It may be spießig but I totally want one. In Alpine, please. I can provide a shipping address.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry about this. What do you think? (Or maybe you never liked them, anyway.)
Bwah! My alma mater is in the news. From the local paper:
As Hood College celebrated its second annual homecoming last month, the naming of a female student as Homecoming King elicited both criticisms and praise.[...]Santo Provenzano, 21, who was also on the ballot for king, said, "My first thought when I heard she won was the obvious — she's a girl — Certain traditions are supposed to be a certain way."
Singleton Newman, 22, is a Hood senior who was nominated for queen. "She is not a man," Ms. Newman said. "It is a gender issue, and she is a woman."
Ms. Jones, who is openly gay, attempted last year to run for Homecoming Prince. Although she had the required number of petition signatures, the school's homecoming committee ruled against listing her name on the prince ballot.
You see, it only recently went coed, and apparently is experiencing a few growing pains (thank goodness!). I guess I don't have anything else to say about this, other than that I'm so glad that Hood continues to be a place where this kind of thing can happen, and where there are a lot of people who think that it should.
(Getting about half of the 169 ballots cast at a school of about 1000 also seems to indicate that not very many people voted, and thus that the campus as a whole just didn't really care one way or the other. Which again, as far as Homecoming goes, is also just fine with me.)
I'm thinking I might have linked to this before...seems like I would have. But just in case I didn't:
This web exhibition was put together by the Berliner Landesbeauftragten für die Stasi-Unterlagen and has some interesting photographs of the GDR in the late '50s and early '60s, including the construction of the Wall. The original captions, which are generally critical of the GDR, suggest that the pictures were part of a sort of fact-finding mission by the West German (formally East German) photographer. He was later captured (arrested? taken captive? kidnapped? detained?) by the Stasi and imprisoned under suspiscion of espionage.
If you haven't looked around at the Legacy Project yet, take a few minutes to do so:
Our site is a gathering place for people interested in the enduring legacies of the many violent traumas of the 20th century. We are dedicated to exploring issues of remembrance in different cultures, in order to better understand the contemporary significance of historical tragedy.
[hat tip to Nurri]
James Young has written a brief analysis of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as part of H-German's "Message from Germany" series.
From the NY Times:
Susan Sontag, Writer and Social Critic, Dies at 71.
Peter Eisenmann's memorial in Berlin is nearing completion, or at least you can tell how it's going to look now. The last pylon was put in place yesterday, but there's still several more months before it officially opens. In anticipation, the BZ has an interview with the architect. The FR also has some thoughts.
Why should I write up a review of the press coverage of the Flickmeister when H-Arthist has done it already? Happy Reading.
H-arthist just sent around this notice about a discussion/event, "Heil Dich doch selbst!," a critique of the Flick collection to be held this week. The list of participants is impressive; wish I could be there. Scroll down the h-arthist page for an English version, or read the same thing at the bookstore's site:
Vielleicht ist der politische Unternehmer Friedrich Christian Flick auch deshalb zum Nach-MoMA-Joker der Berliner Kulturpolitik geworden, weil die Unterstützer in der Dreistigkeit des Coups ihre eigene Macht erkennen. "Heil Dich doch selbst!" ist ein weiterer Versuch, diese Form der Stillstellung der Erinnerung zu unterbrechen.
A Sammelrez. at H-Soz-u-Kult on books about our friends the Flicks, including one about the Flick Collection. Now *that* was some fast publishing.
At H-Soz-u-Kult, Annette Vowinckel has a Tagungsbericht on a recent conference concerning the legacy of the RAF. Apparently there were a lot of former members and sympathizers in the audience, "Die zahlreich vertretenen jüngeren Historiker, Soziologen, Sprach-, Literatur- und Filmwissenschaftler, die mit dem Ziel der wissenschaftlichen Aufarbeitung der Epoche angereist waren, kamen deshalb nur selten zum Zug."
Vowinkel distinguishes between two types of eyewitnesses ("überwiegend Herren"): those who had been there and those who wished they had been:
Viel undurchschaubarer war der Konflikt der Historiker mit denen, die wir dann die uneigentlichen Zeitzeugen nennen müssten, und die sich von doppelten Schuldgefühlen geplagt sahen: den eigentlichen Zeitzeugen gegenüber, weil man damals nicht mitgekämpft hatte, der Jüngeren Generation gegenüber, weil man nicht so objektiv sein konnte wie man sein zu wollen vorgab.
This must have been some conference.
Dan's kind essay, something similarly heartfelt from Johnny.
I know some of you (even me!) don't really want to read anything else about a Certain Film. But die Zeit has a very personal essay by Wim Wenders analyzing his reaction to said film, and it's really worth a look.
At CT, Henry mentioned reading about Walt Kelley's wonderful Pogo...this sent me on a little memory trip. When I was a kid I read ALL the Pogo books. My dad had every one from when he was young. I loved them. No I wonder where in the world those books have gone, whether he kept them (did you? Do you read this ever?). I want Pogo back.
Does this mean I scooped them? Well anyway...Dirk Peitz covers the current state of leftist pop in Germany (samt Blumfeld).
Both Ostblog and Ionarts posted today on the trasformation of the Palast der Republik into the Volkspalast. Performances etc. are ongoing until 9. November, and the building is still slated to be torn down, by government mandate, in the spring.
In conjunction with the upcoming long-term exhibition of works from the Flick collection, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich will conduct research into the circumstances of the Flick family fortune so that visitors to the museum (presumably; they haven't yet clarified where, and if, the results of this study will be posted within the Hamburger Bahnhof itself.) I've written a few notes about this before: here, here, and here. Last week Die Zeit published a brief sketch of Flick's gradual rise during the Nazi period; the author, Thomas Ramge, has just published a book on the topic, apparently scooping the Berlin Foundation...
A few excerpts, first regarding the activities of Flick Sr. during the war:
Den »Arisierungen« folgte das dunkelste Kapitel in der Geschichte des Konzerns. Mindestens 40000 Zwangsarbeiter schufteten in den Kriegsjahren für Werke der Flick KG. Die DDR-Forschung ging für den Sommer 1944 gar von 60000 Arbeitssklaven in Flick-Betrieben aus. Die Betriebe griffen unter anderem auf jüdische KZ-Häftlinge aus Buchenwald, Dachau, Groß-Rosen und Auschwitz zurück. Bereits sechs Wochen nach dem Überfall auf Polen trafen in der bayerischen Maxhütte die ersten polnischen Zwangsarbeiter ein. Der Konzern nutzte seine Verbindungen zur NS-Bürokratie, um sich eine ausreichende Zahl von Zwangsarbeitern zu sichern.
Drei Viertel seines Konzerns hatten im Osten des Reiches gelegen und waren von den Sowjets konfisziert. Binnen zehn Jahren baute Friedrich Flick durch geschickte An- und Verkäufe zum zweiten Mal einen gigantischen Privatkonzern auf – und stieg zum zweiten Mal zum reichsten Deutschen seiner Zeit auf. Bis zu seinem Tode weigerte sich Flick, Zwangsarbeitern auch nur eine einzige Mark an Entschädigung zu zahlen. Geld für die Zwangsarbeiter wären aus seiner Sicht einem Schuldeingeständnis gleichgekommen.
[keep reading for English]
The darkest chapter in the history of the [Flick] corporation followed the "Aryanisation" [of German industry]. At least 40 000 forced laborers toiled for the Flick KG during the war years. In the summer of 1944, according to GDR researchers, there were 60 000 slave laborers in Flick factories. The factories drew from Jewish KZ prisoners from Buchenwald, Dachau, Groß-Rosen and Auschwitz. As soon as six weeks after the accession of Poland the first Polish forced laborers arrived in the Bavarian Maxhütte [mine/refinery]. The corporation used its connections to the NS bureaucracy to secure an adequate number of forced laborers.
...
Three fourths of his corporation were in the east of the Reich and were thus confiscated by the Soviets. Within ten years [of being released from prison after his conviction at Nuremberg], through careful buying and selling, Friedrich Flick built a gigantic private corporation for the second time--and became, for the second time, the wealthiest German of his time. Even until his death, Flick refused to give slave laborers even one single mark of reparations. Money for the forced laborers would have been, in his view, the same as an admission of guilt.
So here's an example of someone who questions the efficacy of comparing the recent public dissent towards the SPD's social reform package with the protests of 1989.
(I find I totally agree with Tom, if my opinion as a non-German is worth anything.)
The SPD's social reform package ("Hartz IV") is really stirring up opposition. For the last several weeks, crowds have marched in various East German cities to register their dissatisfaction with the government's plans.
According to Deutsche Welle (in English), some 30 cities took part and the total numbers were in the tens of thousands; Reuter's story (also English) reports ten thousand in Magdeburg alone.
Wolfgang Thierse, the president of the German parliament, is supporting the protests, saying that the East Germans "have had good experience with this kind of protest in the past" and that "people in the East have a stronger sense of justice than those in the West." But there is some discussion about the use of the term "Montagsdemo" to describe these protests. The word is borrowed from the grass-roots movements of 1989 that eventually brought down the Wall, and some people feel that taking the term out of that specific original context diminishes the struggle against the Honnecker regime and the efforts of that movement.
And there's more that's making people nervous: some of these demos have been supported by neoNazi groups. I can't find any specifics on this yet, mostly it's just politicians speculating that the NPD and similar parties will profit from the public's general dissatisfaction. But the various websites that have been hastily launched to organize the marches give me the feeling that there are lots of groups working on the protests, and that these all just meet up together at a given time to form a more or less cohesive group. And since this is all about protesting the government, among these are "extreme" groups on both the right and the left.
DeutschlandRadio has an interesting update on the Flick Collection situation (previous entries here and here). While there won't be any mention of the family's history in the exhibition itself, they've got all sorts of other measures planned to prove that the SMPK are still Good People who take History seriously:
Zwar soll in der Ausstellung selbst die Familiengeschichte des Sammlers nicht thematisiert werden - schließlich gehe es um die Kunst, so Lehmann. Um die Ausstellung herum hat die Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz jedoch ein ganzes Paket von Maßnahmen zur Schadensbegrenzung geschnürt: Die Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung wird Gesprächskreise zur Bewältigung der NS-Vergangenheit organisieren. Und Klaus-Dieter Lehmann will ein Symposium moderieren, an dem neben Künstlern und Politikern auch die entschiedenen Gegner des Berliner Ausstellungs-Projekts teilnehmen sollen. Wer konkret dazu eingeladen wird oder bereits zugesagt hat, wollte Lehmann allerdings nicht verraten.
Darüber hinaus hat die Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz beim Münchner Institut für Zeitgeschichte ein Forschungsprojekt in Auftrag gegeben, das die Geschichte der Industriellenfamilie Flick beleuchten soll. In welcher Form dessen Ergebnisse veröffentlicht werden sollen, und ob sie in Verbindung mit der Ausstellung präsentiert werden, ist noch unklar.
For comparison, here's the Spiegel's report.
So: Berlin gets this apparently great collection of contemporary art, and, if the SMPK does this properly, the city also has an ongoing series of open discussions. Can't argue with trying to engage people, especially when you're dealing with a donor with a loaded legacy behind him. In general, really, a museum that is "living" in this way is much more use as a public institution than one which doesn't have these kinds of programs. But it's a little worrisome that they haven't worked out the details yet, especially since it's supposed to open at the end of September. Another worry is the duration of the show: will they be able to sustain this kind of public dialogue for 7 years?
Wonder what they'll do for Lange Nacht der Museen.
[keep reading for English trans. of the quote]
The collector's family history won't be treated in the exhibition itself - this is about art, says Lehmann (pres. of the SMPK). But around the show, the foundation has organized a package of measures designed to minimize damage: the Federal Center for political Education will organize discussions on overcoming the Nazi past. And Lehmann wants to moderate a symposium in which artists, politicians, and those who vehemently opposed the Berlin exhibition will participate. But Lehmann would not reveal who had been invited or who had already confirmed.
In addition, the Foundation has commissioned the Munich Institute for Contemporary History to start a research project designed to shed light on the history of the industrialist family (Flick). It is still unclear in what form the results of this study will be made available, as is whether they will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition.
Last night we watched The Battle of Algiers. (Here's the trailer.) Apart from being just an amazing film--apparently entirely staged, containing no documentary or news footage--it was also strangely familiar. Colonial power overstays its welcome, "insurgents" struggle to convince it to leave...If you can see this in a theatre I highly recommend you do.
[thank goodness for the Alamo, which allows me to fill in the blanks in my knowledge of film history while also giving me the opportunity to see the premiere of Anchorman outside, in the park, with beer. You can have it all.]
After reading Vasili's comment, I started looking around for some more information about how the Frauenkirche had been rebuilt: what did they preserve, was this to be a 1:1 replica, or would there be some indication of the building as memorial? Here's Dieter Bartetzko's analysis at the FAZ. (It has several nice photo series, useful for getting a sense of the interior and the overall scale. Also see the Frauenkirche page; and for comparison, Coventry Cathedral's page, as well as these photos.)
Some relevant excerpts from Bartetzko's essay:
...
So kann denn der Unterschied zwischen Coventry und Dresden als Manifestation gewandelten Bewußtseins gedeutet werden, als Wendepunkt, an dem die von unmittelbarem Erleben geprägte Erinnerung, wie sie sich in der Architektur Coventrys darstellt, in ein Gedenken übergeht aus weitem zeitlichem Abstand. An die Stelle des quasi in Architektur eingefrorenen Kriegsschreckens, wie ihn Coventry oder hierzulande die Berliner Gedächtniskirche darstellen, ist mit der rekonstruierten Frauenkirche eine Art dreidimensionaler Chronik getreten, die das gesamte Geschehen umfaßt - Ursprung, Bestand, Zerstörung und Auferstehung.In dieser Historisierung wird handgreiflich, was unter dem Begriff "Wir treten aus dem Schatten der Geschichte" in Deutschland und Europa die Runde macht. Im Spiegel der Frauenkirche zeigt dieses Bild allerdings auch Blindstellen, die eine spezifisch deutsche Empfindlichkeit vermuten lassen, die weder die Zeit noch die Gnade später Geburt haben tilgen können.
...
Die sinnlich faßbare Erinnerung an das einschneidende Erlebnis in der Geschichte der Kirche, Dresdens und Deutschlands jedoch ist im Inneren an eine untergeordnete Stelle gerückt. Dort könnte sie so verblassen wie die Farbe an den Flickstellen und Ergänzungen des Hochaltars…
...
In nicht allzuferner Zukunft also werden die Ruine und der Neubau kaum mehr zu unterscheiden sein. Dann wird sich erweisen, ob der Wiederaufbau ein Zeugnis des gewachsenen historischen Abstands ist oder der letzte Abkömmling einer Ruinenphobie, die uns der Zweite Weltkrieg einpflanzte.
[keep reading for English]
We can understand the difference between Coventry and Dresden to be the manifestation of a shifting consciousness, a turning point, at which Remembering shaped by direct experience (as in the architecture of Coventry Cathedral) becomes Memorializing from a temporal distance. In place of the horrors of war virtually frozen in the architecture of Coventry or at Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche is a sort of three-dimensional chronicle encompassing the entire process: origin, persistence, destruction, resurrection.
In this historicization we are able to grasp the notion of “stepping out of the shadows of history” currently making the rounds in Europe. Reflected in the Frauenkirche, however, this image reveals some blind spots suggesting a specifically German sensitivity, which neither time nor the grace of a later birth have been able to extinguish.
…
In the interior, the sensory memory of the incisive experience in the history of the church, Dresden, and Germany slips into a less important space. It could fade like the color of the patches and restored bits of the high altar…Thus in the not-so-distant future, the ruin and the new building with be barely distinguishable. Then we will see whether the reconstruction is a sign of mature historical distance or the last vestige of a fear of ruins instilled in us by the Second World War.
At h-soz-u-kult, Jörg Arnold has published a lengthy review of 28 (!) recent books dealing with localized accounts of the Allied air war. According to the reviewer these are books spawned by the success of Friedrich's Der Brand, offering documentation of the destruction of various cities, including photographs and quotations from eyewitnesses, rather than any historical analysis. As such they are reviewed "nicht in erster Linie als Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Forschung ...sondern als Indikatoren der gegenwärtigen Erinnerungskultur..."
[I was thinking that this might make an interesting context against which to understand the (near) completion of the restoration of Dresden's Frauenkirche.]
Yesterday the dome was put in place on Dresden's Frauenkirche. Their website is (understandably) slow at the moment, but it might be worth waiting on to see some views of the completed reconstruction. It's impressive.
I should be saying something about the significance of the recreated wholeness of this building in the context of the [left's?] new understanding of Allied bombing and German victimhood, but I don't have a thesis yet. Not an easy thing to think through, certainly.
Some related resources: Charles Maier's H-Net review of Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand—and the whole H-Net forum on WWII bombing.
[Update: Ionarts has responded with a nice overview of the history and some good image links.]
Friedrich Christian Flick, an art collector and philanthropist, is planning to give his collection to the Hamburger Bahnhof as a permanent loan. This offer has drawn a lot of criticism because Flick's grandfather used slave and forced labor during the war; Germany's Jewish Central Council has said that the collection was built up with "blood money," and that Flick's generosity could "outshine" the crimes of his grandfather, but "can never mitigate them." The Foundation of the National Museums of Berlin has defended Flick, saying that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren can't bear an eternal familial guilt, and, essentially, that art shouldn't be a victim of history. (Remember that the Berlin museums recently made a big show of returning a Friedrich to the decendents of its former owner after it was discovered that the painting was forcibly purchased by the Nazis.)
In an public letter in the Tagesspiegel, Flick said he was "shocked" by the Central Council's accusations of whitewashing:
Blood money. Bringing this expression into the debate means, if one follows it through, that I have blood on my hands. And further still: so do my children, and their children after them, all of the employees who receive a salary from me, even the waiters whom I give tips. Blood money: this phrase makes me responsible for the deeds of my grandfather, actions for which he was condemned at Nuremburg, and for which I also condemned him—but for which I cannot be found guilty. This expression, I feel, seeks to set me outside of the community, to criminalize me.
The collection, which has yet to be described in much detail (apparently over 1800 works by 150 artists), has caused interesting reactions, especially among Berlin's politicians. Thomas Flierl, Berlin's senator for culture, suggested that while accepting the collection raises painful questions about Germany's past, it might be a chance to "make the historical rupture with which the city and all of German society lives with into the focus of a public discussion of the past."
It's the old question: when / where does blame for the "deeds of the fathers" stop? Not easy to reconcile.
Henry at Crooked Timber posts about a recent Pew survey of antisemitism in Europe. It reminded me of the data released in Germany late last year, which showed different results, apparently, than the Pew study found:
23% of the 1301 people surveyed were found to have “latent antisemitic attitudes” compared to 20% three years earlier.
28% (versus 21% in 1998) agreed that Jews have “too much influence in the world.”
35% (versus 25% in 1998) agreed that Jews feel bound first and foremost to Israel rather than the country in which they live.
The study was conducted by Forsa; its publication corresponded nicely with the Hohmann-Affair.
Browsing through der Tagesspiegel today I came across this photo gallery of the Terra Cotta soldiers currently on display in the Palast der Republik.
What I had meant to find were images of the Palace itself: a Google image search was very productive. Perhaps most interesting was this page at Arbeiterfotografie (even though the use of java there is annoying and unnecessary).
At H-Soz-u-Kult, a forum on Nicolas Berg's Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker.
Berg's treatment of post-war history writing in West Germany is receiving quite a bit of attention right now. An extremely condensed exerpt from Ian Kershaw's contribution suggests a bit of what the debate is all about:
Nicolas Berg...is keen to demonstrate that because memory and personal experience were inseparable from the way German historians viewed the Third Reich, even when they claimed to be writing detached and objective history, their attempts to explain "the German catastrophe" were exculpatory and apologetic...
[...]
Overall, Berg's analysis, though a work of history, has something ahistorical about it. It is as if he is asking why the historical questions of the 1990s were not those of the 1960s and 1970s, and why the legitimately differing perspectives of German and Jewish historians were not identical. In judging the work of earlier generations solely from the perspective of the 1990s and after, Berg underrates their achievements by narrowing the focus to what seems central to historical research now. And for all its centrality and pivotal significance, the Holocaust does not exhaust all the issues that needed (and still need) to be addressed about Nazism. The overriding concern of research in Germany on how the Nazi system had been possible, then into how it functioned, was not simply in itself legitimate; it was crucial.
→I see that Berg himself will be posting a response on Friday.
Update, 1. March: Berg's contribution keeps being pushed up; it's now scheduled to appear on Tuesday.
At H-German, Max Paul Friedman reviews the consequences of the Hohman affair.
Susan R. Boettcher wrote this excellent Letter from Germany for H-German, discussing Jewish practice outside of the larger urban communities in Germany.
On Friday, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden was expelled from the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm for throwing a spotlight at an installation by Dror Feiler and Gunilla Sköld Feiler. The installation includes a photograph of Hanadi Jaradat, the Palestinian lawyer who became a suicide bomber in October. Here's the BBC's story.
Here's the installation:
So: what are the limits of freedom of expression? No small question.
Today the BBC ran an overview of European and Israeli newspapers; this discussion highlights the questions within the European left concerning anti-Semitism: what it is, how it manifests itself.
[I'm letting this percolate for the moment.]
H-Net has just published Richard Steigmann-Gall's review of Daniel Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning. It will be interesting to see what public discussion follows this book; I suspect it won't be like last time, although it does sound like Goldhagen's tone and approach haven't changed much:
Claiming to be aware of historical contingency and nuance, Goldhagen feels himself freed to go about the rather heavy-handed task of exposing every antisemitic diatribe he can find. For the ethicalist, what follows in the body of this work is stern stuff, and exceptionally convincing. Goldhagen leaves no stone unturned, overwhelmingly laying to rest any lingering claim among historians that the Catholic Church was anything other than a leading propagator of antisemitism throughout modern European history.
Update/correction: Reckoning isn't new; it was published late in 2002. Oh well. Luckily I have H-Net to bring these things to my attention.