Central German Travel Blog

A Jewish-Christian-Muslim Programme

2007-12-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

GALILLEE COLLEGE, MAR ELIAS COLLEGE

Joint Jewish-Christian-Muslim Programme:
A Religious Mosaic in the Holy Land

Students and faculty from all parts of the world are invited to a unique interfaith seminar that will utilise the Galillee in the north of Israel - the origin of religious traditions and the living place of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze (and other religious groups) - as a living example of interfaith dialogue and co-existence.

The participants will spend five weeks in the Holy Land studying the three great monotheistic traditions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam (as well as the other traditions/different sects which are present in Israel), the history of these, their connections to the Land of Israel / Palestine and its relevance to Modern Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Special attention will be given to the challenge of religious leaders and educators in our days to develop interfaith dialogues, both in Israel and in other parts of the world, in order to foster mutual understanding, tolerance and pluralism instead of hatred and violence.

If you are interested, please see this link for further details:

The "micro-histories" of fear: Erfurt & the KPD

2007-12-13T03:45:00.000-08:00

Part I: January to May 1920
Part II: June to the Fall of 1920
Part III: Erfurt and the DNVP

The KPD started its newspaper, Der Kommunist, in May 1919 for Erfurt readers. It drew support from "Spartkists", who had sided with the uprisings in early 1919, and local independent socialists who were disenchanted with the old socialist party, the SPD. The Communist's editors also addressed the perceived lower middle class and other groups, whom they thought they could mobilize for its politics. For much of their first year of political activity under the banners of Independent Socialism (represented in the Vorwaerts daily newspaper too) and Communism, people in Erfurt kept their activity to public demonstrations and repeatedly hoisting a red flag on the Rathaus (which the local DNVP's supporters did not like). However, in the midwinter and early spring many were actively preparing for the chance to take up arms for the Revolution. After their failure to instigate that Communist Revolution by exploiting the General Strike of the "March Days" (see Part I), local Communists turned to the First national republican parliamentary elections scheduled for June 1920. The records of this newspaper in the Erfurt municipal archives, unfortunately, ends in June 1920.

The call for a new struggle
At the beginning of 1920 in an article entitled, “New Year – New Struggle” (The Communist, Nr. 1, 3 January 1920), the editors sketched the current situation. For the majority of those comrades still living the past year of 1919 was a year of greatest disappointment, a year of horror and the most bitter physical and spiritual torture. […] What will the near future bring? That is the anxious question which moves millions of hearts and minds at the turn of the new year.

In the rearguard
On page 2, the editors carried Maxim Gorki's article, “What is the lower middle class person (Kleinbuerger)?” Gorki wrote: Life is known as the struggle of the lords for power and of the servants for freedom from the yoke of this power. The tempo of this struggle is accelerating more and more with the increasing feeling of personal worth and the consciousness of the unified class interests among the Volk masses.

The lower middle class wanted to live quietly and agreeably without actively participating in this struggle; its favorite position was a peaceful existence in the rearguard of the strongest army. The internally powerless lower middle class bows to the visibly raw power of its government. When, however, as we have seen and still see, the government begins to become criminal, then the lower middle class becomes capable of begging or even taking its part in power over the land, whereby it draws from the strength of the Volk and relies on the hands of the same for achieving its desires.

The Reaction
As word of a possible right wing military coup spread, the editors of the Communist carried the headlines, “The Reaction Marches” (The Communist, Nr. 13, 11 March 1920), “Monarchist demonstrations in Potsdam; closure of the officers school there”.

Pogroms?
On age 2, in their “Political Overview”, the Communist editors described “Pogrom exercises” for its readers. On January 13^th 42 proletarians were shot to death by the security police in front of the Reichstag. What has followed is the Reich’s state of emergency, the suppression of the revolutionary press and protective detention for hundreds of revolutionaries. The military-monarchical counterrevolution promptly drew consequences from this fact… […] The first result was the revolver shots that Mr. von Hirschfeld fired on Erzberger (Matthias Erzberger, The current German Reichs Financial Minister). The independent German judiciary deemed the attack on the life of one of the democratic government’s leaders worth 1.5 years imprisonment. The so called public opinion praised the young hero of the “Black Hundred” (Schwarzhunderttum) with the laurel leaf and the Juenglingsstirn (? An honor for youth?).

The March Days of 1920 (see Part I)

The Housing Emergency
On page 4, the editors wrote about the local housing situation in “From the Local Districts”; from their view, the housing crisis was increasingly threatening; millions of people did not have a chance of finding even the most modest roof for their heads.

Weapons
In “The Call to the First of May” (The Communist, Nr. 23, 29 April 1920), the Communist's editors sought to mobilize local people for its coming demonstration. Workers! Comrades! In May 1919 the White Guards closed the iron ring around revolutionary Muenchen. The Noske Regiment completed its victory run. The middle class Democracy created a new weapon for itself in these struggles against the Proletariat: the Reichs Army with its aristocratic (Junker) officers, the citizens’ defense units and the Freikorps. The proletariat is being disarmed. The middle class Democracy has realized itself as a government by the saber, as the dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.

The Red Army Advance
In “Advance of the Red Army” (The Communist, Nr. 41, 22 May 1920), the editors reported from new actions on the front of the war between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet forces in the Ukraine and Poland. In the area around Borissow a Polish airplane was shot down. In the area around Kiev our units are advancing. […] Northeast of Kiev the battle is on.

The frightening social crisis
In “To the Comrades of the District of Thueringen!” (The Communist, Nr. 46, 29 May 1920), the editors of the Communist sought to mobilize voters for the upcoming national elections. Party Comrades! Men and Women! […] At every opportunity it must be clearly and sharply emphasized that the victory of the Proletarian Revolution cannot be achieved through elections and parliamentary decrees. The insidious illusion must be destroyed that a social democratic majority in parliament can bring about Socialism or at least an amelioration of the increasingly frightening social crisis! Tell the Proletariat that our representatives should not go to parliament in order to whittle away the advantages of the Proletariat for the representatives of the Bourgeoisie. Our representatives in parliament have no other task there but to ruthlessly strip capitalism and its agents of their masks for the whole world to see and call the masses to struggle from the tribune of the parliament for the dictatorship of the councils (Raetediktatur)! […] Our solutions are no division of power with the Bourgeoisie! No weapons in the hands of the Bourgeoisie! All weapons in the hands of the Proletariat! All power to the councils of the working Volk in the city and on the land!

Only work can save us
In“Only Work Can Save Us!” (The Communist, Nr. 49, 2 June 1920) on page 2, the editors of the Communist invoked the memories of the recent past. Remember the 15,000 proletarians, whom Noske had slaughtered in the name of democracy! Choose Spartakus! […] Send no social traitor or pseudo revolutionary to parliament! Vote for the Communists!

Cooperation with Soviet Russia
In the lead up to the June national parliamentary elections, the editors of the Communist carried banners in the headers and footers of each of its pages such as, “Spartakus fights for the closest cooperation with Soviet Russia. Send Communists to Parliament!” (The Communist, Nr. 50, 3 June 1920).

The Women Warriors for Communism
In “Women as the Warriors for Communism” (The Communist, Nr. 51, 4 June 1920), the editors of the Communist foresaw a special role for women. […] As soon as working women join the advanced socialist warriors for Communism the danger of rumors and the intrigues of pastors and village leaders, which incite the masses against the hated Bolsheviks, will disappear.

Hangman's work and sending Black Troops to Poland
In “Support Troops for Poland on the Way through Germany” (The Communist, Nr. 59, 13 June 1920), the editors of the Communist wrote about the possible role of German railway workers in supporting the use of French colonial black troops for the fight against Communism in Poland, a possibility which the local middle class press had called a racial insult in the French occupation of the Ruhr. The withdrawal of colored troops from the Saarland is foreseen for the middle of June. The troops are designated to go to

Poland

. The Saarland will maintain a French occupying force. The troops must make their way through

Germany

. German railway workers will be designated to transport them. However, the same German Bourgeoisie, who has just staged a national indignation against the “black insult”, suggests an insulting hangman’s work for the German proletariat against its Russian brothers.

Housing crisis
In “Increasing Housing Misery” (The Communist, Nr. 60, 15 June 1920, p. 4.), the editors of the Communist invoked a problem that must have been persistent among some of its intended audience. From their editorial view, the problem would grow worse because the recent national decree for the removal of housing shortages had been declared inadmissible by a court in Hannover.

Democracy in Crisis
In the wake of the parliamentary election results (see Part II), the editors of the Communist published, “The Continuing Crisis of the Democracy” (The Communist, Nr. 64, 19 June 1920), and proclaimed, “The Dying Democracy” in its subheading. […] The Democracy should have brought salvation from all need, should have brought the war to a favorable conclusion, the glorious peaceful understanding, etc. – and the Volk masses, who have just awoken with dumb heads from the frenzy of a patriotic shroud, believed in it with almost religious conviction. Not only the workers, but the broad masses of the lower middle class and the farmers began to believe in the Democracy; even large sections of the Bourgeoisie saw in it its way out of all difficulties. […] Only a small group of advanced proletarians, who rallied around the Communists, opposed the belief in Democracy and fought it from the very beginning as the cover for the counter revolution. […] Since then things have fundamentally changed. The military power has gained control of the situation and from the excitement for the Democracy there is barely a hint left to feel.

The "micro-histories" of fear: Erfurt & the DNVP

2007-12-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

Part I: January to May 1920

Part II: June to the Fall of 1920

The DNVP was the German National Volks Party. In Erfurt, local elites gathered around this political party and helped start the Mitteldeutsche Newspaper (MZ) in 1919 in order to profile a more nationalist and conservative rightwing voice in the local media, especially to compete with the most widely read and highly respectable middle class paper, the Thueringer Allgemeine Newspaper (TAZ). In the wake of the First World War, they saw themselves as the proper voices to guide the people of Erfurt.

In “Weapons of the Spirit” (MZ, Nr. 136, So., 29. Mai 1920), the MZ reported on Communist deeds in Jena. At the German Nationalist meeting in the Volkshaussaale, Mr. Wilhelm von Trotha spoke to German Nationals about the new times they all found themselves in. According to the report, a mass of people were in attendance with Russian haircuts, openly hairy men’s chests and short English pipes. Those who did not have this uniform at least wore a tie. Every one who was aware of the local relations knew that the evening was developing like a storm. However, the results were much greater than expected.

From his very first word, Mr. Trotha’s objective and calm speech was interrupted by “Gebruell”, “Johlen” and “Schimpfereien” (onomatopoetic words for screaming and insulting). According to the MZ reporter, every one knew that is was an organized action. They tried to talk Mr. Trotha to death (totzuschreien), but only his cold bloodedness and “Gewandtheit” enabled him to bring the whole speech to its conclusion. Twice, they had to resort to their fists to help their throats and lungs. Three men, who had made it known they were members of the rightwing parties, were forced out of the room by pushing and punching. After the speech the real scandal broke loose. A small group pushed forward like a “Stosstrupp” (a strike force). Several people were encircled, forced into a corner and severely mishandled. The lights went out briefly. The election posters of the German Nationals were torn to pieces and stomped on. Instead of fists flying there were now stool legs. Several women were insulted and threatened. The “victors” celebrated their triumph by singing the Workers’ Marseillaise and other revolutionary tunes. Two of them gave their own speeches. The MZ reporter asked his readers, whether or not they thought the radicals were happy about their victory. From their speeches and other gestures one could surmise that the radicals themselves believed it was only a pyrrhic victory. It was only important to MZ readers, the reporter added, that every one except for those two communist speakers and their comrades, know what the phrases of equality, freedom and fraternity mean for the leftist radicals. One got a small taste of the gentlemanliness (“Herrlichkeiten”) that the Spartacists had to offer at the celebratory feast.

The "micro-histories" of fear: Erfurt in 1920, Part II

2007-12-08T10:14:00.000-08:00

Part I: January to May 1920
Part II: June to the Fall of 1920

The death of parliament

In “The stillborn parliament” (FP, Nr. 124, 10 June 1920) the Free Press (FP) reacted with dejection toward the results of the first national parliamentary elections (Note: the editors of the FP had surmised that the conservatives would take it on the chin for the Kapp-Putsch; so this was a significant disappointment). The editors wrote that the Central German Newspaper (Die Mitteldeutsche Zeitung (MZ)) was silently enjoying the “personal defeat” of the government (Note: the MZ was as a paper was only in its second year and carried the perspective of the middle class right, especially the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP)). The editors parted with a shot: We can only tell them and their whole pack of capitalist, pious and obstinate servants (Trotzknechten) that they should not be happy about this ‘victory’ and this ‘defeat’. It will not last long. Then they will not have anything to say publicly, but at home they will sit and moan in their little rooms. Woe to us, we have won.

The results of the National Parliamentary Elections on 6 June 1920:

The German Democratic Party (DDP): 10% of those who voted (about 6400 people)

The German Volks Party (DVP): 18,9%

The German National Volk Party (DNVP): 20,5%

The Centre Party: 5,1%

The old Social Democratic Party (SPD): 6,8%

The Independent Socialist Democratic Party (USPD): 36,3%

The Communist Party (KPD): 2,6%

Guns

In “The handover of weapons” (MZ, Nr. 213, 14 August 1920), The DNVP wrote in to the editors of the MZ and addressed Erfurt’s president in regards to the National Law for the Disarmament of the People (Das Reichsgesetz ueber die Entwaffnung der Bevoelkerung from 7 August 1920). First, they argued, a general disarmament will not help the inner peace. The precondition must be an equal disarmament – to no one’s advantage or disadvantage. The political parties will accept the invitation to meet. As for the workers, it does not matter how many freely give up their weapons, but rather how many are subjected to terror. We know that the workers of Erfurt generally acted in a calm and composed way during the last unruly days (the March Days of 1920), but we have to add that from our perspective it was the military and political security measures that proved effective. May it remain as such. We want to hope so. One should not take it the wrong way, when we make use of the “democratic duty to mistrust” in this matter. Mr. President, investigate the conditions of the working classes to see how their leaders agitate them and lead them down the wrong path. Then we will be on your side.

[…] We want a strong government, and we will welcome it when the government makes its strength known, as currently in the words of the president. A demonstration on the street does not bring us great joy. However, we are determined to use this means as well, when we have no other and when the parades of the Proletariat are not in a kindly fashion stopped.

In that same day’s paper on page five, the MZ reported on “The weapons find in Erfurt”. There were five wagons full of countless weapons, machine guns, 98s and manufactured guns. There was one further wagon was loaded by the Moving Company Liefegang (Erfurt) and has a value estimated at 35,000 Reichsmark.

The August Days

“General Strike in Upper Silesia” (MZ, Nr. 218, 19 August 1920; Note: Upper Silesia was an ethnically mixed Polish and German region under Allied Occupation).

Second page: “New Battles in Kattowitz” (Note: a town in Upper Silesia); “Persecution of Jews in Warsaw”; “The Cholera in Petersburg”.

The Poles

In “The Poles are the Instigators!” (MZ, Nr. 219, 20 August 1920), the MZ carried a report on the causes of the unrest in Upper Silesia and the deployment of Italian troops there. According to the author, just as well as the Poles ordered a strike force into Rybnick in order to disperse the German public gatherings there, they could have followed another tactic in Kattowitz in order to force the confrontation between the Germans and the French military. The Poles are working with the assumption that these sorts of frictions have to worsen the relationship between the occupiers and the German population so much so that under the circumstances the results of the ballot (on the national question of Upper Silesia) will most likely be influenced too. Most certainly, it is without question the Poles who have an interest in the military support of the Western Allies. All of Upper Silesia is swarming with Warsaw’s agents, who are working day and night to ignite the politically tense atmosphere.

Another Workers’ Uprising

(TAZ, Nr. 220, 21 August 1920), In Duesseldorf, the Workers’ Council Republic was declared. One hundred men occupied the Rathaus and were requisitioning automobiles and bicycles in the city. From those who were doing well, money was being taken.

Black Murderers

In “Colored murderers in Germany” (TAZ, Nr. 220, 22 August 1920) the TAZ editors reported on a former milk handler and current court civil servant who were shot and robbed on the way home from the Ruhr region to Erfurt by two colored soldiers.

The Day of Sedan
In an article entitled, “Sedan”, Dr. W. A. Krannhals commemorated the decisive battle in the German wars of unification against the French on 2 September 1870, whereby Napoleon III became a prisoner of war to the Prussian army. (MZ, Nr. 232, 2 September 1920). For many nationalist Germans this was the most important, albeit unofficial, national holiday. Kaiser Wilhelm I refused to declare it an official holiday and saw Sedan more as an honor to the Prussian military. In the 1890s more and more Germans began to associate Sedan with the theme of unity. On 27 August 1919, the Weimar Republic declared that there would no longer be celebrations to commemorate the day of Sedan since it was not considered appropriate for the times (hence the Erfurters' scheduling of a celebration over a week later). Dr. Krannhals wrote: Today, 50 years ago, is the proudest day among the great years that the Reich gave us and Germany unity. Not with celebratory actions nor in great joy do we celebrate this day, but with worry, full of a thousand doubts. We celebrate this day because we cannot do anything else except in calm reflection and in the struggle to draw new strength from the meaning of this day for the most difficult and largest challenge that this Volk and Reich have faced.

[...] “Then the devil should be afraid, we do not want to fear,” so proclaimed Luther in faithful trust: “The hour will come, in which the wisdom and violence that pulses will go away. We will say, where are they now?” This trust, this belief in Sedan, this unshakable confidence in victory should flourish in us from this day marking Sedan, which we observe from the depth of our need. It should steel us to new strength and commemorate the great inheritance that we have to protect. It should let us become healthy and commemorate the holy strength that have grown in us out of our greatness, from Luther, from Bismarck and from Hindenburg. So do these three lead us in the depths of our hearts and everywhere where we stand, whether on the field of deeds; one day it will also mean for our enemies, who lure us with their wisdom: “Where are they now?” We, however, will then be able to celebrate a new Sedan, greater and more powerful, as the source from which new strength will flow to us, when we are unified and true. Unified, like our fathers were, who created the Reich for us, such that we are concerned that we must fight today in word and deed with our blood, with our spirit and with our strength! For that help us Sedan!

“Citizens’ Courage”

The Central German Newspaper (MZ, Nr. 243, 13 September 1920) published a letter from a woman in Erfurt about the commemoration of the Fatherland in early September on the steps and broad plaza of the cathedral:

What moves me to write is not the attempt by the demonstrators to disturb the Commemoration of the Fatherland on Sunday, 12 September, but rather the once again proven courage and pride of citizens. Dear German citizens, do things really have to get worse for you first, does the water first have to climb up around your throats, before you have the courage to commit yourself to resistance? How many participants did I see from my vantage point on the steps of the cathedral run away to save themselves? Secretly, quietly they disappeared and left the showplace to the youth, who bravely fought and defended their beautiful, new black, red and white flag. Women also showed their courage, their temperament not daunted by coercion. I witnessed many fists dancing on the backs of the demonstrators. Bad examples spoil good morals and it is always still better to show one’s feelings for the Fatherland this way than to stand cautiously to the side as, unfortunately, I saw among many of my fellow citizens do. They screamed at the officials with complaining looks, ‘this did not function either. The whole event is poorly organized.’ Think about it, dear citizens, the best organization does nothing when it is not supported with powerful deeds, if not one for all and all for one, if not driven by the determined will that we want to do something, we want to have our commemoration undisturbed. That could happen without division! […] If only you knew how strong you are, dear citizen (Buergersmann). Carry through with the task at hand. Don’t always stand there by the side with a wait and see attitude, distinguished appearance and misunderstood decency. It is the only way to impress upon the riff raff and rabble, which, naturally incited by a Jew, sang, whistled and screamed on the Wilhelm Plaza, let the International live and otherwise revealed themselves in other ways as uneducated children in need of punishment. One can only call it riff raff and rabble, then one could not imagine that a reasonable, thoughtful and decent worker would have something against it when our great past, our heroes' deeds and our dead whom we have to lament, are to be commemorated.

The Defenseless Old Ones

In the same edition, the MZ carried an article about the fictional conversation between the cathedral dome and the old veteran (of the late 19^th century wars of unification, “Der Dom und der alte Veteran”. It described the thousands who had just gathered there on the wide space of the plaza, standing densely packed to the corners, and just having dispersed through the side streets. The sun of a September Sunday streamed playfully over the obelisk that stood in the middle and the children played ball in their bright Sunday best. There was still a group of people talking, but otherwise the place was quiet.

[…] “I saw everything and heard everything,” said the Dome. “Everything. I understand exactly what is going on with you old warriors and truly, so deeply the German has not yet tread into the muck. Not yet so deeply. He cannot surpass himself anymore, such as he can be outdone by the worthlessness and shamefulness of his own people. […] we must have patience. The insanity must and will cease raging. To be sure, you will barely live to experience it. Well, I have gone on talking long enough; soon you will see the gloriosa (!?). There is only one thing I want to ask you: why did all of you thousands gathered here today with honorable intentions, why did you thousands from this society stand here on this plaza and let the scandal of a few stupid young men take place? Huh? It is not meant as an accusation against you. No. You old ones have become defenseless and powerless, But the others, where are they? […] Wake them up. And now, live well, old man, for better times.”

Two Different Socialist Voices

In an article in that same issue entitled, “Two Socialist Voices” (MZ, Nr. 244, 14 September 1920), the editors of the MZ found it remarkable what Erfurt’s Free Press, the moderate Socialist paper in town, had to say about the scandalous events on Sunday: It was a sad picture. So the ‘celebration’ degraded into a tumult. Given everything that happened, it has to be seen as fortunate that it ended mildly. Certainly, there were at time moments where the situation was dangerous and the serious encounters seemed unavoidable. A unit of the security police was alarmed, but did not engage itself. Reason still proved victorious - luckily. If it were to come to something extremely and unforeseeably unfortunate, then the wire pullers of the communist counter demonstration would have to carry the primary responsibility [...]. Finally, the FP asked, What had the communists achieved with their senseless actions? We want to say it without making it sound nice: they have only damaged the thing that they say they wish to represent. Their appearance was a very visibly instructive lesson against the Moscow system. Moreover, the whole socialist minded working class of Erfurt will most certainly suffer the consequences because the bourgeois masses will weld themselves more strongly together to a unified block, which will allow itself to be all the more easily misused for reactionary purposes. The Reaction itself will not be affected by this […]. It demonstrates a lack of political education and the most elementary democratic principles to disturb disagreeable events in this violent and provocative manner.

The editors of the MZ noted how the other Socialist paper, the Tribuene, put it differently and added that the Tribune's editors had voted for working with Moscow. They defended their communist brothers and talk in well known ways about "German National Agitators Convention" and "Punches for the 'Victims of the War'".

The Enemies of the Republic and Democracy

In “The Interrupted Memorial in Erfurt” (FP, Nr. 205, 13 September 1920), the editors of the Free Press called it a victory for the enemies of democracy. As they saw it, last Sunday was a day for the victory of the enemies of democracy in Erfurt. The reactionary parties, namely the national rightwing Bolsheviks, have “won”; the Communists have given them water for the millwheel for new attacks on the democratic republic. We have held the Communists responsible from our side for all kinds of follies both non political and political, in order to discredit them and lead us past the old “gentlemanly” times of the monarchical-military “order”. And the leftwing Bolsheviks, the communists, have “won”, because they have marred the democracy. Both are enemies of the Republic, enemies of the Democracy, and enemies of the Social Democracy! When will the day come in Erfurt, on which the cool, thinking working classes make an end of the irresponsible communist heroes of riot, the greatest enemy of the calm upward development of the German working class? Workers, comrades! Prevent the uprisings from left and right! Long live the free democracy!

A Dangerous Pell-mell

In its coverage of “The Commemoration of the Fatherland” (TAZ, Nr. 243, 13 September 1920), the editors of the more moderate middle class TAZ emphasized how the memorial on Sunday at noon on the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Plaza was open for every member of the German Volk, without injury to any feeling or political view. Unfortunately, a few hundred people with red flags and the usual placards assembled, in order, as they had already threatened, to disturb the festivity. In the pile tumbled a large number of young men well known from similar opportunities. The whole pile of protesters disappeared at any rate in the excited mass, which wanted to celebrate despite all attempts at disturbance. The usual cheers for the International were answered with hand clapping and patriotic songs. […] there was a dangerous pell-mell on the steps of the Dome and a storm of demonstrators toward a black-white-red flag of a Veterans’ Association. In spite of all that, the memorial’s program was fully carried out. There were male choirs. Pastor Mueller greeted the veterans of 1870/71. The writer Gustav Schroer spoke on the spirit of love in which the entire people must unify themselves. To which those of another mind howled […] the sign of leftwing radical agitation.

The Police Report on the Disturbances

In “The Folks Festival” (MZ, Nr. 244, 14 September 1920), the MZ carried a report from the police of Erfurt on their security measures. The Organization of Revolutionary Railroad Workers and the International Federation of War Wounded, known by their placards and red flag, attached themselves at the end of the line of the associations. The police tried through negotiations with the leaders to make sure that they wished to peacefully participate in the festivities or intended to cause a disturbance. In that moment, the security chains fell and the whole mass poured onto and up the dome steps. […] The police tried to maintain order and calm those yelling. […] In order to counter any rumors from hence forward, it is also noted that the police did not observe or receive any reports about any injuries of a serious nature.

The Life Line & Personality

In an article entitled, “About the Reformation Celebration” (TAZ, Nr. 291, 31 October 1920), Pastor Huettenrauch from Klosterlausnitz wrote: for the second time since the collapse (of Germany), October 31^st had come to our Volk, which could still not raise itself up from its deep fall. Do you know why you have not found the strength to rise up? […] You wanted to bring about the new ordering of your life through laws and decrees. That is the wrong way. Then the rebirth of a Volk depends not on measures, but rather on people, from the quality of the personalities that are bound by success and ruin to the whole Volk. The quality of the personalities depends on the spiritual strength which they possess. […] Whoever takes religion away from the people rips the life line out of them.

Anti-Semitism

In “The Order to Murder Jews” (FP, Nr. 253, 8 November 1920), the editors of the FP commented on German National (DNVP) educators. In Munich there was an assassination attempt against Dr. Hirschfeld by German National younglings; the youth are trying to infect political opponents with the motivation to murder. The Dresdner DNVP supports the assassination attempt.

Dresden

2007-12-05T06:29:00.000-08:00

Dresden is regenerating.

Please click here to see photos.

I visited Dresden in 1994 along with my friend Colin and our Colgate/Freiburg University Study Group. It was cold and gray and the city seemed desolate in March. The giant concrete buildings seemed like dead monuments to Communism even though there were new stores along the main pedestrian boulevards. There was only a pile of rubble where the Church of Our Lady once stood, but there were also tall construction cranes swaying all over the place and wonderful artistic collections in the museums and performance halls in the city center along the Elbe. Dresden had retained those old hints of classical Greece, the Enlightenment and Baroque, but I could find dilapidation everywhere. The city of Dresden in Canaletto paintings would never exist again, at least not like that. The traces of its destruction are writ large here, but not necessarily easily recognizable. Its experiences have been left lingering like testimonies in the voices of those like Kurt Vonnegut, Victor Klemperer or several generations of many other people.

In my return, I found plenty of activity. People had painstakingly rebuilt the Church of Our Lady and there are many new commercial projects. I also found a good energy and interesting people and things going on across the river in Dresden Neustadt (The "New City" which is actually pretty old too). Continuing to build on David Emory's suggestion to write about the people whom I meet, I include more sketches below. For more sketches from my travels, please see the friends link here on my blog.

In the Lollis Hostel:

I met Julianne (Jule) at the front desk. She seemed to be in charge and knew how to get me pointed in the right direction.

I met Jeremy and Will in the lounge off to the left of the front desk। Will was working on his I-Phone. His sketch books were laid out on the table.

Jeremy Gardner was at the chess board and he was waiting for a ride to Berlin. He recently graduated from college with a concentration in literature. He styles himself a young poet, novelist and musician and he is traveling around Europe and the Mediterranean coast for about a year depending how the money runs out. Jeremy plans to go to Jordan to meet displaced Iraqis, convey their stories and develop his journalism. He wants to return to the US and get involved in national politics for a Democratic US President, someone who knows how to lead us in national politics. He speaks passionately about the US even as he runs off a list of all our problems from foreign policy to intellectual freedom, war, consumption, the environment, capitalism and his own art. He is also the best chest player in the hostel’s guest lounge. I told Jeremy that groups like American Voices Abroad in Berlin may be interested in his work with Iraqis since they want to build up cooperative projects with both US veterans and Iraqi citizens and maybe even build some bridges. If you are interested in his work in its various forms and stages, check out http://geocities.com/thehartwick for his writing, http://www.myspace.com/themisms for his Hip-Hop music and http://www.myspace.com/jermgardner for his solo music.

Will is in the other corner. Everyone thinks he is crazy. Then again, there are several people in this room who can oddly strike an impression. Will admits that he is crazy, but not crazy like everyone else thinks he is crazy. I think Will is crazy in that good way of good people with good souls, burning. For Will, it is in the music and the moment. He is constantly thinking about his music and exploring everywhere for it. For Will, music is not simply to be found in the forms of the past, though he has nothing against history and what it has given us. He just wants people to consider the present and the future and bust out of the past. He looks everywhere among the world's canyons and mountains for its sounds and its players. He is concerned about the commercialization of art as compared to the actual act of making art. More importantly, he is constantly sketching and his composing seems to be leading him to some very interesting places, people and music.

I spent a Saturday walking around Dresden with Will looking for food, gifts and supplies for his digital camera. Will was born in 1965 in Cleveland but grew up in Florida. He oversees construction contracts for his father's company, but he is finding his groove with avant-garde music composition. He has been in Dresden for about a week as the guest of local musicians. On Saturday evening in Hellerau at the European Center for the Arts, the elole piano trio (http://www.elole.de) premiered Will’s piece, “Calabi-Yau” (2005/07) as part of a larger program including contemporary works from Tom Johnson, Juan Maria Solare, Hartmut Dorschner and Carsten Hennig. All of these composers still go back to the old forms and instruments, but they explore them for their range of experience in different ways from variations and structures to the performance itself. My favorite was the piece in which the trio visually took turns going through the motion of playing while the others kept fragments of the piece's sounds coming - sometimes it felt angry; at other times the silence was full of earlier variations in the listener's mind. Will was impressed with his peers' composition work, which motivates him to work even harder. He is not a bad chess player either; maybe just a little "unorthodox". He hopes to have a better designed webpage up and running some time soon for people to see.

Later in the evening, a local guy named Joe, popped in to the hostel to see Jule and hang out with people in the guests lounge. He likes to talk and show his wide range of knowledge on history, language and politics. He found me all ears. Having lived in the Neustadt for almost 20 years, he feels that Dresden has unfortunately become more commercialized. Neustadt, the place I find so cool, has lost its bohemian qualities from his view. Instead, the Neustadt has become more of a club and party atmosphere (God save the Kinks and the Village Green Preservation Society). However, Joe also notes the increasing diversity of people, although he also thinks there is still a lot of closed mindedness (Spiessbuergerlichkeit) around the Neustadt itself.

Gustavo Vieyra enters the lounge looking for people to play chess. He is from Mexico and studied German language and literature at UCLA. He has worked as a teacher in Los Angeles’ schools for years, but is frustrated with the curriculum and pedagogy involving Spanish-speaking children and bilingual language education in general. He has been to Germany many times and has been staying here at the hostel for an extended period. Most people in the lounge know him as the guy who has been in Germany for weeks at the computer checking his stocks and researching investment opportunities on the internet. Gustavo explains that he grew up poor. So he wants to have enough money to live well. However, Gustavo is also working on a new learning program that uses music as a core approach to teaching children. He claims a large degree of success in using the singing songs to help achieve a bilingual level by the age of eight or nine, if children start at the preschool level with his teaching model. He has found some support in German schools and is currently developing his model in Goerlitz. Still, Gustavo is frustrated with the bureaucracy and resistance to his project in general and is interested in finding people, both parents and teachers interested in applying his approach or even starting their own charter preschools. Gustavo is also a brilliant chess player, who seriously kicked my butt in three moves, although Jeremy beat him two out of three times. When I left him, Gustavo was researching the precious metal Tellurium, which is found in traces as an alloy of copper, gold and lead, and widely sought by the computer chip industry for its conductive quality. Gustavo told me that he is going to buy a house here in Dresden-Neustadt with his investments. Housing prices are still low and nice old apartments readily available. Yet I hear a sense of loneliness in his voice when he tells me that he likes Dresden. If you are interested in his project, please check out this link:

http://www.gestaltdialektik.com

I drank tea with Jule and Jeremy in the kitchen on Saturday morning. Jule loves her city, but she wants to go away every couple years for a healthy dose of change. When we asked her about Dresden and her family's past, she told us that her grandparents never really talked much it except for a few stories about her grandmother during the war.

That night several of us gathered at the lounge to accompany Will to elole's concert. Nicole Neeley is from Austin, TX. She is a good young artist and thinking about grad school. However, she wanted to travel first and think things over. Travel has meant feeling the uncomfortable and she is looking forward to returning to the comfort of home, although returning to Austin has her also thinking about the healthy change of place. Nicole has been traveling around to some of the premier art festivals in Italy and Germany this fall and heads home via Paris. If you are interested in her work, check out her myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/bespeeched and the link: “Things I Make” for her artwork.

Abram Foley is from way up in northern Wisconsin. All the lake effect snow up there lands in western Michigan, he tells me when I ask where up there. Abe has graduated from Wisconsin and is teaching English as a Fulbright Fellow in a little German town called Perleberg in Brandenburg. He speaks very good German and wants to go to grad school for English literature or maybe 20^th century American literature in another year or so. On Friday, he will be in Berlin to sing with a choir, and I may see him again soon.

When I asked a music composer after a concert, if Dresden was the new experimental music capital of Germany, he shook his head no and mentioned Berlin in the same breath. Yes, there is a small and interesting community of artists and musicians here in Dresden, he conceded. It may be provincial, he added, but it has a nice laid back pace that he appreciates.

As for me, I am heading home soon and I hope this finds you all well.

The "micro-histories" of fear: Erfurt in 1920

2007-12-05T05:38:00.000-08:00

Introduction:
In this post I want to present my research on the public record of fear in Erfurt from the first half of 1920. In a post that follows, I want to present the second half of my findings for that year, highlighting a gathering of Erfurt’s citizenry for the commemoration of the nation that September and in a final post, I want to discuss the theoretical, historiographical and archival significance of this research in relation to my larger project. Part II: June to the Fall of 1920

A Year of Hope:
1920 began as a year of hope for Germany’s national leadership and the local Erfurt papers published their wishes for the New Year. The first national elections were scheduled for that June, but the rightwing Kapp Putsch in Berlin would lead to renewed Putsch attempts from the right and left across Germany. In nearby Gotha, the radical socialists and communists had taken control of the city only to be violently crushed by the military and paramilitary organizations made up of Great War veterans, local Buerger and fresh young men. Meanwhile, those local political and military leaders turned Erfurt into a militarized zone of barbwire and armed checkpoints, but called for restraint on all sides of the political spectrum as reports came in of excessively violent clashes. Most strikingly, there was a working coalition of moderate voices in Erfurt. The moderate socialist editors of the Free Press (FP), who supported more democratic and social reform and inter-party political cooperation, would claim victory by the end of March for the Republic because of the cooperative efforts of the town magistrate, police, military, moderate socialists, railroad and postal workers, middle class Democratic and Catholic leaders. However, they could not control more radical efforts from people on the extreme sides of the political spectrum, who wanted to undermine this cooperation and eliminate their political enemies. That spring, local papers continued to report on political acts of terror in the vicinity from all sides. As for local "everyday" voices, I found a few including a letter from a young engineer asking the local government to explain the excessive use of force by groups acting in its name.

Fear in 1920
Among the periodical highlights on fear in the first half of 1920:

The veiled threat from Erfurt’s civil servants:

In January, the civil servant association (Erfurter Beamten) held a public meeting at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz in front of the cathedrals. They claimed that they could physically feel how much the current government (the Weimar Republic) had troubled them and they demanded “reasonable” measures to deal with Germany’s economic problems. They saw themselves as the group which had saved this republic’s young life and hinted at withdrawing their support if they did not get their way.

Profiteering:

In response to the reports about the activity of “Wucher” in the region the government of Thuringia had passed a new law to combat the problem of profiteering (The Thueringer Allgemeiner Zeitung (TAZ), Nr. 1, 1 January 1920). In the spring articles on the history of “Wucher” in Thuringia would appear in the TAZ

Educating children in the wake of trauma:

In March, a group of teachers wrote into the TAZ (Nr. 63, 3 March 1920) with their concerns about the moral effects of the Great War and the use of force in the home and school on Germany’s children. They believed the Great War had tortured (zerquaelten) and broken the German people. So these teachers asked readers not to hold their children responsible for the past and resort to outdated physical forms of punishment.

The wounded nation and the duty of women:

In March, Dorothea Hartenstein wrote in the TAZ (Nr. 68, 8 March 1920) that it was the first duty of German women to cultivate a national feeling and Germans should focus on binding their own wounds and healing the German people before they should or could deal with the pains of other peoples.

The anarchy and chaos of Independent Socialism and Communism:

The FP (Nr. 59, 10 March 1920) saw the rise of an independent socialist government in Gotha as leading to anarchy rather than Bolshevism. Just the fact that the independent socialist (USPD) government in Gotha had declared war against the German nation demonstrated that the independent socialist leadership either had no qualms or the minds of sparrows. Their forms of politics continued to provoke other segments of the population, especially their declaration on religion. Moreover their elimination of the teachers’ council and its replacement with a directory was an assassination of democracy.

The lack of adequate housing:

The local communist paper, The Kommunist (Nr. 13, 11 March 1920), reported on capitalistic and communist housing politics. This author claimed that the housing crisis in Germany was growing more and more threatening. Millions of people did not have a chance of finding even the most modest roof for over their heads.

Economic Emergency:

In an article entitled, “A Declaration of the Middle Class” (der Mittelstand, the TAZ, Nr. 72, 12 March 1920), a gathering of the specialty trade shops, craft workers and house owners met in the gymnasium at the Catholic citizens’ school (Buergerschule). Senator H. Beythien spoke about Germany’s economic need. He recalled the days of economic prosperity before the war, but he also noted how difficult it was for the middle classes against big business. He described the current national government’s politics as an enemy of middle class interests, which robbed the virtuous and industrious elements in society of every initiative. It was a forced form of economy instead of a free one. The possibility of unfolding all of one’s own personal virtue could make Germany great and strong again. Dr. Seeman, the Syndikus for Erfurt’s Chamber of Craft Workers, described the results of the 9^th of November 1918 as detrimental (unheilvolle); only the interests of the workers were represented, which he reiterated, was a threat to the middle class. The business leader Meydig added that socialization was a danger for property owners.

Anti-Semitism:

In response to the increasing reports of anonymous defaming and threatening letters directed at Jewish Germans in the region the FP (Nr. 62, 13 March 1920; see also FP, Nr. 59, 10 March 1920) carried the writing of Hans von Weher from a publication called Onionfish (Der Zwiebelfisch). According to von Weher, the anonymous actions of Anti-Semites were the signs of their cowardness and underhandedness. Anti-Semites, from Weher’s perspective, were either political ignorant people who were just born that way, or if they understood politics, then they were demagogues who were using Anti-Semitism to conduct business. The FP believed that a recent assassination attempt on a prominent Jewish German in Baden-Baden was a sign that the old All German Union (Alldeutscher Bund) was actively inciting young people to attack Germans of the Jewish religion.

Heat for homes and energy for industry:

Most of the newspapers reported on the rising prices for brown coal and the concerns over home heating in the cold months. The FP (The Free Press, a local moderate socialist newspaper, Nr. 62, 13. March 1920) believed that there were more local roots to the lack of coal such as the distribution problems in Halle, and suggested balanced reporting in response to public accusations, like those of the German Brown Coal Industry Association in Halle pointed at the French Occupation and the Weimar Republic.

The home and family are in danger!

Fliers from the “March Days” of left and rightwing uprisings found in the Erfurt City Archive records of the Freikorps made statements like this: “Mothers, Women, Girls! Foreign elements without a fatherland have succeeded through (?) agitation and foreign phrases to shroud the reason of a part of the German people and distract them from the path of duty. True men of German blood have barely escaped the hell of war and must now take up the war against terror, murder and (Notzucht), against erroneous teachings. These are the Citizens’ Defense Units. Without paying heed to the shameless insults and lies of foreign agitators, voluntary bands are doing their duty, which is doubly difficult because they must defend the German homeland, mothers and children against members of the German people fanaticized by paid agents and spies. Your home, German women, and also your happiness, German girls, are in danger. Therefore, do your part too in the great task of liberation: talk to your man whose name you carry, to the father of your children, your fiancé, whose home you eventually want to guard. Talk to your friends, who would support you in times of danger and need, so that they too do their part and report to the Citizens Defense Units!”

The Call to all Order-loving Men
In another flier: The outrageous Terror of the last few days immediately demands the most aggressive defense, if it should not lead to the complete destruction of the economic life and property of the individual. For the support of the Professional Defenses (Berufswehren) the “Ordnungshilfe” (Order Support) has been created (StVAE, 1-2/120-14, Bl.2)

Copy for Reproduction and Distribution!
The labor unions associated with the German Civil Servants Union declare that they will only support an order of government that is based on the currently binding constitution because of the oath that the civil servants have taken on the basis of the constitution. (Deutschen Beamtenbund) (StVAE, 1-2/120-14, Bl.4)

District Commander's Order from 15 March 1920
As district commander of Erfurt, I am letting it be known that under my command: the Reichswehr Infantry Regiment 21 and the Security Police will under all circumstances maintain calm and order regardless an older or newly built government.

The wish of the Fatherland must be that honorable and capable men from the old government and all parties should lead us.

[…] To Point 4a: The ban on gatherings of political parties will be suspended. For this all further gatherings should be officially registered with the Land Councils and the local Police authorities and subject to my authority. Signed Von Selle (StVAE, 1-2/120-14, Bl. 5)

Message to the Reichswehr

Brigade 11 in Cassel, 16 March 1920: The Proletariat strives for control through the call for the Councils Republic, Action Committees or Executive Council, and is trying to remove troops, security and citizens’ defense units. (StVAE, 1-2/120-14, Bl. 14)

Herr Oberbuergermeister!

Yesterday evening at 6:35 it was still daylight. I wanted to make my way from the Schloss Bridge accompanied by a colleague to Schloss Street past the main checkpoint.

[…] I afterwards confirmed: the three men from the Security Police fired without even the slightest grounds to do it. No one stood. Everything went further. No one wanted to in anyway harm the three men, the whole public was well clothed and did not look like Spartakus;, many women were there as well. All persons were far removed from the Security Police, every man immediately followed their command. It was completely unmistakable that this involved harmless people who did not know that the Anger (one of the major Erfurter plazas) was cordoned off. Why then this shooting?

I ask you earnestly, Herr Oberbuergermeister, to do everything in your power to protect your fellow citizens from such infringements. […] Besides this danger for the body and life of innocents there is, however, something else to consider: that the Green Police (Green uniforms were for the State Police *must check) have made themselves more and more unloved so that they are making a name for themselves not only among the politically most radical circles but also already in the whole citizenry as a raw, bloodthirsty Soldateska.

Robert Jacki

Teacher at the Building Trade School.
Prussian Government Building Master, Lieutenant in the Reserves of the 7^th Baden Infantry Regiment.

Member of the Technical Emergency Support (StVAE, 1-2/120-14, Bl. 31)

The threat to democracy and the call for its defense:

At the end of March and in response to voices from the right that democracy in Germany was bankrupt, the FP claimed that moderates across the political spectrum, including the railway and postal worker unions, old socialists and middle class democrats and Catholics had successfully defended the democracy during the “March Days”, but new support was needed to build democracy. Despite the warnings from some that such actions would result in democracy becoming terror and dictatorship, democracy’s proponents could not shy away from removing reactionary and rightwing elements from the military and civil service. (Nr. 64, 26 March 1920).

Terror from the right and left:

Newspapers reported on continuing terror from the right and the left in the region. The FP kept a daily column on the “civil war in Thuringia”. They reported a communist attack on the palace guard in Gotha from nearby Weissenfels and Zeitz (Nr. 65, 27 March 1920). In another article entitled, “The White Terror in Thuringia” (Nr. 67, 30 March 1920) the FP graphically described a middle class self defense force’s extralegal execution of 16 workers in neighboring Soemmerda.

In another article, “What will happen with the Self Defense Force in Soemmerda?” (Nr. 84, 21 April 1920), the FP cited an order from the German national government that the local citizens’ self-defense forces were supposed to disband themselves, but no one was obeying that order in Erfurt. The article’s author reported that the citizens’ defense force in nearby Soemmerda was still armed and holding training exercises. They were also maintaining a watch over local workers’ homes, preventing those workers from returning home. Those workers were afraid to return home because of the reports that the citizens’ defense forces had shot workers whom they claimed had tried to escape. The FP’s author saw as immediate danger for the republic in both left and rightwing paramilitary units and demanded the immediate disarmament of the citizens’ defense units.

Rebirth, Life and Freedom:

In its lead article on Easter the FP (Nr. 70, 3 April 1920), the authors wanted their readers to believe that everything had been rejuvenated. Countless voices, according to the authors, announced daily the joyful message of rejuvenation and life and liberation from the power of winter and bandits.

The end of small farms:

In April, the TAZ (Nr. 101, 21. April 1920) reported that 500 farmers convened in Weimar. The head of the meeting, the mayor of Legefeld, spoke about the sad situation of the fatherland and claimed that as long as the national government was in the hands of socialists, there could be no national rejuvenation. The head of the Thuringian Farmers Union (Landbund) claimed that there was a stark contrast between what the national government promised and what they did. The streets were under the control of the lowest elements of the masses (the Poebel). Meanwhile, the middle classes slept and had learned nothing. The only weapon that the individual had in this situation was the ballot. There was still a major division between large and small farm owners. It looked like most small farm owners would lose possession of their farms within three to four generations given the current and approaching tax laws. Despite their differences, farmers had to mobilize their voters. The speaker told those present that they had to be conscious of themselves. He reminded that that there were 46,000 organized farmers in Thuringia. There were 3.5 million farmers in all of Germany. They commanded over a million votes in and could take 100 seats in the national parliament.

Money and inflation:

The FP reported optimistically at the beginning of April that the value of money appeared to be rising, which would consequently mean lower prices (Nr. 74, 9 April 1920). However, at the end of the month, the FP was explaining the nature of inflation for its readers and demanding the organization of economic production instead of increasing prices as the solution among individual producers (Nr. 88, 26 April 1920).

The middle classes:

The TAZ (Nr. 106, 27 April 1920) also carried the announcement for the founding of a middle class union. According to the article the middle class had two tasks. One task was to avoid Germany’s political and economic catastrophe and the second task was to defend against the socialist assault, which mobilized workers with the slogan “Against the middle classes”. The author claimed that these were the wishes of all segments of the middle classes: industry, trade, house owners, farmers, civil servants, white collar workers and craftsmen. The Middle Class Union was an organization for the whole middle class and above all parties with the goal of forming a political block against the rising tide of socialism.

Black troops in Germany:

In May the TAZ (Nr. 111, May 1920) reproduced an article from the Syndikalist newspaper with the title, “Black Troops in Elsass”. The author wrote, “that if the government deemed it necessary that we must have foreign troops on German territory, then we would prefer to have French troops rather than half wild soldiers, who come from all other parts of the world and who are incapable of communicating with us. We will no longer accept black troops in our land!”

The Red Danger in the East:

The MZ (Nr. 136, 29 May 1920) carried an article about the “Red Danger in the East”, in which the author expressed the fear that Poland, the last bastion against the spring flood of Bolshevism, would fall. Germany had very little strength to oppose the Red Army and Germany’s enemies had broken the weapons for their own self defense. The German national government continued to look at the whole thing, as it always did, through rose colored glasses.

New rumors of a leftwing uprising:

In that same issue, the MZ reported on the latest rumors of possible uprisings. The author cited reports from Berlin and Munich that the leftwing headquarters were in Halle and Remscheid. Moreover, there was a plan to start small uprisings in cities like Hamburg and Berlin in order to draw the military into a conflict, which in turn would start a rightwing uprising that the communists would use to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Buchenwald

2007-12-02T05:42:00.000-08:00

The word means "beech forest" in German. It was here, overlooking Weimar, Germany (about 15 minutes by train from Erfurt) that the Nazis built the prison facilities, forced labor and death camp of Buchenwald. The town of Weimar is known as one of the centers of German culture with familiar names to some like Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche and Bauhaus. The SS built the camp in the early 1930s to hold political prisoners. During the Night of Broken Glass action, between November 1938 and February 1939, the SS imprisoned hundreds of Jewish men from the region, killing 650 people and telling those remaining to leave (See Thuringian State archival records in Weimar and Gotha). During the war the Nazis also imprisoned Russian soldiers, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. A local company from Erfurt, Topf and Sons, developed the crematoria and ventilation systems for the SS death ovens. It is said that on a clear day, Topfs' engineers could see the chimney smoke from their drafting room windows in Erfurt. After the war, former prisoners began commemorating their experiences on site (there is little left of the original camp buildings). The Soviet and GDR officials used this place as an opportunity to articulate their propaganda and political myth of Antifascist resistance to Nazism. On the ridgline overlooking the valley, they erected a monumental structure. If you are interested in seeing some of these photos, please click here.
For more information on Buchenwald, please see the link in English to the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.

Erfurt's Christmas Market

2007-11-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

I have just a few more days left of working in the archives in Erfurt. So I will soon introduce readers to my research findings for the year of 1920 as a starter. But I also want to show you some more photos; first, nice ones I took from Erfurt in December 2006. If you are interested in Erfurt's Christmas markets and some of my late afternoon walks, please click here.

Dictatorship, Terror and Human Rights in Iran

2007-11-27T09:39:00.000-08:00

I have taken a break from archival work and writing to travel with my girlfriend Nicole from Berlin to Magdeburg, Erfurt and back. It was a much needed respite after months of being on the road. I plan to post more in the following days on my own research and writing, but I wanted to write today about the man I met while walking through Potsdamer Platz (Berlin) to the train station.

He was standing in the street bundled up in a long dark coat and gloves. He had metallic rim glasses, bushy eyebrows, gentle eyes and a mustache. He was waving his hands and asked me in German if he could speak to me about human rights violations in Iran, thanking me as he moved closer.

He had a folder in his hands and he quickly flipped through it to show me photo identification with his official proof of German citizenship and terrifying pictures of young people, both men and women, on the gallows.

He told me that he had been a teacher in Iran. When he refused to fight against the Iraqis in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, he claimed that the Iranian government imprisoned him for three years. Afterwards he sought asylum in Germany and has been living in the southwestern German state of the Baden-Wurttemberg for the last ten years. He had taken a few days off from his job to travel to Berlin and sought to raise awareness by approaching people among the passageways of Potsdamer Platz.

He asserted that his fellow Iranians now live under a brutal dictatorship, which will not come as a surprise to many. He flipped back through the photos of young men and women marched to the gallows for public executions. He asked me to help with a donation or petition campaign. I told him that I am not a citizen of Germany and could not fill out any of his petitions or bank transfer forms. I had little money, but I suggested that I could take a flyer with his group’s contact information and give him some of my pocket change. He was interested in my pursuit of a dissertation in history and the fact that I am a US citizen. I told him that I wanted to support his efforts and that I am concerned about current US foreign policy, especially the public calls from our neo-conservative right for strong gestures of saber rattling and even military action against a radical Iranian government armed with nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

If you are interested, please check out his organization’s website address: www.hmiran.de. However, it is in German. HMIRAN stands for Help for Human Rights in Iran and is based in Dortmund, Germany.

His flyer makes some moving claims. German papers like Die Welt (from 05.08.2007) have been reporting on these public executions, but the German government, so HMIRAN claims, has been slow to act. Moreover, HMIRAN claims that since the beginning of 2007, the Iranian theocratic dictatorship, i.e., President Ahmadinejad, the Mullahs, the secret police and paramilitary squads, have carried out over 1400 death sentences and executions. Over 1.5 million people have been arrested. At least 7,300 of these arrests have been politically motivated. Over 670,000 people have been imprisoned. At least 6,500 of these people were arrested for political reasons. 255 newspapers and other forms of media have been banned. The list of problems goes on and on; the group cites numbers for those Iranians who are addicted to drugs, infected with HIV, homeless or female survivors of male violence. Most striking, HMIRAN claims that there have been over 2700 public forms of demonstration, strikes and protests all despite the government’s public reign of terror.

I find HMIRAN’s projects worth considering. They want to use donations from German citizens to hire lawyers in order to free Iranian political prisoners and stop executions. They claim to have already engaged the support of over 500 lawyers for international law. In order to protect Iranians’ human rights, they are initiating these public protests and supporting the broadcast of television programs with more information via satellite.

I had to catch a train, but I promised to do something. He looked me in the eyes as if to see if I meant what I said. Why don't Americans hear more about the details of what is actually going on in Iran? I hope there are some readers out there that can think of ways to help these Iranians help themselves despite such oppression. I do believe that war should remain the very last option when our leaders have proven that all other political options are ineffective. Opposition to such regimes does face the prospect that their government will label them as a dangerous foreign influence in order to legitimize going after them, but there are still signs of an active Iranian civil society (See the BBC’s online articles from this week on the Iranian Supreme Court’s decision to reopen the case of a dead Canadian-Iranian woman). Military action is not the only way to overthrow regimes and too many US and Iraqi citizens have died in the current approaches to regime change and political reforms so as not to consider other more creative alternatives. See also last week's Spiegel for the problems the German government faces in trying to exert economic pressure on Iran because of Germany's own economic ties with Iran.

What about those readers out there who are connected to American Voices Abroad here in Berlin already looking for ways to start dialog among US and Iraqi citizens and soldiers here in Germany in order to help deal with the trauma of the current US occupation – is this a chance to act proactively on Iran? What about those of us connected to groups like MoveOn.org or Amnesty International? How can we help fact-check and network these activists with those who can focus political support in constructive ways? What about Americans? Does saber rattling help? Is the Bush Administration actually interested in a new course with Iran? Can we help Iranians help themselves against their fellow Iranians who resort to violence and terror? Can we develop a different approach than that of our current US Administration that will move our national foreign policy, professional service and average, everyday American effort and sacrifice in more thoughtful and constructive directions in the wake of perhaps the worst foreign policy mistakes in our nation’s history?

Glimpses of Erfurt

2007-11-10T00:22:00.000-08:00

I first came to Erfurt in the fall of 2006 on a fellowship from the local university. I came back here for a month in the fall of 2007 to follow up on my research and find a quiet place to read and write. I love taking walks in this city and I thought I would collect some of those glimpses. If you are interested, please click here.

Erfurt

2007-11-09T07:06:00.000-08:00

View of Erfurt from The Schedelsche World Chronical (Nuremberg, 1493)

Back in the former GDR

with a laptop

and no internet access.

From Magdeburg

I took the local train this morning

past rolling hills

dark furrows

windmills all around.

Walls crumbling,

whole rows of warehouses

worn shaggy and tufted.

We stopped at every little town,

names I could not find on my map

nor show the old man going to Hettstedt.

He wanted some change for a cola

and told me his brother was going to pick him up at the station.

I can can see inside all these little towns

past the church towers and house corners,

the wooden crossbeams,

old people in their little gardens

and cars waiting at the crossing.

When I last looked back,

the old man was walking off the platform alone.

In Stassfurt the shoulders of new windmills

lie among the old walls

and weeds clawing at the edges.

We moved past more fields

and deer looking over their shoulders.

Stops at Guesten, Sandersleben, Hettstedt, Kloster Mansfeld, Riesstedt, Sangerhausen, Oberroeblingen, Voigtstedt, Artern, Bretleben, Heldrungen (past a dam/waterfall), Etzleben, Griefstedt, Leubingen and Soemmererda.

Workers' Paradise

From the train station I caught the tram to south part of town, past the state parliament building, the unemployment center, the ice hall and the soccer stadium to the room I had rented.

The doorman told me to come back if I needed things for the apartment.
He locked his office door and took me down the long hallway past the old lecture halls. I asked him what this building once was.

In the front lobby there is a huge mural.

Was this place a vocational school?

No, he replied. It was school for the Party.

For the SED in all of Thueringen?, I asked.

For all of East Germany, he claimed.

(Bezirksparteischule)

It was a giant building, he went on: heavily secured with military personnel; lecture rooms in the front; several basement levels including bunkers for atomic attacks and residential spaces for the students, Party cadres in one month programs. With everything they needed: barbers, health clinic, even a bowling alley. He opened a door to a room in the back and showed me shelves full of pots and pans, dishes (with the East German logo, glasses and silverware anything I wanted just leave it in my room before I go.

I like Erfurt. It has an old, dynamic and green city core. The old town sits on some of the old crossroads between east and west and it was known for its production and trade in a blue pigment made from the woad plant (Waid) and known for other herbal properties and uses.

Erfurt has one of the oldest German universities (although there was a major break in continuity up until Reunification) and once had a prosperous Jewish community. Martin Luther studied here as a young Augustiner Monk. Napoleon inspected the Petersburg fortifications as part of his visit with Goethe in nearby Weimar.

In the mid 19th century, the city began an extensive urban canal project to shape the course of the Gera around and through the city. Erfurt also began to industrialize like many similar sized towns in the region, but it also developed successful horticulture and gardening industries, known for garden plant seeds and watercress.

Much of that industry is gone now. In between the world wars, Erfurt industry, although robust and diverse, would become most known for Topf and Sons (looking for an English version; German-speakers, see also Holocaust und Moderne). They started as a firm that made industrial furnaces and brewing equipment in the late 19th century. Around the First World War they began supplying mortuaries with industrial crematoria and the accessories like urns and plaques. The sons joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and their engineers instructed the SS on the use of their ovens and ventilations systems for the Final Solution and death camps,. The company's engineers could little plumes rising up valley on a clear day in the late years of the Second World War above town of Weimar from their drafting tables. The Soviets found the company's nameplates and knew to start looking for the Topf brothers in Erfurt. This story brings up interesting points for modern students, but more on the history in another post.

Erfurt suffered damage from aerial bombings, but not as extensively as most other cities in Germany. The Soviets and their East German communist compatriots spent forty years giving the town a Stalinist belt of public housing projects, but much of the town remained has it had been at mid century.

Since reunification in 1989/90, Erfurt has bloomed, unlike many small towns and cities in East Germany. It has that old historical center and tourists as a good starting base. There is still a robust agricultural economy and there is a new university with a beautiful library north of the city. In the old town, much has been renovated and modern architectural structures are tucked amongst the old buildings, lined with shops, cafes, bakeries and butchers.

Compared to Berlin, this place is quaint. Most of the outlying suburbs wind their ways along the trams to the center, known as the Anger. I have been taking walks up in the Steigerwald Forest near my apartment and when I am working at the municipal archives in the old town or the new library, I make my way to the Gera and its many pathways for my walks.

Europe and Islam

2007-10-31T08:35:00.001-07:00

The Einstein Room in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is packed for a discussion of European identity and its relationship with Islam. It is Friday night, 26 October 2007 at 6PM. This event highlights the Academy's central theme of "Europe in the Near East and the Near East in Europe" (if you are interested, please check out their webpage here and and also the related special edition from the Tagesspiegel; source of the photo above on the right). The topic itself and the "class" of four prominent historians and members of the Academy account for the larger than normal attendance. Plus all four of the historians bring a different knowledge base and set of perspectives to the question of Europe and Islam. The two hour evening followed with rounds in which the historians presented their theses. They had opportunities to sharpen their points and finally hold two rounds of questions and discussion with those in attendance. They presented a huge amount of information in a relatively short amount of time. In a way, the transcript that follows below serves as a historical and historiographical sketch and one can only hope that the Academy organizers can find ways to effectively integrate such a high quality presentation into the year's calender of interesting events.

The "Class notes":
The moderator is Dr. Christoph Markschies. He is a professor for ancient church history, President of the Humboldt University in Berlin and the Secretary of the Academy. Dr. Markschies opens the forum with the note that Islam is often viewed as a medieval phenomenon, but more and more, some scholars see Islam as a development emerging from late antiquity. What, he asks, is the identity of Europe?

Round I: Europe and Islam from the Ancient Historian's perspective:
Dr. Christian Meier has the floor first, since he is a Professor for Ancient History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and well known for his work on Caesar and Athens. Dr. Meier looks for the unique (eigenartig) qualities of Europe and, therefore, starts with the Greeks and the Roman Republic. Of course, Dr. Meier notes, Greece had roots in the “Orient”, but the Greeks created their own form of community (Gemeinwesen). In the 9th century Islamic civilization, carried on the Greco-Roman tradition in translated forms, but there were limits to this appropriation of the Greco-Roman tradition. Whereas “Europe”, in his opinion, would more deeply appropriate and develop the intellectual inheritance of the classical world, for example, in the discipline of philology. Moreover, Dr. Meier believes that the Greeks are the only known case in the ancient world, where a people emerged in freedom and without a monarchical form of government.

From the Medieval European Historian's perspective:
Dr. Michael Borgolte, a professor for Medieval History at the Humboldt University in Berlin, receives the chance to respond next. He has just published a new monograph in German translated here as "Christians, Jews and Muslims. The Inheritance of Antiquity and the Rise of the Occident". Dr. Borgolte starts by noting Dr. Meier’s “master narrative” on the classical tradition and its influence on Europe and the Near East. Dr. Borgolte does not want to necessarily question what Dr. Meier has already said, but does assert that master narratives open up room for alternative histories. Moreover, Dr. Borgolte wants to come back to the idea of identity. From his point of view, historians have the job of critically examining traditions of identity; not producing identity itself. Dr. Borgolte suggests that there is no canon of universal values. He also asserts that people develop identity mythologies as a result of state-building projects, not the other way around as Dr. Meier would suggest in his opening remarks. Dr. Borgolte also draws attention to the boundaries of European identity for further discussion, in particular toward the East. Finally, Dr. Borgolte asserts a dialectical relationship of unity and multiplicity in this “Europe’s” historical development.

From the Early Modern European Historian's perspective:
Dr. Heinz Schilling, a professor for Early Modern European History at the Humboldt University and known for his work on Christian confessionalization in the 15th and 15th centuries, has the final word in the first round. Dr. Schilling starts by addressing the question of identity too. Citing his training in the “Bielefelder” school of history, Dr. Schilling looks for the structural history and cultural development of identity. Moreover, Dr. Schilling wants to sharpen Dr. Meier’s assertion of a unique type of European identity. He also raises the question of “global” history, i.e., the idea of a “small” Europe and a “large” Europe as a way to approach the topic of European identity and Islam. Dr. Schilling sees methodological and periodical problems in approaching the historical relationship of Europe and Asia. Dr. Schilling also asserts that there are specific types of civilization and uses this approach to further delineate European identity. From Schilling’s point of view, therefore, Russia does not belong to Europe because Russia emerged from another form of civilization centered on the Greek-Orthodox religion, whereas Schilling claims that Europe is in fact a Latin-Christian civilization. Schilling, however, does not see this as a form of European identity but an experiment. It remains for historians to work out the properties of European identity and he asserts the important role of religion. Schilling adds that people defined Europe through conflict with Islam.

Round II:
Dr. Meier opens the second round of discussion. He believes that identity can be a useful term for analysis, but draws a distinction between the citizens of antiquity and modernity. Dr. Meier also questions the usefulness of “types” as Dr. Schilling would suggest and pleads for comparative analysis in large strokes (a point that needed further clarity). From the very beginning of the idea of “Europe”, Dr. Meier sees a high degree of pluralism through the building of monarchies, cloisters and universities. Europe had no center or monarchical center as in the case of the Orient in places like Baghdad. This plurality gave Europe a dynamic that moved it beyond antiquity.

Dr. Borgolte further questions the unified history of “freedom” that Dr. Meier suggests in the historical development of Europe. Dr. Borgolte sees breaks rather than continuities in the history of the idea of freedom. From his perspective “Europe” in the Middle Ages was in fact in a pluralistic form of identity that included both Christians, Jews and Muslims. The monotheistic cosmology of Judaism from the 5th century B.C.E. and the related idea of the “transcendence” (between this world and what lies beyond) influenced the Roman form of Christianity that emerged in the middle ages and Islam in the 8th century C.E. This triad constellation of religious world views played a key role in the emergence of European identity even as Roman Christianity would come to dominate that identity.

Dr. Schilling defends the use of “types” as instruments for comparative analysis. Dr. Schilling also sees a nonlinear development in Europe’s plurality. From his view, it is pluralistic development with major discontinuities. Europe’s current development of plurality stems from the 15th and 16th century European concentration on Christianity, especially Luther’s call for reformation of the Roman Catholic Church. Social and theological changes were already underway in the late middle ages that would lead to divisions, competition and conflict. In this context, the arrival of Islam through the Turks and the Spanish re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was more a matter of power politics. Dr. Schilling adds that Europe was at this time plural in terms of particularistic states and forms of belief. There was both closure and opening to the rest of the world. As a note for further discussion, Dr. Schilling suggests that Spain makes an interesting case for the further study of European and Islamic identities.

Round III:
Dr. Borgolte suggests that the modern idea of tolerance in Europe has its roots in the interaction of the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, at the time when Europe was becoming more culturally unified in the late middle ages around Roman Christianity. When Dr. Markschies asks Dr. Borgolte about the homogeneity of Europe, Borgolte responds that it was neither nor. On the one hand, the middle ages marked the convergence of a European culture in relationship to the conflict with Islam and on the other hand, the interactions between Europe and Islam generated the emergence of cosmopolitanism and the possibility for further understanding.

Dr. Schilling wants to more precisely define pluralism as the equal recognition of different views of the world. From Schilling’s view this is a modern European development. In the 15th and 16th centuries Europe was concentrating itself at the same time that it was defining itself in opposition to Islam in terms of absolute truth and eschatology. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 marks the European leaders’ decision to develop a secularized structure for international law that would seek to remove the issue of religion from international politics. Islam, Dr. Schilling notes however, did not appropriate this idea of pluralism.

Dr. Borgolte, in reply, stresses that Islam was not solely about holy warfare and draws attention to the Islamic conquest of Sicily to raise the question of Europe’s multicultural historical development and the role of difference. From Dr. Borgolte’s view, Islamic control of Sicily marks a long period of peaceful intellectual cooperation and cultural development including universities and the translation of Aristotele, which also involved Jewish translators.

Dr. Meier adds that he still sees Europe as a unique Greco-Roman inheritance, highlighting structural developments including markets, language and philosophical concepts in Latin.

Finally, Dr. Schilling wants to draw attention to the eastern boundaries of Europe again and the relationship of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. The emergence of religious fundamentalism in this conflict strikes Dr. Schilling as an interesting chance to ask how Europeans overcame the pitfalls of religious fundamentalism. Dr. Schilling also offers an observation (since he had prepared for a lecture not a discussion) that there is a difference in the historical relationship of Islam and Judaism to Europe. After the Spanish Christian re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, Islam withdrew to North Africa and had very little presence in Europe except for diplomatic relations (Shilling notes the presence of a tombstone for a Moroccan ambassador in the Hague for support). On the other hand, in this period Jews, although forced out of Spain, became an important presence in central Europe. Places like Amsterdam became centers of Jewish-Christian exchange.

Open Discussion:
From the audience comes a call for clearer definition of European normative values and sentiments in the first round of questions. Someone also asks about the role of the Crusades in the historical relationship of Europe and Islam and someone else asks for more comment on the particular case of Spain after the Reconquista. In the second round of questions, someone wants to know more about the role of Byzantium in the relationship of Europe and Islam. Another person draws attention to Cordoba, Spain and asks to know more about this case as a model of tolerance. Finally, someone asks about the Greeks; almost provocatively, do they belong to Europe?

Dr. Borgolte replies first. He does not see a historically stable form of European identity with related ideology and values. He reiterates the dialectical relationship of difference and unity in the development of Europe’s identity in relationship with Islam. In response to the question about the Crusades, Dr. Borgolte agrees with the audience member that the Crusades marked a distinct break in the identity of Islam that has affected Muslims to this day. In regards to Spain, Dr. Borgolte notes that under Islamic control, there was a relatively low degree of Islamicization due to the fact that most Islamic leaders were more interested in exacting forms of tribute and controlling the population. By the 10^th century, the majority of those people under their control converted to Islam but by the 17^th century, roughly 70% of Spain’s population was Christian; 15% Jewish and 15% Muslim.

Dr. Schilling responds next with a note on identity politics. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the idea of European identity originated from above, which leaders of the various forms of Christian confession propagated from the top down in their domains. Noting the work of another scholar, Hartmut Kaeble, Dr. Schilling reasserts that there was no European consciousness before 1700. From this perspective, European identity is a modern phenomenon and closely tied with European state-building and expansion.

The historians do not have much to say in response to the questions on Cordoba and the Byzantine Empire. Dr. Schilling adds a note on tolerance in 16th century Budapest under the control of the Pasha and another note on the emergence of a Palestinian identity in the late 19th century.

In a final note, Dr. Meier draws attention to the current issue of “radical” or Islamist politics as a point that people in Europe need to discuss further.

Where the Greeks stand in all of this and what this says about European identity remains open. The questions are all interesting, but seem to present points for further exploration and clearer connection with other voices in this project. After two hours, the group discussion appears to be over and people are heading for the exits or the reception room for drinks and snacks.

After all is said and done, it appears that there really are two distinct questions: European identity (itself a complicated question involving many regions, religions (confessions) and state-building) and the question of Islam, both in historical relationship to Europe and in current affairs. I am not convinced to what extent old Latin Christian religious structures can shape current European development. From this evening's discussion, it appears that the historical interrelationship of Christianity, Judaism and Islam have at different times contributed to the unification of European identity and its idea of plurality. At least from the historical perspective, it is not simply a question of whether Islam or Islamic countries could belong to Europe. And what about those pesky Greeks and their historical roots? There seems to be more questions here for discussion exactly along all the lines of Europe's borders, especially at key places like Spain or Greece. What can these border studies tell us?

A European identity seems quite possible, but Europe within its contemporary boundaries has the potential to develop in very diverse ways, which may be an even greater strength stemming from its historical development. The question of Turkey's candidacy for the European Union has brought some of this historical knowledge into the discussion. I have heard several voices in my travels looking for a way to draw boundaries along the old lines of a unified religion and normative values of the Occident, but I am not sure if this is the best way to frame the issue and the argument itself may be on shaky grounds to begin with. The strength of Turkish civil society seems like the more pertinent question. After all, democracy had its birth on the coast of Asia Minor and Turkish society has its own long struggle with the values of secular civil society. For this kind of question, we need other voices. The Islamicist acceptance of violence, restrictions on freedom and rejection of equality, however, seems a clearer case for drawing a line in terms of normative values that go beyond Europe.

The "micro-histories" of fear

2007-10-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

Among its file on „Social Democracy“ in the Archive for the Church Province of Saxony is a 1907 article from the Social Democratic newspaper, the Volksblatt, in Halle entitled, “Who terrorizes?” According to their report, Dr. Vogl, had suddenly been removed from his position as pastor in the town of Leislau by Kamburg with one third of his earnings withheld. Directly after the parliamentary elections in February of 1907, Dr. Vogl had held a “family night” at the church on the topic of “The political parties of the Reichstag”. Dr. Vogl claimed that he only wanted to introduce people to the topic in a matter of fact sort of way and not step on anyone’s toes. He also wanted his presentation to help the political parties learn to understand each other so that they could fight with “only the honorable weapons of truth and justice”. At some point in the evening, a local aristocrat (“Rittergutsbesitzer”) named Schlueter stood up and announced that the pastor had to fight Social Democracy above all else. The pastor, according to Schlueter, should also explain how social democracy wanted to do away with Christianity and destroy marriage and the family. Dr. Vogl countered with the remark that there was nothing in the Social Democratic platform about destroying marriage or family. Furthermore, people misunderstood the party platform plank: “religion is a private issue”. Thereafter, Schlueter told Dr. Vogl that he should be ashamed of himself and then left the “family night” with his wife. The reporter noted that Dr. Vogl was widely loved and respected in his community and there was a strong feeling of bitterness among his congregation and beyond. Such an occurrence reminded the reporter of one of the darkest times in the middle ages where people burned those of different faiths. Dr Vogl, accordingly, would realize that contemporary society was the greatest enemy of truth and justice. What, the reporter asked, would the bands of liars have to say about this?

Notes: Source: AKPS, Rep.A, Generalia, Nr. 1529, "Die Sozialdemokratie"; image above is entitled, "The Red Terror" from an 1881 edition of the Viennese satirical paper, the Gluehlichter.

I plan to introduce more of my archival findings in later postings and I want to explore their interpretation and significance for my work. I think this finding from today's archival research is interesting for several reasons. It is an article appearing in a pro-Social Democratic newspaper in Halle. So one has to take its reportage with a grain of salt, but it does articulate a notion of "terror" even as it raises "terror" as a question. From its emergence as a political force in the late 1870s, the working class political movement had articulated a capitalist form of "terror" as part of its way of organizing workers in the face of work-related fears. Opponents often resorted to labeling nascent Social Democracy as a "red" form of terror. In this case, the aristocrat's remarks reflect that trend among conservative circles to paint the emergence of Social Democracy as a form of "terror" that threatened Christianity, the family and marriage. The reporter uses collective memories of persecution to frame the description of the aristocrat's words and actions as an example of the capitalist system's terror. By the turn of the century, parliamentary politics had developed a high level of rhetorical exaggeration in Germany around supposed threats and terrors from both the left and right. I wonder how much objective positions in those platforms played a role in comparison to those calls of "terror" and how the invocation of collective fears affected those communities. In that context, it is interesting to see a pastor try to develop a presentation within the confines of a "family evening" to better inform people as voters. The aristocrat's attempt to publicly shame the pastor, appears to have backfired, but it also reveals one way in which people publicly threatened each other for political purposes at the turn of the century, namely through use of hierarchical forms of status and shaming as a way of then removing that pastor from his congregation. The local Social Democratic paper used this occasion of an apparently non-biased pastor to more effectively make the case. Most Protestant pastors, I would have assumed, would not have veered from their support of the monarchy and attacks on related opposition. Social Democracy was supposed to be the most immediate internal enemy to the Reich. It then strikes me how someone like this aristocrat can "archetype" space (see Teresa Hubbard's presentation of her work on the "home and fear" from the Akademie Schloss Solitude Conference post for this idea) or at least attempt to shape the "family night" to articulate the "terror" of Social Democracy and threaten the pastor and anyone else open to opposing ideas. I think the description of the pastor's actions and the actions of the Social Democratic newspaper also reflect William Reddy's concept of individuals "navigating" social and cultural space that others are attempting to shape for the purpose of control. In the bigger picture, I think these kinds of sources reveal how national politics was already working through the local level before the First World War. More importantly, these local political practices and notions of "terror" would continue to influence German politics in the wake of the First World War, beyond the Kaiser's call for national cooperation (the "Burgfrieden") during the war and the revolution that followed in the wake of Germany's defeat and the end of the monarchy.

Magdeburg

2007-10-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

After working in the Archives for the Church Province of Saxony today , I took a walk from the eastern part of the city to the Elbe and back. If you are interested, please click here.

The "Doku"-Center

2007-10-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

Before leaving for Berlin, I decided to check out one last place, the former Nazi Rally grounds outside of Nuremberg's old city. If you are interested, please click here.

Akademie Schloss Solitude: Dealing with Fear

2007-10-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

Akademie Schloss Solitude

Handeln mit der Angst: Dealing with Fear
What holds societies together
Thursday – Saturday, 18-20 October 2007

This past weekend I attended a conference on dealing with fear at a castle in the hills overlooking Stuttgart. The Akademie Schloss Solitude should also be on many of our radar screens. Founded in 1990, this foundation is looking for new ways to bring creative minds from different disciplines together, whether artists, filmmakers, dancers, musicians, architects, product designers, business managers, geneticists or historians. Dealing with fear is the latest part of this new endeavor. About 100 or more people gathered together to talk about fear through their own work. It is only the first step, but such diversity of minds and projects do not allow for a quick and easy definition of the feeling. It is also interesting how this topic has struck so many different people in the work they choose to pursue. They inspire me to think about my own work, how I live and plan to do.

One example that I find compelling for framing this conference is London after the bombings in 2006. Jens Skibsted described to us how the terrorist bombings actually propelled bikes sales. That effect interested Adam Thorpe. It turns out that many more people feel they need greater mobility in a city known for its automobile congestion. Adam chose to think about the bike and began to find a new set of problems. Despite the possible benefits from switching to bikes, London security experts have tended to view bikes themselves as a threat to the city. That is an interesting effect. Bikes become objects of fear too. From Adam’s point of view, “security” threatens to trump “sustainability” in London. He wants to find ways to question the “Orwellian” scenario and restore a healthy balance to the needs of security and liberty. So Adam’s project examines the fears behind bikes like the threat of theft and their use as terrorist “vectors” for delivering bombs. His team breaks down those fears and looks for potential solutions to counter them. Some of the ideas are very simple but also quite able to change perception, behavior and consumption.

What follows is the basic program schedule as an outline with notes on individual talks and related links that may be of interest to you or others (See the conference blog link too). It is a report in progress. So I will develop it as I find time. I am placing links in one of the sidebars on the right. Please let me know about mistakes. Add information or post a comment.

Thursday, 18 October 2007

8PM

“Since When and Why Do We Fear the Future?”

Prof. Dr. Gumbrecht, Standford University

Notes: Dr. Gumbrecht’s talk opened the weekend’s conference. He would remain an active participant in the panels to follow and his theses on our conception of time, individual consciousness and fear of the future continued to influence our discussions all weekend.

A new concept of time? a new form of subjectivity?

From Dr. Gumbrecht’s perspective, there has been a deep transformation of how we view the future since the Second World War and it is linked to what has happened to our perception of time and our own subjectivity. His main thesis is to “see the condition for our new, increasingly fearful relationship to the future in a transformation of the chronotope (a term he borrows from the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin) of the “construction of time” that surrounds us, within which the future is an unattainable position, different from the position that it used to have in the “historicist” chronotope as it had emerged and institutionalized itself during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.”

The Historicist Chronotope and the Second-order observer

Dr. Gumbrecht traces the construction of this “historicist chronotope” in the response to the historical “emergence of the second-order observer” (what Michel Foucault called “la crise de la representation”), i.e., the insight that every phenomenon of reference in the world, according to the observer’s point of view, is capable of producing an infinity of interpretations/renditions (from the lecture’s handout). This idea has stirred debate for some time and as I think we will see from other panels and our final discussions below, these issues of perspective and representation remain problems.

Simultaneities: unlimited numbers of simultaneously conscious beings, pasts & perceptions

From Dr. Gumbrecht’s perspective, the competing ideologies of Socialism and Capitalism account for the success of the “historicist chronotope”. In his words, “Both Capitalism and Socialism (Communism) rely on our being able to anticipate the future – a possibility that, based on reflection and other intellectual work, the historicist chronotope offers. In this sense, it is significant that Fascist ideologies tried to depart from the historicist chronotope (e.g. the Nazis “Empire of a Thousand Years”)”.

A new form of fear?

From Dr. Gumbrecht’s view, we have not fully worked out the consequences of the Second World War and at the end of his talk he speculated on our transformation and reconstruction of time and the “Cartesian subject”, i.e. of the “rationally choosing” subject (see Descartes' sketch on the right). Gumbrecht observes the emergence of a new “chronotope” characterized by three features: “a past that almost aggressively invades the present (Memoria-culture); an unattainable future that produces fear; and, between this future and that past, an ever-broadening present what he terms Latenz)”. He suggests that the first experience of mass destruction on a new scale has transformed our human self-reference. In his new book project on Latenz, Dr. Gumbrecht explores the notion that we are like “blind passengers” who can no longer predict the future. In his most foreboding assertion, Dr. Gumbrecht sees the loss of the enlightened, caring, rational human being and the emergence of something closer to the “animality”. Moreover, the conscious decision to create weapons of mass destruction makes our actions play an active role in the possibility of our self-extermination.

Friday, 19 October 2007
9.15 – 10.15 AM
"Why Do People Fear What They Fear? The Psychology of Risk"
Ortwin Renn, University of Stuttgart

"From Irrational Fears to Insurable Risks"
David N. Bresch, Swiss Reinsurance Company, Zurich

Notes: I missed the bus that morning and unfortunately missed most of this talk. I caught the end of the discussion though. Dr. Gumbrecht was interested in the historicity of behavior toward fear. He reiterated a point from his work, i.e., that we are living in a time of “unlimited simultaneities of experience”. He suggested that there has been a change in the capability of trusting. Purchasing insurance has become buying a little piece of the future. He wanted to know if the changes in the insurance industry reflect his argument that there has been a change in the “chronotope” of time. The panelists noted that the key in their work is in fact how the insurance industry perceives time. In the past, people could build up the feeling of “trust” over a longer period of time, but now the collective risks are greater and the periods in which people must make decisions much shorter. From their view, individuals are actually living with increasing security in terms of health and well being. Despite their perceptions, more human beings are living closer to paradise (sic!). However, we are collectively living in the possibilities of catastrophe.

10.15 – 11.15 AM
"Die Another Day: Endangered Bodies, or the Fear of Performing"
Gerald Siegmund, University of Berne with Maren Rieger, Berne University
of the Arts

Notes: Maren and Gerald chose an interesting way to jar a conference panel with a performance piece. With the immediate moment in which the panelists became performers they waited to evoke the feeling of “fear” in the conference room. They also showed a short clip from the Sheffield-based group Forced Entertainment called "Show Time" (1996), in which a man stands on stage with no shirt on and a belt of dynamite strapped around his chest with a ticking clock. In their presentation they explored how the feeling of fear may develop out of the “contract” between audience and performer (in this case, presenters and participating audience) or through "sharing" emotions with the audience. From their view, theater develops out of the fear of the performer and the audience's desire to witness failure. Some like Dr. Gumbrecht raised questions about their assertions of the audience and performers and asked for clarity about the emotional relationships between them. In discussion, there is no one-way street or one to one correlation. Dr. Gumbrecht said he felt anger and embarrassment instead of sharing any anticipatory fears of failure. Gerald suggested that even that anger is an aggressive reaction that avoids the feeling of fear.

11.45 am – 12.45 PM
"Between Fear as a Spectacle and Interiorized Fear" (in French
language)
Bertrand Bacqué, Haute école d'art et de design, Geneva with Ingrid
Wildi, Haute école d'art et de design, Geneva

In the first part of this presentation, Bertrand sketched the spectrum of films from Hollywood aliens and apocalypses to the films of Rossellini, Wenders and Cassavetes that address our fears and also attract us to film through our fears. In the second part of the presentation, Ingrid Wildi explored the new media of “video art” through interviews with her own brother who has been wandering around Europe for years. In Oblique Portrait, shown at the Venice Beinnale in 2005, she asks him questions about his experience as a migrant from Chile, his sense of identity, memories of his family, the feeling of difference, the lack of belonging and depression.

12.45 – 1.45 PM
"Home and Fear"
Beate Söntgen, University of Bochum with Teresa Hubbard, University of
Texas at Austin and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard
College, New York

Beate and Teresa are interested in the historical constructions of interior space and time. They ontextualized this for us through examples from the European painting traditions. Their collaborative projects explore these framings of interior and exterior, public and private. They are interested in the thresholds, voids and holes in their experience and how people “architect” these confrontations with space and time (I mentioned to Teresa afterwards that this in part reminded me of William Reddy’s concept of “navigating” experience with each moment. See William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling). They showed us a photography project that they developed in Berlin about women between the frames of space and then they showed us excerpts from two of their films, A Single Wide and House with Pool, which play with the structure of the mobius strip. A Single Wide, for example (see still shot above right), is about a US single wide trailer with one wall cut away to expose the interior. The camera revolves around the interior and exterior space of the trailer and a “threshhole” in the life of a woman. In the discussion, Dr. Gumbrecht suggested the idea of "thickness" that Teresa and Beate's films develop through the experience of encountering and confronting the framing of space and time. In response, Teresa mentioned her interest in the "flatness" of space and time and and said she will think about the "thickness" of experience that her work may also express. I highly recommend checking out their work. I am interested in the notion of "architecting" space that I think helps me show what people are doing in the source materials I find in the archives; it may be an interesting other side to William Reddy's suggestion that humans navigate the feeling of their selves in relation to their surrundings, societies, cultures and politics. If you are interested, please see their link: www.hubbardbirchler.net/

2.45 – 3.45 PM
"Genetic Roots of Instinctive and Learned Fear"
Vadim Bolshakov, Harvard Medical School, Boston with Petros
Koumoutsakos, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Notes: Vadim presented his research on how genetics influences the experience of fear in mice. As Vadim would later tell me, this is perhaps the fastest growing field of research in the world and noted that over 25, 000 researchers attend the US association’s annual conventions. More recently, the work Joe Z. Tsien’s team of researchers on the experience of fear in mice at Boston University has been published in leading journals including Scientific American and this month’s edition of Spektrum der Wissenschaft (the German edition of Scientific American). If you are interested, please see these links:

www.spektrum.de/artikel/903041

www.spektrum.com/gehirn

www.spektrum.com/lernen

This work is pushing the boundaries of our knowledge and representation of how our brains function through neurotransmissions and how the brain “remembers” the experience of fear. Researchers like Vadim take an extreme position that our experiences and behavior are rooted in our genetics. Others would challenge this assertion from the perspective of their various disciplines, but the results of their work continues to challenge us to think about our representations of the human being, consciousness, memory, emotions and behavior.
One of the wilder parts of this work is how these scientists are in some ways creating new “machines”. Tsien’s team, for example, has been using designer mice for their experiments and placing electrodes in the CA1 region of the Hippocampus (see the image on the right from Tatjana Hilbert, 2003). This region focuses on registering the contents of experience in the brain and is involved in short-term and long term memory production. These researchers are using this animal-machine interface to measure and then map the experience of fear through simple experiments of feeling air on their backs, falling in a box and experiencing shaking in a box.
Vadim believes that fear has its own place in the brain and we have the ability to measure it. There are the innate and unconditioned responses to fear that come from the hardwiring of evolutionary development, and there are the acquired and conditioned responses to what Vadim calls “biologically insignificant events” (but probably very significant to the person experiencing fear!). The experience of fear is essentially a memory of the experience, or more accurately, a memory then recalled from a memory of a set of experiences. In the brain, the amygdala region processes the perception of an external stimulus, compares these sensations with stored memories of past experiences and influences our behavioral and somatic responses.
Interestingly, Vadim points out that some researchers now believe that memories are not stable things, a phenomenon that some evolutionary psychologists call memory “reconsolidation”. Memories involve clusters of neurotransmitters that have linked together through the sensation of an experience and they deteriorate over time, especially if not recalled. Recollection of these “memories” helps strengthen the original neurotransmitter clusters, but these clusters are no longer the same. This instability of memory is a point of extreme vulnerability that is open for manipulation – something that some researchers and others with political motives wish to pursue further (sic!). However, Vadim pointed out to me that understanding what exactly is going on with neurotransmitters and the sensation of fear is something that researchers may never understand. That knowledge is at best a long way off. Moreover, at the very best, these scientists can only represent these biological processes. Researchers are developing more precise measuring and mapping instruments for the brain, but their animal-machine interfaces generate “constructions” of those processes that they represent through visual forms of media.
I am interested in what this research tells us about experience, consciousness, sensation, fear, the ability to map and manipulate them. I think it also lends support to William Reddy’s assertions that humans operate with “thought materials” – stored memories of experience, including their own sense of identity and goals, culture, social relations and the consequences of behavior, which they can reconsolidate and consider in their interactions with the world around them. Finally, it raises a methodological question for me about the subjective nature of the sources I am seeking for my history of fear in German politics and what those sources may tell us beyond our constructions of memory and fear. When I mentioned this to Vadim, reminded me that without the presence of actual outside observer, there can be no idea of absolute certainty for any observation.

4.00 – 5.00 PM
"Mind the Gap"
Henry Urbach, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with Jürgen Mayer H., Berlin

Notes: Henry started this panel with a series of reflections on his work as an architect and sees fear as a blind spot. He is interested in the idea of difference and he is looking for ways that architecture can engage fear of the other in different ways through the uncanny, mutant, things that do not belong together, codes, seduction, trust, surprise and the sublime.
Juergen then presented some of his work. He started with the technologies of surveillance like television cameras and infra-read scanners and places of surveillance like web lounges. Juergen began tracing the movement of people around spaces with bar code scanning technologies and used the biometric information for graphic forms of representation and more interactive art between the spectator and place. One of the most graphic examples was his project, “In heat”, in which the person passing through space leaves parts of his or her personal information in the memory of materials they contact. In a second step, Juergen began making the representation of this biometric information transferable to other places. Since then he has developed several architectural projects that celebrate the citizen instead of the administration of citizens. One of the most compelling examples is the town hall of Esslingen, Germany, situated on a former US military barracks. Juergen found this interesting for the bases's association with feelings of fear and security. Part of this project is called “pitter patterns” and uses the acoustics of falling rainwater collected from the roof of the building to draw citizens, especially children, to the building as a way to express the idea of transparency in a government building designed to collect citizens’ personal data. Currently, Juergen is working on the “metropol parasol” redesign of the Plaza de la encarnacion in Sevilla. If you are interested in his work, please see his website: www.jmayerh.com

In the final part, Henry started with a comment on the US architectural market. He notes a boom in commercial architecture but dwindling resources for architectural creativity. It was at this point that I began to think about Dr. Gumbrecht’s assertion that there is no longer a perceived place for “agency” – the ability to act – in a world that seems doomed to an unpredictable future. And yet here were architects, artists and designers making conscious decisions in their work and engaging the problems they perceive in our world. Henry’s website is currently down, but you can see some of his work at the www.sfmoma.org

5.00 – 6.00 PM
"Liberty versus Security: Bikes versus Bombs"
Adam Thorpe, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London
with Jens Martin Skibsted, Skibsted Ideation, Copenhagen

Notes: If you recall up top, Adam is looking at the bike and our associated fears. He is concerned about the high level of surveillance in the United Kingdom and he is also concerned about things like 1600 deaths per year in London related to poor air quality. Adam’s response to irrational responses to real problems is, “don’t panic”, look at the problem and “research”. What he has found is that people are afraid to ride bikes. So Adam became interested in the second major reason why people will not ride: theft. He started thinking about ways to counter these irrational fears and began with the small things like how do thieves steal bikes? It turns out there are many ways to steal bikes (I personally like “lifting” where two men lift a bike up over a sign post) and many people do not properly lock their bikes. Adam designed an informational sticker describing good locking practices, which people can place on the bike’s crossbar. Then he design public parking stands (like the “m” forms I have even seen in State College, PA) that help bikers more properly secure their bikes. Then Adam took a step further and began asking questions about public security experts perceived fears of bikes. It turns out security experts see bikes as “vectors” and it turns out that the three known uses of bikes as terrorist bombs in the UK either did not work properly or were stored in an attached bag; not in the bike itself. His suggestion: maybe no bags in secured spaces, but that does not necessarily have to mean no bikes. Adam also showed us another group’s project to deal with perceived bike parking fears in Barcelona, Spain called the “Biciberg”. If you are interested in his work, please check out: www.bikeoff.org

Jens started off his talk by telling us that he does believe in fear, but he is interested in fear as a puzzle. As he put it, that “snake” may just be a stick and there are many sticks that are not snakes. His project starts with the idea that “the car is king”, but by that phrase, he also means cars make have the biggest impact: traffic congestion, air pollution and environmental impact on a global scale. He believes that cars have nothing to offer to cities and he is looking at ways to make bikes more appealing for a culture that places such high value on the class, sex, speed and power appeals of the car. Jens points out that bicycle vehicles allow humans to efficiently make energy and move like nobody’s business and he designs bikes right down to very interesting driveshaft component (instead of the chain) and overall designs. For him, it is about finding unity in the object of his crafts, and several others gathered here at the conference have linked up with him to push this further. If you are interested, please check out this link: www.biomega.dk/biomega.aspx

6.00 – 7.00 PM
"Sounds of Fear"
Isabel Mundry, Zurich School of Music, Drama and Dance

Note: this presentation did not take place due to illness and the Akademie plans a new performance of Isabel’s work at another time and place.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Note: the second day highlighted the projects of current or upcoming Akademie fellows.

9.00 – 10.00 am
I. Section: Design

Björn Franke
"Manufactured Fears"

Matthias Aron Megyeri
"Sweet Dreams Security™ Est. 2003 – Notes from an Orwellian City"

Notes: Both Bjoern and Matthias see their work as ways to question that they see as the “Orwellian scenario” in Great Britain.

Bjoern’s work is a series of what he calls “design experiments” that deal with the imagination of fear and the psychology of social relationships. A US survey piqued his interest for its findings that about 70% of women and 90% of men think about jealousy. So the first project he showed us plays with objects used to induce jealousy in partners, including photographs of objects he designed like a vacuum pump that leaves a “hicky” on the skin or others that leave scratches, bruises, bite marks or instant kisses. His second project was “panic boxes” which create controlled spaces in which humans have to deal with the machine and the feeling of powerlessness. Bjoern’s third project is a set of “affective sensory extensions” with names like “sunburn” and “cramped” that he designed to place around the arm. They monitor behavior, and generate feedback to modify behavior. His fourth project is called “violent machines for troubled times” (see image above left). These design experiments aim to measure the level of the US terror alert through the body’s activity and represent that level in the respective color. If you are interested in Bjorn’s work, please check out his site: www.bjornfranke.com

Matthias’ work started with the “feeling of security” and the kitsch of “cute” that he finds in such an extreme juxtaposition in London. His photography documents a whole range of security objects like fences, locks, alarm boxes, television cameras, shutters, and curtains, and objects of “cuteness” like numerous stars, flowers, butterflies, smiling apples, etc. As a side note, it was a bit disturbing to realize that marketers design eyes on products to attract children’s attention and “follow” them along the shopping aisle. So Matthias decided that he wanted to use this stark juxtaposition in a way to intervene in London’s home security market. He wants to offer a thought through his product and raise a question for discussion. Some people see the business side of his projects, which have quickly drawn the attention of major architects and security experts, but I think there is something to his decision to choose consumer security products like fences or curtains and combine them with popular cute objects. His projects have names like “R. Bunnit, Peter Pin and Didoo” (see image above right), “Mr. Smich and Madam Buttly”, “Billy B” padlocks, “Mrs. Welcome” and “Mr. Welcome”. As an extra note, the travels resulting from the popularity of his designs and exhibits has brought him into interesting comparisons between places like the UK, US, Japan, Brazil and Israel on the objects of security and cute. If you are interested in his work, please check out the link: www.sweetdreamssecurity.com

10.00 – 11.00 am
II. Section: Architecture

Iassen Markov, Stephan Trüby
"5 Codes: Space of Conflict – The Temple of Janus Revisited"

Gabi Schillig
"The Politics of Lines – on Architecture/War/Boundaries and the
Production of Space"

11.30 am – 12.30 pm
III. Section: Performing Arts, Video

Susanne M. Winterling
"Dealing with Fear: an Inside and an Outside Perspective"

Helene Sommer
"High over the Borders – Stories of Hummingbirds, Crying Wolves and the
Bird’s Eye View"

12.30 – 1.30 pm
IV. Section: Daily Life Between Social and Politics

Damaso Reyes
"Fear and Photography"

Damaso Reyes is from New York City and he is traveling Europe for the next few years. Damaso was supposed to present his work in a stand alone panel on Saturday about daily life between society and politics, entitled, “Fear and Photography”, but at the last minute Damaso had the chance to photograph a rabbi from Berlin who services a small Russian Jewish community in the German town of Hameln. If you are interested in his photographic work (he still uses a black room; see photo on the left) documenting the changing lives of Europeans, please check out this page: www.theeuropeans.net

Jasmeen Patheja
"Blank Noise: Exploring Fear as Experienced by Women in Their Cities, Everyday"

Notes: This was an interesting panel and represents many projects under way under the title of “Blank Noise”. I like how their work raises the question of gender and it helps me view the world through her photographs and stories of women who have been groped, fondled, stared at, humiliated, terrorized and despite all of that willing to fight back with their sandles and anything else within reach. Jasmeen has turned the experience of groping into a public scene on places like buses that make the audience spectators. She started photographing the men, some growing more ashamed, apologetic and pleading; some just remaining as a blurry image running away; some not deterred. She finds a high level of public denial and a lack of political interest in the problem. She hears the old excuses: it is her fault, but this has not deterred her from looking for ways to deal with sexual harassment. Jasmeen has set up most of these projects in places like Bangalore, but they have a very good blog that I suggest checking out with ongoing projects inviting men and women to participate. Some of the projects include the collection of testimonies, online event blogging, “Y R U Looking at Me?”, roadside sign actions, group building, staring back events, T-shirts with lines like “I never asked for it” and written reports of sexual harassment crimes that the apply to the sidewalk surface. If you are interested, please check out their site: www.blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com

2.30 – 3.30 pm
V. Section: From the Lab to Politics and Globalization

Margarete Vöhringer
"No Fear in the Laboratory. Art and Science in the Early Soviet Union"

Paula Diehl
"Ambivalence of Power in National Socialism. The SS Mise en Scène of
Fear and Identification"

Yi Shin Tang
"Dealing with the Fear of Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights in a
Globalized Economy"

3.30 pm
Final Discussion :
In this part, participants formed a large circle and talked about what they took away as important from this conference, what was missing and what needs addressing in future conferences. People brought up the lacunae in the panels like the lack of politicians, media producers, psychologists and religious leaders. The issue of temporality, the problems of violence and war, all still remain on the table for discussion. What of the more interesting points seems to have formed around the actual objects of fear and the psychology of dealing with fear. This pushed further questions such as how are fears created, who articulates the “feeling” of fear, and how is fear expressed and experienced. How do different cultures deal with fear? Can we identify peoples and places that face immediate and real fears with shorter event horizons as points for further conference work? Moreover, what can other disciplines tell us? How would a cultural anthropologist illuminate the notions, rites and symbols of death? How could psychologists help us understand how different groups deal with fear differently, especially through religion (here I am thinking of Kate Fiori and the research at Long Island University in New York and religious voices)? What about the perspective of children and developmental psychology? This seemed to be a formative place in most participants eyes. What about the politics, power and hierarchies of feeling and dealing with fear?
One of the other major points of this discussion also focused around what we are learning about the neuroscience of memory and what other disciplines suggest about what influence the feeling of fear beyond our genetics and mind, i.e. social relations, cultural notions, gender, etc. The geneticist takes the hard line view of genetics determines the whole thing and others pleaded for the complexity and unpredictability of human experience and behavior. Among the last observations, Philip mentioned a book worth considering, Traveling Concepts in the Humanities. Petros noted the way each different discipline chooses a different point of reference in their studies, e.g. the gene or the social, which then influences their view and understanding. This is something for us to keep in mind, as we explore this in an interdisciplinary manner.

Final notes:

I met Rolf Spinnler at the opening lecture. He is a journalist for the local Stuttgarter newspaper and he was charged with writing about Dr. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s talk on the origins of our fear of the future (the article is online and entitled, "Abschied von Fortschrittsglauben" (The Departure from the Belief in Progress). In talking with him afterwards, Rolf believed that Dr. Gumbrecht was in a way still shaped if not trapped by the historical philosophical tradition which he says has collapsed. He also disagrees with Dr. Gumbrecht about the turn towards an "animality" in our consciousness. When he thinks of something like Nazism, Rolf goes back to Horkheimer and Adorno and sees the perfection of the Enlightened consciousness emphasis on rationalism in genocide and war.

In the first coffee break, I met Antigone from Greece and Ekariko Nana Obot from Ghana. Both live in the area and were active participants in the conference discussions. Antigone has trained a physicist, but works in upper level information technology management. She gets to use her analytical skills but she comes to the Akademie conferences to feed her mind. She appreciated one of their past themes which brought business managers together around the question of "what managers see."

Ekariko has been working on many things. He used to work for the Americans in their interests in Nigeria but found himself on the outside with regime change in Nigeria. He has wandered from job to job,and started his own import-export company, but Ekariko also pursues questions about Africa, its history and identity. He showed us his articles in African newspapers about the perceptions of dictators like Mugabe in Zimbabwe. From his view, Europeans have made Africans into monsters both in terms of their image and the way that dictators like Mugabe are both perceived and act. When he looks at the European artistic traditions, he believes that we have also tortured our own history and other conceptions of the Oriental, the Muslim, the women, the black, the brown, the red and on and on. He also questions our notions of “culture” and believes that when we get down to it, what person does not desire the same things: food, shelter, warmth and love. To Ekariko, this is “culture”; this is our humanity. Everything else is constructed and tortured, he suggests, through our relations of power and politics.

Ritta Baddoura from Lebanon
Like many of her peer fellows at the Akademie (names I never learned), Rita had many thoughtful ideas to add to the various discussions. He is a link to her poetry in French: http://rittabaddouraparmilesbombes.chezblog.com/

Malaka Dewapriya from Colombo, Sri Lanka. He has been making films about his home country and wants to know more about Germany's history as he plans his next project. If you are interested in his work, please check out this link: www.studentfilmmakers.org (currently not linking)

Back to Stuttgart

2007-10-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

When I enter the train station of Stuttgart, another flood of memories courses through my mind. I was last here in 1994. My former home-stay brother, Okofo, came to pick me up and take me to his mother’s apartment in Stuttgart-Neugereut. This is the first place in which I lived in Germany in 1990. It was the summer after the Berlin Wall had fallen. I was seventeen years old and my classmate, Jason, and I were on a one month program supported by the American Association of Teachers of German. We each had a home-stay family and we went to the local school with our home-stay siblings.

For me, it was an exciting time. My home-stay mother hailed from Leipzig and she had married a man from Ghana who no longer lived with her. She had a daughter who lived and worked in Berlin. I never met her, but Okofo took me everywhere to his favorite haunts and to meet his friends. We visited Tuebingen, Heidelberg and Muenchen together.

I had three years of German by that point, but I could not really communicate too much with them. Yet I had so much to take in that summer. Stuttgart is not Berlin as my adviser’s wife, Natascha, will tell you, but it was still impressive for me. I was struck by Stuttgart’s urban development, huge residential living projects built around the schools, parks and mass transit system. Coming back, Stuttgart has a 1970s retro feel to it, but it still impresses me for its level of urban planning, modern designs and development. Stuttgart is known for the headquarters of automobile manufacturers like Mercedes and Porsche and postmodern buildings that showcase their cars and the feeling of speed. However, I am also struck by the “green” level to Stuttgart’s development. Both hotels in which I have been staying, for example, have green roofs. Plus Stuttgart is in the lower western corner of Germany and even has a transnational feeling linked to neighboring France.

I plan on telling you all more about the conference I am attending here on “Dealing with Fear”, but for now a few more memories. Germany won the World Cup of soccer that summer. It was the first unified team for Germany and was a moment of symbolic and collective importance for a country that would rapidly face the challenges of re-unification. It was, for instance, the summer in which the Federal Republic of Germany instituted the currency reforms, which would have an immediate impact on East German pensions and jobs long connected with the Soviet Block’s economic system. Pensioners did not fair too badly with the currency exchange. Massive unemployment in the East, however, was the other effect. The criticisms from West Germans about the money their state had to give out to help bolster the eastern half had not grown that loud yet.

But as a seventeen year old, none of this was in view. My host mother was so excited because she could see her relatives from East Germany, some of whom she had not seen in forty years. My German was bad enough, but I could not understand a lick of their Saxon accents. As I mention in my biographical notes, these events would motivate me to continue my study of German back home in high school and beyond.

When I came back to visit my host mother in 1994, I was in my third year at university and in Germany for the summer semester at Freiburg in Breisgau. My German was much better by then. My spoken German was still a mess, but good enough to talk at greater length with my guest mother, Barbara Addai. She told me some of her story. She was a young girl during the Second World War and remembered how the Russians entered Leipzig. Her brother had a job at one of the local factories and was told that the Russians wanted him. He took off on his bike and I am not sure if Barbara ever saw him again. She broke down in tears as she began to recount those first days and months when the Russians occupied East Germany and she told me that she too eventually fled to West Germany where she became a kindergarten teacher in Stuttgart.

I last saw Barbara in the fall of 2002. I was then living in Berlin and attending the Humboldt University. She was in town to visit her daughter and she met me at the café in the university’s main building. She was tickled to learn that I had continued my studies in German and German history and we had a nice hour together talking about her family. Okofo, she told me, was involved in radio broadcasting around Stuttgart and I told her that he had the deep resonating voice that listeners would love. She also told me that she was dying of cancer. I gave her a big hug and told her I would try to see her again. We wrote each other one more time. She told me she had moved into a hospice care facility for cancer patients and gave me the address. I wrote one more time, but never heard back. I am still looking for Okofo.

From the historical records of Nuremberg

2007-10-18T21:24:00.000-07:00

Nuremberg is quintessential German for many. One German studies scholar has even recently documented the varied historical meanings of Nuremberg (Stephen Brockmann. Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden House, 2006). As an architectural reminder, there is a series of columns outside the German National Cultural History Museum, which is about a block away from the hostel where I have been staying. The columns display the articles from the UN charter declaration in several languages. Now this place is as much remembered as the site of the Allied War Crimes Trials after the Second World War, as it is for the larger than life Nazi Party parade grounds outside the old city and its maniacal former vocational instructor, Julius Streicher (first portrait on the right below).

Nuremberg’s architecture has an old feel to it, but people meticulously reconstructed the city after the war and incorporated more modern designs with the same kinds of stone and other materials. The red rock seems very characteristic for Nuremberg’s streets, but this has kind of a jarring affect for some when they realize that this was all once a pile of rubble at the end of the Second World War (see the photo on the right from the Nuernberg Stadtsarchiv). In many cases, only pieces of the original fountains or buildings remain in exhibition rooms of the National Museum. The reconstruction tries to recapture the feeling of old Nuremberg. The city's old wall still convey the powerful feeling of a fortress and much of the old inner city is now a highly commercialized business and tourist center.

For historiography, I think it helps to look at Nuremberg and the region of Franconia. It is perhaps the most important place for the return of the Nazi movement in 1925 after Hitler’s imprisonment in Landsberg (see Rainer Hambrecht, Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Mittel- und Oberfranken (1925-1933), Nuernberg: Stadtarchiv Nuernberg, 1976.). Hitler's assertion of the Fuehrer principle drew important resources of support from cities in this region, especially the small business and craftsmen classes.

The story of the Nazi movement and its most characteristic leader, Streicher, is well documented, but it is worth recalling the political struggle that occurred here in the wake of the First World War. It is often overlooked in the grand narrative of the rise of the Nazi Party and their seizure of power, but this struggle over civil society illuminates the history of Germany's political development. In that context, the person in Hermann Luppe presents a key figure in the battle for civil society (on the right below Streicher). He was an active and capable local Democratic politician (and by that I mean, he actually believed in more democracy and more political and social reforms). He had served in other municipal governments elsewhere and was chosen by Nuremberg’s city council in 1920 as the Oberbuergermeister. He would become a thorn in the side of Bavaria's conservative politics and Julius Streicher’s main opponent (Matthias Braun notes how this would help Streicher and the Nazis profile themselves). Luppe went toe to toe with the Nazis and tried to fight them the way he thought best: through parliamentary procedure in the town council and through the municipal police and local courts if necessary. The Bavarian government brought the Nuremberg's police under state control and placed one of their own in the position of police chief, who was also pro-Nazi. The Nazis never legally forced Luppe out of office; in fact Luppe was continuously reelected in every election until 1933. Although Luppe helped hold together Nuremberg through its municipal institutions, the Nazis were able to nazify the town with what has become familiar to us now: the marches, rallies, flags and terror against local Jews and anyone else who stood up to defend their neighbors and the values of civil society (See Arnd Mueller, Geschichte der Juden in Nuernberg 1146-1945, Nuernberg: Selbstverlag der Stadtbibliothek Nuernberg, 1968). What lesson does this struggle offer us about civil society, its sustainability, fragility and defense?

Luppe felt his town’s efforts had become swept up in something larger that he could not control (see Hermann Luppe, Mein Leben, Nuernberg: Stadtarchiv Nuernberg, 1977). In 1933 his opponents arrested him and took him down town for interrogation. They also went after his son-in-law in Bavaria and his own son in the German navy, fulfilling some old personal vendettas. Still, Luppe was able to help the town council oversee major reforms in the 1920s with social services for the retired, poor, unemployed, sick and children. Despite the period’s economic upheavals, Nuremberg was able to secure resources for huge residential living space initiatives and public service buildings and facilities.

I have also found several other interesting individual voices in this week’s research at the Landeskirchliches Archiv and the city archives. I will have to keep expanding on some of these in this blog entry over the next few days, given the accelerated course of events for me right now. I will get a chance to look at the Protestant records for Nuernberg more early next week, but already, there is a very interesting case about a Pastor Meisner who directly spoke to the issue of Anti-Semitism in 1926 in Nuremberg and the New Testament message of love for one’s neighbor, despite such strong local views against Jews, upon which he elaborated in his sermon. What makes this piece even more interesting was the attempt to touch it up once the Nazis came into power in Nuremberg in 1933 and they began going after individual pastors like Meisner.

One of the most interesting figures for my work is a man named Otto Pallas. He wrote a set of memoirs about his life in Nuremberg and gave them to the city archive in 1983. No one has done much with his records. Matthias Braun did not know about him. Pallas was ten years old when the First World War began. He would go on to become a communist activist in Nuremberg and the Nazis would eventually send him to Dachau. What interests me right now is his recollections of the First World War, the hunt for spies, which he sees in the village in Franconia where he spends much of the war, and what he experiences at home, especially the return of his uncle from the front and his descriptions of wounded men. So please come back to read more in a few days. It is on to Stuttgart, other old memories and an interesting conference on fear at Schloss Solitude.

Nuremberg

2007-10-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

Gruss Gott
and Servus!
When you hear those words, you know you have entered another region of Germany. I have spent the last week in Nuremberg and I am headed to a conference on fear in Stuttgart. I will be back here in Nuremberg next week for more work in the Protestant and municipal archives.

As I walk out of the main train station and find my way across the roads to one of the gates, I remember walking around here eight years ago with my friend Jo. As I kept walking, I quickly recalled what I had learned about the old city of Nuremberg, a "free" city in the Holy Roman Empire, the home of Albrecht Duerer, fabled markets and crafts.

I turned left and followed the wall down the Frauentor street until I found the hostel. Further down, this street is known for its red lights. People would later tell me that this area is one of the seedier parts of Nuremberg. The people at the front desk gave me a map and the password for the front door. They told me I was in the “wrong room”, meaning, I had a bed on the second floor in a six-person, mixed gender room. There I found Jenna lazing on her bed. She had just arrived a little before me. We went downstairs and found our way to the “common room”, which has a kitchen, dining area, computer station and lounge with almost all of the amenities.

At the front desk, “they” (I never got to know these people by name) told me that there were at least seventy beds and forty people in residence. As I would find out, most travelers get to Nuernberg on their way out. Every one is passing through. They had been on the road for several weeks, visiting several countries and bigger cities like Prag, Berlin, Vienna and Paris. Nuremberg sounds like a second thought for some. The kitchen serves as a room for recuperation, it seems. I can hear the life of the road in their voices, their feelings of exhaustion and hacking coughs from weeks of beer, cigarettes and living from one bed to the next.

With David Emory’s question still in the back of my mind about the people I meet, here are a few sketches of the people whom I have met at the “Lette ‘m sleep” hostel in the Frauentormauer 42.

My roommates:

Jenna was the first person whom I met in our six person room and the first to leave for home. She just finished college and decided to take a year off to figure out what to do with her life. She is from Toronto, Canada and has been traveling for several weeks across France, Holland and Germany. She is still young but very spiritual. She was interested in talking about Christianity with the Spanish-speaking boys following her around, but they did not seem as interested in that.

Tania arrived toward evening. She is from Ulm, Germany and is in Nuremberg for an eleven-day internship at a doctor’s office that specializes in alternative medical practices like massage therapy and reiki. Jenna and I decided to hang out with Tania in the smoke-filled kitchen. Tania ended up asking us when we were born for an astrological reading of our lives and futures, but I could not give an exact time. So Tania left me hanging, unable to tell me more precisely what she could see in her reading. However, she did get both Jenna and me to talk about our lives, where and when we were born (know the exact time of your birth?), our families and friends, our desires and our foibles.

Other people began hanging out that night in the kitchen too.

Sylvia is from Tapei, Taiwan. She is actually working at the hostel for two months doing odd jobs, but what she really wants to do is study English literature and drama and maybe go back into stage set design and lighting.

Julia is another young woman from Canada. She is a student at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver and also interested in traveling Europe on her own.

Michael and Mark walked in with thick southeastern English accents. They are from near Canterbury, on the last legs of their trip, low on money and looking for the next beer. They told us to check out the Matisse sketches at the nearby national museum. I noticed Michael keeping his own book of sketches of things he had scene. It looked like portraits of people. Mark was friendly, but tended to say less. As I would learn, Mark tended to stay out much later coming back in the middle of the night or early morning. He would slam the door when he came in, strip down to his underwear, take a swig from his water bottle and climb up into bed.

Margaret arrived yesterday. She is from Indiana (originally Connecticut) and a die hard Quaker. Margaret is a double major in German studies and chemistry. She has a sharp mind and likes to lay things right out on the table: her staunch pacifism, her analysis of US foreign policy, the comparisons of US and Germany cultures and feelings like freedom, security and nationalism. She likes to get right to the point and tells you what she likes and dislikes. Her mother studied journalism and philosophy. She describes her father as a clever man who runs a junkyard. Like several others here, she wanted to experience travel on her own and she hopes to conduct research for a pharmaceutical company some day.

I had noticed Amadeo earlier in the day sitting in the corner of the lounge. He overheard me that night talking about my research from that day at the city archives and wanted to know more. He is much older than the rest of us and hails from New York City. He worked at the World Trade Center for over ten years and is interested in how Germans have responded to war. He pointed out an interesting comparison: building the new Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan and reconstructing Nuremberg after the Second World War. He mentioned that he has been traveling all his life. He made a trip one and a half times around the world when he was my age. He expressed an empty sense about New York since 9/11 and I concurred. We quickly found common ground in Beth Israel Medical center in lower Manhattan. His children and I were born around the same time there when my mother worked there as a young doctor fresh from the Philippines. It is a small world in some ways, we said. It is. It is. Amadeo loves visiting museums and cultural sites. He is making his first trip into former East Germany. He is on his way to Weimar to visit Goethe and Schiller’s old haunts before his final stop in Dresden. I told him to stop in Erfurt since it is on the way and only ten minutes from Weimar.

Nahiro is one of the more interesting characters I met. I saw him later on the second night waiting around in the kitchen and lounge. We started talking with him over coffee and tea. His father was born in Bamberg (also in Franconia and not far from Nuremberg). His mother is from Venezuela where Nahiro grew up for most of his life. When he was eleven, he lived for several years in his father’s home town. His German grandfather became an important figure in his life there. His grandfather was a shoemaker in Bamberg and received severe head injuries and trauma in the Second World War.

Nahiro was also interested in what I studied. He wanted to know what I thought about the Jews and whether or not it was possible that they were “guilty” themselves. Most people, he noted while looking around the room, would be very upset to hear such a question. I was a bit shocked. He recalled another recent case from German television about one German writer who wants people to also remember the good side of the Third Reich. He recalled his grandfather’s stories about Jews and wanted to know what I thought. His grandfather's tales did not sound good, but he never offered me anything concrete. He asked me, “Do Jews control the world?” and he claimed to not know much about this history. So I told him in packaged lecture form what I know about the history of Jews in Germany, the waves of anti-Semitism over a long period of time, centered around things like the plagues and Christian celebrations (particularly Easter), claims of poisoned wells and ritual murder, the history of emancipation from above at the beginning of the 19th century, the history of assimilation and the construction of the pseudo-scientific racial paradigm of Aryan and Jew. I also told him that his question reminds me of the one hundred year old propaganda piece, The 300 Wise Men of Zion and who knows, how many older conspiracies (I also made a mental note of his grandfather's profession; craftsmen and small business owners in this region were known for their anti-Semitism and their eventual support of Nazism). I pointed out that historians believe that particular story to be a Russian construction. When I hear such things, I suggested to him that such a story about a people or a person often has a malicious intention behind it. I was struck by how much this idea of a powerful group stuck in his mind and concerned about this old myth's staying power. There was no doubt, we concurred, that the “MAN” is made up of many different groups of elites, crossing ethnic and racial lines. There is no doubt, he added, that what the Nazis did was wrong or what Isreal does in its current politics is another question. Such questions and discussions some times make it hard to see what is really going on and how people think. How do these old ghosts still haunt us?

Nahiro told me he was in Nuremberg for an appointment. He had to check in with his Moroccan contacts late that evening about tomorrow morning’s sale of unsold shoes from the Adidas warehouse down the block. He helps the Moroccans sell them around the world. We talked about the current dictatorship in Venezuela and we talked about the emergence of the image of the Muslim as a terrorist. We compared economic and social development in Germany. It is not hard to see, given the way things stand between currencies like the pound, euro, the Canadian dollar and our own. From Nahiro’s view, the US economy has been “abgewirtschaftet”, as if we have really wrecked it through our thinking it is every one for his or her own sake. He likes what the Germans are doing with their economy and what he calls a social form of policy making. He also likes the European Union’s chances for becoming mighty again. I told him I could not view the US so monolithically and cited interesting developments in different regions. He had to get going and promised to see me in the morning, but he is gone now too and I never got to come back to some of those things he brought up.

In the archives I met many nice and helpful people. One in particular stands out. At the city archive, the archivists directed me to a man typing away in the corner of the little glass-walled reading room. Matthias Braun looks a bit older. I could see it in his eyes. He grew up in Nuremberg his whole life and is writing his dissertation at one of the local universities on an important figure in the local Nazi movement in the 1920 named Liebel. Matthias went over all of the available literature with me and pulled out title after title from his computer. He was interested in my project and what I have been finding in the records of Nuremberg’s individuals, its pastors, rabbis, politicians, children, businessmen, lawyers, First World War veterans, etc. I will see him on my return trip in a week and have more to say about much of my work.

But it has gotten to the point where I have seen the week’s third wave of travelers come through. I don’t know their names, but I hear their stories around the table in the lounge while I make my dinner. There is an Australian girl whom the other guys deem an elder at the age of 22. There is an English kid with a Mohawk and American soldier on leave from Iraq. They are all gathered around him, asking questions, and he is showing them his home made video collections, talking about war and the Iraqis. He misses his friends back in Iraq and he says he is one of the few in his outfit who really want to be over there. He says he wants to get back into the fight. A curly headed kid enters the room with a guitar and another group has landed on their last legs.

One last set of notes on Nuremberg:

Before I left for Stuttgart an older gentleman came to stay with us in the “wrong room”. He coughed all night and snored keeping Tania and me from sleeping. In the morning I was leaving. I let him know that the train engineers were striking again. I found out that he is from Mexico City and traveling around doing a little “business”. I helped him set up his laptop for wireless and told him about my dissertation. Then wished him safe journeys and made my way to the station to try and catch a train to Stuttgart. When I returned on Sunday, Tania told me that she had a talk with him. She told him that his sleeping habits disturbed her. He apologized. Later on, she noticed that some of her toiletries were missing and she suspected “Opa” (grandfather) as she called him.

Finally, I met a man on my way back through Nuremberg. After I had finished talking with him, I felt like I found myself standing in front of a similar self. Last night in the kitchen I met Stephan Guenther from Quebec. He had bought this huge piece of salmon for four Euros and he was preparing it for dinner while Sylvia and I looked on. He worked as an engineer for about five years at a hydroelectric power station. He was just a few steps away from the house with the white picket fence, as he put it, when he decided that after millions of years of evolution sitting in front of a computer at a desk everyday could not be the final goal for him or anyone else. So he quit his job and drove his car west across the United States. When that car broke down on the highway leading into Denver with his cousin along for the ride, he knew that he had reached one of those moments of trial, citing Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology. Stephan felt like he had found himself at a moment of trial like that first stage of ancient “heroes”. Having passed those trials, Stephen asserted, we are capable of anything. Not surprisingly, he has been reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in his travels.

Since that US trip, Stephen packed his things and took his bike across the Atlantic. He has been traveling all over Germany by bike for the past few months, but now that the weather has turned colder, Nuremberg is probably his last stop before heading back to Canada. He began to realize that it was time to return when he found himself in a cold downpour in northern Bavaria. As it began to snow, he took shelter at a little peasant shrine to the Blessed Virgin Maria and awoke in the morning to an older woman asking him if he was ok. He also mentioned that when he reached Nuremberg and walked around the former Nazi Party Grounds and “DokuCenter”, he felt like he had reached the end of this adventure in his life and the beginning of something new.

Guenther’s thoughts on Germany are also interesting. He wanted to know why so many people are fascinated with Germany and I offered my own opinions about our fascination with the history, the war and even more narrowly, Nazi technologies, the SS, power, violence and fear. Guenther has been to Europe before and traveled through Italy and France. He thought about Germany, but he found excuses for not going. Finally, he decided that he needed to travel through Germany to make peace with his father and his own life. When Stephan was young, his father recalled his own teenage years to his son. He was born in part of the Second German Reich. He told his son about being pushed out of what became Polish territory after the Second World War into East Germany, then West Germany, and eventually Quebec. Beyond those memories though, his father never went much further. His father is part of the “Vertriebene” generation, those that were pushed from their homes in the wake of Nazi racial war in Eastern and Central Europe. His father is also part of that "silent" generation of German parents (see a newly released book related to this subject by Sabine Bode, Die deutsche Krankheit - German Angst). Stephen mentioned that his father and aunts never said much, but he was aware that they communicated a tremendous amount through their non-verbals. Stephen also became very aware of the feeling of difference growing up in Quebec. He just did things differently or noticed other children doing things in very similar ways that were different from his own. He believes that this is the result of the cultural imprint that his father and aunts gave him as a young person and that this is carried over into the third generation, as Stephen claims to see its mark in the behavior of his nephew. It was while traveling through Germany that Guenther felt that he was similar to Germans in terms of cultural traits and behavior. He recognizes plants that his aunt used to tend back home in Quebec (but cannot find anywhere else in Canada) and he thinks he understands why his nephew picks black berries that most people pass over for blueberries or strawberries. After a week of traveling, though, he felt alone here. He even went to the movies that lonely night in Dresden and chose the film Du bist nicht allein (“You are not alone”). Perhaps ironically, the German language remains a barrier to this part of Stephan’s life. He feels like he has found part of his psychological mirror in this place, but he is also ready to return to that other home in his life. Before he left, he told me to go back to the Philippines someday. He feels that there is another important part of me to revisit and see in a new light.

walking through Nuremberg

2007-10-17T05:40:00.000-07:00

If you are interested, please click here

Talking about the environment

2007-10-13T00:29:00.000-07:00

At last check, there are over 14,000 individual blogs reaching 12 million readers today to talk about one topic: the environment. The aim of the project is to get us talking about a better future, but I hope this amounts to more than just a really big BUZZ.

Germany
Since I am using my blog to talk about my travels through central Germany and develop parts of my dissertation work on the history of fear, I might as well start with what I have seen here in Germany. I am interested in things like innovative architecture and organic whole foods markets.

Buy more local, consume more organic
Berlin has more and more "Bio" stores like the one in this picture. "Bio" products are also appearing more and more regularly in conventional grocery stores, so there is a growing market and distribution network in the making much like in the US. For those trying to stay local, there are lively farmers' markets in several parts of the city. I have also seen the growth of this local and whole foods trend in other parts of Germany, especially in the former East Germany in the agricultural region of Thuringia and its cities like Erfurt where I will be in a few weeks. The "Bio" mark on products represents the European Union's system of inspection and regulation for organic and whole food products. In this case, I think a supernational or national system helps. The label carries a strong sense of quality. Moreover, prices for many products are more and more comparable with non-"Bio" alternatives in other stores,. Still, it is a good idea to check out the ingredient labels; many of those "Bio" products have things that may not be right for you. Some of my friends and I try to buy less things, eat more local, more organic, more whole foods and waste almost nothing. I am learning not to necessarily buy the whole foods shipped in extra special from half way around the globe. Berlin also has a municipal composting service, but many people still do not use it or use it properly from experience. Even Germans have some way to go when it comes to food consumption and waste.

Buying fish

Since I am talking about food, I will post a link to the Blue Ocean Institute's "Guide to Ocean Friendly Seafood". We like to eat fish. This guide provides useful information on different types of fish, typical harvest and farming methods, and species health for the purposes of conservation and sustainability. Check it out if you are interested.

Rethinking our buildings

In my limited travels, I think the three most interesting cities in terms of alternative design, green architecture and urban planning have to be Portland, Oregon, New York City and Berlin. Tell us more about other places that are out there! Wind energy is a major state initiative in Germany and outside of Erfurt, for example, I can count four large wind farms on each direction of the compass with between 15-25 mills. Much of the central German landscape, regions like Saxony and Thuringia have substantial wind farms. In Berlin, I notice that some of the new tram stops have glass roofs with embedded solar cells. Berlin is also a fairly green city with parks all over the place. Sometimes from some of the elevated subway lines in central Berlin, I can see green roof tops, even on the tops of corner gas stations. I hear that Germany is a leader in this field, which Americans helped start. There is also quite a large water remediation project on Potsdamer Platz that filters gray water from the whole plaza before letting it enter the neighboring Landwehr canal. There is a very good mass transit system with light gage rail, trams, subways and buses and there are pretty good cycling lanes with coordinated traffic lights for bicycles in many parts of the city.

On the right are details of the GSW headquarters building in the middle of Berlin (renovated in 1999). Those red, orange, pink and white shutters are integral parts of a frame, which drapes the entire western side of the building. The shutters automatically rotate to help regulate the building's use of energy, light and air resources. The architects, Sauerbruch and Hutton, also developed an innovative ventilation system, including an aerodynamic cantilevered roof that generates a strong depression by intensifying the natural thermal currents around the building. One site claims that the building's design cuts energy usage in half. Plus, it is just a beautiful looking structure that should inspire innovative thinking.

Bringing it all back home
I have been keeping my eyes and ears open for years on alternative living ideas, mulling over designs for our family house and changes in my own life. When I returned to north central PA in 2003 for grad school, I decided I needed to make some basic changes. For one thing, I was glad to be back home in the hills, near the creeks and our family garden (pictured on the left in its winter state). Putting my hands in the soil and tending vegetables, herbs and fruit trees is much more than hippy junk (real hippies rock). Gardening changes my perspective on the environment and my relationship to living things and healthy living. It is also hard work. I have lost berries to birds, peaches to deer, beets to rabbits, tomatoes to groundhogs, broccoli to flea beetles, squash to acidic soil, blueberries to heat and drought, on and on. Planting is not about plugging it in and taking it out when it is done. It involves learning on all kinds of levels about plants, soil, insects, animals, chemistry, etc. But I get to be outside in the sun, wind and rain. My mother and I spend good time together weeding and catching up. We marvel over life and its seasons through the little things in our gardens. We get to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and supplement our diets with the most local of local foods.
Before I left for Germany, I turned the compost one more time and planted the garlic cloves for next year's harvest. I plan to make at least a three season garden. I miss it and look forward to visiting it in December just to see what is going on in its fourth season.
Gardening is also one of the things that many people have been doing in our region for years. Older folks grew up with gardening around here and bring a wealth of experience to what appears to be a good trend (within an older cycle: there was an organic movement around here in the 1960s; look for notes on the old Walnut Acres Farm, which only really exists in a label now). My brother-in-law Yuri has been developing nicer organic gardens over the years. My friends, Kurt and Masha, started their first garden (pictured above with my friends Keith and Alex and their two children Lucy and Ella). Plus my colleague and friend, Jan, and his wife Beth have a plot in a beautiful community garden in the north end of State College. So gardening is alive and well in this part of the country.

Living in State College for graduate school has also put me in contact with a whole group of interesting people centered around a new alternative co-op (on the right). They participate in a local Community Susported Agriculture (CSA) organization. This CSA is made up of local farms that work together, using "environmentally friendly methods to raise a variety of farm products, including vegetables, herbs, flowers, dairy products, eggs, meats, and berries". Paraphrasing their mission, they work together to coordinate growing, marketing, and distribution and provide an abundant and reliable source of fresh, healthy foods to grocery stores, restaurants, and individuals. Right now, they are laying the groundwork for an effort that may one day evolve into a farmer-owned cooperative, supporting a large number of local farmers and supplying food to a great many members of the community. If you are interested, check out the home page for the GroundWorks Farm CSA in the Penns Creek watershed.

Recycle

If you are interested in local recycling networks to get rid of things other people could use or find some things that you could use, please check out the Freecycle Network for a network near you.

Health and well being: yoga
When I returned to graduate school, I found myself generating
stress as I did in my old college days. I knew I liked yoga when my sister introduced it to me years ago. So I decided to find a class somewhere in town and trusted the recommendation of a classmate. There are so many things one can do to bring movement into one's day of sitting, reading and staring into computer screens. For some it is jogging or squash, cycling or soccer. I like those things too and get outside to kayak in the spring when the water is up or cross country ski in the winter when we get the occasional snow. However, yoga helps me integrate my mind, body and spirit through increasingly more and more practice. At first, I went once a week and decided to commit my time and money as an investment in my general health and well being. Practice is part of a long learning process, discovering flexibility in some places and inflexibility even pain in other parts of my body. When stress from work is building up and time seems so precious, that is when I need to go to yoga class the most. When I am in State College, I go to Laurie Bonjo's Iyengar-style class at least three times a week now. I brought my mat with me here to Germany and unroll it all the time in my apartment to practice. Yoga helps me clear my mind, work out the body's kinks, increase my flexibility, make me stronger and healthier. It also helps me focus on the here and now, draw my mind back from its intensity and bring better breathing into my daily activities. It helps that I have an amazing teacher and friend in Laurie Bonjo (that's her above). If you are interested, check out her home page for the Harmony Center.

The big dream: rethinking our home
I have had many ideas for our family home in north central PA and I have been mulling them over for years. Since my family seemed most interested in integrating innovative technologies into our house and thinking about the family's future in relationship to the home, I decided to focus our efforts on considering alternative energy. My girlfriend, Nicole, put me in touch with a new local company called Envinity to see what we could do (check out the link if you like). They are a great group of people and they approach their work in a personable way. As an extra benefit, talking about alternative energy with them has brought my family together in interesting and exciting new ways.
As a first step, we had the Envinity guys conduct an energy audit on the house for about $500. This involved surveying the house, going over its energy systems, doors, windows, electrical outlets and insulation from top to bottom. They then used a big fan to create a pressure differential in the house and see how and where air was leaking out. They fed those results into their super powerful computer programs and came up with an energy audit and a list of possible improvements we could make with the time it would take for those improvements to pay back our investment.
The first steps are basic, frugal, do-it-yourself. Over the next year, we are collecting materials to improve the building's insulation. Our house looses heat through a door into the attic and through electrical outlets. So we purchasing things like electrical outlet insulation covers, weather stripping and door sweeps (to seal the door jambs) plus thinking about other little things we can do to make the house more energy efficient before considering bigger ideas. For one thing, we are reducing the energy envelope of the house - that space we need to air condition - by sealing the hallway door to the basement.
We have also decided to invest in solar heating water. We can do this almost year round in this part of the country. Plus heating water usually takes up a third of the energy budget because of those pesky hydrogen bonds. Installations can run up to several thousand dollars for a house like ours, but we will save hundreds of dollars on those heating bills and the technology pays itself back in about 18 years.
The biggest decision involves a "closed" geo-thermal heating and cooling system. This technology uses the temperature differential of the ground and air to its advantage. In the summer the system draws water from a series of small wells spaced around the outside of the house and sends it coursing through the interior of the home to draw heat from the warmer air. In the colder months, the system reverses itself, drawing warmth from the ground below to heat the water and send it coursing through the home. These systems cost more than $20,000 to install for a house our size, but the energy savings are in the thousands of dollars and the system will pay the initial investment back in about 16 years. It is an extremely efficient heating and cooling system and we can combine it with a heat recapture and ventilation system that will help bring fresh air into that sealed interior space and recapture heat that may be lost through conventional venting.
What surprised me the most was the cost for photovoltaic systems (solar generated electricity). These systems can run over $30,000 for a house like ours and they pay themselves back in over 100 years. The technology and the markets are simply not there yet for serious consideration for any sanely budgeting family.
One last part of this family plan: my mother's office and medical practice. When our parents moved out here from New York City in the early 1970s, my father converted the original garage of the house into my mother's medical offices where she still practices to this day. When I was 14 I helped my father and a construction crew build an addition. My mother is nearing retirement, so it is time to think about the future of our family. My sister is a local hospice caregiver and developing her own practices as a certified massage therapist and yoga instructor. So we want to redesign the old office space and make a health and wellness center where my sister would have a beautiful new yoga studio and massage room and my mother could still see the occasional patient. Thinking about these things gets us all excited, but there is much work ahead for us to make this happen.

On a walk from the Kottbussertor to the Friedrichstrasse

2007-10-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

I went looking for a building on this sunny afternoon that I'll tell you more about on Blog Action Day. I found some interesting things along the way in the architectural history of Berlin.
If you are interested, please check out the link.

Primary source 4: Protestant sermons from Erfurt

2007-10-10T07:40:00.000-07:00

@ the Evangelical Central Archives (EZA)

I went back to the central church archives in the eastern part of Berlin-Kreuzberg today. The Protestant Church played a very important role in Germany at the turn of 20th century and I am interested in how this role looked for the first part of my study. I think this period has much to tell historians about our analysis of culture and Germany's struggle with modernity in the early Weimar Republic, and subsequently, Nazism and after 1945. I think this history may also have something to tell us about how Germans deal with fear today (See Sabine Bode's new book on German Angst. I am reviewing it for H-German in the early spring of 2008).

In the Imperial period (1880-1914/18), Protestant Church leaders strongly advocated for the Prussian monarchy and actively girded Germans for war as did most Protestant leaders across western Europe at that time. Most Germans were Protestant and in Thuringia they made up an overwhelming majority of the population. Most churches presided over districts drawn across their city maps. They estimated the numbers of people living in their districts from anywhere between 12,000 and 18,000 individual souls. They saw themselves as important administrators for those areas and supported many civic efforts and relief programs. Even before the First World War, many churches found themselves strapped for the necessary resources. In 1918/19 most churches experienced a wave of members leaving and found themselves surrounded by more and more non-believers, smaller alternative Christian communities like the Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists and Baptists, and hostile elements in the new communist movement. Still, between 300 and 500 people regularly attended services and those numbers doubled for the church holiday services.

I found a few sermons and church bulletins from ministers in Erfurt and Magdeburg (in Saxony-Anhalt). Protestant ministers never seemed to be too far away from talking about fear and that gives me an important view to how a few ministers expressed fear and and how they offered ways for Germans to deal with those fears. The number one fear was for one's soul and then for the souls of other believers around the reader or listener. They also discussed the fear of death and how to deal with death, but also questioned the way the Prussian state would order Germans to commemorate death, reminding their public about death as a religious form of sacrifice or eternal damnation.

The first sermon also imagines a hostile world and paints a picture of a type of community that I find interesting for its vision and how it would later influence newer forms of political culture in Germany in some interesting and important ways. The second source is a set of excerpts from a sermon and bulletin from another pastor in Erfurt. He reacted to Germany in the wake of its defeat in the First World War and preached a path for Germany's renewal through a Christian spiritual re-awakening at a time when Germans were pulling apart their society.

The last record that I shall add soon comes from among the church archives of Magdeburg in northwest neighboring Saxony-Anhalt. From these materials, I can see how German Christians battled Confessing Christians for control over local churches, their pastorships and teachings. The source I want to show you is one minister's report of his Gestapo interrogation. Those records reveal how German Christians terrorized local religious communities in the 1930s and how the Protestant church focused its resistance along these lines of Christian tradition. That said, I am still perplexed by how Christians could not muster the courage to protest the racial transformation of Germany. I think one of the keys to answering that questions may lie in the first source below and what happened to the vision of Germany as a diverse form of civil society.

1875: Imagining Germany

On May 24, 1875, the pastor from the Regler Church in Erfurt, Dr. Baerwinkel, gave a sermon at the Ulrich Church in Halle a./S. for a meeting of the Evangelical Union. His church published an edition and one copy ended up in the EZA records for the Regler Church.

What I found most interesting was how Dr. Baerwinkel talked about the kind of place his listeners should make. He invoked a story from the Old Testament book of Nehemia 4, 1-9 . That story recounts opposition to the Jewish rebuilding of Jerusalem and Dr. Baerwinkel uses this passage to paint this picture of Germany about four years after the creation of the modern German nation state in 1871. For example, he states:

We are of one opinion that the city of God we would like to build must have walls. It is necessary to give this city a mighty border so that one knows how far this territory reaches and where foreign lands begin. It must be a wall so solid that the foxes cannot find a way. Yes, this city of God, our church, must become a mighty fortress and a free place for everyone who calls out in the name of the Lord and seek shelter within its walls, but also a powerful place of arms for the battle against the unbelievers and the amoral of the world.
[...] our task here is the same as it should be in focus everywhere: proclaim the word of God, toil with our hands in the realm of God, practice the actions of the good Samaritan, take care of the sick or call sinners to repent. The is the same task we are given when we hear the sermon or fold our hands in prayer for our soul's salvation.

What I find interesting is that fortress-mentality that can almost seem ubiquitous in central Germany in the form of inscriptions on church architecture or in the verses of the Luther hymn, "A mighty fortress is our God". Even more striking to me is the reading of the Old Testament. This city of God is for believers. That does not necessarily preclude Jews, but it views everyone else as enemies. It is at once a militant and a compassionate vision of Germany. What happened to these visions are strands in my analysis for the 1920s.

1921: The German soul is sick

The second source comes from Pastor Kohlschmidt of the Augustiner Church. Pastor Kohlschmidt appears to heave been a prolific writer. The first excerpt is from his sermon, "Be at peace", in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther Day, which the church subsequently published in a local newspaper as a three part series. Pastor Kohlschmidt's sermon captures the sense of Germany's catastrophic loss in the wake of the First World War and the feeling of occupation by foreigners, most likely the French, but possibly others, maybe Jews or communists. Pastor Kohlschmidt believes that Germans have accepted the materialism of England and France, which in turn has fractured German society much like 400 years ago during the religious wars. So Pastor Kohlschmidt invokes Luther as the German hero and admonishes Germans to turn to Jesus Christ in order to help heal Germany's sick soul. For example, Pastor Kohlschmidt writes:

[...] 400 years have passed by since that memorable day. We write the year 1921, a year not of salvation but of disaster; a year and a time of calamity […] what kind of salvation do we need? Just like 400 years ago, we are a divided people. Back then, foreigner sat upon the throne. The foreigners are now more than ever our masters.

[…] Materialism, despite Kant and Fichte, has almost stifled the German mind. Materialism has mechanized work and flattened thinking. And it has led into a form of dogmatism […]. It has atomized society and mocked reverence. It has turned duty into egotism, truth into perjury and morality into fornication […] And so it has happened as it had to happen. If Luther were to make his way from Wittenberg to Erfurt via Halle, Leipzig and Merseburg, what would he find? What would he say?

Poor German people! Other people say that today who call for salvation and offer themselves as saviors. Economic reform, socialization, school reform, new philosophy! […]

This is about the soul of our people, not our minds or our hands. Our soul is sick and therefore our ways of thinking, our entire writing and endeavors. […] Be at peace! That is how Luther advised us 400 years ago. This peace is not something that the world can give us; only he who bore the burdens of humanity, Jesus Christ!

1925: Totenfest: commemorating death and dealing with fear

In a second piece from an Augustiner Church's bulletin from 1925, Pastor Kohlschmidt talks about the holiday commemorating the dead. According to Pastor Kohlschmidt, this festival did not always exist in Germany. Over one hundred years earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm Friedrich III had ordered Prussians to remember those who had sacrificed their lives in the wars against Napoleon. Here, Pastor Kohlenschmidt claims that Germans have forgotten the origins of this festival, but asserts a deeper meaning behind the notion of death than simply dying for a nation state's wars on earth. Pastor Kohlschmidt invokes the fear of death without salvation and admonishes his readers that they really should be more concerned with where they end up in the afterlife. For example, he writes:

Is that really the deepest meaning of Totenfest? Are we allowed to say that dying means becoming blessed? No, the Holy Scriptures says that only those who die in the Lord are blessed. How many have died and have not wanted to know about the Lord while living? How often is the inscription, “Here rests in the Lord”, only an untrue form of speaking? More true is the word:

“Who acts according to my word,

To him I open the gates of peace;

Who transgresses against me, will not find what he seeks!

I come knocking at your door.”

Therefore Totenfest should remind us that we too must die. The earnest, bitter earnest question should press upon us and never let go, “Where do I want to spend eternity?"

Just who felt this fear of damnation is unclear. The churches presided over districts with populations in the tens of thousands, but only 300 to 400 regularly attended services. So on the one hand, the fear of damnation may not have had that much of an affect on Germans. On the other hand, however, there were significant groups of practicing Christians and that will influence their views of Germany, the Weimar Republic and the idea of Germany's renewal through religious practice.

Primary source 3: through the clippings of the Imperial Rural Union

2007-10-09T11:26:00.001-07:00

For the past two days I have been looking through the press clippings of the Reichslandbund at the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfeld (the history of the building complex is posted above in German).

The Reichslandbund (Rlb) is translated as the Natural Rural League on the Wikipedia.org site, but that does not make much sense. I would translate it as the Imperial Rural Union, which still does not say much. In 1921, two German agricultural associations united to form the Rlb. Large landowners dominated its politics and it formed a large network of local associations and newspapers to advance the interests of "big" German agriculture alongside those of industry and labor in the Weimar Republic. Benjamin Ziemann suggested I take a look in their press archive, which goes back into the 1890s and reads like a gigantic collection of newspaper articles from newspapers all over Germany that the Rlb organized into a wide range of topics.

Since the collection is so large, I chose to first look at the press collection on Thuringia (Thueringen), the central German region in my study (depicted at left in pink on the map of Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933)). There is so much material that I chose the collection bound in a book for the years 1921-1924. I was interested in these years in particular because of the rise of the Nazi Party in Bavaria to the south and what I knew from earlier research about the rise in political violence and anti-Semitism all around Germany during that time. I wanted to see what fear looked like through this collection and how Germans responded.

Since the collection is primarily newspapers, although other materials occasionally pop up, many of the "voices" among these article clippings are middle class and Protestant, although they collections also include the newspapers of the local agricultural union, the communists and the social democrats. Among the middle class papers, there are conservative, nationalist, racist and democratic voices. It is hard to approach fear this way because I am really looking for descriptions of individual expressions of fear, but I am struck by how much fear does come up in this sampling of German newspapers and the way that Germans were transforming their politics.

In September 1921, Thuringia held its state parliamentary elections and the "Red Block" of Social Democrats (SPD), Independent Social Democrats (USPD) and Communists (KPD) were able to form a ruling coalition with a combined vote of more than 51%. The middle class Democrats were already well on the way to decline from their early successes in the first Weimar elections, but the other, more conservative middle class parties did very well. Much of the press clippings reflects their positions. Their authors very closely followed the decisions of the ruling "Red Block" coalition and the actions of everyday people who supported Social Democracy or Communism in Thuringian communities and they tended to play on the fears that middle class, Protestant Germans associated with the "Reds". Historians such as Helge Matthiesen have pointed out these trends before, but my research brings out some of the dimensions of these political battles even more. For example, conservative middle class authors tended to play the religion card more so than I think we know. So when the "Red Block" announced a new law in October 1921 that eliminated official state status in Thuringia for the holidays celebrating the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther's birthday (on October 31 and November 9 respectively), many papers carried headlines that stylized the decision as the beginning salvo in a new "Cultural War" (Kulturkampf) . The law also made the founding of the Weimar Republic (also on November 9) the new state holiday. Dissenting papers noted how the new law would eliminate religious education and choirs in the schools and reported cases of local ministers and teachers protesting the new law. The Rlb's local papers used the law's promulgation to condemn the entire Weimar Republic. In many cases, the dissenting papers exaggerated the very nature of the law, claiming that the socialists and communists wanted to destroy freedom and moral values and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat and the masses. They portrayed political appointments and hiring practices of the ruling state government as infiltrations, allowing socialists and communists to work in the local police forces, and claiming that the government unfairly granted amnesty to people accused of "political crimes" (in their view, to mostly socialists and marxists), while more aggressively prosecuting rightwing associations and censoring their media like the film Fredericus rex after the rightwing assassination of the German-Jewish industrial and political leader, Walther Rathenau in June 1922. In this context, as Matthiesen has noted, conservative middle class authors railed against the powerlessness of the middle classes and called for a unified middle class voting block of their own made up of Protestants, craftsmen and farmers.

What also struck me about these records was how central Thuringia was to German politics in the early 1920s. My project assumes this approach and the archival materials I saw today focus on the region. So these approaches slants my view a bit, but it was remarkable how many papers from other regions picked up on the developments in Thuringia and even claimed that this region was the cultural battleground and political laboratory of Germany. Thuringia was a newly organized political state that contemporary authors often referred to as "Greater Thuringia". Locals writers initially talked excitedly of the possibilities for the idea of a Middle Germany (Mitteldeutschland), but the fear of a "red" central Germany made national headlines in 1921 and 1922 as something Germans should fear. Papers closely followed the region's events, picking up on the terrorist tactics of local communists who organized paramilitary organizations, conducted house searches, stopped local commercial traffic and attacked right-wing demonstrations. When the socialist and communist leaders of the central German states of Braunschweig, Saxony and Greater Thuringia gathered in Dresden to discuss their regional cooperation, papers across Germany painted the picture of socialist Middle Germany as a grave danger to the nation (the Reich).
I have not yet found much public reaction to the rise in anti-Semitism in this region in 1922 and 1923, but I have found files in this collection that thematized this issue too. I will come back in another week to see those. Meanwhile, I am also struck by the region's connections to events in Bavaria and Berlin. With the possibility of a "red" Central Germany, conservative leaders in southern Thuringia were seriously considering joining their districts to the Federal state of Bavaria. In the fall of 1923, hyperinflation, rising unemployment and the French occupation of the Ruhr industrial valley in western Germany dominated the national headlines. Meanwhile, the national government ordered the military in Thuringia and Saxony to keep order, especially against the threat of communist violence and pending revolution. However, a new group calling themselves the National Socialists were literally reported to be massing paramilitary units on the southern borders of Thuringia and the rumor was they were going to seize power in Munich and march on Berlin.

Blog Action Day

2007-10-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

this post is a little change of pace from my blog's objectives, but it is in line with everything I believe in and want to do. Here is another little idea that I have picked up from Larissa Chace Smith's wonderful blog. On October 15, 2007, thousands of bloggers are going to focus their individual blogging projects on the issue of the environment. If you are interested, please check out the web site for Blog Action Day and see what you could do. In one form or another, we are all going to draw awareness to the environment and I imagine that there are many interesting people out there who are going to think up some creative things. If you are a blogger or know one, please consider passing on the Blog Action Day environmental initiative to them and please check back on our blogs on October 15th for what we create.

American Voices Abroad

2007-10-06T04:52:00.000-07:00

On Thursday night I met with a group of old friends in the middle of Berlin. It was the weekly "Stammtisch" for the group American Voices Abroad, which a group of American ex-pats, including Colin and me, helped start in the spring of 2003 as a way to oppose the invasion of Iraq and articulate other positions on US foreign policy and our own democracy.
Events have moved beyond those early days and efforts, but the group still meets and finds interesting ways to get involved in the public sphere of Berlin and with other US citizens' activist networks throughout Europe and the US. I just wanted to stop by, surprise some old friends and see what they were doing.
I found them at Barcomi's in the Sophienstrasse and they were meeting with a man named Patrick, who is one of the top Information Technology (IT) guys for MoveOn.org. He grew up in Germany and visits Berlin annually. He had dropped in at the Stammtisch to introduce himself as a lead in to his presentation next week on MoveOn.org's upcoming US election initiatives.
So I started asking questions. Patrick told us that MoveOn.org is interested in testing out a campaign model on the upcoming elections in Kentucky, where the election is up for grabs. It involves much of the old campaign grunt work of going door to door and calling voters as they leave for work to encourage them to go to the polls (Patrick mentioned that this is actually a good time to catch voters). Given their resources, they are focusing on the governor's election in Kentucky and the voters in the Lexington metropole area. It is unclear in which states they will focus their attention for the US presidential elections, but they think they have a successful model in the works for how to improve democracy.
I was curious to see what Patrick thought about the state of politics today. On the one hand, as we sat around discussing this from different angles, there is clearly a concern about the state of US democracy, questions over proportional voting, widespread corruption, transparency, the use of smear tactics and the diversion from focusing on issues and developing sharper analysis for stronger positions and better policies. On the other hand, the new media and bloggers in particular appear to have helped in some ways such as providing a greater degree of transparency to what is going on out there in our politics.
From his view, Patrick sees the biggest change in the money. He feels that a group like MoveOn.org can now fund any electoral campaign at the state level through small donations of $30. Smaller donors and more of them are able to make a difference at the level of state elections. He noted what he termed the small "d" revolution in our democracy. There is better news media now that are able to provide greater transparency to our politics. Groups like MoveOn.org have figured out the "carrot" in the political process and can now focus large sums of money from many small donors interested in the same issue to help a candidate win the vote. What they have not figured out yet is the "stick", i.e., how to hold politicians accountable once they are elected and get them to vote like they promised. AVA members brought up other issues like informing voters on all the ballot initiatives that pop up on their ballots and thinking of ways to develop stronger grassroots approaches to the content of our politics.
Finally, I had to ask Patrick about the "white elephant" still lingering in the room before he left. What did he think about MoveOn.org's poster campaign on General Petraeus in the lead up to his US Congressional Report on Iraq last month? Back home I kept hearing about MoveOn.org's smear tactics directed toward General Petraeus and journalists demanding that US Presidential candidates like Senator Hilary Clinton take a clear stand against MoveOn.org, which she skillfully avoided in her Sunday morning news blitz two weeks ago.
From his point of view, Patrick felt that MoveOn.org's response started with a good communications director. They received many responses from their own membership expressing their concerns about the organization's campaign, even suggesting that it was a mistake. So MoveOn.org sent out emails explaining their position. They found that the members who then responded to this explanatory letter were first appreciative of the fact that MoveOn.org responoded to their emails at all. Some also said that they then changed their opinion on the matter once they had read the group's explanation. Others said that they were still not convinced. Most of the objections that their surveys found, however, involved members' views on US military leaders and civil servants, never the facts cited in the campaign's message.
I asked Patrick to explain this point a little more, since it seems to be the crux of the matter. I explained that I had been telling many of my students at Penn State since 2003 to follow General Petraeus when he was with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. He seemed astute from all reports and sharply analytical and intelligent in his division's operations. The 101st seemed to have a different approach that was working. Patrick explained that MoveOn.org wanted to point out that we expect the highest integrity from our military leaders and civil servants, but that their jobs ultimately come with boundaries. They have to obey the US Commander in Chief and MoveOn.org asserts that this colors the analysis in General Petraeus' report.
From this view, the smear campaign against MoveOn.org resulted in a slight dip in polls that measure people's attitudes, but in the end, it generated huge name recognition for MoveOn.org in the process.
With that Patrick had to leave, but if I can make it this coming Thursday night, I will report some more.

Research in the Evangelical Central Archives in Berlin-Kreuzberg

2007-10-06T03:18:00.001-07:00

I have spent the last two days looking through the records of the central archive in Berlin for the collections of the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) and the Evangelical Church of the Union, the former Prussian state church (EKU) (See the reading room on the left). I am searching for records from local churches in hopes of finding sermons, petitions or letters from people in the communities in my study, Erfurt, Magdeburg and Nuremberg. I am particularly interested in any materials that can give me a sense of how German Protestants reacted to the growing anti-Semitism and political violence after the First World War. Protestant Christians made up a majority in my areas of study. So I want to see what fear looks like from a Christian’s point of view and how they dealt with the presence of fear resulting from the rise in more violent forms of politics from more radical leftwing working class groups and racist rightwing associations.

I found interesting sources dating back into the 1870s that I think are worth presenting here at some point. For example, I found a sermon from 1875 in which the minister shapes the Christian vision of a community in the form of a fortress. Notably, the minister draws that vision from the Book of Nehemiah 4, 1-9 in which the Jews must raise a wall to defend Jerusalem from their enemies. I also found a judicial case from 1911-1915, which offers a window into how marital relations and gender shaped a legal investigation and the very physical feeling of fear that influenced the accuser's willingness to tell the truth. The case involves the expert opinions of the local minister, the district doctor and police chief. So there is quite a wealth of material, but one should also be prepared to sift through stacks of documents and read really bad handwriting. It makes getting outside on a beautiful fall afternoon essential and makes me miss my yoga teacher and regular classes back home.

The majority of the correspondence that I have found in these administrative records, however, involves the requests of specific congregations and their ministers for things like pensions, health care support and additional ministers. The early and late periods of the 1920s witnessed massive inflation, unemployment and housing shortages. These findings in themselves tell me that these congregations were more focused on different concerns about old age, health, housing and adequate ministers for spiritual and educational need than the kinds of issues in my work.

It struck me that Erfurt was still growing with industrialization after the First World War. Many people left the churches right after the First World War because of their disappointment in the way the churches had so whole heartedly supported the Kaiser and Imperial Germany’s war aims (Dr. Roeber notes that this was also an international trend after the war). The churches noted larger and larger populations in their districts because of Erfurt’s growing economy, but also added that large numbers of these residents were socialists, communists, freethinkers, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists and Baptists and expressed a militant attitude toward them. On most Sundays there were perhaps only 300 to 400 people at a service. On religious holidays like Easter the numbers more than doubled. So thousands of Germans did not attend for one reason or another, but, interestingly, they were sending more and more of their children to the church schools in their districts (why?). Therefore, the church councils requested the need for more ministers to teach the growing numbers of children in their religion classes. Several churches either built whole new worship houses or requested an additional minister and spent much of the 1920s dealing with the issues of finance in their correspondence with the upper levels of the national church administration.

So far at least, I have not found many records of how Christians responded to the earlier period of violence that is the focus of my study, i.e., the political assassinations from 1921-1922 or the wave of Anti-Semitism in 1923. Why that is the case, is not clear. In part it involves the type of records I am examining, but there might be more (I have found other records elsewhere that I will present in due time). From the little I did find, some Christians viewed the world in terms of believers and non-believers, i.e., Socialists, Communists and even other Christian sects that had erred in their view. The authors of these sources make an effort to remind their audience about how scared Christians were of the anti-religious and anti-private property actions of Communists during the revolutionary period and the wave of people leaving the churches in 1918/19. Where Jews fit into this picture is an interesting question. The sermon that I found from 1875 raises some of these questions for consideration, especially how Jews and others fit into a Christian world view of community through a reading of the Book of Nehemiah. The discussion of actual Jewish neighbors, interestingly, does not appear as a topic. I think that is an important question for the possibility of more diverse and tolerant communities, especially in times of economic crisis. So I wonder why this is the case. That said, it appears that more everyday issues of money, housing and health shaped the concerns of these individuals rather than larger political or moral issues resulting from the spate of political assassinations or reports of violence directed against Jews or defenders of civil society.

Writing letters to church officials noticeably increased with the rise of the Nazi movement and their seizure of power in 1933. Erfurt became a bastion of the German Christians in the State of Thuringia in the years leading up to the seizure of power. These Christians sought to aryanize Protestantism and very closely align it with Hitler and Nazi racial doctrine. The letters in support of aryanization, however, reveal different ideas about how Protestantism should be Nazified, e.g., removing the Old Testament because it was Jewish or even getting rid of Christianity all together because it was scientifically outdated.

The records from Magdeburg reveal a high level of struggle within the local churches and their governing bodies between 1933 and 1938 over Christianity, i.e., the struggle between the “German Christians” and the “Bekennende Kirche”. "Bekennen" means confessing or professing the ideals of Christianity in this case, but "bekennen" can also convey the sense of coming out and admitting one's responsibility. Many of these letter are from people who were interested in bringing the churches and their evangelical mission in line with Hitler and the Nazi State, but there are also letters (so far fewer) from people invoking a kinder and more tolerant Christianity. They made no bones about how Nazism contradicted Christian teachings and bluntly expressed their mistrust of the Nazi State. There are even cases of Germans questioning the Nazi sterilization programs as early as 1933.

In one case, there was a letter justifying the Nazis' eradication of the communists because of their “enemy” status. From this first culling of the materials, not too many Germans invoked Christianity in response to the violence in the earlier period that is my focus. They did invoke Christianity in the early Nazi period, but that in turn led to a rift within the churches. Interestingly, few seemed to question German or Nazi treatment of Jews or the persecution of political opponents. Why not remains an interesting question. What is just the more pressing material needs of everyday life? Was it the Christian individual's focus on one's own Christian community? the understanding that the others did not belong? the appeal of Nazism? ignorance? apathy? What had happened to Christian notions of compassion for others among Christians in general? Why did fear of one's standing before God in final judgment not urge more to worry about their actions or inaction on earth and in the world around them? These are questions worth pondering for our own understanding of the contemporary world and the visions of our own communities as well.

The bug on the wall

2007-10-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

My former tenth grade English teacher, David Emory, wrote me and asked whether I intend to stay within the relatively safe format of observation and private reflection. Will I remain the quiet spy, known to you readers only as a narrative voice with opinions, or will I become a character in the scenes I report on, interacting extensively with the people there?
To be quite honest, I walk around Berlin kind of like a quiet spy, a detached voice, an alien or a bug on the wall. I have a vivid imagination that evokes fears of the city and myself: flash images of pickpockets’ hands, bullish men, skinheads, people just looking at me funny like I am from Mars (and not in that really nice way some people greet Martians). Sometimes it is the eyes in the city, catching glances, darting looks, thousands of them. Sometimes it is the mass of bodies passing – streams of them. I begin to imagine people imagining me as some sort of thief, vagabond or sexual predator. What do I look like to all these people? Who am I?
In part this goes back to two posts on Larissa Chace-Smith’s blog about fear and stepping out of one’s comfort zone. I am very aware of people here and the closer I get to them, the more things matter in my mind like my appearance or my accent. It also makes me think about my post on Heinrich Mann’s character Diederich Hessling, who imagines his surroundings through his fears of specific people. Hessling’s name, by the way, refers to him as the ugly one. He worries about his appearance as a gentleman in the eyes of his town's society. He is dominated by the older men and war veterans and he is aggressive in his actions toward his employees and women. I am also reminded of the more obvious reference to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, that sense of one’s ugliness and alienation in relation to the world and one's self. Reading Emerson's essay "Experience" also raises the issues of the person and his or her relationship with the world around them.
As I initially thought out this post, I was riding the tram. A Muslim woman sat down next to me. I imagined this veiled person and thought about exploding. The image of the threatening Muslim has affected my consciousness and more importantly, the American consciousness. I am paranoid. We are paranoid. So we seek comfort and safety - a lot of it, if possible (see the designs for the US embassy in Berlin or the one in the Green Zone in Baghdad).
Much of this is my imagination; in part a collection of old fears from notions of the city, run-ins with Nazi skinheads and experiencing the sense of not belonging. My imagination can run wild, but things are not that bad – my German is pretty good and I really do not look like some horrible creature (except at night when I am tired). Plus, I have learned not to let some of the actual experiences get to me so easily - like watching a baker turn her face into a grimace when she looked up and saw me after having just acted so friendly toward another customer. What appearance did I express with such thoughts active in my mind? This is part of learning how to deal with the fear we confront in our everyday lives. I cannot control what anyone thinks of me nor do I always know what is really going on with that other person. Who knows what that baker saw or what she intended with her facial expressions. In the process of navigating Berlin through this mix of experiences, I have been encouraged to just be comfortable with the ever changing me and not worry so much about my bug-like self (I have clad myself as a yellow bug today).
I often relate the humorous side of this to friends: people here do not necessarily know what to make of me. I heard an old man describe me to his wife as a “real Indian”. So I began to walk as if I was some proud Indian I had only seen in movies. A vendor at a street market started talking to me in Spanish and wanted to know if I were from her home country of

Peru

. It gave me the chance to practice some Spanish and meet a person from another world. In Magdeburg, a man did a double take and then turned to me in the street with a Russian-accented German. He begged his pardon and told me that at first he thought I looked like Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris?!? Not knowing what to make of myself makes it interesting. Yet what were to happen, if enough people began making an environment hostile because of one reason or another, and then focus that hostility in law and policy? Why should we even notice? How would we respond to the presence of such widespread fear, intolerance, hatred, violence and terror? Would we defend a more liberal vision of society, when there appear to be enemies all around us? These are key questions underlying my own work on Germany in the wake of the First World, but I also think that we should consider them in our own world too.
But back to Berlin: I love walking through this city and interacting with people. I lived here for three years. So I feel at home here.
I also think I sense a mood swing among people here in Berlin from my last visit less than a year ago. Granted the weather is turning colder. That oppressive ceiling of leaden grey has hung low over the city much of the day. The air becomes thick and clammy. In the afternoon, the clouds break and the air becomes crisp. Also keep in mind that Germans have been making their moods an issue of late (more on that in a later book review). The government has even made uplifting Germans’ moods, no matter how absurd that might sound, a point for national initiative.
That said, business on the streets and in the corner markets looks robust. Large international realtors are buying up apartment properties and renovating many more, speculating that this relatively cheap market is going to appreciate quite well in the next years. Moreover, the people I see ranging about the city are quite diverse, and more and more, Berlin has that kind of energy I get from places like London and New York City. This place has interesting things going on and can inspire. People seem friendlier too in passing, on the tram or in line. My friend, Stefanie, thinks that children are taking over the city, whole hordes of them in the playgrounds and parks spreading throughout the city, influencing marketing campaigns, business and social life. From the archive windows in east Kreuzberg I can hear children laughing outside. Maybe that is just Berlin on a good day or maybe I have been catching the city at the right moments when I miss the grumpy, racist, lonely, sad and sick or stark mad.
One last note on the recent national holiday that marks German Reunification: I get the sense from talking to Germans that they do not know what to make of this day. My friend, Stefanie, wanted to celebrate and called up her East and West German friends and family. Her father complained about the money that West Germany had spent on the East (Stefanie partially agreed). Her friend Ollie likes to refer to the day as the “Day of the Imperialist Annexation). He was just joking, but he also asked what exactly should one celebrate on this day and how? Stefanie shot back that the wall is gone; well, at least Ollie agreed to that. Most East Germans do not want to go back, although we hear those voices too. From the smells in the inner courtyards of the old apartment blocks, it appears that people slept in on their national holiday, cooked big breakfasts and had afternoon cake and coffee almost like any Sunday in some parts of Germany.

Literature 1: Notes on the new cultural history of politics and need to pay attention to the expression of feelings.

2007-10-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

See Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918-1939, Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005.

For starters, Hardtwig (b. 1944) asks us to look toward cultural anthropology for new ways to historically examine political cultures. This is not a new idea by any means. Hardtwig draws from a wide interdisciplinary body of scholarship, but I think he brings together an interesting set of questions for my work and the upcoming graduate student conference in the Penn State Department of History and Religious Studies. Hardtwig makes a distinction between what he calls the old approaches of political culture history and cultural anthropology and the new ones, which he believes can further illuminate politics through the subjective experience of individuals. Hardtwig reminds us to go beyond "high culture", static models of political behavior, structural frames or anthropological meanings and suggests that historians need to look more for the affective and cognitive markers in the records of individual people. For a new cultural history of politics Hardtwig poses a set of questions, familiar to some historians, regarding the subjective experience of space, time, body, emotion, knowledge, work, communication and finally, the political, social, religious and intellectual order. Hardtwig hopes to thereby integrate the historical analysis of political culture with anthropological categories and develop the theoretical basis for the historical analysis of political cultures.

Hardtwig elaborates on some of these anthropological categories better than others, but it his discussion of the feeling of pain that I find interesting for the moment. It suggests that feelings offer a key way for viewing the relationship of the individual and his world and thereby explain how these relationships change. From Hardtwig’s view, a feeling such as pain displays an incomparable world of experience. On the one hand, pain involves cognition, but it is not completely pre-formed through culture either; on the other hand, physical feelings push the boundaries of our representative systems and even require the self-fashioning of symbols and the transformation of their representation for expression. The expression of pain in the “materials” available to the historian can possibly show a new way to think about political culture, how politics operates through the links of the individual and his or her body with forms of expression and the world around them, and thereby see how and why politics changes with the perception of space, time, society, culture and ethics.

Sidenote: this is one place I think it is worth while engaging the upcoming graduate student conference in the History Department at Penn State and their theme: “voices of violence”. From this reading of Hardtwig, topics such as violence and terror could be served by the application of such questions and source analysis. What are the voices? What are the sources? What can other approaches illuminate? How do our perceptions of space, time, gender, etc. shape feelings such as fear and how does the physical sensation of fear shape its expression and even transform its representation? What happens to individuals, communities and nations through the presence of fear or pain? Certainly gender, the construction/expression of men and women, and the influence of masculinity and femininity on individuals and societies must play a role. How does violence look from this view? How does any of this look through the eyes of our ancient, medieval, early modern and modern historians in training and our faculty? What can some of our current graduate seminars, students and faculty bring to this discussion on fear and violence? I am thinking of Dr. Landes for example and her work on early modern conceptions of the human, the body and feelings or Dr. Jenkins on religion, fear and terror in our contemporary world or Dr. Eghigian on the modern imagination, politics and science of criminal deviance in Germany.

Primary source 2: through the eyes of Heinrich Mann’s Herr Hessling

2007-10-03T09:44:00.001-07:00

One type of source that interests me is the literary. In 1919, Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) published his novel, Der Untertan (often translated as The Loyal Man or The Man of Straw). On the right, interestingly enough, is a poster from the 1951 GDR production of the book. It is a story about a boy who grows up in the late Kaiserreich. What strikes me about this literary source is how Mann first presents the world of Diederich Hessling through the eyes of Hessling as a young boy. Most critics immediately make the link between this character and the idea of blind obedience, but Mann portrays a richer picture of a small German town. Hessling’s perception of home and neighborhood is populated by scary figures: his father, the minister and doctor among others. When he goes to Berlin as a student he is confronted with the world beyond his distant home. The figures change and the perception of fear becomes less explicit, involving the professors, the fraternity brothers (with almost no talk of his classes and work), his military training, a young woman, the woman’s father and a chance glimpse of the Kaiser in passing, which stirs Hessling to excitedly identify himself with the monarch. When Hessling returns to his home town, the figures change once again, this time: his father’s old assistant at the family-run factory, one of his father’s workers, a socialist labor organizer (and likely troublemaker), the young Jewish lawyer Judassohn, the old gentlemen, their Gesellschaft, their ladies’ circles, the old liberal 1848er, the 1871 veterans, and the judge he faces while accused of “insulting his Majesty”.

The types of fears change with the cast of characters. The minister makes his appearances. The doctor is not much of a presence anymore. Hessling would claim perfect health anyways. Now his fear involve things like his “person” and its relationship to his society: his military service, business, workers, sexual relationships and “politics”. The talk there is about the nation above and beyond his liberalism. So from this reading of Mann’s book, Germans were placing their values in question. As Hessling puts it to the old gentlemen in town when they want to know, “liberal yes, but the nation above all else”. That would remain an uneasy arrangement up until the Great War: a nation not quite above the values of liberalism and the values of liberalism already a bad word in some mouths. However, these “politics” were not at a point of absolute truths, unequivocally worth tearing the nation apart. There were still enough people open to the idea of some form of cooperation. The First World War opens up the question of violent young men returning from the war to brutalize their nation and society, but the war would also, at least initially, make the possibility of more democratic and social reforms more possible in many small German towns and cities. So I begin building my presentation of primary sources.

Pictures from the Day of German Unity, the Holocaust Memorial & Potsdamer Platz

2007-10-02T13:44:00.001-07:00

If you are interested, please click the link below:
From the Brandenburg Tor to Potsdamer Platz

Our old mentor and notes on sources

2007-10-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

I had a surprise today. I went to work in the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfeld on the former grounds of the Prussian military, which also later housed the US military. I am still setting up my study of central Germany through the eyes of the old Empire's state system and the Weimar Republic, but I have ordered several sets of materials and plan to get started after tomorrow's national holiday which commemorates German reunification in 1989/90. So I decided to check my email and found a note from my old friend and college classmate Colin. Our mentor in German studies from Colgate, Dr. Hans-Juergen Meyer-Wendt, and his wife Barbara were in town and wanted to meet him at the original Einstein Cafe on the Kurfuerstenstrasse at 4PM. They had no idea that I was in town and I had not been in contact with them for several years. So it was a pleasant surprise for all of us when we sat down for coffee. Some things have not changed. Juergen wanted to know where we are in our own dissertation work (Colin is working on Aristotle from classical philological and philosophical perspectives at the Humboldt Universitaet). As he is wont to do, Juergen wanted to know who would finish first, but Colin and I have learned to take the old game in stride. He and his wife are retired now and traveling around Europe to visit friends, attend his 50th high school reunion and finalize the publication of his upcoming book. With so much time, Juergen and Barbara have translated W.E.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk into German together and published it to good reviews. Juergen is in the final stages of finishing his book on Emerson and fully documenting Emerson's influence on European intellectual history (Colin used to help Juergen way back in the early stages of what will probably become Juergen's major life work). For my own work, Juergen's notes on Emerson are interesting. Emerson influenced writers such as Nietzsche, Hoffmansthal (much of the Vienna Secession), but it was Juergen's note on Emerson's articulation of a Wirkungsaesthetik and Wirkungsgeschichte - the aesthetics of "effect" and its history that caught my attention. It has struck me that there is a history to historicizing effects and the modern subject (who we are as individuals and how we are able to experience). So it struck me that our old mentor was still going on about Emerson after all these years, but it was like a small gift from an old teacher. If you are interested, he told me to check out Emerson's compact presentation of these ideas in his essays, "The Poet" and the more famous "Experience". I guess I will have to keep my eye out for the release of Juergen's book in the coming year. On another note, he echoed a suggestion from Dr. Schaepdrijver to look through Sebastian Haffner's Memoirs of a German (ca. 1938) translated into English as Defying Hitler. What struck Juergen is how well Haffner described how German society came apart in the 1920s. More striking, is how Haffner recalls his childhood at the beginning of the First World War and makes insightful observations, for example, how children would excitedly line up at the news kiosks to read the soccer scores before the war and then gathered at the same places during the war to read the lists of the fallen as if it was a similar kind of game cheering for the home side and wishing death and destruction upon the enemy that markedly worsened as the lists grew longer. From Haffner's view, this relation between sports, children and war is more than coincidence, claiming that many of the most militant and eventual Nazi supporters after the war were not the war veterans but the next generation of young men seeking that feeling of winning again and willing to prove themselves through more violence. Such notes strike eerie chords with someone like Juergen who grew up during the First World War and fled from East Germany with his family later on. He sees parallels with our own US society in which he has now lived for about half his life, particularly the "Mitlaeufertum" or going along with everyone else without question. Before I left, Colin and I also talked about blogging and doing something relevant with the new media and its potential for democracy, for our own work, but perhaps more importantly, for US politics. He suggested a couple new blogs, "The Timber Room" for its eclectic but solid group of writers and Uwe Steinhoff's work, both his blog and his recent book from Oxford University Press, On the Ethics of War and Terrorism. After hearing more about my work Colin suggested that I write an essay on fear and the fragmentation of society. It is kind of funny how things work, but I plan to stay in better contact now with the Meyer-Wendts and see what Colin and I can do together. Thank you for sending that email, Colin.

Pictures from today's walk through the Mauerpark

2007-10-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

Please open this link in your browser if interested:
Mauerpark, Berlin, October 2007

Frederick the Great and the Notion of Fear

2007-10-01T04:44:00.002-07:00

On Sunday I took a walk through the middle of Berlin. It was cold and rainy, but I wanted to see how things had changed since my last visit a year ago. One of the highlights is the newly restored Bode Museum on the Museum Island in the middle of the city. Originally designed by the Imperial Court's architect Ernst von Ihne between 1897-1904, the neo-Baroque museum was meant to hold the sculpture and artwork collections of Wilhelm von Bode. When I entered the main doors, I found my way into the "small" cupola hall facing a large bronze statue of Frederick the Great on his horse. In reading a little more about this place I found out that the emperor was originally surrounded by statues of five of his generals. They are no longer apparently there, but in looking around the large hall and the ornately wrought balustrades winding up along the sides toward the restaurant and gift shop above, I could read gilt inscriptions in Latin and English. One read, "I and my house want to serve the Lord" and another read, "Fearlessness and Perseverance" (Furchtlosigkeit und Beharrlichkeit).
This was not a place meant for just any German to enter. When the curators opened the museum in 1904, they invited the Emperor's court society and upper middle class patrons. I have not found any documents that demonstrate how people received this architectural display of the old Prussian emperors, but it is striking that the architects chose to invoke the likeness of arguably the greatest Prussian monarch as military leader in the entrance space to this museum. It is even more interesting to me that the architects chose texts that link the notion of service to the activity of the emperor's house and the belief in God. Moreover, instructs those connected to the undertakings of the Prussian monarchs that they should not feel fear and they should persevere in the face of...what, fear itself? On the one hand, it is clear that the builders would intend to eradicate the feeling of fear with this place as it calls onlookers to serve their leaders. One emotion that should not have been present under this monarchy and in that society was the feeling of fear, and yet there it is written in large gold script on the ceiling.
In future postings, I plan to explore the problem of fear in more detail. One of the things I plan to do is review a new book on fear in German society built on interviews with prominent Germans who discuss the specificity of fear in Germany and the way Germans go about their lives today. Reflecting on this statue, I am not sure how much this, I'll call it, "emotional culture" differed from those of other monarchies and nation states in Europe, but it does not appear unusual so far in comparison. Plus, I think it is worth exploring the notion of fear more widely in that time and place at the turn of the century through different types of sources. I will keep an eye out as I now enter the archives. Please let me know what you think.

2007-09-28T22:50:00.001-07:00

The Atlantic World and Pond Jumping

2007-09-28T04:36:00.000-07:00

Boarding a plane and leaving the United States gives me the feeling of being on the move. It is a very forward looking sensation, but at 35,000 feet above the sea and clouds traveling opens up my perspective even more. I spent much of my five-hour layover in Frankfurt International Airport watching people from all over the world cross paths and move on toward their destinations in a cacophony of different languages. When I finally reached Berlin, I knew that I had to deal with jet lag and stay awake as long as possible. Berlin is very familiar to me and it felt good to be back and look for the little changes. Yet I also had that intense feeling that I had crossed into another place in our world and that reminds me to be very aware of my project as a historian and a writer who is looking for materials that provide access to the past. I am from a different world and time and entering another space and place looking for part of the German world (and our own) that is no more.

Introduction

2007-09-04T06:03:00.000-07:00

Hello friends, family, faculty and strange web surfers. Welcome to my blog.

I want to use this site to let you follow me on my trip through Germany. This fall I plan to visit Berlin and then move on to Magdeburg, Erfurt and Nuremberg. So I want to use this blog for several purposes. For one thing, I just want to keep everyone up to date on my travels. I will have plenty of time to myself. I will muse as I wander, post on what I see in each town and give you my take from current events in Germany, especially those things relating to discussions on terror, security, freedom and democracy. For another, I want to float parts of my writing on fear and politics in Central Germany. I want to generate posts and discussions on theory, methodology, archival findings, historiography and arguments related to my work. As an offshoot of this, I want to suggest that some of us start a forum that leads up to the graduate student conference this fall in the Penn State Department of History and Religious Studies on the theme of "voices of violence". And who knows what else - this may be a place for our department's dissertation group to build a forum as well. So with these goals in mind, I am ready to jump the pond and get started. I look forward to hearing from you and hope that you check in from time to time. Mach's gut!