American Voices Abroad

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Pictures from today's walk through the Mauerpark

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Mauerpark, Berlin, October 2007

Frederick the Great and the Notion of Fear

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.