Our old mentor and notes on sources

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.