Dresden

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.

Erfurt's Christmas Market

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.

Glimpses of Erfurt

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

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.

Magdeburg

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

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

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

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

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.