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.