this
part of the world did not like to talk while
they ate; never begin a second job until
you have finished the first.
•
The two-man scull changed course
and headed for home. He had met the
scullers, two retired accountants in their
fifties, fit as mountaineers, taciturn as
owls. They always drank a beer in the tavern
on the corner when they finished
with the boat, and Greenwood was often
there at the same time. The accountants
were slick with sweat and exhilarated
from their rowing, drinking their beer
straight sown and then waiting patiently
for the barman to draw them another, a
process that took five minutes. They had
no interest in discussing their sculling or
their families, and were uninterested in
what drew Greenwood to their country.
They were happy to lecture him on the
superior security arrangements of Europe,
plans that allowed a faithful employee to
work until he was fifty-five and then
retire with money enough to live on,
and time to scull whenever he wished
and take vacations in Spain during the
worst of the winter weather, and set aside money for the children as
well. Wasn’t it wise for the old to make way for the young? And
the state provided, as it had every right to do. It seemed pointless to
inquire whether they missed their accounting. When eventually
they asked Greenwood what he did before he retired – he was
older than they were and surely drew a pension of some kind – and
he replied that he was a filmmaker engaged
in accounting of a personal nature,
they lost all interest.
•
AMERICAN ACADEMY
The water darkened as the clouds lowered; and then Greenwood
smiled, watching the little passenger ferry make its slow transit
beyond the mallards. That meant the time was four-forty-four precisely,
only six minutes to go in the twenty-minute run from Kladow
to Wannsee, the passengers already collecting their shopping
bags and briefcases, already looking toward shore, already anticipating
the evening meal. This was usually the time he put away his
work and made for the tavern down the street from the train station,
careful to snitch the Herald-Tribune from the library downstairs for
reading material in case the scullers were not talkative, or talkative
only with each other. He enjoyed
sitting at the far end of the bar with
his beer and the newspaper, a leisurely
sixty-minute read. During the
first weeks of his residence, Greenwood
invited some of the others in
the House to join him but they never
did, fearing distraction from their
work, and perhaps fearing also that
such an occasion might become a
habit or worse, a ritual. Everyone
knew that the winter months at
Wannsee were disorienting, the sun
disappearing for weeks at a time and
the weather raw. A frigid mist arrived,
the sullen breath of the Baltic, and at
those times the weight of the past
was palpable.
•
In the winter it was recommended
that one remain with oneself, living
with circumspection, resisting temptation.
The staff told lurid tales of
previous residents who disappeared
as early as three in the afternoon, returning
to dinner befuddled and hilarious;
and sometimes not returning
until late in the evening accompanied
by new friends, trailing the
usual noise and disorder. More than
once the police became involved
owing to altercations at the tavern, a
terrible embarrassment for the House.
The Rector was embarrassed,
though no charges were ever filed.
Of course there was no publicity
because the House was under the
protection of the government, all courtesies extended to the scholars,
writers, and other intellectual authorities from America. But
there was no mistaking the smirk of the police lieutenant as he laid
the disagreeable facts. Under the influence of drink, the Americans
were worse even than the teenage skinheads who loitered drunkenly
at the train station harassing commuters. At any event, Greenwood
FadeOut
ByWard Just
During his stay on the Wannsee in Spring 1999,
novelist Ward Just began work on The Mexican Church.
This is a fragment from his novel-in-progress.
HANS PUTTNIES
was not tempted that afternoon. He
had more work to do, and he had
laid away plenty of vodka in the tiny
fridge under the sink.

The
American
Academy
in Berlin
The Berlin Prize
Fellowships
2002—2003
The American Academy in Berlin
invites applications for its Berlin Prize
Fellowships for the 2002-2003 academic year.
The Academy is a private, non-profit center for
the advanced study of culture and the arts,
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.
Specially designated fellowships include the
Bosch Fellowship in Public Policy, the Daimler-
Chrysler Fellowship, the Ellen Maria Gorrissen
Fellowship, the Holtzbrinck Fellowship in Journalism,
the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship, the
J.P. Morgan International Prize in Economics
and Finance Policy, the Guna S. Mundheim
Fellowship in the Visual Arts, the Philip Morris
Emerging and Distinguished Artist Awards,
and the Alberto Vilar Music Fellowships.
The Academy, which opened its doors in
September 1998, occupies the Hans Arnhold
Center,a historic lakeside villa in the Wannsee
district of Berlin. The Academy also schedules
public lectures, seminars, and performances
that bring Fellows together with Berlin's cultural,
academic, and business communities.
U.S. citizens or permanent residents 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
award. The Academy offers furnished apartments
suitable for individuals and couples,
and limited 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.
Application forms are available from the
Academy or can be downloaded from its web
site (www.americanacademy.de). Applications
must be received in Berlin by November 1, 2001
(Emerging Artist applications are due December
1, 2001). Candidates need not be German
specialists, but their project description should
explain how a residency in Berlin will contribute
to their professional development.
Applications will be reviewed by an independent
selection committee following a peer
review process. The 2002-2003 Fellows will be
chosen in January 2002 and publicly announced
in early spring.
The American Academy in Berlin
Am Sandwerder 17-19 · D-14109 Berlin, Germany
Telephone (+4930) 804 83-0 · Fax (+4930) 804 83-111
applications@americanacademy.de