Berlin Journal 02

The Berlin JournalA NE WSLE T TER FROM T HE AMERI C AN AC AD EMY I N B ERLI N • NUMB ER T WO • SUMMER 2001

IN THIS ISSUE

Jenny Holzeron her PermanentExhibition of Maxims in Berlin’s NeueNationalgalerie

plus:Gerald FeldmanRichard HolbrookeCharles MaierWard Just

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In this Issue

Honorary Chairmen

Thomas L. FarmerHenry 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 BurtGerhard Casper

Lloyd CutlerJonathan F. FantonThomas L. Farmer

Julie FinleyVartan GregorianJon Vanden Heuvel

Karl M. von der HeydenRichard C. HolbrookeDieter von HoltzbrinckDietrich Hoppenstedt

Josef JoffeStephen M. KellenHenry Kissinger

Horst KöhlerJohn C. Kornblum

Otto Graf LambsdorffNina von Maltzahn

Klaus MangoldErich Marx

Robert H. MundheimRobert Pozen

Volker SchlöndorffFritz Stern

Kurt ViermetzAlberto W. Vilar

Richard von WeizsäckerKlaus Wowereit

A Newsletter from the American Academy in BerlinPublished at the Hans Arnhold Center

Number Two · Summer 2001Edited by Gary Smith

•Managing Editors:

Teresa Go · Miranda RobbinsContributing Editors:

Becky Gilbert · Heidi PhilipsenIllustrations: Natascha Vlahovic

Design: Hans PuttniesAdvertising: Renate Pöppel

Subscription Manager: Christian OelzeEmail: [email protected]

Subscriptions: $15 per annumAll Rights Reserved

The BerlinJournal

The American Academy in BerlinAm Sandwerder 17-19 · 14109 Berlin

Tel. (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-0 Fax (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-111

Trustees of

the American Academy

The American Academy

in Berlin

Executive DirectorGary Smith

Office Manager, N.Y.Jennifer Montemayor

External Affairs DirectorRenate Pöppel

Program DirectorPaul Stoop

Fellows Services DirectorMarie Unger

Fellows Selection CoordinatorTeresa Go

C o n t r i b u t o r s

t o t h i s i s s u e

Henri Cole is Fannie Hurst Poet-in-Residenceat Brandeis University. He was a Berlin PrizeFellow in the fall of 2000. Artist Jenny Holzerlives and works in Hoosick, New York.

Gerald Feldman who was a Berlin Prize Fel-low in 1998, directs the Institute of EuropeanStudies at University of California, Berkeley.He is preparing a major study, History of theAllianz Insurance Company.

Richard C. Holbrooke has served as US Per-manent Representative to the UN and Am-bassador to Germany. He is partner and ViceChairman at Perseus LLC, and Chairman ofthe American Academy.

Ward Just lives alternately in VineyardHaven and in Paris. The political novelistand former foreign correspondent was aBerlin Prize Fellow in the spring of 1999.

Charles Maier is Krupp Professor of Europe-an Studies and Director of the Center for Eu-ropean Studies at Harvard University andchairs the Academy’s Berlin Prize Committee.

The 20th Century is dis-appearing into History.But did it begin in 1900and span 100 years?Or did it start with WWIand end with the Fall of the Wall? Historian Charles Maier

Jenny Holzer’s dramaticinstallation this spring atthe Neue Nationalgaleriewas such a success that itwill return to the museumthis fall as part of the per-manent collection. Here,

Letters of Hans Arnholdare a rare discovery made byFellow Gerald Feldman. InJanuary 1948, Hans Arnholdreceived a letter from a Wei-mar-period colleague – andfomer Nazi Reich Economics

argues that the modern worldis better demarcatedby examining the years 1860 to 1980, a period with

more historical coherencethan the notion of the

»short century.« Page 12

As we launch the Hans ArnholdCenter’s fourth exhilarating year,we continue to seek ways of makingthe Academy’s activities known toa largercommunityofcolleagues,media, benefactors, and interestedmembers of the public. We’ve con-ceived The Berlin Journal to comple-ment both our website www.ameri-canacademy.de and the traditionalfall publication of a Tagesspiegelsupplement, showcasing the workof upcoming Berlin Prize Fellows.

More substantial than a conven-tional institutional newsletter, our»newsletter as journal,« is a selec-tive and subjective record of life andletters at the Academy. We will re-port on the accomplishments of our

fellows, the brilliant array of scho-lars, artists, and policy makers whovisit us each year – from recent Ber-lin exhibitions of work by JennyHolzer and Sarah Morris to themany scholarly colloquia and lec-tures by Academy scholars.

Finally, each issue features sub-stantial and original texts, many ofthem inspired by the eighty or soevenings of lectures, readings, anddiscussions that take place on theWannsee each year. As a journal ofideas and information, we hopethat The Berlin Journal provides aninspiring glimpse into the dyna-mism of our young institution andwill motivate its readers to supportits mission.

A Record of Ideas and Visions

in conversation with HenriCole, she shares some ofher thoughts on Mies vander Rohe’s building andhow she conceived thework during her year atthe Academy. Page 15

Minister – Kurt Schmitt. Aremarkably frank and shortcorrespondence followed.Gerald Feldman presents thefascinating exchange, placesit in its context, and readsbetween the lines. Page 17

Richard HolbrookeReflections on the vicissitudes of humanitarian intervention Page 10

The Notebookof the American Academy Page 4

Life and Lettersat the Hans Arnhold Center Page 7

On the WaterfrontPress reviews of our program Page 21

Sneak PreviewThe Fall 2001 Fellows Page 25

Ward JustPreview of a novel-in-progress he began to write in Berlin Page 26

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The Notebook of the Academy

hen founding President Everette Dennis left to help establish anew 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 ofthe prize selection process, professionalizing the entrepreneurial mana-gement, and making the institution, which has already received major

media coverage, even more familiarto academics, cultural leaders, andprofessional decision makers.

It was Lloyd Cutler who propo-sed drafting Bob Mundheim, a dis-tinguished attorney and financialexpert whom he had worked withduring the Carter Administration(and unsuccessfully tried to recruitinto his law firm several times overthe years). Their closest collabora-tion had been in the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis, as part of ateam that had improbably »nego-tiated the return of our Iranian hos-tages on honorable and advantage-ous terms in the most complex, de-licate, and exciting financial tran-sactions of modern times.«

Mundheim had become an equallyeffective Dean of the University ofPennsylvania Law School, where hehas taught since 1965, and a muchsought after general counsel, whoafter 1992 participated in the turn-around of Solomon Brothers.

Mundheim’s career is marked by accomplishment in the privateand public sectors as well as in theacademic world – thus making himan ideal spiritus rector for an institu-tion that demands keen intellectualsensibilities as well as the ability todeploy the considerable corporateand governmental experience of itsBoard of Trustees.

Born in Hamburg in 1933, RobertMundheim’s career as an attorneyhas spanned over forty years since

Leadership in New YorkThe Academy Welcomes Robert H. Mundheim

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his graduation from Harvard LawSchool in 1957. Those years inclu-ded an early stint in the KennedyAdministration as a special counselto the Securities and Exchange Administration, many years as theUniversity Professor of Law and Finance at the University of Penn-sylvania, General Counsel to Trea-sury Secretaries Michael Blumen-thal and William Miller in the Car-ter Administration, and Co-Chair-man of the New York law firm Fried,Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.

Currently Of Counsel at Shearman& Sterling – a law firm with four of-fices in Germany – Mundheim hasalways committed a significantamount of time to supporting non-profit institutions in leading roles.At present he is President of theAppleseed Foundation, a trusteeof the New School University, and adirector of the Salzburg Seminar.He himself says that he has »alwaysfelt that it is important for activepractitioners to find time to give topublic interest work.«

Academy Chairman Richard Hol-brooke, himself a negotiator of fab-led ability, stated that »there is noquestion that the American Aca-demy in Berlin has made a coup ofmajor proportion by bringing aman of Bob Mundheim’s abilityand background to help negotiatethe next phase of its existence. Hisvast experience and talents willhelp ensure that the American Aca-demy becomes the preeminent, andcertainly most effective voice intransatlantic cultural and intellec-tual affairs.«President Robert H. Mundheim

An IdealSpiritus Rector

our months after deliv-ering a talk on philanthropy

and opera at the Hans ArnholdCenter, Alberto Vilar has joined theAmerican Academy’s Board ofTrustees and underwritten a long-term music fellowship program.

Presenting his generous donationof over four million dollars, Vilarsaid that his »goal is to extend thereach of the classical performingarts and make them available to alarger audience than ever before.Through this gift, I hope to intro-duce a new generation of outstan-ding American artists to Berlin’smusical audiences. At the same time,I am confident that the Americanmusical repertoire will benefit im-mensely by having some of its bestand brightest stars learn from and

ichard C. Holbrooke’sreturn as Chairman of the

American Academy in Berlin hasbrought two immediate benefits.First, Ambassador Holbrooke pro-vides the Academy with remarka-ble visibility within the highestechelons of the political, diploma-tic, and corporate worlds. He is,moreover, an energetic and effec-tive champion, recently cementingan agreement with the philanthro-pist Alberto Vilar to ensure thatmusic will be a cornerstone in theAcademy's program.

Ambassador Holbrooke has hada distinguished career in public ser-vice. In the past decade, he has servedas the United State’s Ambassadorto Germany (1993-1994) and theU.S. Permanent Representative tothe United Nations, a post fromwhich he stepped down early thisyear. A cabinet member in the Clin-ton administration, he played a

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A Foreign Affair

central role in shaping Americanforeign policy as well as the nation’sresponse to such humanitarian cri-ses as AIDS. As Assistant Secretaryof State for Europe (1994-1996), hewas the chief architect of the 1995Dayton Peace Accords that endedthe war in Bosnia, later serving asPresident Clinton's Special Envoyto Bosnia and Kosovo. As a privatecitizen he also served as a pro-bonoSpecial Envoy to Cyprus.

In the corporate world, Ambas-sador Holbrooke has held seniorpositions at two leading Wall Streetfirms, Credit Suisse First Bostonand Lehman Brothers, in additionto an important position at Ameri-

can Express. This year AmbassadorHolbrooke has taken on severalmajor tasks in both the private andpublic sectors.

He is building upon his Wall Streetexperience in joining Perseus LLC,the Washington-based merchantbank founded by financier FrankPearl, as partner and Vice Chairman.He also joined the board of AIG andthe advisory councils of Coca-Colaand AOL Time Warner. Ambassa-dor Holbrooke continues to lead inthe fight against AIDS, an issue towhich he gave priority during histenure at the U.N, as the unpaidPresident and CEO of the GlobalBusiness Council on H.I.V. & AIDS.

He belongs to several major non-profit boards, including the Natio-nal Endowment for Democracy,the Museum of Natural History inNew York, the International RescueCommittee, and Refugees Interna-tional, chairing the latter two. He isalso a Counselor at the Council onForeign Relations, where he is pre-paring a book-length study of Ame-rican diplomacy.

Ambassador Holbrooke’s visit tothe American Academy this Springwas accompanied by a flurry of in-terviews and raised a host of foreignpolicy questions affecting European-U.S. relations. Among these weremissile defense (covered in the Ber-liner Zeitung and on wire services);the torpidity of the E. U. bureau-cracy (The Financial Times); and theimplications for Europe of the newBush administration’s foreign po-licy (Der Spiegel). In a public inter-view held at Continued on Page 25

American GenerosityResounds in Berlin

Arts Patron Vilar Endows Music Fellowship Program

Alberto Vilar and Conductor Daniel Barenboim in the Academy’s Library

exchange ideas with the luminariesof Berlin’s musical scene.« Begin-ning this fall, the Alberto Vilar Music Fellowships will bring excep-tional American composers of clas-sical music, performing artists, andexperts working in music and tech-nology to Berlin each semester.

In addition, an annual AlbertoVilar Distinguished Fellowship willbe awarded to a performer or com-poser for a short-term residency inBerlin to work with a major Berlinorchestra or other musical venue.Both programs will deepen theAcademy’s relationships with Ber-lin’s major musical institutions. Anoutstanding selection jury – inclu-ding Michael Kaiser of the John F.Kennedy Center for the PerformingArts, Lorin Maazel of the Bavarian

Radio Symphony Orchestra, TodMachover of the Massachusetts In-stitute of Technology, Marta CasalsIstomin of the Manhattan Schoolof Music, and Gary Graffman of theCurtis Institute of Music – will en-sure the program’s success.

Alberto Vilar founded AmerindoInvestment Advisors, Inc. in 1980to manage institutional portfolios

exclusively invested in emergingtechnology growth stocks. No onewould have known at that time howauspicious this would be for the fu-ture of classical music. Many of thecompanies Amerindo significantlyinvested in – Microsoft, Oracle,Cisco, America Online, Yahoo!, andebay – became household names.Continued on Page 20

Founder Richard C. Holbrooke Returns as Academy Chairman

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s the American Academyenters its fourth year, public

policy issues will become an increa-singly important part of its profile.It attained a major step toward de-fining this profile when it announ-ced, together with the global invest-ment bank J. P. Morgan, the esta-blishment of the J. P. Morgan Inter-national Prize in Financial Policyand Economics.

The annual prize is the first of itskind in the realm of finance. It willallow American economists and fi-nancial professionals to pursue aresearch project and interact withGerman corporate and governmentofficials on significant financial po-licy issues facing Germany, Europe,and America.

While in residence at the HansArnhold Center for terms rangingfrom four weeks to one semester, J. P. Morgan Fellows will lecture andhelp the Academy expand its forumfor economic and financial policyissues. Announcing the new fellow-

ship program at a press conferenceon Wall Street in February, AcademyChairman Richard C. Holbrookeunderscored both the Academy’smission of strengthening German-American relations and the prize’sability to forge a much needed linkbetween academic knowledge andpractical relevance.

»We are very pleased that J.P.Morgan has taken the lead in sup-porting this initiative, as we feel it isimportant to recognize the contri-bution made by those in the field offinance to our social and culturalenvironment. By bringing such ex-pertise to Berlin on a regular basis,we are underscoring the increasingrole of Germany’s capital in esta-blishing policy in these areas fortheir nation as well as the EuropeanUnion.«

Walter Gubert, Chairman of the J.P. Morgan Global InvestmentBank, articulated the strategic rele-vance of the fellowship for the bank’sintellectual self-understanding:

Capital InfusionJ . P. Morgan Underwrites

Financial Policy Focus in Berlin

Trustees On BoardGregorian, Kornblum, Pozen, and Vilar Elected

»Creating this prize extends ourexpertise in finance from client ac-tivity to the public and academicrealms in Germany. As a worldwideinvestment bank we recognize theeffects of increased globalizationand the importance of bringingcountries in Europe and Americacloser together in all aspects.«

Academy President Robert Mund-heim especially thanked Kurt Vier-metz – a founding trustee of theAmerican Academy who, in hismany years at J.P. Morgan, has beenthe most important German in U.S.banking – for his help in bringingabout an especially timely and pro-mising collaboration.

Possible projects might compareAnglo-Saxon and continental mo-dels on regulatory issues, for example

or investigate other areas of directrelevance to Berlin policymaking,including global and transatlanticexchange rates; the convergence ofEuropean capital markets and stockexchanges; national and pan-Euro-pean tax and pension reform; com-peting policy models for economicrestructuring; and European inte-gration.

A distinguished panel of expertsreviews applicants for the prize. It includes: Rüdiger Dornbusch ofthe Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology; Benjamin Friedman of Harvard; Richard J. Herring, ofthe University of Pennsylvania’sWharton School; Horst Siebert, of the Kiel Institute of World Eco-nomics; and Charles Maier, ofHarvard University.

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The Hans Arnhold Center hosted a symposiumwhich brought a team of medical experts from theMayo Clinic together with leading health care ex-perts from throughout Germany. Co-moderatedby the President of the German Science Council,Prof. Karl Max Einhäupl, and Mayo Trustee Prof.Rolland E. Dickson, the symposium had two ambi-tions: first, to articulate the Mayo Clinic’s particularhealth care opportunities for a German specialistpublic, and second, to create a high-level trans-atlantic dialogue in key policy areas.

During the day-long convocation, initiated andgenerously made possible by the Anna-Maria andStephen Kellen Foundation, the visitors engaged

around seventy specialists on issues such as the division between the private and publicsector; 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, thera-peutic, 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 thelessons of Germany’s specific history, and warned of the potential stigmatization of certaingroups as they become more defined by shared genetic traits. The intense and productiveexchanges during the symposium underscored the importance of continuing to focus onhealth policy questions in transatlantic dialogue.

our new board members– Vartan Gregorian, John C.

Kornblum, Robert C. Pozen, andAlberto Vilar – will strengthen theAmerican Academy’s Board of Tru-stees and support its efforts in theacademic, foundation, businessand philanthropic communities.

Each of the new trustees has a hi-story of commitment to non-profitinstitutions as well as considerableleadership experience. VartanGregorian, President of the CarnegieCorporation of New York, and for-mer president of both the NewYork Public Library and BrownUniversity, brings to the board hisinvaluable background in culturaland academic institutions, in ad-dition to an intimate knowledge offoundations.

John C. Kornblum, a former ca-reer foreign service officer and anabiding supporter of the Academyduring his term as U.S. Ambassa-dor to Germany, will continue toadvise the Academy on public po-licy and business matters from Ber-

lin, where he will remain as Chair-man of the investment bank Lazard& Co. GmbH. Ambassador Korn-blum recently contributed a collec-tion of four hundred volumes to theHans Arnhold Center’s library.

Robert C. Pozen, a chief invest-ment executive of Fidelity Invest-ment, brings an experience in diffe-rent worlds that is extremely at-tractive to the Academy. He taughtlaw at New York University, servedas associate general counsel to theSecurities & Exchange Commission,and practiced law in Washingtonbefore 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 Invest-ment Advisors, recently donatedfour million dollars to establish along-term program for classicalmusic. The gift has been reportedextensively in the German pressand is eagerly looked forward toby Berlin’s musical community.

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After extensive work on the poli-tical history of imperial Germany,including the themes of Kulturkampfand democratic institutions, histo-rian Margaret Lavinia Anderson ofthe University of California at Berke-ley found a new theme in an unlikelysource: a historical novel by FranzWerfel. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh(1933) fictionalizes the attempt ofthe German Protestant pastor, Jo-hannes Lepsius, to prevent the de-struction of the Armenians during

Composer Martin Bresnick,whom Fanfare Magazine has calledan »eminence grise to some of themore successful younger composersaround« and »a champion synthe-sizer of disparate materials,« took aleave from the Yale School of Musicin 1998, when he received the firstCharles Ives Living Award, a three-year grant from the composer’sestate, administered by the Ameri-can Academy of Arts and Letters.

Bresnick’s Berlin residency coin-cided with the release of a two-discset of his works, which the New YorkTimes described as »tough, thorny,clear, elegant, thoughtful, and diffi-cult to pin down.« Bresnick’s BerlinPrize also brought his musical »sig-nificant other« to the Hans ArnholdCenter: Australian concert pianistLisa Moore, a gifted interpreter of his composed work, who gave several performances while at theAcademy. She also performed anevening with poet-in-residenceEllen Hinsey.

Architect and native New YorkerHillary Brown used her Bosch PublicPolicy Fellowship at the AmericanAcademy to study European envi-ronmentally progressive buildinglegislation and administration. Inrecent years, Germany has led Eu-rope in setting forward models ofsustainable development, amongthem the ecological approach tothe design and construction of


Life and Letters at the Hans Arnhold Center

the First World War by pleadingwith Enver Pasha, the OttomanWar Minister. Lepsius, who lateredited a forty-volume documenta-tion of German foreign policy, hada long history of commitment tothe Armenian cause. While at theAcademy, Anderson drew on ex-tensive archives in Berlin and Halleto document Lepsius’s efforts onbehalf of the Armenians. Her studyexplores both the history of the ear-ly human rights movement and itsentanglement with imperialismand decolonization.

buildings. A sophisticated suite ofpublic policies, performance stan-dards, and regulatory measures areinfluencing the form, techniques,and aesthetics of architecture.

Though the United States lagssignificantly behind Europe in pro-mulgating equivalent policies, Brown herself has fought hard toincrease awareness of them. She is afounder of the Office of SustainableDesign and Construction in NewYork City, which works to introduceenergy- and resource-efficient fea-tures into the city’s public facilities.Brown brought to Berlin her fifteen-year-long career in city government,a decade of professional architec-ture practice, and years of teachingat the Yale and Columbia graduateschools of architecture.

Philosopher Judith Butler, a lead-ing theorist on gender and identityissues, returned to Berlin this springas a Distinguished Senior Visitor atthe Academy. In a talk at the HansArnhold Center she probed con-temporary debates on new forms ofkinship and gay marriage. She alsolectured on »intersexual allegories«at the Freie Universität Berlin andheld a public conversation withchoreographer Sasha Waltz aboutthe piece »Bodies« performed atthe Schaubühne. Butler is a profes-sor of comparative literature at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.Her most recent book, Antigone’sClaim has just been published inGerman by Suhrkamp.

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Margaret L. Anderson

Martin Bresnick

Judith Butler

Hillary Brown

Profiles in ScholarshipThe 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, CarolineFohlin and Jeffrey Eugenides.

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directorates in imperial Germanyinto a database that details relation-ships in corporate governancebetween German industry andcommercial banking in Germanybetween 1895 and 1912. She simul-taneously pursued a broader histo-rical study of the implications of financial system design.

While at the American Academyshe worked on two monographs,New Perspectives on the UniversalBanking System in the German Indu-strialization and Financial SystemDesign and Industrial Development:International Patterns in HistoricalPerspective.

Reading great literature in trans-lation is an act of faith; one musttrust that the work is true both tothe author’s language and spirit.The finesse required of the transla-tor is perhaps most appreciablewhen two markedly different inter-pretations of the same text are com-pared. Translator and literary scho-lar Mark Harman spent two terms

collection Best of Young AmericanNovelists and in The New Yorker’sspecial issue Twenty Writers for the21st Century. During Eugenides’ time in Berlin, the new German capital has begun to insinuate itselfinto his work, both in review essaysand short stories. His soon-to-be-completed second novel takes thereader far beyond the city, but theplot’s genetic underpinnings weretime and again at the forefront ofpublic discussions at the Hans Arn-hold Center during his year at theAcademy.

That financial systems are sha-ped in part by the influence of poli-tical and legal environments andeven historical accident is a key pre-mise underlying the research of Cal-Tech economist Caroline Fohlin.Since completing her doctorate atBerkeley in 1994, she has publishedwidely on the history of Germanbanking during industrialization.

Most recently she expanded herresearch on the rise of interlocking

In 1817, American Secretary ofState John Quincy Adams warnedpotential German immigrants thatthey »must cast off the Europeanskin, never to resume it, or be dis-appointed in every expectation ofhappiness as Americans.« Univer-sity of Chicago historian KathleenN. Conzen has dedicated her careerto examining the acculturation ofthe six million Germans who arrivedin the United States before 1916.

In particular, she studies the ex-tent to which areas as diverse as rel-igious life, agrarian ideology, urbanmass culture, and political attitu-des were influenced by German cul-ture. Two published works, Immi-grant Milwaukee: Accomodation andCommunity in a Frontier City, 1836-1860 and Making Their Own Ameri-ca: Assimilation Theory and the Ger-man Peasant Pioneer are case studiesin the cultural cross-fertilization ofmass immigration. While at theHans Arnhold Center, Conzen col-laborated with Willi Paul Adams of the Freie University’s Kennedy Institute on a compendium of textsdocumenting German-Americanpolitical debates between the Ame-rican Revolution and 1916.

When writer Jeffrey Eugenidescame to Berlin two years ago underthe auspices of the DAAD, the suc-cess of his 1993 debut novel wasstill fresh. Even J. K. Rowling, authorof the famed Harry Potter books,revealed that »the last great book Iread was The Virgin Suicides,« oneencomia among many for a novelthat had already won distinguishedfiction awards from the WhitingFoundation, and the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters amongothers. New York Times critic Michi-ko Kakutani described the novel as»by turns lyrical and portentous,ferocious and elegiac« and called it»a small but powerful opera in theunexpected form of a novel.« Hisstories were included in Granta’s


at the Academy pursuing the enigmaof Franz Kafka, an author to whomhe had already devoted considera-ble attention. Harman’s translati-on of The Castle was hailed by TheBoston Review as »truer to Kafka’simagination than the earlier versi-on,« and he received the first LoisRoth Award from the Modern Lan-guage Association in 1999 for histranslation work.

A professor of German and Eng-lish at Elizabethtown College, hehas published critical essays onother modernists as well, JamesJoyce not least among them. At theAcademy, Harman shared histheory that a rich »autobiography«of Kafka may be gleaned throughan attentive and critical reading ofhis fiction.

Paris and Berlin are cities of abi-ding resonance for American wri-ters, and to some, they serve as por-tals to other destinations as well.Paris-based poet Ellen Hinsey,whose poems are marked by a pre-occupation with Eastern Europeanliterature and a passion for traveland languages, used her stay at theHans Arnhold Center to work on afirst novel.

Hinsey’s poems have appearedin numerous newspapers and jour-nals, among them The New Yorker,New York Times, The Paris Review,and The Missouri Review. Her firstvolume of poetry Cities of Memorywon the Yale Younger Poets Prizein 1996. Fellow-poet James Dickeyhas written admiringly: »with herquiet and deep involvement inother places and tongues, her true-running imagination, Ellen Hinseycomes to rest in many ways and places. Though not native-born tothese, she is at the center of themjust the same, by virtue and talentone of the best kinds of humanbeing: the perceptive voyager, thesympathetic and vivid stranger.«

Her second volume of poetry, Vita contemplativa, is forthcomingthis fall.

Kathleen N. Conzen

Caroline Fohlin

Jeffrey Eugenides

Mark Harman

Ellen Hinsey

Martin Bresnick and Lisa MooreBreak in our Bösendorfer

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T h e l i f e of Jurek Becker spanned six decades of sweeping political chan-ges in his homeland and in Germany. Born in Lódz, Poland in 1937, Beckerwitnessed major events of the twentieth century; among the defining phasesin his life were his childhood in the Lódz ghetto, the concentration camp atRavensbrück, life in post-war East Berlin, and West-German exile.

By the time of his death in 1997, Jurek Becker had authored numerousnovels and screenplays, including his best-known work, Jacob the Liar, pub-lished in 1968 and acclaimed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Becker wasa friend of Berlin Prize Fellow Sander Gilman, who spent his year at theHans Arnhold Center preparing a biography of him. Gilman’s investigationadds a personal dimension to his scholarly work.

The cultural and literary historian Sander Gilman is himself a prolificwriter, to date the author or editor of over sixty books. His most recent mono-graph, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery waspublished by Princeton University Press in 1999.

For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical fac-ulties at Cornell University and for six years of the faculty of the Universityof Chicago. Since Fall 2000 he has been Distinguished Professor of the Li-beral Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Direc-tor of its Humanities Lab, a new type of structure that will further collab-orative research and training in the humanities.

Fiona MacCarthy characterized Making the Body Beautiful in the New YorkReview of Books as »a strange, macabre and often richly comic story of shif-ting desires. His book shows a dazzling European erudition.« The breadthof Gilman’s knowledge was not lost on his colleagues at the Hans ArnholdCenter, who nicknamed him »The Internet« because of his uncanny abilityto answer questions intelligently on any subject. The biography of Becker isdue to appear next fall.

OBrother,WhereArtThouSander L. Gilman in Search of Jurek Becker

It has become commonplace forEuropeans to question America’sdominant role in international af-fairs. The nation’s economic, tech-nological and military advantages,not to mention its cultural influenceon adversaries and allies alike, areimpressive – and unsettling – tomany. As a Bosch Public Policy Fel-low at the Academy, ChristopherKojm investigated European per-ceptions and responses to thisAmerican hegemony and its impli-cations for American policymakers.

Mr. Kojm, a former Bosch Fellowwith extensive policy experience inWashington, currently serves asDeputy Assistant Secretary of Statefor Intelligence Policy and Coordi-nation in the State Department’sBureau of Intelligence & Research.Kojm’s study is especially timely given the recent change of admini-strations, which has dramaticallyeffected the European view of Ame-rican power and altered its percep-tion of the degree to which the European Union and European governments influence Americanforeign policy.

Philosophers, writers, and policymakers have debated the geopoliti-cal potential of cyberspace almostsince the term was first coined byWilliam Gibson in 1984. Bosch Public Policy Fellow Colette Maz-zucelli draws on this debate and applies it to a strategic area of gov-ernment interest in her projectEducational Diplomacy via the Inter-net: Defining the American Interestwithin a Transatlantic Policy Dia-logue on Kosovo.

Mazzucelli holds a doctorate in comparative government fromGeorgetown and serves as Co-Presi-dent of the Robert Bosch AlumniAssociation. Her seminar at theHans Arnhold Center provided aglimpse into how state-of-the-arttechnologies such as video confe-rencing and internet streaming

enable colleagues in cities fromNew York to and Pristina to conferon breaking crises, specifically therecent escalation in Macedonia.

Adam Posen, Senior Fellow at theInstitute for International Econo-mics in Washington (IIE), has beeninvolved in the study of the Ger-man economy since working at theBundesbank and Deutsche Bank asa Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowin 1992. This year, as a Bosch PublicPolicy Fellow at the Academy, hecompleted an investigation of Ger-many’s persistently high rate of un-employment and the degree towhich this problem has influencedGerman international economicpolicies. Before joining the IIE, Po-sen spent three years at the FederalReserve Bank of New York, analy-zing German economic develop-ments for Federal Reserve Boardmembers and top managementthere.Mostrecently,hehasauthoredRestoring Japan’s Economic Growthand co-authored Inflation Targe-ting: Lessons from the InternationalExperience. Another work, Discip-lined Discretion: Monetary Targetingin Germany and Switzerland (co-authored), is the most widely-citedstudy in English of German econo-mic policy and has been excerptedin Bundesbank publications. Themonograph resulting from his stayat the Hans Arnhold Center, Ger-many in the World Economy afterEMU, will be presented this fall atthe Academy.

Distinguished Stanford historianand DaimlerChrysler Fellow JamesSheehan has already turned twoprevious fellowship years in Ger-many into major works: GermanHistory 1770-1866 (supported bythe Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)and Museums in the Modern ArtWorld: From the End of the Old Regimeto the Rise of Modernism (HumboldtPrize). Continued on page 24

Colette Mazzucelli

James Sheehan

Christopher Kojm

Adam Posen

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Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, returning inMay 2000 from a UN tour of Africa – including theCongo, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia – stopped byGermany to make the case for humanitarian inter-vention. Indeed, it is among the most urgent issuesin foreign policy today and will become a public policy focus in future programs at the Academy.

ne of the new issues that will bindour countries together is our mutualinterest in peacekeeping. Peacekeeping,

especially UN peacekeeping, is being challengedtoday in a fundamental way.

I arrived here directly from Asmara, Eritreaand Addis Ababa in Ethiopia after an intense,grueling eight-day, eight-nation UN SecurityCouncil Mission to seven African states. Our mainobjective on the mission originally was to assessthe prospects for deploying UN peacekeepers inthe 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 worldcannot be ignored by Americans or by Europeansand that a little bit of effort early is a lot betterthan 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, human-itarian, strategic, financial, moral – we cannotturn away. Financially the cost of the conse-quences of a war – famine, the need for refugeerelief and reconstruction, and the grave threatof spreading disease – is much greater than thecost of trying to prevent it. From a moral andhumanitarian point of view, we cannot turnaway. From a political point of view, we can make a difference if we engage.

The UN is many things, but it was conceivedin the ashes of the war that destroyed Europe tobe primarily and centrally a conflict preventionand conflict resolution organization. This is stillthe core responsibility of the UN. The stakes arevery high in Sierra Leone and the Congo and Ko-sovo and East Timor. How the UN and the worldcommunity respond to the situations there willhave huge ramifications for peacekeepingthroughout the world and determine whether

whether the world looks to the UN at all to dopeacekeeping. There has been extensive criti-cism of the UN effort in Sierra Leone. Both policymakers and the press are asking tough questionsabout whether the UN was prepared for the crisis.Sierra Leone, like Bosnia before it, is an exampleof what happens when the parties to a peacesettlement violate that settlement, wreaking havoc on everyone – peacekeepers and civiliansalike.

The question is even more fundamental: whatis the future of UN peacekeeping? The world hasa choice in Sierra Leone. And, what happensthere will also affect the UN’s approach to theCongo, although I believe that decisions on theCongo should be made independent of, while atthe same time drawing lessons from, the crisis in

Sierra Leone. I want to be clear on another point:Sierra Leone, the Congo, or Ethopia/Eritrea, ap-palling as they are, cannot be viewed as a meta-phor for all of Africa. Despite these legitimatelywell-publicized disasters in Africa, there areplenty of success stories, for example ECOWASin the West African states, and the South Afri-can Development Council in Southern Africa.

All of this – the good, the bad, the ugly –needs to be drawn on in the difficult coming daysand weeks of policy making for the internationalcommunity. This a continent which, from a dis-tance, seems to be aflame from across its entirebreadth 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

Mobutu’s legacy – hangs heavy over the coun-try. Perhaps no African state has had more dif-ficulty in overcoming its past. Last year, underthe 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 Africanproblem. The UN has committed itself to sup-porting it, and part of that commitment will in-volve peacekeeping troops.

I certainly do not disagree that UN peace-keeping has fundamental problems. In SierraLeone the UN deployed a force that was too in-experienced and insufficiently capable. Deploy-ments were very slow. This troubles me greatlyin regard to the Congo, where both PresidentMuseveni of Uganda and President Kagame ofRwanda have urgently called for UN troops totake over Kisangani.

I remain committed to trying to make UN peace-keeping effective, which if done right, is vital.It can be successful. We have many examples:Cyprus today, still divided and beginning theprocess of accession to the EU, would not be thepeaceful (but tense) island it is today were it notfor UN forces. The UN peacekeepers played in-dispensable roles in bringing stability, indepen-dence, and progress to other areas like EasternSlovenia and Croatia. They played critical rolesin Namibia, Macedonia, Mozambique, and Icommend them highly for the work they aredoing in East Timor.

The UN is certainly not going to be the answerto every crisis. Sometimes as in Bosnia, the bulkof the forces are not UN. The initial deploymentin East Timor, for example, was not a UN peace-keeping deployment. Although authorized bythe UN, it was a regular military force led by avery powerful Australian contingent, backed upby British, French, American, Philippine andKorean troops. When they had things undercontrol, they transitioned from a multinationalforce to a UN force. Some of the same troopsstayed and put on blue berets.

The UN and regional leaders should and mustwork hand in glove. Sometimes regional orga-nizations should take the lead with UN support,

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Mission PossibleBy Richard C. Holbrooke

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The longer the United Nations fails to live up to its

potential, the longer the innocents will suffer, the

greater the danger that wewill be sucked in later

Peacekeep ing and the Uni t ed Nat ions


outweigh the costs so generously undertaken.Kosovo, of course, is a much more difficult situat-ion, but it is much earlier in the process, and a similar commitment by all the countries invol-ved is essential for it to succeed. Peace in Kosovois far from assured at this point as an enduringoutcome. 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 respon-sibility. 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 amountof external United Nations or international for-ces can ever bring peace to the Congo. It has tobe the parties themselves, assisted by the inter-national community. No one is arguing that aBosnia/Kosovo-type operation would be desir-able or possible in the Congo. Nonetheless, wecannot turn away from it. In order to make itwork, the UN Secretariat is going to have to do abetter job.

We will propose to the UN far-ranging re-forms for the way its peacekeeping office is finan-ced, structured, and administered. Absent the

as in East Timor. In other cases, the UN shouldlead with regional support. Among the world'sregional organizations, there is no doubt aboutwhich one is the most powerful and the mosteffective. It is NATO. The Atlantic Alliance re-mains indispensable to stability.

The question for us is not whether or not thatAlliance is strained. It is not. It is a strong orga-nization and the strongest strategic relationshipin the world. It has survived every challenge ofthe Cold War and made a transition to a post-Cold-War context, adding three new membersand taking on incredibly difficult responsibili-ties in Bosnia and Kosovo. There are many crisesin the world. The Atlantic Alliance is not one ofthem. On the contrary, Bosnia is one of the greatsuccess stories of international peacemakingand peacekeeping. The United States, Ger-many, France, and the United Kingdom – andeven Russia in the Contact Group, in the Daytonnegotiations, and in the subsequent period – have kept the peace for five years with no casual-ties. Much more slowly than we want but un-mistakably, the country is beginning to knit to-gether. Germany has, as a result of that effort,been able to see a sharp reduction in the numberof refugees from the Balkans, so the benefits far

reform, UN peacekeeping will be on a collisioncourse. But reform, if carried out, should be able to deal with the simple fact that demand forpeacekeeping is far outpacing the UN's capacity. Reform cannot wait. The talk about peace-keeping reform brings to mind Bismarck’s famous observation that conquering armies –or rebel groups for that matter – will not be hal-ted by the power of eloquence. Words are im-portant and have meaning, but the time is herefor action.

We should remember that peacekeeping in itscore, whether it is in Bosnia or Kosovo or Cyprusor East Timor or Africa, is about more thanmaintaining the credibility of the great powers.It is about protecting innocents from suffering.It is about providing people with the opportun-ity 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 peace-keeping shortcomings to go unfixed, the longerthe innocents will suffer, the greater the dangerthat we will be sucked in later – in a more cost-ly way. I hope we will not turn away from thedaunting tasks ahead of us at this particularlychallenging moment.


ow will historians deal with the century that hasjust concluded? What narratives or interpretations will theyconstruct to make sense of the last hundred years? Will the twen-

tieth century cohere as a historical epoch? Twentieth-century history assuch, I believe, will serve as a framework for what I call moral narrativesbut not as a chronological framework for thinking about politics and society.

The problems it presents do not arise just because of ragged beginningand end points, such that 1914 and 1989 seem to open and close the polit-ical story, at least of Western history. Nor is the diffi-culty a result of the fact that internal caesuras, suchas the defeat of fascism and the end of the world wars,might be viewed as so deeply dividing the Westernnarrative, at least, that the 1900s as a whole retainlittle»structural« unity. Rather, to focus on the twen-tieth century as such obscures the most encompassing

How Long was the Twentieth Century? Modern Times began around 1860 and fell apart in the late 1960’s

or fundamental sociopolitical trends of modern world development,these have followed a different trajectory through time, providing the ter-ritorially anchored structures for politics and economics that were takenfor granted between 1860 and 1980, but have since begun to decompose.

To focus on the twentieth century as a historical era obscures impor-tant developmental patterns that are better understood as products of achronological period that began deep in the nineteenth century and theneffectively concluded two to three decades before the century formally

ended. As an argument about periodization, thethesis thus proposes that a cluster of developmentsI label territorialization and deterritorializationclaim a degree of significance usually taken forgranted. But, the twentieth century will not dis-appear as a historical reference point. Historiansof the physical sciences, of music, of painting and

By Charles S. Maier

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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.

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In a work that has fallen into undeserved ob-livion, the historian Robert Binkley took accountof this global transition sixty-five years ago inRealism and Nationalism, 1852-1871. Here hepointed out that political territories or nationalunits had undergone a great crisis of confederalorganization, abandoning – in a process of wide-spread civil wars – their traditional decentralizedstructures of politics for more administrativelyand territorially cohesive regimes. In the UnitedStates of the Civil War era; in Meiji Japan; in theGerman Confederation and the states of Italy; inthe emerging halves of the Habsburg empire; inthe British organization of India; in Canada,Mexico, Thailand, and later in the Ottoman em-pire; national societies were reforged in a rapidand often violent transformation; which firststrengthened central government institutionsat the expense of regional or confederal authority; second required that internal as well as externalmilitary capacity be continually mobilized as

a resource for governance; third co-opted the new leaders of finance and industry, scienceand professional attainment into a ruling cartelalongside the still powerful but no longer supremerepresentatives 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 goodsand people, and the mass output of industrialproducts assembled by a factory labor force. Indeed, it was probably this technological tran-

architecture certainly use the label 20th-Century– validly so, given the fundamental innovationsin all these fields between about 1905 and 1910.Perhaps most indelibly, the twentieth centuryhas become synonomous with the narratives ofmoral atrocity that continue to transfix intellec-tuals and the public alike. For western intellec-tuals the twentieth century does not refer prim-arily to a chronological unit. Rather it constit-utes a sort of moral epoch, a passage of timefundamentally characterized by war and viol-lence, i.e. by political killing, or, as Isaiah Berlinsummarized it, as »the worst century there hasever been.«

This essay takes up, however, not the moralnarrative of the twentieth century but the morestructural theme of territoriality, which spillsacross the century’s chronological limits. Whencited by historians, centuries are like Procrustes’famous bed: the Greek innkeeper eitherstretched his guests if they were too short orchopped them down if they were too long forthe sleeping accommodations that were offered.By and large, historians of the West have stretched the 1800s into the »long nineteenthcentury,«extending it until WorldWar I.

Europeanists, at least, have conceived of it asthe century marked by industrial development,the triumph of the modern nation state, the ad-vent of mass democracy, the partition of muchof what would later come to be called the ThirdWorld,andfinallybyasuperbconfidenceinecon-omic and moral progress. As a pendant to this»long nineteenth century,« finally terminatedby World War I, Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of a»short twentieth century« offers the advantageof accommodating the long nineteenth althoughit stops a decade ago in 1989. But European nar-ratives serve less well the chronologies of Africanand Asian histories, whose caesuras have to doeither with the impact of the West or indigenousdevelopments that followed diverse rhythms.

The twentieth century as such is not very use-ful, in fact, for understanding world historicaldevelopment. I would propose instead that a coherent epoch of world development began inthe sixth and seventh decades of the last century– say for the sake of simplicity around 1860 –and that its technological, cultural, and socio-political scaffolding began to corrode and fallapart in the late l960s, initiating a process ofprofound transformation in which we are stillcaught up.

sition that was responsible for the simultaneityof such geographically dispersed changes.

What historians and political scientists havetended to take for granted until recently wasthat, common to all these national reorganiz-ations, was an enhanced concept of territory as a source of national energy and power, administ-rative cohesion and economic resource. Notthat historians have not dealt with frontiers,butthey have done so primarily for the Roman Em-pire or in the context of the post-Westphalian,seventeenth-century state system, which securedthe principle of sovereignty and renewed thepreoccupation with fortified frontiers that hadmarked antiquity.

Western statesmen and publics of the late nineteenth century believed that they mustreinforce the frontiers anew. And not only geog-raphical frontiers. Social and class upheaval athome as well as renewed international competi-tion, compelled a renewed fixation on social enclosures of all sorts: boundaries that separatednation from nation, church from state, publicfrom private, household from work, alleged

male from reputed female roles.

But what further characterized mid-nine-teenth century development was that, even as anew class of political leaders believed they mustreestablish frontiers anew, they also emphasizedthat national power and efficiency rested on thesaturation of space inside the frontier. The majorconcept was that of »energy.« National spacewas to be charged with »energy«, with prefec-tural presence, new railroads and infrastructure,mass-circulation newspapers, telegraphic com-munication and the possibilities of electrical power in general. The metaphors of contempor-ary physics provided a conceptual analogue. Bythe 1870s James Clerk Maxwell’s equations re-lated electrical and magnetic fields and assignedevery point in space a quantity of energy thatemanated from the center. Territories, too, hada center: the national capital from which politicaland economic energy radiated outward. (In con-trast, today’s metropolises are wired to each other,not their national hinterland, and conceived assuspendedinaworldnetworkofcapitalandlabor.)

What were the resources of territoriality?First, quite simply, extent. Indeed, by the endof the century, territorial ambitions were exten-ded to overseas empires, and geopolitical theo-rists divided over whether maritime or landed

How Long Was the Nineteenth Century?


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Modernity Came Through Energy

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extension offered more power. Population wasobviously a resource and so, too, was economic development.

I cite these developments because theyproved fundamental to the collective organiza-tion of economics resources and political powerfor over a century – not the twentieth century,but rather the hundred or so years extendingfrom the 1860s to the 1970s.

The era of economic nationalism and protec-tive tariffs starting in the l870s; the subsequentdrive to annex overseas territory; the formation oflong-term alliances during peace time, and theratcheting up of the arms race that preceded theFirst World War; the ideological polarizationbetween a Marxist Left and a militarist Right,thereafter between communism and fascism,and finally between Soviet power and its Atlanticalliance. These were the stages of historical de-velopment within this long era of territoriality.

It is true that the Marxist Left sought to chal-lenge the premises of territoriality and appealto a revolutionary internationalism. Eventually,however, Communists achieved power only byaccepting 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 convincedthat the nation-state offered an appropriate ful-crum for democratic emancipation. They bene-fited from the fact that, by the 1940s, represen-tatives of the industrial working class were co-op-ted into the power-sharing arrangements fromwhich they had been largely excluded before.

Common to all the changes that took placefrom the 1860s on, up through and beyond theadmittedly important critical divides of 19l4and 1945, however, remained perhaps the fun-damental premise of collective life, namely thatwhat we can term »identity space« was coter-minous with »decision space«; that is, that theterritories to which ordinary men and womentended to ascribe their most meaningful publicloyalties (indeed thus superseding competingsupranational religious or social class affiliations)also provided the locus of resources for assuringtheir physical and economic security. This oncefamiliar congruence no longer exists. Identityspace and decision space are no longer seen asidentical. Territoriality no longer suffices as adecisive resource; it is a problematic basis forcollective political security and increasingly

irrelevant to economic activity. Of course thereare fierce exceptions where ethnic groups insiston hegemony. But renunciation of the Golan isprobably more the sign of the times than claimsfor Kosovo.

When and why did the territorial imperativeloosen its grip? The coordinates of political andeconomic 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 »glo-balization.« The processes that undermined theearlier 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 unleas-hed; the American unwillingness to continueupholding the international monetary regime;the emergence of new economic contenderswhether through industrialization or the exploi-tation of their hold on world oil supplies; the breakdown of relatively easy collaborative indus-trial relations in Europe and the Americas; andshortly thereafter, the emergence of militant social movements among students, women and anti-nuclear protesters; and finally by thecollapse of state socialism and planned econo-mies during the 1980s, systems even more vulner-able to the seismic changes underway than themarket economies that enjoyed a renewed vigoron a post-territorial and post-Fordist basis.

Indeed, the collapse of communist regimesin 1989-90 and the end of the Cold War rivalrycan be seen as the most spectacular politicalconsequence of the weakening of territorialpolitics. It had been the state socialist regimes,after all, that were most committed to control-ling politics, economics and ideology on the basis of territory and frontiers (most tangibly in East Germany), and also most heavily investedin the aging processes of heavy industry that had characterized the territorial era.

For just as a qualitative change of technologicalpossibilities for mastering space and its exten-sion had facilitated the political transformationsof the century after 1860, so the very technologi-cal transformations of the last thirty years havetended to make physical space a less relevantresource. The age of coal and iron, and then, too,of hydrocarbon chemistry, of oil and electricity,of aluminum and copper as well as steel – allstill epitomized even in the l950s and l960s –was overlaid in fact, and in the public imaginat-ion – by the technologies of semiconductors,computers, and data transmission – with anew accepted basis for creating private wealth.The concept of hierarchically organized Fordistproduction (based on a national territory) wassupplanted by the imagery, if not always the reality, of globally co-ordinated networks of inf-ormation, mobile capital, and migratory labor.

The political result has been to transform the major political division of our times. Thisseparates those who envisage their future pros-pects based on non-territorial markets orexchange of ideas, and those who insist that ter-ritoriality can be reinvigorated as the basis foreconomic and political security – whether onthe basis of provincial regionalism, or supran-ational organization, or by harsher measures ofethnic homogeneity or territorially and religi-ously based politics. As is so often the case in history, the outlines of an earlier epoch becomevisible only as they dissolve: the famous owl ofMinerva takes wing at dusk.

My claim is that the fundamental transitionshistorians associate with modern history werebased on the consolidation – and then the endingor at least a profound crisis – of territoriality.The century familiar to those of us who are atleast middle aged began shortly after the mid-l800s and began to decompose, I believe, a gener-ation ago. Sometime between l968 and the endof the l980s, we lived through our own fin de siècle.

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Identity Space and Decision SpaceAre No Longer Identical

Our Fin-de-siecle came sometime after 1968

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As Berlin Prize Fellows in Spring 2001, artistJenny Holzer and poet Henri Cole had manylate-night conversations in the library of theHans Arnhold Center. The following is an ex-cerpt of a public conversation held in February.Their main subject is Holzer’s site-specificinstallation in Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a work consisting of amber-lighted digital text. Holzer was the first PhilipMorris Distinguished Artist at the Academy.Cole contributed an essay to the forth-coming catalogue of the show.

Henri Cole: When you undertook the installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie – a project so large inscale, cost, and logistical complexity – what was themost you hoped for?Jenny Holzer: I began because I wanted to seethe artwork. I was afraid of the project immedia-tely 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 theinstallation, and I persevered because I wantedto 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’redone. I am happy that the building was gener-ous with me.

Did you start by writing a text or think in terms ofspace?In Berlin, I saw the space first. I could tell thatthe building would be fine once the museumwas cleared of temporary walls. After a month of visits, I thought I could do something with theceiling because – slow student that I am – I’d finally realized that the roof dominates. When Irecognized the roof, I thought this was the placewhere I could join the architect. This was the

place he was strongest, the place I could salutehim and not be killed. So, I understood some-thing of the space, and then spent much timeavoiding the new text. You helped me completethe writing finally. The text was done about fivedays 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 youworking in a studio. How did you work in Berlin? I was delighted by the invitation to work at theNeue Nationalgalerie, but the pleasure was fol-lowed by fear and much walking around thebuilding. Most mornings I would try to write inthe peace of the Academy. At my New York farm

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Flesh Against SteelThe Art of Inscribing Maxims in Mies van der Rohe’s Museum without Walls

A Conversation between Henri Cole and Jenny Holzer

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I practice my habit, which is the addiction to of-fice 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 use-ful because my projects require much manage-ment. Eventually I return to writing. In Berlin, I went to the museum at least thirty times earlyon. Later I could revisit the space by closing myeyes. Strangely enough, I can see in 3-D. I’d gosomewhere quiet, shut my eyes, patrol the muse-um again and check my notions. For this project,I lost my nerve and resorted to computer gra-phics in case I was dead wrong.

Did the computer graphics accurately reproduce theimage in your head?The computer graphics were so good that I wasanxious that they would be superior to the exhi-bition. Eventually I thought the installation wasbetter because it changes itself and its environ-ment, it moves and the movement can be liquid.At times, the installation is quite rigorous, logicaland linear, and at other moments it is a lazy riverwith eddies, and this wasn’t entirely possible inthe computer.

Do you want your texts to make a stronger claim onthe viewer than the physical presence of your instal-lations? Or to put it another way, should the viewerbe reading or looking first?Sometimes reading can be all-important, andhere in Berlin, I would have guessed that the textwould be co-equal with the formal and the mater-ial parts of the installation, but I am not certain itis. It is embarrassing for me to talk about myown work, so I squirm now, but in the museum,it felt as if something was passing over the skin oracting on the whole body, more than an act ofplain reading. So the text was necessary butperhaps subordinate.

When I am teaching poetry, I always hope my studentswill respond to the formal body of a poem, by consid-ering its music, its arrangement on the page and thedrama of language, before they reduce it to themeand content. It seems to me a museumgoer can res-pond similarly when viewing your installations.Because I don’t have great facility with language,I need to have part of the meaning and the exper-ience come from the space, from the motion andthe 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 personalmaterial 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 Idecided to work on that ceiling, it made sense toshow this text and others that treat flesh againstthe steel. I wanted writing about people on theblack metal. Even though the new text isn’t purelyautobiographical, there’s enough of myself that Ithought somewhere between twice and a thou-sand times about even finishing the writing, muchless displaying it.

Do you feel this text is different from others? I heardsomeone say at the opening that it was more »writ-ten,« 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 theAcademy and imagine you working for hours atyour desk in your room, and I thought this themost frightening thing in the world: to be alonein a room trying to write. I wondered what wouldhappen if I attempted that instead of practising one of my avoidance activities. Maybe it’s notgood when someone who is not a writer spendsmore time writing.

You’ve said that your preferred themes are sex, death and war. Would you add anything to that listtoday?I don’t know whether those three are the prefer-red themes, but they come back time and again.This is embarrassing to say in public, but I believeI’m also sneaking up on love. That gives me pause.

Did you intend for there to be a dialogue betweenyour works at the Neue Nationalgalerie and theReichstag?At the Reichstag, I was given the politicians’ ent-rance, but I couldn’t imagine what to show par-liamentarians going to work. I reviewed my writ-ing and also considered composing somethingnew, but then said no. Eventually I thought to pre-sent many speeches delivered since the first dis-cussions of whether to construct the Reichstag,all the way through Bonn debates about whetherit would be right to return to the building. Once Ihad that concept, I made a long, thin electroniccolumn with text on four sides. One side facesout so that anyone walking by can see speech. TheReichstag piece is different from the work for theNationalgalerie. Continued on page 23

When Jenny Holzer received the Aca-demy’s first Philip Morris DistinguishedArtist fellowship in the fall of 2000, she in-tended to use Berlin as a geocultural van-tage point for already-commissioned cur-rent work. She soon found inspiration inBerlin itself, however, specifically in thearchitecture of Ludwig Mies van der Ro-he’s Neue Nationalgalerie.

Last February’s dramatic installation in-scribed the ceiling with thirteen beams ofmoving electronic texts. At night, it illum-inated a previously dark corner of Berlin’sKulturforum. The ocher letters of hertext, »OH,« shone from Mies’ glass buil-ding and seemed to run into the sky, andHolzer’s text – always at the forefront of

her art – competed with the sheer beautyof illuminating the architectural master-piece. During the exhibition’s openingweek, Holzer also projected texts onHans Scharoun’s Philharmonie as well ason a number of important new Berlinbuildings by Renzo Piano, Axel Schultes,and Daniel Libeskind.

A great success, the installation wasbought by the Friends of the Neue National-galerie and will return to Berlin in January2002. At that time a catalogue documen-ting the work will be published by Dumontand The American Academy. The book issupported by Philip Morris Kunstförde-rung, which also helped underwrite theexhibition.

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Two German BusinessmenBy Gerald D. Feldman

h e N a t i o n a l S o c i a l i s t r e g i m e was not only criminalbut 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 1914and 1933, was nevertheless still intact when the National Socialists cameto power. Berlin was surely its most important center, and here Jewishbankers and bankers of Jewish origin played a distinguished and respec-ted role as business leaders and men of affairs.

One such banker was Hans Arnhold (1888-1966), the fourth of the fivechildren born to Georg (1859-1926) and Anna (1860-1917) Arnhold. Thebanking house Gebr. Arnhold was formed in Dresden in 1864 by LudwigPhilippson and Max Arnhold. The firm prospered as the leading privatebank in Saxony, opened a branch office in Berlin in1907 and eventually as Gebr. Arnhold Dresden–Berlin became one of the largest five private Germanbanks. While Max Arnhold had no children, thefour sons of his nephew Georg Arnhold – Adolf(1884-1950),Heinrich(1885-1935),Kurt(1887-1951) and Hans (1888-1966) – joined the firm as

partners. Hans, the youngest brother, took over the increasingly importantBerlin office, after receiving his training as a banker, both in Hamburg andthe US. It was in the 1920s that Hans Arnhold built the Wannsee villa whichnow houses the American Academy in Berlin.

Thanks to its solid and skillful management, Gebr. Arnhold weatheredthe great inflation of the postwar years and kept its doors open in the ban-king crisis of 1931. Indeed, Gebr. Arnhold expanded by entering into ancommunity of interest (Interessengemeinschaft) with the banking houseof S. Bleichröder, rescuing it in the process. Not surprisingly, Hans Arn-hold was a trusted figure, active in the big business and high politics ofGermany’s capital city. He was involved in important transactions, forexample, for the Allianz Insurance Co. and collaborated with its General

Director, Kurt Schmitt. He also had the confidenceof Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who asked himin 1931, in the midst of the great economic andpolitical crisis, to approach Kurt Schmitt about

T

Gerald D. Feldman, who was a BerlinFellow in 1998, directs the Institute of Euro-pean Studies at University of California, Ber-keley. He is preparing a major study, Historyof the Allianz Insurance Company.

The Postwar Correspondence of Hans Arnhold and Kurt Schmitt

Hans Arnhold with wife Ludmilla and daughters EllenMaria and Anna-Maria in the 1920s at the entrance tohis Wannsee villa, today The Hans Arnhold Center.

taking over the position of Finance Minister.Schmitt declined the invitation, but the role as-signed to Hans Arnhold is some measure of hishigh status.

All this ceased to matter after 1933. To be sure,Kurt Schmitt, who served as Reich EconomicsMinister from June 1933 until the summer of1934, believed he had secured Hitler’s agreementto the principle »there is no Jewish question inthe economy,« but found that the Party was notwilling to respect such principles. ReichsbankPresident Hjalmar Schacht replaced Schmitt after the latter became ill,serving until 1937. Hetoo opposed anti-Jewish measures in the econ-omy on the grounds that they would hurt the rec-overy at home and Germany’s economic relat-ions abroad.

Nevertheless, the forces working to expel theJews from the economy were hard at work fromthe beginning. In January 1934 the Saxon NaziLeader, Gauleiter Mutschmann, who felt a parti-cular hatred toward the Arnholds because hehad been denied credit in earlier years in view ofhis questionable reputation, used trumped-upcharges to indict Adolf and Dr. Heinrich Arnholdof fraud and bribery. It was made clear to theArnholds that if they did not abandon theirSaxon business, Mutschmann would spare noeffort to force them to leave. Heinrich Arnholddied as a consequence of this persecution. Boththe lower and higher courts exonerated the bro-thers in every respect. By the end of 1935, Gebr.Arnhold was driven from Saxony by the regio-nal Nazi leadership, and the Dresden based business was sold to the Dresdner Bank.

Unhappily, however, the family still thoughtit had a future in Germany and chose to concen-trate its efforts in Berlin. By 1937, Kurt Arnholdwas the only brother still active in running theremaining firm in Berlin. By 1938, it became apparent that to maintain a normal businesswas impossible. He was forced to sell the assetsof the Banks to the Dresdner Bank and finallyfled as the last member of the family at the endof November of 1938 across the border to Hol-land. Hans Arnhold had already left Germanyfor France in 1933 and escaped to the UnitedStates after the outbreak of the war, where hecontinued the tradition of the family by buil-ding up the Investment Banking firm Arnholdand S. Bleichroeder, Inc. His house on the Wann-see was taken over by Schacht’s spineless succes-sor, Walther Funk.

Kurt Schmitt’s fate was a very different onefrom that of Hans Arnhold. His brief career ingovernment was not a happy one. While not freeof anti-Semitic sentiments when it came to Jewishjournalists and lawyers, he found the anti-Semi-tic measures of the government distasteful andincreasingly dangerous and felt a strong bondwith some of his Jewish colleagues, especiallythe banker Otto Jeidels of the Berliner Handels-gesellschaft, who fled to America and later be-came a Vice-President of the Bank of America. Also, he seems to have worried that the regimewas driving Germany toward war, a policy heviewed as mistaken, despite his nationalist sen-timents, his honorary appointment as an SS Bri-gadeführer and an odd enthusiasm for wearingthe uniform on certain official occasions.

Whatever the case, the American AmbassadorWilliamE.DoddreportedfavorablyonSchmitt’sviews in his published diaries. Moreover, Schmittseems to have been happy to have the excuse ofhis bad health to leave public office and returnto the world of business in 1935. He became theGeneral Director of the Munich Reinsurance Co.(Münchener Rückversicherungsgesellschaft),which was closely connected with Allianz andwhich he managed with great energy until theend of the war.

A complicated personality, Schmitt continuedto have contact with Hitler and other powerfulfigures in the regime, but also tried to gain therelease of Pastor Martin Niemöller and took careof his son. While pursuing the business interestsand expansion of his company throughout thewar he also became increasingly disaffected withthe regime, feelings undoubtedly promoted bythe loss of his two sons. His very mixed recordmade him a particularly difficult denazificationcase. He was brought before a variety of tribunalsbetween 1945 and 1948, and he finally ended upamong the »lesser-implicated«. His desire tocollect testimonials was undoubtedly an impor-tant motive in his decision to write to Hans Arn-hold on January 22, 1948 in a letter demonstra-ting a peculiar mixture of obligatory sensitivityto the delicacy of the situation along with irrepressible self-pity:

Gut Tiefenbrunn, January 22, 1948Dear Herr Arnhold!

By pure chance I happened to mention yourecently in a conversation about old times withPrivy Councilor Gassner of Brown Boveri and lear-ned of your fate. I only wish today with these lines tosay that I happily remember our common work forAllianz. I will not bore you today with news about

my circumstances. Before I do that, I first want toknow whether you remember me. For, after every-thing that has happened in these frightful years, itwould not be surprising, if you have drawn a lineunder 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 allenvy you yet.« I would be very happy to hear fromyou, and am with best regards, Yours

Dr. Kurt Schmitt

Arnhold’s moving reply, obviously typed byhimself on a machine without umlauts – in itselfa commentary on the relationship between thephysical and spiritual burdens of even a fortun-ate refugee – is a monument to the German-Jewish bourgeois culture torn asunder by Natio-nal Socialism.

New York, March 25, 1948Dear Herr Dr. Schmitt,

I have just received your friendly letter. I mustconfess that I was very happy to receive your greetingsbecause they come from a person whom I have al-ways highly valued for his honesty and his strongcreative power and his collegiality. I also confessthat your letter made me somewhat melancholy because it demonstrated to me that one still has afalse picture over there concerning the situation here and especially concerning the fate of the manyrefugees.

You are right that I often would like to draw a lineunder the past, but when one has lived in Germanyfor fifty years and has had good friends and wasattached to the beauty of Germany, then it is just notso simple to draw this line. I was in Europe in 1946-1947, but I did not step upon German soil because Idid not want to see the destroyed country and all the


18

Kurt SchmittForced Departures

and Fellow Travellers


19

The Hans Arnhold Villa at Lake Wannsee in 1928

misery. I also do not correspond much, and if I replyextensively to your friendly letter, then it is one of thefew exceptions.

I say that I am made somewhat melancholy bythe remembrance of you. Today we know how muchbetter it perhaps would have been if you had respon-ded with a »yes« instead of with the words »it is tooearly,« when I was commissioned in 1931 to contactyou as to whether you would accept the position ofReich Finance Minister. Perhaps Germany wouldhave been spared the fearful years about which youspoke if you had placed yourself at the disposal of thegovernment then instead of only doing so under theNazi regime in 1934. I know that you did so in thebest faith and most complete love of the Fatherland,but it must be said that you made a mistake. Do nottake it ill if I write this and add to it that there is noone who has not make mistakes, including myself,and perhaps I would have also made some if I hadnot 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 allenvy you some day«, and you believe that this day isnow at hand. If you mean by that the peace that Dr.Jeidels has found in his quiet grave on the Buergen-stock far »from all partisan hate and favor,« thenyou are right. But if you mean the fate of those drivenfrom Germany, then you have a completely false pic-ture. You only hear of the very few who have managedto gain a foothold here or in other parts of the worldand believe that you can generalize their fate. Believeme, most of them, strewn over the entire world, fighthard from dawn to dusk for their existence, and onehears daily about new misery on the part of many ofthose who once happily lived in Germany. I knowthat things are very, very bad for countless numbersin Germany, and I try myself to help old friends there;but I believe, that things still are much worse for thelargest portion of the refugees. Not even to mentionthe unending misery that has overtaken manythrough the cruel death that was the fate of manyrelations left behind in Europe. The one thing thatthe refugees have to be sure of is their freedom ofthought, and that is worth a great deal.

Forgive me please, dear Herr Dr. Schmitt, if in myreply to your friendly letter I have become detailedand somewhat serious. Please do not consider it anunfriendliness but rather as a discussion which I –as I said – must have sometime with a person fromwhom I can expect understanding, after I haveotherwise corresponded with practically no one.Write to me, if you so interpret my letter as I meantit, and write to me please a bit about yourself, for itinterests me. I do not forget your friendly attitudetoward me in the years of your official activity.

With friendly greetings, Yours, Hans Arnhold

Schmitt replied almost immediately, recoun-ting his own travails since 1934, his connectionswith Resistance figures, and his difficult denazi-fication and forced inactivity. He also sought tojustify and explain his refusal of the Finance andEconomics ministries before 1933 as well as hisacceptance of the Economics Ministry post under Hitler.

Gut Tiefenbrunn, April 1, 1948Dear Herr Arnhold,

Your letter of March 25 has given me unspeakablehappiness. I hasten to answer it immediately.

Insofar as the picture I have of the situation inAmerica and above all the fate of the many refugeesis concerned, you should be convinced that I have, ifnot an absolutely correct, then still an approximatepicture.Iknowhowmuchisconnectedwiththehome-land that, to a great extent, became dear to themand old friends, and that one cannot simply forgetone’s youth and the years of one’s creativity. It was precisely here that one finds the insanity ofHitler’s policy, that it refused to recognize so manygood Germans and, in its madness, did such bitterinjustice to them. But there is one thing you all have,as you yourself say, the freedom of thought and, I mayadd, of personality, while we have lived now for 15years in a kind of prison. From the time of my with-drawal from office in 1934, I did not know what oneintended to do with me. I took in the son of PastorNiemöller; I had to openly take a stand against thepolicy in many matters; there was Dodd’s book, inwhich I was severely compromised with the Natio-nal Socialists (I enclose an excerpt); I lost many friends, for whom I had found places in the MunichReinsurance Co., on July 20, 1944. And thereafter?I was repeatedly arrested. As a former minister, Iwas [classified as] a major culprit. My assets areblocked. Even today I may not work, not even on my

estate, although my services are necessary in everynook and cranny. I would help with full fervor in thecreation of a United States of Europe, in whoseestablishment I see the only possible basis for aneconomic recovery and for a final true banning ofwar inside Europe, in any case in western Europe.But my case is still not terminated. The denazificationhas been carried through in the lower court. All thewitnesses have confirmed the best about me. No stone was thrown at me. But I was Reich EconomicsMinister in 1933-34. At that time, without my having any hand in the matter, I stupidly receivedthe honorary rank of an SS-Brigadeführer. I wastherefore formally declared to be »less incrimina-ted.« 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 complete-ly forgotten, namely that I should have become ReichFinance Minister in 1931. At one time Brüning him-self proposed me for the Reich Economics Ministry.If I turned it down at that time, then it was not be-cause of my political position, but rather out of lackof desire to leave my beautiful Allianz to go into poli-tics, but in general also because of the justified feelingat that time, that the activity would have stood onweak and short-term legs given the constitution ofthe parties and their short-sighted egotistical fightamong themselves. When Göring offered me theReich Economics Ministry in the summer of 1933, Isaidtomyself – ingeneral,afterconsultating,amongothers, Jeidels, who has expressly confirmed this tome – that what was involved was saving the Ger-man economy from madness and internationalcomplications. It seemed to me worth the sacrifice.When I saw after ten months – to which many friends have also testified under oath – that I couldnot accomplish this and that my decree, which Ieven managed to get from Hitler himself, that »there

Alberto Vilar

20


is no Jewish question in the economy,« would notbe 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 yourprecious lines, even if you criticize me. On the contra-ry, I am pleased. It is human to err. What I wantedand the views I represented cannot be condemned byany American.

Believe me that despite this I do not contest my fate.I know of and suffer for the fate of so many other per-sons, and I know that even my friend Jeidels had tobear much bitterness despite all his successes.

I hope to get another letter from you soon. Even ifour connection at that time was a purely businessone and under the circumstances was not of the kindI had, for example, with Jeidels, still your letter hascaused me to write to you today in a more personaland detailed way. I hope to learn more about yourpersonal 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 businessmantoo, and Schmitt had good reason to expect thatArnhold would sympathize with his remarks.What divided the two men was not politics orWeltanschauung but history, as the next two let-ters of this exchange demonstrate. WhereasArnhold was preoccupied, as his reply to Schmittshows, with trying to deal with the discontin-uities in his life and coming to terms with thethreatening and alien world that was enteringthe Cold War, Schmitt found himself trying todig his name and honor out of the moral ruinleft by the »Third Reich«.

New York, May 4, 1948Dear 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 bookdoes not tell me anything new about the various per-sonalities, and I always knew about your positionduring the regime, especially about the honorablemotives which led to the false step in 1934. But as Ihave already written to you: Who does not at timesmake a mistake? What is only important is that onerecognizes it and has the courage to admit to it, andthat you also have shown – in contrast to Dr. Schachtwho, in my view, despite his cleverness, his courageand his fight against Hitler, has no right to be cyni-cal and arrogant.

I am naturally very sorry that you personally nowhave such disagreeable circumstances, and if I canhelp to make them easier, then please turn to me.

I can understand that you find it oppressive to be inactive, but I believe, that – if there is no war – theworst times are past and the reconstruction of westernEurope 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 asmall banking business here under the names Arn-hold and S. Bleichroeder, Inc., but I have not reallysucceeded because, first of all, I have lost somethingof my strength, and second, I am not young enoughfor this land, and third, because there is a great dealof bureaucracy here also, and I am totally unsuitablefor it. I have along with this a small ceramics factory,and even though I am no industrialist, the buildingup of this factory has still given me much pleasure.

All in all, I have grown up too much in a free, indi-vidualist capitalism to be able to go along with thepresent methods, where in the final analysis every-thing will be directed from the state in all the coun-tries. Just as the achievements of the French Revolu-tion have been spread about the entire world, so inthe final analysis also those of the Russian Revolutionwill spread over the world. With that, I think, wewill experience a kind of state socialism everywhere,and I only hope that it will not be bound up, as inRussia, with terror and deprivation of freedom.

I travel tomorrow to Europe, but I do not believethat I can decide to travel to Germany, althoughmany people write that I still should come.With many friendly greetings, Yours,

Hans Arnhold

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Gut Tiefenbrunn, July 22, 1948Dear Herr Arnhold,

I have not acknowledged your letter of May 4th;many sincere thanks! You were so friendly as to offerto help me in my affair, should this be possible. It isstill not finally settled. I hope to achieve completevindication. Among other things, the question of mymotives in taking over the ministry plays a role, evenif a great number of witnesses, among them the de-ceased 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, toput 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 couldstrengthen my influence. The year in which I heldoffice was a ceaseless struggle. Already after half ayear, I recognized the futility of the situation andthis recognition led to my collapse on June 28, 1934.I have been told from many sides, especially fromJewish businessmen and merchants, that they haveviewed my appointment in this way and in no otherand 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 Arnholdand Kurt Schmitt available to me concludes withthis last letter. Whether the requested testimonialon Schmitt’s behalf was sent and whether thetwo men ever corresponded again or met, priorto 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.

Continued from Page 5

Today, Amerindo manages around nine billiondollars in the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S.economy.

In the world beyond business, Alberto Vilaris acclaimed for his generous support of educa-tion, healthcare, and the classical performingarts, both in the U.S. and Europe. He has sup-ported the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall,the Mariinsky Opera & Ballet Company, the Roy-al Opera House, Covent Garden, GlyndebourneOpera House, La Scala, Bayreuth, Baden-Baden,the Salzburg Music Festival, and the Vienna State Opera, among others.

Indeed, his major donations to musical institu-tions have made him into the most generous phi-lanthropist in our time supporting the classicalperforming arts, especially opera. A frequent vi-sitor to Berlin in the 1970s, today Alberto Vilarsees rich potential in the reunified city’s threeopera houses, its several world-class orchestras,and such superb conductors as Daniel Baren-boim, Kent Nagano, Christian Thielemann, andSir Simon Rattle.

His donation to the American Academy rein-forces the substance of last spring’s lecture, inwhich he urged a strengthening of private initia-tives and philanthropic funding of the arts. Hismessage that private funding must grow signifi-cantly in Europe or the quality and quantity ofthe arts will decline has resonated throughoutGermany. Invited by the German federal govern-ment, Alberto Vilar will be lecturing this fall onhow successful joint undertakings by public andprivate patronage can save the heritage.

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On the Waterfront


»Heimat« in ExileBernhard Schlink lectures on Utopia

Morals vs. the ArtsIn America, Guardians of Public Decency Threaten Public Support

By Jörg Magenau

By Claudia Keller

eimat is a term withouta counterpart in English. This

makes one suspect that the ever-vacillating sentiments correspon-ding to it are a genuinely Germanconcern. Nowhere does the needfor Heimat seem stronger; nowhereis it more discredited and taintedwith shame than here. Following1945 Germans preferred to viewthemselves as citizens of the world,who declared civil society – whichappeared free of suspicion – to betheir homeland. Or, as Hanseats,Bavarians, and Saarlanders, theyslipped away from the pitfalls of national identity by retreating intoa regional one. Thus Heimat becamea word primarily used by associationsrepresenting displaced Germansand was strongly suspected of beingrevisionist well into the 1980s.

This troubling word served asthe starting point for writer and lawprofessor Bernhard Schlink’s lect-ure at the American Academy.Sometimes it seemed as if the spe-cial problems associated with theGerman Sonderweg had also to beexplained to an American audience.The Academy, which arose from aninitiative by Richard Holbrooke fol-lowing the Allies’ departure fromBerlin, is a place where the worldsof scholarship, literature, and thearts come together. Who could be more qualified for this »intellectual

airlift« than Bernhard Schlink?With his novel The Reader, the storyof a young man who falls in lovewith a former concentration campguard, he became the first Germanauthor to head the American best-seller list. On this evening, he re-vealed that the concept of Heimatwill play a crucial role in his nextnovel.

Situated in a villa on Lake Wann-see formerly belonging to the ban-ker Hans Arnhold, and just one yearafter its founding, the Academycould be described as »venerable.«Listeners gather in an illustrious,salon-like,semi-privateatmosphere.

Theguestlistcontainsrepresenta-tives from the business world, po-litics, the media and culture; a cos-mopolitan Berlin not yet in existence.Although the guests are primarilyGermans, English is the official lan-guage. Schlink, too, gave his lecturein English. The unfamiliarity ofthe situation can also be seen as anironic subcommentary on the topicof discussion: Heimat seen as home-sickness, phantom aches, and theresult of a loss can first be made tan-gible in unfamiliar surroundingsand in a foreign language. And thus»exile« was the answer to the firstquestion as to what the place ofHeimat might be.

Excerpt from the Berlin edition of theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ofDecember18, 1999. Bernhard Schlink’sAcademy lecture was recently published bySuhrkamp as Heimat als Utopie.

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an it be true? Robert Map-plethorpe’s homoerotic pho-

tographs are already consideredtoo obscene to be exhibited in theUS with the aid of public money.When the expert Robert Brusteincame to the American Academy totalk about the culture battle ragingthe States, it sounded like a nine-teenth-century drama. Brustein, artistic director of the AmericanRepertory Theatre in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, explained that thefight is over allocation of public sup-port by the National Endowment ofthe Arts (NEA).

Christian factions have pressuredCongress to cut the NEA’s budgetdownto$ 100 million, from $170million. Their reasoning: a greatamount of the art it supports doesn’tpass the »propriety-test« enactedby law. And this in a country wherethere are no limits in revealing the

intimacies of its President’s privatelife! The NEA is no mere institutionof public art support in the US. It isits very center.

The current debate turns on thequestion of whether a democraticgovernment is responsible for crea-ting a sphere where the arts canflourish independent of politicaland economic reasoning. Brusteinhas a solution. He suggests that artsfunding be taken completely out ofthe hands of the government andsecured instead by a new concept of

royalties. Royalties should be exten-ded from 75 to 150 years after theoriginal publication of a work ofart. The gains made during the laterperiod should then be devoted tosupporting the arts. It is only to behoped that by then, fewer »guard-ians of public morality« will feelthey have to protect the peoplefrom the good, the true, and the beautiful.Der Tagesspiegel, June 17, 2000

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om e o n e l i k e Americanconductor Michael Tilson

Thomas would have been perfectfor the Berliner Festspiele, whichhas a culture of portraying indivi-dual composers. He is enthusiasticabout his subject and knows how toinspire people. But Tilson Thomasis not among the guests, nor is»his« composer Aaron Copland.

Hence, it is to the credit of theAmerican Academy that TilsonThomas was lured to Berlin at leastfor a lecture. As part of the »Ameri-ca’s Voices« series, he spoke in theovercrowded Academy quarters onLake Wannsee about Copland –and, in doing so, revealed himselfto be a brilliant entertainer.

One always has to smile, said Til-son Thomas, when the »nationalcomposer« Copland is played atevents like the Republican conven-tion. The gentlemen of the rightwing apparently don’t know whosemusic they are using as a »patrioticsound-bed.« As a »gay Jewish left


22

Big City Fascination

Brother Aaron

New York’s Sarah Morris Exhibits at Hamburger Bahnhof

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas on Copland

By Nicola Kuhn

By Frederik Hansen

i s s o u n s e x y and un-glamorous,« declared Sa-

rah Morris at the press conferenceannouncing her show at the Ham-burger Bahnhof. The public greetedthe comment with nods of appro-val, but we might hesitate before taking her words at face value. Herseries of sixteen paintings is simplycalled »Capital.«

These,andtheaccompanyingnine-teen-minute film, with its fast cutsand hard underlying rhythms (to asoundtrack by LiamGillick),guidethe visitor around importantsitesinthe American capital: the WhiteHouse; the green spaces in front ofThe Capitol; the WashingtonPostBuilding;theWatergate complex;

the Dupont Circle subway station.These are interspersed with imagesof politicians, joggers, subway-users. There’s even Clinton landingby helicopter.

Well, thesubjectsaren’tespeciallysexyorglamorous,butSarahMorrissurfs so elegantly over the smoothsurfacesofpowerthattheysuddenlyseem stylish and desirable, like a la-vishly marketed object of consump-tion. The 33-year-old American is amaster of packaging.

Her abstract paintings reveal nothing but the cool facades of buil-dings, laconically referred to in theirtitles: »L’Enfant Plaza,« »Dulles,«»Federal Triangle.« Sarah Morrisremains persistently concerned,

not with what lies behind, but withwhat delicately lies before. And inmaking this intelligent decision,she fascinates even the most criticalobservers. Her paintings hold outthe promise of enlightened pleasure,skillfully mingling sensual experi-ence with a highly rational approach.

The New Yorker mastered an aca-demic vocabulary of semiotics andstructuralism before focusing onartistic praxis. The theoretical un-derpinnings are evident in her pain-ting, which unfolds from a sobercalculation of axes. The individualcolor-fields are separated by thickbars, marked off by cellophane-tape before they are coated withhighly glossy varnish. There’s notrace of artistic flourish here.

Morris holds the Academy’s firstPhilip Morris Arts Fellowship forEmerging Artists and worked in a

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guest-studio in the KünstlerhausBethanien. Those who hoped thather stay in Berlin would influenceher work are bound to be disap-pointed. The American remainstrue to her cultural background.We can only add that this is fortun-ate, since her work is markedlystrong in this realm.

In a conversation with her came-raman David Daniel she candidlyexplains: »I guess I like to be mal-leable in that way. I like things thatfunction across fields, for differentpurposes simultaneously. I don’thave any problems with being produced.« Such a sentence can probably only be understood in anAmerican Pragmatist context. Butthe art emerging from that self-definition has proved seductiveeverywhere.Der Tagesspiegel, June 2, 2001

extremist,« Copland wouldn’texactly have matched their targetgroup. He succeeded in graspingAmerica in his music, said TilsonThomas in his lecture.

Only he did it in his own way. The result: modern, contemporarymusic in which Yiddish songs arerepresented, along with jazz. Hismusic catches the sound of NewYork street life. Tilson Thomas describes the composer as rootedin the Jewish-American tradition,caught in the tension between modernism and lost tradition.

His insistence on these roots illu-strate – like his brilliantly sharp in-terpretation of Copland’s Piano Variations of 1930 – more than justa close relationship to him as a pupil. This conductor feels a conge-niality of spirit with the »revolutio-nary and outcast.« Alas, duringthis visit, his words won’t be trans-lated into sounding deeds in a Ber-lin concert hall. Der Tagesspiegel, September 10, 2000

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www.chase.com

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 Stät-

ten der Kunst. Chase glaubt fest daran, daß Kunst etwas ist, wovon die gesamte

Gesellschaft profitiert.

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Jenny HolzerContinued from page 16

My response is completely formal,which is to say that one work is hori-zontal 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 tofind art, and the other is in a placewhere you don’t. In the United States,we would never expect to find contem-porary art in the Capitol. Yet both installations contain amber light. I know you often use other colors.Amber came from a process of eli-mination. Red is too cruel for themuseum or the Reichstag. Green orblue would have turned both intofish bowls. White is too ethereal,too pure, but the yellow is warm,somewhat neutral, and ratherlike fire. Amber seemed the bestchoice for each place.

You make very large public installa-tions, but you are not even one percenta public person. Do you find this diffi-cult to reconcile? At the very least it is bizarre, be-cause I would rather never get outfrom under the bed.

Critics sometimes say artists have twoor three identifying markers that shapeand distinguish their work. Do youthink your work has one identifyingmarker?Though I don’t manage to say theunspeakable well enough, finally something is shown, revealed. A wayI work is by putting words in publicspaces. I have a sense of how toplace text in front of people on thestreet or in much-frequented buil-dings, and these words may recallevents that have to do with me.And here is a marker: that womenshould not be killed, not be harmedso often.

You often use high-tech, post-modern,industrial materials associated more

with news and advertising. By combin-ing them with your intimate, sometimeserotic, texts, are you being ironic? No, I don’t much like irony. Thechoice of electronics has to do withutility, in part. News appears on electronic displays because peopletend to look at moving lights. I putmy content in signs, or project withXenon on buildings, because eyesfollow. If I want to address the pub-lic, I have to be where people linger,and these media hold people. It iseasier to discuss the practical, butyes, the erotic or at least the sensualis present, and I hope irony is not.

In your writing, there are many styles:a plain journalistic style, a high bibli-cal style, a tender minimalist style anda violent descriptive style. There are funny phrases, and thendepending on the application, I might need text that is matter-of-fact, how a reporter might write. Atother times, the writing should beinflammatory. The »OH« text hasseveral registers as I try to get to the

heart of the matter. I need differentstyles.

Let me just give two examples from thenew text. There is the tender voice thatsays something like, »You are easy totrack and fun to hunt.« And this contrasts sharply with theterrible harshness of, »Girls are foundawake or with eyes burst down holesopen or made new rabbit frozen orflailing blood sneaks or ass rains rui-ned on an infant with a sucker throatgagged or mewling still love aside onthe bed waits.«That was the terror paragraph inthe middle of an otherwise rathersoft text.

What was your greatest fear in comingback to Berlin to build the National-galerie installation?I was afraid I could not do the sub-ject justice, that I wouldn’t be ableto speak well enough about what itis for women or for little girls to beassaulted. That was worse than fearof architecture.


The project he pursued at the Ame-rican Academy, What It Means to be a State: A History of Sovereignty in20th Century Europe, builds uponhis interest in how contemporaryEurope is transforming itself as wellas the conviction that, both at thebeginning and end of the 20th cen-tury, Germany was one of Europe’s»exemplary« states.

One measure of Berlin’s presentattractiveness may well be the circahundred applications submittedfor the single Philip Morris Emer-ging Artist Fellowship. The pro-gram’s appeal is enhanced by theresources of the Künstlerhaus Betha-nien, an artists’ center with whichthe Academy collaborates.

This year’s award went to NewYork artist Stephanie Snider, whoreceived her MFA in sculpture fromYale in 1998 and has taught at bothher alma mater and Ohio Universi-ty. Snider described her work as»primarily about desire: its conun-drums, its tensions, my own emotio-nal attachment to it, and especiallythe space it literally occupies.« Her recent installations explore thearchitectural ramifications of emo-tion, »creating sites that map anx-iety, confusion, obsessive sorts oflove, puzzles, and the psychologicaltricks our minds play on us.«

She was quite visible in Berlin dur-ing her fellowship year, collabora-ting with the artist group Berlin-Kopenhagen in a week-long projectentitled »Wet Dreams.« Togetherwith artists Rodney Graham andMathew Hale, she publicly produ-ced multi-layered monotypes in agallery near her Kreuzberg studio.Some of these prints have enteredthe Academy’s nascent art collec-tion. Two exhibitions of her Berlinwork are scheduled for Fall 2001.

Alex Katz’s Berlin residency asPhilip Morris Distinguished Artistunderscored both the intensity ofGerman interest in his work and hisability to paint prolifically. Scoresof peers, students, and critics turnedout for his public presentations,which included a workshop with local artists at a Dresden gallery, adiscussion with Luc Tuymans at aBerlin’s Galerie Barbara Thümm,and his Academy talk, held at Ber-lin’s contemporary art museum,the Hamburger Bahnhof.

Katz painted a series of landscapesfrom his window at the Hans Arn-hold Center that captured the lightand aridity of Berlin’s lakeside win-ter. After returning to New York,he presented the Academy with alarge silk-screen portrait of his wifeand muse, Ada Katz. A small exhibi-tion at the Hans Arnhold Center,supported by the Philip Morris

Kunstförderung, showed a range of portraits and landscapes. Indeed,it has often been remarked thatKatz is »a poet’s artist,« as testifiedby his long, productive filiationswith John Ashbery, Robert Creeley,Frank O’Hara, and others (his sonVincent is also a noted poet).As such, he and Ada were ideal andactive members of Academy’s com-munity of scholars and artists. Theywill surely return to Germany in2002 for the major Katz retrospec-tive at the Bonn Bundeskunsthalle.

No American scholar has hadgreater impact on contemporaryGerman musicology than Daimler-Chrysler Fellow and Harvard pro-fessor Christoph Wolff. Not onlyhas he recently published majorstudies of Mozart and Johann Seba-stian Bach, but in 1999 he redisco-vered in Kiev the vast archives of

the Berlin Sing-Akademie – a troveof some five thousand manuscriptssaid to have vanished in 1943.

The collection had been movedfrom Berlin to Silesia for storage,after which all trace of it vanished.Wolff came across the collection in1999 while doing research in Kiev.The composers in the five-thousand-manuscript trove form a Who’s whoof late-Baroque and early-ClassicalGerman music.

Some weeks after Wolff made hisdiscovery known, however, theUkrainian conductor Blaschkov an-nounced that he had been acquain-ted with the collection for thirtyyears, and had already performedsome of its pieces with the KievChamber Orchestra.

Wolff’s work shows how a soberscholar can extract precious know-ledge from old scores. Finding, bu-ried in the piles, a motet by J.S. Bach’suncle, Johann Christoph Bach, trans-cribed in J.S. Bach’s own hand,

A Regular, Renaissance Kind of Guy: Artist Alex Katz

Stephanie Snider

Alex Katz

Christoph Wolff

Berlin PrizeFellowsContinued from page 9

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Jules Feiffer immortalized the intellectual elan he encountered whilevisiting Berlin and the American Academy last fall. He came for the launchof America’s Voices, a two-month-long American cultural festival conceivedby philanthropists Bill Rollnick and Nancy Ellison. The American Academyand the US Embassy hosted a dozen American writers, filmmakers, perfor-mers, and cultural notables in conjunction with the festival. The cartoonistand writer spent a week in residence on the Wannsee.

This semester will also inauguratea number of named fellowships.Two such fellowships will honorthe daughters of Hans and LudmillaArnhold. Anthropologist VincentCrapanzano (Graduate Center,CityUniversityofNew York) has beenawarded the first Ellen Maria Gor-rissen Fellowship and literary scho-lar Katie Trumpener (University ofChicago) has been designated the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow.

Two endowments will ensure thatjournalists and economists are al-ways in residence at the Academy.New Yorkers writer Jane Kramer isthe first Holtzbrinck Fellow in Jour-nalism at the Academy. Recipientsof the J.P. Morgan InternationalPrize in Finance and Economic Po-licy are Richard Freeman (HarvardUniversity/London School of Eco-nomics) and Kenneth E. Scott (Stanford University Law SchoolEmeritus).

The first Alberto Vilar Music Fellow will be composer MichaelHersch (New York) and the PhilipMorris Emerging Artist for the aca-demic year 2001-2002 is Sue deBeer (New York). Bosch Public Policy Fellows during the fall areBarbara Balaj (World Bank, Wash-ington, D.C.), Richard Locke (Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technolo-gy), and Adam Posen (Institute forInternational Economics, Washing-ton, D.C.).

Distinguished Visitors includesociologist Nathan Glazer (Har-vard University Emeritus), HaroldLevy, (Chancellor, New York CityBoard of Education) and author Susan Sontag (New York). The newFellows will be welcomed at a lake-side reception at the Academy inthe presence of Germany’s Presi-dent Johannes Rau.

reater emphasis on publicaffairs highlights the fourth

year at the Hans Arnhold Center.The Berlin Prize Fellows for the Fall2001 will include Jewish Studiesscholar Daniel Boyarin (Universityof California at Berkeley), writerAris Fioretos (New York/Berlin),art historian Evonne Levy (Univer-sity of Toronto), literary scholarRichard C. Maxwell (ValparaisoUniversity), and poet and transla-tor Christopher Middleton (Emeri-tus, University of Texas at Austin).

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Named Fellowships Enhance Berlin Prize Program

theAcademy’sHansArnholdCenterwith New York Times correspondentRoger Cohen, Ambassador Hol-brooke elucidated a vision of for-eign policy rather different fromthat of the current Administration,while remaining moderate in hiscriticism. He is acknowledged inGermany as »one of the best con-noisseurs of Europe« in America(Berliner Zeitung). His sobriety anderudition continue to steer the Aca-demytowardaprogramthatreflectsurgent policy concerns.

Three years ago, it was Holbrookewho first urged the Academy to be-gin its program with fellowshipsand a major conference devoted tocitizenship and migration policy.We will continue, with his guidance,to plan a vigorous public policyprofile, complementing the Aca-demy’s strong focus on the arts, humanities, and social scienceswith special programs addressingurgent humanitarian, political, andenvironmental issues. Now, thanksto his encouragement of AlbertoVilar, there will be music as well.

HolbrookeContinued from page 5

Wolff sees this as more than a tran-scription, asserting that it is themusic that Johann Sebastian selec-ted for his own funeral. The motetitself is known and has been perfor-med, but none were aware of its sig-nificance as funeral music: Bach bows before his musical ancestorsfor a last time.

Focused on the period betweenthe 15th and 20th centuries, Wolffis using the archives as the basis forhis current research on music andbourgeois culture in late-18th andearly-19th-century Berlin. Profes-sor Wolff’s term at the Hans Arn-hold Center coincided with his ap-pointment as Director of the BachArchives in Leipzig.

Highlights of his stay in Berlin in-cluded a lecture-recital of previous-ly unperformed Mozart fragments

that provide fascinating insights intothe composer’s musical plans and ar-tistic choices. Together with a perfor-mance by the Manon Quartet, Wolffdiscussed the composer’s method ofworking by focusing on this unusual-ly large body of unfinished pieces.

In addition, Wolff gave a talk inSchloß Bellevue at the invitation ofGerman President Johannes Rau,and a press conference with Ukrai-nian President Leonid Kuchma toannounce the return of the Sing-Akademie archives to Berlin.

Musicologists in the audiencelooked thoughtfully at the slide-projection of the score, the elderlyJohann Sebastian’s shaky notes,and the Ukrainian Conservatory’sinventory-stamp, and left satisfiedwith the somewhat sensational finding.

25

Thewaterdarkenedas the clouds lowered; and thenGreenwoodsmiled, watching the little passenger ferry make its slow transitbeyond the mallards. That meant the time was four-forty-four pre-cisely, only six minutes to go in the twenty-minute run from Kla-dow to Wannsee, the passengers already collecting their shoppingbags and briefcases, already looking toward shore, already anticipa-ting the evening meal. This was usually the time he put away hiswork and made for the tavern down the street from the train station,careful to snitch the Herald-Tribune from the library downstairs forreading material in case the scullers were not talkative, or talkative

only with each other. He enjoyedsitting at the far end of the bar withhis beer and the newspaper, a leisu-rely sixty-minute read. During thefirst weeks of his residence, Green-wood invited some of the others intheHouse to joinhimbut theyneverdid, fearing distraction from theirwork, and perhaps fearing also thatsuch an occasion might become ahabit or worse, a ritual. Everyoneknew that the winter months atWannsee were disorienting, the sundisappearing for weeks at a time andthe weather raw. A frigid mist arrived,the sullen breath of the Baltic, and atthose times the weight of the pastwas palpable.

•In thewinter itwas recommended

that one remain with oneself, livingwith circumspection, resisting temp-tation. The staff told lurid tales ofprevious residents who disappearedas early as three in the afternoon, re-turning to dinner befuddled and hi-larious; and sometimes not returninguntil late in the evening accompa-nied by new friends, trailing theusual noise and disorder. More thanonce the police became involvedowing to altercations at the tavern, aterrible embarrassment for the House.The Rector was embarrassed,though no charges were ever filed.Of course there was no publicitybecause the House was under the

protection of the government, all courtesies extended to the scho-lars, writers, and other intellectual authorities from America. Butthere was no mistaking the smirk of the police lieutenant as he laidthe disagreeable facts. Under the influence of drink, the Americanswere worse even than the teenage skinheads who loitered drunkenlyat the train station harassing commuters. At any event, Greenwood

was not tempted that afternoon. Hehad more work to do, and he hadlaid away plenty of vodka in the tinyfridge under the sink.

r e e n w o o d 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 themorning news, the American woman with the long legs and leisure-ly diction, all the time in the world to connect the Bermuda Highwith the Warsaw Low, and look what’s happening here in Atlanta.It would be dark in thirty minutes, the sun too weak to pierce thedark vein of cloud. Across the lake the lights came on in the villasback on the yacht basins, the yellow glownervous on the irregular surface of thewater, waffling now in the breeze. Thebrightlycolored sails of the yachts disap-peared as the light failed. He imaginedcooks in caps and starched aprons, and atable laid for a family of five, grace said,conversation slow to begin.The first fewminutes of the meal, it was so quiet youcould hear the clocks tick. People in thispartof theworlddidnot like to talkwhilethey ate; never begin a second job untilyou have finished the first.

•The two-man scull changed course

and headed for home. He had met thescullers, two retired accountants in theirfifties, fit as mountaineers, taciturn asowls. They always drank abeer in the ta-vern on the corner when they finishedwith theboat, andGreenwoodwasoftenthere at the same time. The accountantswere slick with sweat and exhilaratedfrom their rowing, drinking their beerstraight sown and then waiting patientlyfor the barman to draw them another, aprocess that took five minutes. They hadno interest in discussing their sculling ortheir families, and were uninterested inwhat drew Greenwood to their country.They were happy to lecture him on thesuperior security arrangements of Europe,plans that allowed a faithful employee towork until he was fifty-five and thenretire with money enough to live on,and time to scull whenever he wishedand take vacations in Spain during theworst of the winter weather, and set aside money for the children aswell. Wasn’t it wise for the old to make way for the young? Andthe state provided, as it had every right to do. It seemed pointless toinquire whether they missed their accounting. When eventuallythey asked Greenwood what he did before he retired – he wasolder than they were and surely drew a pension of some kind – andhe replied that he was a filmmaker en-gaged in accounting of a personal nature,they lost all interest.

•


ByWard Just

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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.

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U.S. citizens or permanent residents basedin the United States are eligible to apply.Fellows are expected to be in residence at theAcademy during the entire term of theiraward. The Academy offers furnished apart-ments suitable for individuals and couples,and limited accommodations for families withchildren. Benefits include a monthly stipend,round-trip airfare, housing at the Academy,and partial board. Stipends range from $3000to $5000 per month.

Application forms are available from theAcademy or can be downloaded from its website (www.americanacademy.de). Applicationsmust be received in Berlin by November 1, 2001(Emerging Artist applications are due Decem-ber 1, 2001). Candidates need not be Germanspecialists, but their project description shouldexplain how a residency in Berlin will con-tribute to their professional development.Applications will be reviewed by an indepen-dent selection committee following a peerreview process. The 2002-2003 Fellows will bechosen in January 2002 and publicly announcedin early spring.

Th e A m e r i c a n Ac a d e m y i n B e r l i ninvites applications for its Berlin PrizeFellowships for the 2002-2003 academic year.The Academy is a private, non-profit center forthe advanced study of culture and the arts,public policy, finance and economics, histor-ical and literary research. It welcomes youngeras well as established scholars, artists, and pro-fessionals who wish to engage in independentstudy in Berlin for an academic semester or, inspecial cases, for an entire academic year.

Specially designated fellowships include theBosch Fellowship in Public Policy, the Daimler-Chrysler Fellowship, the Ellen Maria GorrissenFellowship, the Holtzbrinck Fellowship in Jour-nalism, the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship, theJ.P. Morgan International Prize in Economicsand Finance Policy, the Guna S. MundheimFellowship in the Visual Arts, the Philip MorrisEmerging and Distinguished Artist Awards,and the Alberto Vilar Music Fellowships.

The Academy, which opened its doors inSeptember 1998, occupies the Hans ArnholdCenter, a historic lakeside villa in the Wannseedistrict of Berlin. The Academy also schedulespublic lectures, seminars, and performancesthat bring Fellows together with Berlin's cultural,academic, and business communities.

The Berlin Prize Fellowships2002—2003

The American Academy in BerlinAm Sandwerder 17-19 · D -14109 Berlin, GermanyTelephone (+4930) 804 83 -0 · Fax (+4930) 804 83 [email protected]

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