Berlin Journal 05

TheBerlinJournal
The I nternati onal

Cri mi nal Court:
a Debate
Kai Ambos
Ri chard Gol dstone
Kendal l Thomas
Ruth Wedgwood
Pl us:
Ni na Bernstei n
Terrence Mal i ck
John Phi l l i p Santos
Leon Wi esel ti er
A Newsletter from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Five | Fall 2002
Executive Director
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A Newsletter from
The American Academy in Berlin
Published at the
Hans Arnhold Center
Number Five Fall 2002
On the cover:
Hermann Gring (left) and other
accused war criminals guarded by
US Military Police during the
Nuremberg Trials.
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Email:
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All Rights Reserved
Ruth Wedgwood, Richard
Goldstone, Kai Ambos,
and Kendall Thomas
debate the ICC.
2
Ruth Wedgwood is professor
of international law at Yale
University and Johns
Hopkins University and a
senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations.
Justice Richard Goldstone
serves on the South African
Constitutional Court and
was chief prosecutor for the
international tribunals for
Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia.
Kai Ambos is adjunct
professor of law at the Univer-
sity of Munich and senior
research fellow at the Max
Planck Institute for Foreign
and International Criminal
Law. He was member of the
German delegation at the
Rome conference and helped
draft the new German Code
of International Criminal
Law.
Kendall Thomas teaches
law at Columbia University
Law School. He was an inau-
gural Berlin Prize Fellow at
the Academy in 1998.
Leon Wieseltier describes
the non-architectural
challenge for Ground
Zero in Manhattan.
14
Leon Wieseltier is the author,
most recently, of Kaddish and
has been literary editor of the
New Republic since 1983.
He serves on the American
Academys Selection
Committee. His article was
presented as a paper at the
Columbia Seminar on Art
and Society this September.
Nina Bernstein reports
on new foundling
movements in Germany
and the US.
30
Nina Bernstein (Holtzbrinck
Fellow, fall 02) is a reporter
for the New York Times and
author of The Lost Children of
Wilder: The Epic Struggle to
Change Foster Care, which was
nominated for the 2001
National Book Award and the
National Book Critics Circle
Award. The book received a
pen Literary Award.
John Philip Santos
offers an extract from
his work-in-progress,
a family memoir.
34
John Phillip Santos (Berlin
Prize Fellow, fall 02) is a
writer and lmmaker and was
a program ofcer at the Ford
Foundation between 1997
and 2002. His next book is
entitled The Farthest Home is
in an Empire of Fire (A Genetic
Memoir). The memoir Places
Left Unnished at the Time of
Creation was nominated for a
National Book Award in 1999.
Plus: A special CD
of music by American
Academy alumni
composers
Pages from the never-
published screenplay of
Terrence Malicks Days of
Heaven, poetry by Henri
Cole, original drawings by
Ben Katchor, a prole of
trustee Tom Farmer by
Jrgen Hogrefe, and more
news about the Academy,
its fellows, visitors, and
alumni.
Trustees of the
American Academy
Honorary Chairmen
Thomas L. Farmer
Henry A. Kissinger
Richard von Weizscker
Chairman
Richard C. Holbrooke
Vice Chairman
Gahl Hodges Burt
President
Robert H. Mundheim
Treasurer
Karl M. von der Heyden
Trustees
Gahl Hodges Burt
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Lloyd Cutler
Jonathan F. Fanton
Thomas L. Farmer
Julie Finley
Vartan Gregorian
Jon Vanden Heuvel
Dieter von Holtzbrinck
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Josef Joffe
Stephen M. Kellen
Henry A. Kissinger
Horst Khler
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Creative Direction
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Susanna Dulkinys and
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Renate Pppel
Translations
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and Daniel Huyssen
become a vehicle for addressing issues of importance
to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
One such issue is the International Criminal
Court in particular, US reluctance to ratify the
Statute forged at Rome in 1998. Following a seminar
on the icc co-organized by Academy Deputy
Director Paul Stoop in Munich last April, we asked
legal scholars from the US, Germany, and South
Africa to articulate the grounds of their disagree-
ment on the icc. The case for US skepticism is made
by legal scholar Ruth Wedgwood; parrying her
arguments are Justice Richard Goldstone, Kai
Ambos, and former Academy Fellow, legal scholar
Kendall Thomas.
The present Berlin Journal also includes original
contributions by current Academy Fellows Nina
Bernstein and John Phillip Santos as well as an admo-
nition on memory and architecture at Ground Zero
by Leon Wieseltier. The arts are represented too, in
poetry by Henri Cole, in a special tribute to lm-
maker Terrence Malick, and in lively Berlin drawings
by cartoonist Ben Katchor. It was Ben who, during
a chilly February stroll around the Wannsee, rst sug-
gested that we bring music to our pages, and we are
delighted to include here a CD of American Academy
composers. Thanks to composer Tod Machover and
to managing editor Teresa Go, Bens aural vision actu-
ally happened. Finally, we are especially grateful to
Susanna Dulkinys and Erik Spiekermann for giving
the Journal its brave new look.
The weeks before and after the German 2002
elections have been a fraught period for US-German
relations. The crisis is partly real, and partly rhetori-
cal. The American Academy, in providing a venue for
Germans and Americans to engage with a vigorous
plurality of independent, intelligent voices, helps
keep the focus on the real.
Gary Smith
TheBerlinJournal
An American Voice in Berlin
When does a newsletter become something more?
The Berlin Journal began three years ago as the semi-
annual record of ideas and activities at the American
Academy in Berlin. Like the Academy itself, it has
grown in size and scope with each semester.
Founded in 1997 by Richard Holbrooke and
Henry Kissinger, among other distinguished individ-
uals devoted to strong transatlantic bonds, the
Academy has quickly become the most visible
American intellectual presence in Germany. Each
year, some thirty scholars, artists, writers, and
policy experts reside at the Hans Arnhold Center
on Berlins Lake Wannsee.
By day, the fellows pursue their own projects.
By night they participate in a rich program of lec-
tures, seminars, readings, and concerts. Drawing
upon the abundant expertise of its fellows, advisors,
and guests, the Berlin Journal has also quickly
Number Five | Fall 2002
R
00:40:01 The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick
There are some clear no-go lines in the conduct of any confl i ct
red lines that any responsible commander will not cross.
A tour of the hague recalls historys ambitions for international
courts. Andrew Carnegies Victorian Peace Palace, with its formal gar-
dens and imposing roof, houses the International Court of Justice. The
icjs docket of state-to-state complaints in civil cases includes matters
such as maritime boundaries, land borders, and questions of state
responsibility. There is no compelled jurisdiction; states must agree to
the methods by which cases are referred, and the court must rely on the
United Nations Security Council to enforce its decisions. But the icj is
useful to states parties as a way to turn down the volume in fractious dis-
putes, giving governments an occasion to defer provocative issues and
yield to compromise. The civil court and its predecessor have not stopped
wars; the international courts forebear a permanent court of justice
collapsed in World War II. But the Peace Palace survived the war, and the
icj has since done an increasing volume of business.
A less magnicent venue up the road houses the UN Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia, established nine years ago to address the crimes of
the Balkan wars. The UN Security Council used its extraordinary powers
to create this special-purpose tribunal to prosecute the atrocities commit-
ted in Bosnia, Croatia, and as it later turned out, Kosovo. The court has
enjoyed strong American backing and has made measured progress, con-
victing 31 defendants. The centerpiece is the trial of Slobodan Milosevic
for terrorist attacks against civilians in three nationalist wars. Handed
over by Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djinjic after Belgrades defeat in
the nato air campaign in 1998, Milosevic has since tried to use the court-
room for his own political purposes. But he is clearly flailing in the face of
changed regional politics. The Yugoslav tribunal has had to create a
distinctive procedure acceptable to both civil-law and common-law coun-
tries and has explored a number of thorny legal and moral issues. One
such question involves the degree to which factors like duress and state of
mind contribute to the commission of war crimes. Yet the Yugoslav
tribunals work did not deter the ongoing atrocities of the Balkan con-
flicts; the autocrats who sponsored the Srebrenica massacre and ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo were fully aware of the tribunals jurisdiction. The
hope is that the prosecutions will have an effect on other leaders contem-
plating a career in nationalist violence. Charged by the UN Security
Council with the further task of supervising prosecutions connected to
the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the Hague tribunal tries to craft common
standards for the Yugoslav trial chambers and a UN sister court in
Tanzania.
The Hague also hosted a trial involving the 1988 Libyan-sponsored
bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. With terrorism, as with war crimes, giv-
ing it to the lawyers has been part of a strategy of deterrence. After years
of negotiation with Libya and sanctions imposed through the UN
Security Council, an agreement was reached to convene a so-called
mixed tribunal to try two suspects in the bombing. The eight-month
trial began in May 2001 at a nearby military base, with Scottish judges
applying Scottish law (since the bomb had detonated in Scottish airspace
over the town of Lockerbie). A vigorous trial defense and the courts split
verdict demonstrated just how hard it is to gather usable courtroom evi-
dence on terrorist networks. Even as the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali
Mohmed al Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, made it clear that
Tripoli was involved in the civilian murders, Col. Muammar el-Qadda
was effectively protected.
Finally, The Hague has now offered to take aboard yet a fourth tri-
bunal, the so-called permanent International Criminal Court, created by
a treaty agreement negotiated at Rome in 1998. The revival of a perma-
nent criminal court, a fty-year-old idea, is rooted in our shared dismay at
the decade past. Ethnic cleansing and deliberate attacks upon civilians
seemed unimaginable in a post-Maastricht Europe. The genocide in
Rwanda rattled a world that had supposed such ethnic ferocity was irra-
tional. The icc is designed to hear cases of serious war crimes, genocide,
crimes against humanity, and in the future cases of alleged aggression.
The court came into formal existence this past summer. The choice of 18
judges and a prosecutor is slated for February 2003. European capitals are
busily culling their ranks of law professors, prosecutors, ministers, and
judges to propose candidates. It should come as no surprise that politics
has something to do with the choices, even for a court that purports to
abolish politics.
icc participants may also discover that voice votes in the midst of a
UN conference are easier to win than formal treaty ratications. Of the
UNs 189 members, some 81 states had ratied the icc treaty at the time
this article went to press. A signicant number of major military powers
and regional leaders remain outside the treaty regime, including China,
India, Japan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Israel, Kenya, and
Chile. The Russian Federation is studying the matter. Relatively few
countries in Asia and Africa have ratied. The commitment to govern
national military operations by the decision making of an as-yet-
unknown court has inspired caution in more than a few capitals.
4 Number Fi ve | Fal l 2002
The International
Criminal Court
Reviewing the Case Ruth Wedgwood Defends US Skepticism
This leaves the question of the United States, which has not ratied
the treaty. Some unhappy critics have attributed American skepticism
about the court to supposed ambitions for empire or hegemony, or a
headstrong pursuit of unilateralism. The inference is unfair. Washington
has well-grounded and rational concerns about the icc, its structure, and
how its operations could affect the execution of Americas responsibilities
around the globe, particularly its efforts to maintain strategic stability in
key regions, including (in the long term) Europe. Parliamentarians who
talk in private to their own military lawyers and senior commanders may
discover that even some Europeans share concerns about the effect of the
court on military planning.
In war ghting and peace enforcement, there is an acknowledged
need to balance restraint and efcacy. Military law is designed to spare
civilians from wars cruelties, while permitting countries to protect their
citizens. There are some clear no-go lines in the conduct of any conflict
red lines that any responsible commander will not cross. The norms
against massacres are part of the customs of war and do not depend for
their mandatory force on any treaty rule or UN mandate. Some matters in
legitimate warfare, however, are harder to regulate with bright-line rules.
Peace enforcement includes operational norms that are often contentious
in practical application.
Scholars distinguish between two different spheres of the law of
armed conflict so-called Geneva law and so-called Hague law (each
named after the treaty venue that rst enunciated the norms). Geneva law
protects groups that are hors de combat, such as women, children, the sick
and wounded, and surrendered soldiers. Most of its rules are widely
accepted, and have plain application at least in traditional conflicts.
Hague law, rather, concerns the difcult operational choices to be made
on the battleeld and in air campaigns. Hague standards are often closer
to principles than to rules; they involve questions of balancing that are
morally uncertain and factually sensitive.
The rst Hague norm concerns discrimination safeguarding
the distinction between military assets and civilian objects. Any well-
trained soldier knows that only military targets can be destroyed. The
difculty arises in dening military objects. A second Hague norm con-
cerns proportionality in an attack on military targets, incidental
harm to civilians must be limited. It is easy to inscribe such norms on
paper. But in the planning and execution of a military campaign, in land-
scapes where military and civilian sectors share a common infrastructure,
both principles prove harder to apply.
natos air campaign in Kosovo gives some striking examples of the
difculty of adapting Hague norms to real-life combat situations. What
should qualify as a military target? nato lawyers exhaustively discussed
whether and how to strike at Yugoslavias oil reneries, electrical grids,
television and radio transmission towers, port facilities, railroad spans,
and highway bridges. In the legal doctrine of World War II, each of these
objects was classied per se as a military target. There are practical rea-
sons why attacks on infrastructure still remain a part of military plan-
ning. Safety for allied aircraft and pilots requires shutting down an adver-
sarys anti-aircraft radar, and air dominance is necessary for ground
campaigns as well as air campaigns. Yet even smart weapons may not nd
mobile anti-aircraft units that are hidden under the lee of a hill; their
radar links may most practicably be countered by disabling the adver-
sarys electrical grid. So, too, cutting off the adversarys oil and gas sup-
plies is the most reliable way to immobilize his battle tanks and ghting
vehicles, including armored personnel carriers. In cloudy weather and
hilly terrain, against an adversary skilled at camouage, battle armor can
be extremely hard to nd and target directly. Likewise, there are tactical
reasons for damaging highway and rail bridges, to prevent the resupply of
ammunition and fresh troops, and to limit the adversarys freedom of
maneuver.
The moral difculty in targeting is that the same transportation
infrastructure and energy sources may sustain the civilian community as
well. It is exceedingly difcult to ght effectively against an adversarys
armed forces without also causing unwanted hardship to the civilian pop-
ulation. The measures taken in Kosovo were part of an effort to counter
the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing to protect Kosovar Albanians
from the depredations of Serb nationalist paramilitaries. The plangent
dilemma of balancing harms is not limited to the Balkans.
Some academic commentators would like to imagine a perfect
method of warfare, with complete success in pinpoint strikes that directly
disable an adversarys mobile military forces. Other commentators
would like to shelter all portions of a countrys infrastructure in an armed
conflict, regardless of how this prolongs the ghting. Some would like to
hold military commanders to a duty of just-in-time targeting waiting
until the very moment the adversary proposes to use a particular bridge
or railroad. But military commanders who are thwarted by real-life
weather, terrain, strategic deception, and mobile weapons may conclude
that an effective campaign requires striking at the underlying military
infrastructure, including an adversarys energy sources and transpor-
tation system.
American commanders are trained to take their ethical and legal
responsibilities with great seriousness. The American military sends
judge-advocates to the eld to advise area commanders on targeting deci-
sions and choice of weapons. They consult computer analyses of possible
collateral damage to minimize the harm to civilians. Commanders
engage in debate within alliance structures, and American military plan-
ners, treatise writers, and trainers also engage with their counterparts.
The debates even continue amid the urgent circumstances of a perilous
conflict. But one should not assume that the clarity and specicity of
criminal law easily ts some of the choices that must be made.
Many countries engage in international peacekeeping under UN or
regional auspices. The classical model of peacekeeping demands that
troops be deployed only where the conflicting parties have agreed to the
mission, where neutrality can be maintained, and where minimal force
need be used. Countries as diverse as Fiji, Guatemala, Estonia, India,
The Berl i n Journal 5
Military law should spare
civilians from wars cruelties,
while permitting countries to
protect their citizens.
Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as our nato allies, have made valuable
contributions to peacekeeping. The decision of the German Constitu-
tional Court now permits Germany to engage in these missions, with the
permission of the Bundestag.
By contrast, peace enforcement has few takers. It is the task of a
very few countries that have the economic power to pay for the necessary
military capability, and a historical role acceptable to their neighbors.
The term peace enforcement was offered by former UN Secretary
General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his important Agenda for Peace to
describe the necessarily robust use of military power to displace an
aggressor or turn back an invasion. Because of history, Japan and
Germany the worlds second and third largest economies are still hesi-
tant to participate in such missions. Europe has under-invested in mili-
tary capacity, some would claim. And in its commitment to regional
peace, Europe is undecided about a broader global role.
The US faces a number of crucial and hazardous military tasks in
which it may have few operational allies. These include the defense of
South Korea, strategic stability in the Taiwan Straits, balance in the
Middle East, and measures against international terrorism. nato allies
may or may not choose to share in these responsibilities. With a commit-
ment to maintaining security in key areas of the world, Washington is log-
ically concerned with preserving realistic standards for military opera-
tions. Innovative proposals for new battleeld standards and the use of
advanced technology to save innocent lives will always warrant serious
discussion among responsible governments, humanitarian agencies, reli-
gious thinkers, military analysts, political commentators, and the public.
But they do not routinely belong in the escalated rhetoric of a criminal tri-
bunal. With 220,000 military personnel serving in overseas deployment,
it is not surprising that Washington should be cautious about the iccs
broad wingspan.
As witting political observers know, an adversary can characterize
the law opportunistically, trying to hobble an act of self-defense or
humanitarian intervention. At the beginning of the Kosovo air campaign,
Slobodan Milosevic sent his lawyers to the International Court of Justice,
charging in a civil suit that almost all of natos combat methods were for-
bidden. Indeed, the Kosovo air campaign was reviewed by the UN tribu-
nal for the former Yugoslavia, and no criminal investigation was opened.
But it is worth recalling that this particular tribunal was the creation of
the UN Security Council, in coordination with natos goal of stopping
ethnic cleansing. The scope of the icc is far broader. It will hear com-
plaints from a host of countries, organizations, and individual sources. It
operates outside the UNs existing security architecture, independent of
the UN Security Council. Moreover, its judges are not required to have
any experience in military operations or military law, even though the
iccs competence would encompass both the contested issues of Hague
law and the clearer standards of Geneva law. A jurists view on how to bal-
ance operational efcacy and unavoidable civilian hazards may be subtly
influenced by unspoken beliefs about the necessary role of military
strength in protecting societies against intimidation.
The American interest in framing intelligent standards for the use
of force extends to issues such as humanitarian intervention and preemp-
tion of terrorist networks, as well as to the role of regional organizations
in Africa and elsewhere. The addition of the crime of aggression to the
iccs docket may thwart the very forms of intervention that are sup-
ported by the human rights community. Though aggression was a histori-
cal crime that t the Nazi war machine in the context of the Nuremberg
Trials, the label can also be mobilized for sharply contested political ends.
Some icc supporters say that this part of the courts docket is purely sym-
bolic. Yet even now, some treaty states propose displacing the UN
Security Council from its central role in evaluating aggression. Legitimate
acts of humanitarian protection or anticipatory self-defense could be
jeopardized by a reckless denition of the crime.
Each ally is free to posit a cure for transatlantic irritations. But the
icc controversy deserves to be analyzed on its own merits, not as part of a
mlange of transatlantic concerns that includes global warming, steel
exports, or the relationship of nato to the EU. It also does not advance
common understanding to assume that an interlocutor is proceeding in
bad faith. Some European critics would ascribe US concerns about the
icc to a heedless desire to operate without norms or limits. But, as
described above, the US has justiable concerns about an unrealistic
reading of the law of armed conflict, indeed because of the very
asymmetry of military power in the world and its unique international
responsibilities.
It is reasonable to point out that the icc statute has some safe-
guards that attempt to prevent misuse of the courts powers.
Complementarity requires the court to defer to national decisions
about war crimes, unless the particular state is unwilling or unable gen-
uinely to investigate or prosecute an allegation. Where there are good-
faith doctrinal differences, this is no protection. For example, the US will
by denition be unwilling to prosecute its pilots or military commanders
for carrying out missions that it believes to be lawful.
When there are doubts about a proposal or a new institution, the
usual course of action is to watch and see how it works in practice. The
stars have not been in alignment here. As both Democrats and
Republicans in Congress have noticed, there is no safe look-over period.
The insistence that the court should have power over third-party coun-
tries, even without Security Council decision, is of deep concern to law-
makers. Washingtons bipartisan view is that the icc has no right to
A second Hague norm concerns
proportionality.In an attack
on military targets, incidental
harm to civilians must be limited.
Constructive things can be done
to help mend the rift between
the International Criminal Court
and the United States.
claim jurisdiction over the citizens of a state that has chosen not to ratify
the treaty without the Security Councils concurrence. This was the view
taken by President Clinton when he signed the treaty on December 31,
2000, and it is a view shared by the Democratic Senate, the Republican
House of Representatives, and President George W. Bush. One may or
may not agree with some of Washingtons methods of pursuing the point,
but it is just as well that icc treaty states not labor under any misappre-
hension about the importance of the issue to the US. There will be plenti-
ful work for the icc docket in the exercise of more traditional theories of
jurisdiction.
Constructive things can be done, even at present, to help mend the
relationship between the icc and the US. It would be useful if some of the
judges nominated to the court were chosen from among military lawyers
and judge advocates, to bring some practical judgment and military expe-
rience to the courts deliberations. So, too, the appointment of deputy
prosecutors should include people with a working background in Hague
law, as well as more traditional international and criminal lawyers. (One
could even be daring and choose an American.) The court may also wish
to have a roster of military experts chosen from responsible militaries for
use as expert witnesses. Secondly, the new icc prosecutor may wish to
announce guidelines for case selection. The experience of the Yugoslav
and Rwanda tribunals has shown that international courts can only han-
dle a limited caseload, and constructive engagement in undisputed areas
could be reassuring. Thirdly, it would be within the prosecutors preroga-
tive to clarify the components of decisions on complementarity, in partic-
ular, to make clear that the court will apply the European idea of deferring
to good-faith national interpretations of the law of armed conflict, with a
margin of appreciation.
The nato alliance and other coalitions for peace enforcement will
require practical standards for joint operations in the future. A coordi-
nated defense requires planning, reasonable interoperability, and, not
least, a workable consensus on what the law allows. Thus, a continuing
North Atlantic conversation on the legal and ethical principles that
govern the use of armed force is in our common interest. Our current
differences on the modes of enforcement should not distract us from the
ambition of our shared normative commitments.
Q
Milosevic sent his lawyers to
the ICJ, charging in a civil suit
that almost all of NATO s combat
methods were forbidden.
In the past few years, I have read a number of
articles written in support of the opposition of the
United States to the International Criminal Court.
Some of them have relied on partial and selective
references to the provisions of the Rome Statute.
Professor Wedgwood displays a similar tendency
here, as the following two examples illustrate.
Wedgwood asserts that the icc is designed to hear
cases . . . in the future . . . of alleged aggression. She
goes on to argue that the addition of the crime of
aggression to the iccs docket may thwart the very
forms of intervention that are supported by the
human rights community. In fact, the treaty speci-
es that the court may not exercise jurisdiction over
the crime of aggression until the Assembly of States
Parties denes it. (A states party refers to a state that
has ratied the Rome Statute.) This cannot occur
until seven years after the statute came into force:
July 1, 2009. This compromise was made at the
Rome conference in light of the considerable dis-
agreement over whether the court should have juris-
diction over this crime at all.
In order for the crime of aggression to come
within the competence of the icc, it must be
dened to the satisfaction of two-thirds of the states
parties at the Assembly held after July 1, 2009. It
would then only become operative one year after
ratication by seven-eighths of the states parties.
Even then, if a states party has not accepted the
denition, the court may not exercise jurisdiction
with regard to any violation committed by nationals
of that particular states party or committed on its
territory. The states party may, moreover, withdraw
from the statute with immediate effect. If this is not
sufcient protection in respect of the crime of
aggression, the statute provides that any provision
relating to it must be consistent with the relevant
provisions of the Charter of the United Nations.
To suggest that the court is designed to hear
cases . . . of alleged aggression does not remotely
reflect the provisions of the Rome Statute.
Wedgwood refers to the principle of comple-
mentarity, which gives states whether they are
party to the Rome Statute or not the right to inves-
tigate alleged war crimes against their citizens
before the icc may do so. However, she writes,
Where there are good-faith doctrinal differences,
this is no protection. For example, the US will by
denition be unwilling to prosecute its pilots or mil-
itary commanders for carrying out missions that it
believes to be lawful. In order for the icc to exer-
cise its jurisdiction, the statute requires the prosecu-
tor to establish that the national investigation or
prosecution was not held in good faith. Thus, the
test is not directed at the outcome of either the
investigation or prosecution. If the US, after a good-
faith investigation, were to determine that the
alleged perpetrator had not committed a war crime,
that would be the end of the matter. I might add that
this principle of complementarity was only one of a
number of compromises sought by the US and
accepted when the treaty was being drafted.
Wedgwood appears to draw some solace from
the number of states that have not ratied the Rome
Statute. She refers to the fact that only 81 states out
of the UNs 189 members have now ratied it, which
downplays the fact that 139 member states have
signed the statute. She singles out eleven nations
major military powers and regional leaders that
have not ratied the statute. Of these, I doubt that
even the leaders of Kenya and Chile would describe
their own nations in such glamorous terms. She
goes on to state that relatively few countries in Asia
and Africa have ratied. That is undoubtedly cor-
rect in respect of Asia. However, 15 African nations
have ratied, including the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, Nigeria, and South Africa three of the
largest countries on the continent. More to the
point, Wedgwood fails to note that the Rome
Statute has been ratied by every European nation
save for the Czech Republic, Malta, Monaco, and
Albania.
If I were an American citizen, I would certainly
question why my leaders are not keeping company
with the other democracies of the world, most espe-
cially with our traditional friends with whom we
share common values. I would ask why my leaders
seek to make my country exceptional and refuse to
send peacekeepers to foreign countries unless they
are placed literally outside the rules of international
humanitarian law. Other military powers are con-
tent to send their armies on similar peacekeeping
missions without behaving in this unhappy fashion.
Finally, I would refer to Wedgwoods plea that
the icc controversy deserves to be analyzed on its
own merits, not in a mlange of concerns about
global warming, steel exports, or the relationship of
nato to the EU. I agree that the advantages and
disadvantages of the icc should be measured on
their own terms. At the same time, friends of the US
cannot be blamed if they view American opposition
to the court with skepticism and even suspicion. In
the rst place, the US relies all too frequently on
incorrect and even specious readings of the Rome
Statute. Secondly and more importantly, the US has
a particularly distressing record with regard to its
recognition of international obligations. The most
recent case was its unsuccessful attempt in August
2002 to block a new UN protocol aimed at efciently
policing the provisions of the 1984 Torture
Convention. The EU publicly accused the US of delay
tactics aimed at killing the protocol. In that action,
the US was opposed by all of Europe and Latin
America with the single exception of Cuba.
Since September 11, 2001, the US has been
flouting the most fundamental principles of its own
constitution and of the Geneva Conventions in its
treatment of detainees both at home and in
Afghanistan. Credible allegations have been made
concerning the murder and mistreatment of prison-
ers of war in Afghanistan and of US indifference to
such allegations. Credible allegations have been
made concerning the number of innocent civilians
killed and injured in the military action in
Afghanistan. The current administration has
avoided making the facts public and even respond-
ing to criticisms made by its own concerned citizens.
Wedgwood can hardly expect the rest of the world to
judge the US opposition to the International
Criminal Court in a vacuum. In the words of
Professor Harold Koh, the former Assistant
Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, the
United States should lead the global community on
the basis of its traditional values and not its power.
Q
Richard Goldstone dissents
The statute requires
the ICC prosecutor to
establish that the
national investigation
was not held in good
faith.
If I were a US citizen,
I would question why
my leaders are not
keeping company
with the world s
other democracies.
clusions when considering the same provisions.
This is indeed one of the fundamental characteris-
tics of law as a normative, hermeneutical rather
than natural science. But no one has yet drawn the
conclusion from this that mankind should live with-
out law. If we accepted that soldiers are beyond the
reach of law because their tasks are too complex to
be judged by (civilian) judges, the same argument
could be invoked, for instance, by entrepreneurs
with regard to economic or environmental crimes.
Wedgwood seems to acknowledge that the
UN ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda proved capable of judging military con-
duct. She approves of the decision made by the for-
mer not to prosecute nato attacks in Kosovo. But
rather than note that the crimes within the jurisdic-
tion of the Yugoslav tribunal are basically the same
as those of the icc, she emphasizes that it is a cre-
ation of the UN Security Council. Her implication
seems to be that its decision was due to this an
assumption that would be rejected by the tribunal
itself. The Yugoslav tribunals strict adherence to
the rule of law is a good example of what we can
expect from the icc. The rst nominees for the
iccs judges, including Phillipe Kirsch of Canada
and Barbara Ott (a former military judge) of
Switzerland, conrm this.
Further, contrary to Wedgwoods claim, the
icc does not operate outside the UNs security sys-
tem. The Security Council may refer cases and even
stay the courts procedures for a renewable period of
12 months if it deems that a prosecution would
endanger peace and security. Furthermore, the
recent Security Council Resolution 1422 of July 12,
2002 (won through US pressure that involved tak-
ing the Bosnian peacekeeping mission hostage)
grants quasi-immunity to US members of peace-
keeping and peace-enforcing missions. (The resolu-
tion, however, misapplies Article 16 and Chapter
VII of the UN-Charter, as I argue elsewhere.**)
The principle of complementarity articulated
in Article 17 of the statute recognizes each nations
primary responsibility to prosecute the crimes com-
mitted on its territory or by its nationals. For
Wedgwood, however, this principle affords no pro-
tection because there are good faith doctrinal
differences in the law of armed conflict. But why
should the iccs Pre-Trial Chamber (which will
make the nal decisions on the question of comple-
mentarity) not accept the good-faith, reasoned
opinion of a US (military) court based on a thor-
ough and serious investigation? The complemen-
tarity principle was not designed to override the
lawful decision of an impartial and independent
national court in a Rechtsstaat like the US. It
becomes effective only when a state is unwilling or
unable to prosecute.
Wedgwood echoes the familiar US view that the
icc cannot claim jurisdiction over non-state-party
nationals. Clearly, in concluding a treaty, states can-
not provide rules for a third state that is not party to
it. This is not, however, what the Rome Statute does.
Even without the statute, the US is already obliged to
accept foreign territorial jurisdiction under the well-
recognized principle of territoriality, which grants
a state (criminal) jurisdiction over acts committed
on its territory. (Such jurisdiction is claimed by the
US when it applies the death penalty to nationals of
states that forbid this penalty, for example.) Denying
territorial jurisdiction to states would mean that, for
example, an American committing a crime in Spain
could not be prosecuted there. Thus, all the states
did in ratifying the Rome Statute was exercise their
sovereign treaty-making power by delegating part of
their territorial jurisdiction to the icc.
These legal clarications should make it clear
that the US concerns are not rooted in alleged tech-
nical flaws of the courts legal regime. Indeed, after
years of negotiations and innumerable concessions
to the US by like-minded states, it would be naive to
believe that the current administrations hostility
toward the icc could be met with yet further conces-
sions. Sadly, the transatlantic differences over the
icc are deeper than any purely legal dispute. At
issue are the principles of conflict resolution in inter-
national relations. Washington emphasizes the
necessary role of military strength, whereas
Europe deeply distrusts the underlying military
logic. Europe is not, as Wedgwood suggests,
undecided about [its] broader global role in
general. It simply doubts the long-term efciency of
a mainly military approach. It prefers the establish-
ment of lasting structures and institutions in inter-
national law such as the icc.
Wedgwood overstates the resistance of some
states to the icc, downplaying the fact that all nato
Professor Wedgwoods main concern regards
a perceived uncertainty in the law of armed conflict.
She argues that the assessment of certain military
conduct by military commanders, though made in
good faith, could differ from a subtly influenced
assessment of the same conduct by lawyers. These
objections are a variation of the US position that the
icc would render politicized judgments. They also
display a mistrust in the courts prospective judges
and prosecutors that is not shared by the majority of
the worlds democracies.
In fact, the uncertain provisions Wedgwood
adduces are not the carefully crafted war crimes pro-
visions of the Rome Statutes Article 8 (the wording
of which reflects proposals made by the US at Rome)
but two abstract concepts of the traditional law of
armed conflict: military objective and propor-
tionality. In contrast, the statutes provisions are
drafted very narrowly even where they leave a cer-
tain margin of interpretation precisely in order to
avoid the charge of uncertainty.* Article 8(2)(b)(iv),
for instance, addressing the principle of proportion-
ality, requires that the damage caused by an attack
must be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete
and direct overall military advantage anticipated.
The following question arises: If a commander
deems the damage caused by an attack to be pro-
portional, but it is later found to be clearly exces-
sive by the icc, would we want to leave this con-
duct unpunished?
More fundamentally, Wedgwood fails to distin-
guish between the law of armed conflict and inter-
national criminal law; a breach of the former
requires only negligence, or even a merely objective
violation. The Rome Statute, however, denes a per-
petrators conduct as criminal only if it is commit-
ted knowingly or with intent.This high threshold
makes it decidedly unlikely that law-abiding com-
batants will be prosecuted.
The icc is designed to address the gravest
crimes known to mankind: genocide and crimes
against humanity. The 139 signatories at Rome
(including the US) wanted to make clear that these
crimes will not go unpunished even if the alleged
offender acted under superior orders. Wedgwood,
however, dwells on the crime of aggression, which
according to Article 5 (2) of the statute cannot be
applied by the court unless a yet-to-be-found
denition of the crime is established.
That Wedgwoods text fails to consider the
hard norms of the Rome Statute and instead
focuses on principles of the law of armed conflict is
not its only shortcoming. The approach is also
flawed in principle. She is of course correct in not-
ing that different lawyers may come to different con-
Kai Ambos dissents
*
In fact, Article 8 has a narrower scope than the corresponding
provision of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva
Conventions Article 85(3)(b), where the term excessive is not
qualified by the adjective clearly.
**
Kai Ambos, Bedrohung. Das Weltstrafrecht hat seine
Unschuld schon verloren, Sddeutsche Zeitung, 16 July 2002,
p.13. English text online in German Law Journal (October 2002),
www.germanlawjournal.com.
The court is designed to
prosecute the gravest
crimes known to mankind:
genocide and crimes
against humanity.
Ruth Wedgwood takes issue with those
unhappy critics who ascribe the Bush Administra-
tions posture toward the new International
Criminal Court to supposed ambitions for empire
or hegemony or a headstrong pursuit of a reck-
less US unilateralism. On Professor Wedgwoods
account, Washingtons skepticism (as she styles it)
does not betray a will to world power. Rather, it
derives rather from well-grounded and rational
concerns about the as-yet-unknown icc, its insti-
tutional design, and the impact the courts interven-
tions would have on the US ability to fulll its
unique responsibilities in the world. Critics ought
not assume that the US is acting in bad faith, or con-
strue US opposition to the icc as evidence of a
desire to operate without norms or limits. The
icc controversy, argues Wedgwood, deserves to be
analyzed on its own merits. Accordingly, critics of
the US position should not distort the icc dispute
by introducing matters that range from such hot
issues as environmental spoliation, steel exports,
and tariff wars to the relationship between the EU
and nato. For Wedgwood, to draw a connection
between Washingtons stance toward the icc and
perceived US recalcitrance on other questions of
global governance is to frustrate a common under-
standing of the current impasse, and a common
effort to nd a way out of it.
Wedgwood is surely right: the rhetorical poli-
tics of linkage has endangered the prospects for
measured debate on the merits of the icc. However,
the US cannot claim innocence on this score. The
sad fact is that Washington stands guilty of the very
type of linkage diplomacy to which Wedgwood
objects. Indeed, in important respects, critics who
would link US hostility toward the ICC to matters
that, properly speaking, have nothing to do with the
court are merely taking a page from Washingtons
own playbook. Discussing US opposition to Rome
Statute provisions that contemplate jurisdiction
over citizens of states that are not parties to it,
Wedgwood concedes (in a curiously oblique
remark) that one may or may not agree with some
of Washingtons methods of pursuing the point.
Tellingly, she fails to specify what those tactics have
been, or to note their deployment on issues that go
far beyond the narrow question of third-party juris-
diction (which, incidentally, the US has itself exer-
cised in a number of instances). More fundamen-
tally, Wedgwoods analysis obscures the degree to
which US diplomacy has in recent months increas-
ingly abandoned the eld of constructive debate on
the merits of the icc.
One disturbing example (unmentioned by
Wedgwood) will illustrate the point. Earlier this
year, the US Congress passed the American
Servicemembers Protection Act (aspa). This legisla-
tion, which President Bush signed on August 3,
leaves little doubt about Washingtons willingness to
play the linkage game. The act prohibits US coopera-
tion with the icc and bars agents of the icc from
conducting any investigative activity in the US; it
includes an invasion of the Hague provision, which
authorizes the president to use all means necessary
and appropriate to free US (and certain allied per-
sonnel) who have been detained or imprisoned by
the icc; and it withdraws US military assistance
from states (with the exception of nato member
countries and other major allies) that ratify the icc
treaty. This latter provision is especially troubling.
The blanket prohibition on military assistance to
Rome Statute signatories imperils longstanding US
foreign policy objectives on issues such as the inter-
national trafc in illicit drugs and regional insta-
bility around the world. Needless to say, these
important matters have little or nothing to do with
the international justice system in general, or the
icc in particular. Moreover, since every key element
of aspa is subject to waiver provisions that permit
the President to block its application in the national
interest, it strains credulity to argue that the act is a
principled expression of US skepticism, or a good-
faith attempt to advance the substantive debate
over the icc. Viewed against the backdrop of
Washingtons other recent diplomatic maneuvers
(such as the pursuit of impunity agreements with
other states not to surrender American nationals),
one can understand those critics in the US and else-
where who charge that aspa must be seen in a rather
more skeptical light
To her credit, Wedgwood concludes by offering
a number of concrete and constructive proposals
that might help mend the relationship between the
US and supporters of the icc. While one need not
agree with her each of her proffered suggestions,
taken together, they warrant close and careful inves-
tigation. With each passing day, however,
Washington provides fresh evidence of its unwilling-
ness to engage in substantive debate of any kind.
Regrettably, the demonstrated indifference of the US
toward the ongoing global conversation about the
icc and the rule of international criminal law holds
consequences that will likely extend well beyond the
current controversy.
allies of the US (save Turkey) have ratied the
statute. It is a realistic scenario that, in the long run,
the only democracies left outside the icc regime
will be the US and Israel. The statute, moreover, has
received worldwide civil support. (The internation-
al coalition of non-governmental organizations has
more than a thousand groups.) The speed of the
iccs establishment has been breathtaking
(although the statute creates the rst compulsory
mechanism to bring violators to justice and there-
fore demands from the state parties more than do
other human rights treaties). The sixty ratications
necessary for its entry into force were achieved this
April less than four years after the statutes adop-
tion. At publication, 81 states had ratied it. In com-
parison, the worlds most important human rights
treaty the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights of 1966 took ten years to achieve
the necessary ratications.
Finally, it must be stressed that the icc was
established to prosecute reckless dictators, large-
scale torturers, and mass murderers not US mili-
tary personnel engaged in international operations.
The Rome Statute was not drafted to address the
single occasional perpetrator of a war crime but to
punish multiple or large-scale outrages. The intent
of the icc is to deter international core crimes such
as genocide and crimes against humanity and to
prevent impunity for them. This vision is severely
compromised by the American spectre of a rogue
court staffed by political maniacs with no greater
desire than the frivolous prosecution of innocent US
citizens. It is to be hoped that instead of intimidat-
ing states that want to join the icc, the US will join
in a constructive dialogue. Wedgwood herself sug-
gests this in the last and best part of her paper.
Q
The transatlantic
differences over
the ICC are deeper
than any purely
legal dispute.
The politics of linkage
endanger prospects for
measured debate.
Kendall Thomas dissents
I appreciate the comments of Judge Goldstone, Dr. Ambos, and
Professor Thomas, and the editors invitation to offer some reections
in reply.
The recent German elections have once again taught that the use of
political language requires care and attention. A tub-thumping phrase
may rally the faithful but can also demonize good-faith differences in view
and interfere with the working relationships important to allies. This is a
lesson that may have equal application to discussions of the International
Criminal Court.
A sense of caution in changing international security architecture
and its governance is also warranted. It is striking that, in the earnest
negotiations for a permanent court, not a single country ever proposed
the creation of retrospective criminal jurisdiction for the tribunal. The
sins of our shared past whether in Algeria, Namibia, or elsewhere are
still off-limits. We will, it seems, become virtuous but only tomorrow.
There is a third lesson, derived from our edgling attempts at inter-
national justice namely, the importance of diplomatic, economic, and
military support from the major powers. To bring defendants and wit-
nesses before the Yugoslav tribunal in The Hague has required the muscle
of states wielding inuence in the Balkans. At its greater distance, the
Rwanda tribunal has sometimes been thwarted by the Tutsi government
in Kigali. The court is unable to access crime scenes or witnesses from the
Hutu-led genocide without government consent, and the tribunal has
even faced threats that cooperation will be withdrawn if it looks too hard
at the Tutsi-led military activities of 1994. The ability of the war crimes
tribunals to gain cooperation has often depended on the willingness of
the larger powers to put the actors in a cooperative frame of mind.
This is why it was curious and sad that the delicate negotiations for
a permanent criminal court were held captive to a millenarian schedule.
In a ve-week-long forced march, the conference leadership at Rome sum-
marily refused an urgent American request for a much-needed adjourn-
ment, forbidding continued discussion of the hard issues that were pre-
venting agreement. The American request for more time was again made
at high levels on the last day of the conference, as delegations struggled to
absorb the complicated draft of the court statute. (The chairmans draft
was not available for inspection until 2 a.m. the night before, and its last-
minute circulation precluded any conceivable approval through the
American inter-agency process.) The court became an unwanted
Rorschach test for the rivalries of the American-European relationship;
perhaps it was even conceived as a test case to show that Europe could go
it alone in security matters. The combative attitude of some Canadian
politicians toward their neighbor to the south also had an inuence
an inappropriate transposition of local politics to a fateful international
setting.
One cannot undo these missteps. The question now is how to pro-
ceed in a way that does not damage alliance relationships while advancing
a shared commitment to humanitarian law. I appreciate Professor
Thomas remark that the suggestions at the conclusion of my essay are
concrete and constructive. The soon-to-be-elected prosecutor of the icc
will have an important opportunity to mend fences and dedicate the
court to its true vocation of thwarting future criminal regimes that irt
with genocide and civilian atrocities.
I offer here a few observations toward that effort. One obstacle to
reconciliation is uncertainty about whether any practical reading of the
icc treaty can be relied upon. It would make sense for the Rome Statute
to respect the traditional division of responsibility for disciplining visit-
ing armed forces, honed over fty years of nato and United Nations his-
tory. The status of forces agreements for both institutions provide that
criminal prosecutions of ofcial acts should be undertaken by the coun-
try that sends the visiting forces. The responsibility for discipline has
been an important issue to the US Congress. (Indeed, political veterans
remember that Congress was highly skeptical of the original nato status-
of-forces arrangements even in 1954.) The language of the Rome Statutes
Article 98 (2) suggests that this division of labor and retention of respon-
sibility should continue under the icc. Yet it has taken months of wran-
gling to gain any general acknowledgement that individual members of
the EU are free under the Rome Statute to preserve the jurisdiction of the
sending country in their peacetime status-of-forces arrangements with
Washington.* This would not displace any traditional jurisdiction of the
civilian courts of the host country. Contrary to Dr. Ambos inference,
there is no territorial principle that would be violated. Civilian courts
have not generally handled military crimes related to on-duty acts,
whether in war or in peace. Nuremberg was a mixed military tribunal.
Article 84 of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 guarantees a captured
soldier the right to be tried in a military tribunal in preference to a civilian
court. Except when soldiers are captured in war, trials are remitted to the
military tribunal of the sending country.**
Some supporters of the icc, such as Italian law professor Flavia
Lattanzi, have constructively observed that the deference due to the
national courts of a sending country under the icc principle of comple-
mentarity also extends to custody of a suspect. If a person were appre-
hended by an overseas power and turned over to the icc, the suspect
would have to be immediately returned by the icc to the country of his
nationality while the prerogative of national investigation was exercised.
*
See Annotated Agenda, General Affairs and External Relations Council, Brussels, 30 September 2002
Press Release: Brussels (27/9/2002). Available at http://ue.eu.int/pressData/en/fc/72291.pdf.
**
See also George A. Finch, Jurisdiction of Local Courts to Try Enemy Persons for War Crimes,
American Journal of International Law14 (1920): 21823.
Ruth Wedgwood replies to her critics
It was sad that the delicate
negotiations for a permanent
criminal court were held captive
to a millenarian schedule.
Hence, the provocative claim that icc treaty-states should have the right
to arrest overseas Americans who are not sheltered by a status-of-forces
agreement proves to be a theological point, by the treatys own terms if
Professor Lattanzis wise reading becomes the prevailing interpretation.
Much Sturm und Drang in the American-European relationship would be
avoided by acknowledging this.
Let me also revisit the question of transparency and criminal law. It
is an age-old tenet that criminal law should be dened with clarity, for the
sake of fairness to the individual. After Nuremberg, Gustav Radbruch
asserted a coordinate principle: that in cases of genocide and gross atroci-
ties, human beings know that the positive law of a criminal regime is not
justiable. But in ordinary times, in the operation of a responsible mili-
tary, there will be many real questions on how to balance reasonable mili-
tary efcacy with the maximum protection of civilians. In the work of the
Yugoslav tribunal, some court personnel have expressed concern at the
proffered view that the court should progressively develop the law in
the context of an individual criminal case. This benign turn of phrase, so-
called progressive development, can mean applying harsh criminal
sanctions for conduct that was not clearly prohibited at the time of its
occurrence. This itself poses questions of human rights and due process
in the courtroom. A responsible commander who believes an attack is
proportional may indeed object to a criminal sanction that could not be
anticipated.
Nor does the role of criminal intent solve the problem, contrary
to Dr. Ambos suggestion. In most criminal prosecutions, there is no
required showing of intent to violate the law as opposed to intent to
carry out the action that will save a commander from the murkiness of
battleeld law. A commander may face an adversary who is perdiously
misusing a protected civilian facility as a weapons platform, and indeed
wonder what to do.
As Judge Goldstone points out, the icc is required to defer to any
national investigation or prosecution conducted in good faith. But the
end of a local investigation, where no charges are led, will not be neatly
accompanied by the reasoned opinion of a US (military) court. Dr.
Ambos misapprehends the procedures for exercising discretion in a com-
mon law system and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It is a
national prosecutor, not a court, who will have the discretion to decline a
case, based on a professional judgment of the law and the facts. It is not
customary to broadcast the detailed reasons for doing so in part to
avoid defaming an individual. Inviting an international panel to inquire
into the internal decision-making processes of a criminal justice system
presents questions about witness condentiality as well as protections for
individual reputation. Even the US Congress is ordinarily discouraged
from requesting criminal case les concerning individuals.
No one has proposed placing American troops outside the rules of
international humanitarian law. In this, Judge Goldstone is simply
wrong. Indeed, the deployment of American judge advocates in the eld
to give advice to military commanders amid hazardous conditions shows
quite the opposite, as does the careful training of American personnel on
rules of engagement, and ongoing alliance debates on air and land war-
fare. But a president and commander-in-chief is also responsible for pro-
tecting his personnel against unwarranted accusation. One may lament
that in some international circles there is little inclination to ascribe any
good faith to American leaders. And closer to home, it is not clear how
one insulates an international court from these attitudes. The brickbats
hurled westward across the Atlantic do indeed reect more than simple
questions of law, as Kai Ambos observes.
Wisdom on both sides of the ocean will be needed to advance the
common vocation of international law using shared norms, the desire
of responsible countries for good reputation, and the ultimate availability
of armed force as a deterrent to the malevolent behavior of dictactors.
The law is not self-executing. The genocides of the 1990s proved that
point. The role of responsible military power in protecting innocent lives
and in thwarting the calculating leaders who prot from ethnic conict
and terrorism must not be ignored in the desire for a heavenly
Rechtsstaat.
Q
No one has proposed
placing American troops
outside the rules of
international humanitarian law.
www.DasErste.de
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FLAG
Since i intend to make a criticism, I should also
make a confession. A few years ago I sought to
understand sorrow by making it the subject of work.
This had a curious and quite unexpected conse-
quence; my work on sorrow often banished it, so
that there were days when the burden was almost
entirely lifted by the study of the burden, when my
happiness at the activity of thought dispelled my
unhappiness at the object of thought. Perhaps it is
impossible to toil unhappily, when ones toil has the
aspect of a calling. When I read Kafka or Beckett, I
sometimes wonder whether any man who could
have written so plentifully and so gorgeously could
really have lived so miserably; and I feel like I have
been vouchsafed a saving secret. One way of forget-
ting the reason for a monument, or of mastering it,
is to throw oneself into the creation of a monument.
Pain becomes your partner. You take meetings with
melancholy. The multiplicity of the meanings of
your grief delights you. Ideas and forms and images
and devices swim in your head, until the confronta-
tion with what has been taken away from you
becomes itself an experience of fullness. There are
moments when you may even regard yourself a
traitor to sorrow.
I do not mean to call them traitors to sorrow,
but I must say that the architects in the aftermath of
September 11 have been altogether too avid. The
perplexity of Ground Zero is not primarily an archi-
tectural perplexity. The theme of monument and
memory is not exclusively or even mainly an archi-
tectural theme. But the New York Times Magazine
proclaimed a few weeks ago that now is the time for
New York to express its ambition through architec-
ture, and reclaim its place as a visionary city. The
magazine presented a series of proposals for lower
Manhattan that, in the words of the papers archi-
tecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, will bring New
York in step with the level of architectural ambition
in Vienna, Tokyo, Rotterdam, and many other cities
overseas. The architecture of New York, he con-
tended, is presently characterized by an intoler-
ance for the progressive ideas that have regenerated
many cityscapes overseas. I do not doubt that he is
correct. But there is something a little grotesque in
the interpretation of Ground Zero as a lucky break
for art, as the opportunity for the advancement of a
particular aesthetic cause. Many of the proposals
are clever; but cleverness is an inadequate response
to suffering. The only design in which I can detect
anything commemorative, anything disturbing, any
universally legible allusion to the fate of the World
Trade Center, is Peter Eisenmans proposal for three
crushed ofce towers on West Street. It is fascinat-
ing, I suppose, that the inverted skyscrapers that
Rem Koolhass would build on West Street represent
a critique of the Cartesian grid, but the Cartesian
grid is not really the villain of this story. At least
the developers do not disguise their own designs
upon the site as an intervention in the history of
rationalism.
Lower Manhattan must not be transformed
into a vast mausoleum, obviously; but neither must
it be transformed into a theme park for advanced
architectural taste. In most of the designs that I have
seen I nd mainly a careerist lightness, a merely pro-
fessional articulateness, a mechanical rehearsal of
established styles uninected by an experience of
horror or a reection on life. It is worth recalling
that the association of architecture with death is an
old one indeed, that it takes us back to the very
beginnings of the art. In the words of one historian,
the earliest surviving structures that we can recog-
nize as architecture were funerary monuments.
What characterized the cairns and barrens and
dolmens of the Neolithic period, and the mausolea
of classical antiquity, and the martyria and the
church-monuments of the Christian civilization of
Europe, and the amboyant funerary structures of
the nineteenth century, was a conception of mortal-
ity or more precisely, a conception of immortality,
of a religious or secular glory. The afterlife of kings
and saints and heroes and ordinary men and
women could be read from these monuments.
They illustrated a religious or philosophical pro-
gram which is to say, a meditation on the
signicance of life. The spiritual challenge at
Ground Zero is plainly much greater. American
society is not animated by a single religious or philo-
sophical program. An architectural monument at
Ground Zero must speak to people of many faiths
and of no faith. Modern tombs, Henry James once
observed, are a skeptical affair. But the various-
ness of American beliefs is not a reason to expel the
question of belief from the site. Ground Zero is a
spiritual opportunity before it is an architectural
opportunity. For this reason, I share the view of
those who insist that the only tting monument at
Ground Zero is a big hole in the ground. We are a
world of worldviews; and a void may hold both
godfulness and godlessness, certainty and doubt,
anger and hope.
peaking for myself, all I
need at Ground Zero is a
void and a ag. I add a
ag, because the attack
upon the World Trade
Center was an act of poli-
tics, of ideology, of his-
tory. It is for our public philosophy that these
enemies wish to destroy us. Individuals were mur-
dered, but owing to their membership in their group.
When I say a void and a ag, I do not mean to say
that the ag will ll the void. I do not impute to my
country, or to my love of it, a salvic power. But it is
hardly controversial, or a collapse into jingoism, to
suggest that we were attacked because we are
Americans, and so Americanism deserves to be
remembered and honored at the site.
Still, we do not mourn only as citizens. We are
hated in our generalities, but in our particularities
we hurt. There are wounds in our spirits that history
cannot close, even if history opened them. If there
should be a void in lower Manhattan, it is not least
because a void is what actually is the case. The people
are gone, the buildings are gone. A monument must
nd a way to reconcile the memory of an event with
the sense of its nality. In memory, the dead live
again; this is one of the many ways in which memory
lies, and one of the many reasons that we have pro-
moted memory into our mysticism, and conferred
upon it such an extraordinary degree of affection and
authority. But the dead are dead, and a monument to
the dead must forbid us to elide that truth. A cold
facticity must ward away a hot sentimentality. The
memorial traditions of architecture, religious and
secular, have generally sought to qualify, or even to
deny, the sense of nality, by furnishing justi-
cations or consolations; but I can think of no more
precise representation of the sense of nality, no
more appropriate place of assembly for the disconso-
late, than a void.
Emptiness is the spatial equivalent of silence,
and it is time for some silence. The banalization of
September 11 was accomplished by the media with
indecent alacrity. Has a catastrophe ever become a
clich so swiftly? (A few weeks ago I heard a cleric
speak sincerely but thoughtlessly about what he
called the tragic events of 7/11.) In this din it is
hard for a thought to grow; but the void is a retort to
the din. A void is an un-architectural monument,
even an anti-architectural monument. Among the
many illusions that crashed to the ground with the
The Non-Architectural Challenge at Ground Zero
By Leon Wieseltier
S
two towers, I would have thought, was the worship
of architecture. Anybody who visited Ground Zero
in those terrible weeks, or who only saw the photo-
graphs of the infernal place, was lled with an
Ozymandian feeling. Those were the ruins of a cer-
tain variety of modern pride. The planes that
brought down the World Trade Center exposed,
along with other frailties, the frailty of matter as a
medium for the perpetuation of human purposes.
ndeed, it may be that the
most lasting monuments
to an ideal of life , the
least perishable remains
of a way of life, are not
physical monuments or
material remains. This is
a conclusion, certainly, that may be drawn from the
experience of a civilization that was for millenia too
weak politically to dream of incarnating itself in
marvelous edices, and so had to devise an immate-
rial home for memory, an incorporeal sustenance. I
refer to Jewish civilization. In the Jewish tradition,
as is well known, the imperative to remember looms
large; but the particular requirements of Jewish
memory are perhaps less familiar. In the Talmudic
discussion of the laws for the reading of the Scroll of
Esther, which enjoins the Jews always to remember
the deliverance in Persia, the fourth century sage
Rava species that this rememberance must be
fullled by means of a book; and it is further stipu-
lated that this book must not only be quietly con-
templated, it must also be read aloud. This latter
point is established by remarking upon the duplica-
tion of language in the scriptural injunction to keep
alive the memory of its eternal foe Amalek. The pas-
sage in Deuteronomy says rst remember what
Amalek did unto thee, and then a few verses later it
adds: thou shalt not forget it. The Talmudic gloss
is that forgetfulness refers to shechicat halev, forget-
fulness in the heart, whereas rememberance, or
zechirah, is bfeh, by the spoken word. A few pages
earlier the Talmud establishes more generally that
zechirah, or rememberance, is the equivalent of
asiyah, or action. Words and rituals: those are the
monuments that the Jewish tradition demands of its
mnemonically oppressed sons and daughters; those
are its most powerful weapons against oblivion. The
Jewish tradition chose wisely not to hold its survival
hostage to physical circumstance. It chose culture
over stone.
We have the option of stone, but I wonder
whether we have the option of culture. Can a culture
that is consecrated to the dispersal of conscious-
ness; that elevates the notorious inconstancy of the
mind into a virtue, so that a consumerist attitude
toward concepts and words and images may be
praised as a cognitive achievement; that gladly loses
itself in a frenzy of materialisms (biological, eco-
nomic, philosophical), of which the reverence for
buildings is just an example; that boasts about its
acceleration of experience beyond any possibility of
genuine fascination or genuine delity; that over-
stimulates the individual so relentlessly that the indi-
vidual is under-stimulated, and nally made
insensible; that fears repetition even as it repeats
everything; that accepts knowledge chiey in the
form of information; that prizes contemporaneity
and believes (in the words of a prominent present-
day critic) that today is the only day we have can
such a culture be a reliable custodian of memory?
Does our language any longer possess the resources
for commemoration? When the mayor of the City of
New York and the governor of the State of New York
renounced the attempt to nd their own words for
the anniversary in lower Manhattan a few weeks ago,
and instead lamely recited, like struggling school-
children, the exalted diction of other leaders in other
times, they conceded a terrible incompetence. Even
the fakery of speechwriting now exceeds their scru-
ples about authenticity.
Shall we commit memory to this? Perhaps we
are right, then, to depend mainly on architecture, on
the power of externalities to manipulate us into the
piety that we seek. Perhaps we are, in our commemo-
rative imagination, too poor for anything except
architecture.
This paper was presented at the
Columbia Seminar on Art and Society
this September.
Q
I
NOTEBOOK of t he ACADEMY
On May 6, 2002, in a ceremony at Berlins
City Hall, Mayor Klaus Wowereit present-
ed Academy trustee Stephen Kellen with
the Ernst Reuter Award as thanks for his
service to the city. The award, which
bears the name of West Berlins distin-
guished former mayor, honors outstand-
ing service to the city in the fields of
scholarship, business, politics, and cul-
ture. The prize was established by the
Berlin Senate in 1954, and recipients
have included Walter Gropius, Robert F.
Kennedy, and Yehudi Menuhin.
In his acceptance speech, Kellen, who
was born in Berlin, mentioned some of
the many links that connect him to the
city. Born on Fasanenstrae and educat-
ed at the renowned Franzsisches
Gymnasium, political circumstances
forced the young Kellen from the city in
1936. A 1941 Nazi law stripped him of his
German citizenship. He began a new life
in the United States, where he married
another born Berliner, Anna-Maria
Kellen, ne Arnhold. Also, auch ick bin
een Berliner, Kellen declared. I became
a very good New Yorker, but despite
everything, I have never lost my attach-
ment to Berlin.
One of the strongest manifestations
of that attachment has been the Kellens
support of the American Academy.
My clever wife and lifes companion of
62 years, our niece Nina von Maltzahn,
and I want to help build after the
Luftbrcke a broader, and I hope,
enduring bridge between the USA and
Berlin.
Stephen Kellen and his family have
provided critical funding for a host of
scholarly and capital programs at the
Academy, endowing fellowships and
numerous renovation projects in and
around the Hans Arnhold Center.
Kellen concluded his remarks by say-
ing that the medal makes me sure that,
not only do I feel like a Berliner, but I am
genuinely welcome here.
Earlier the same day, Mayor Wowereit
and the American Academys chairman
Richard Holbrooke signed an agreement to
extend the Academys lease on the Hans
Arnhold Center through the year 2050.
The attractive villa on Lake Wannsee,
which is owned by the city, is rented to the
American Academy for a symbolic fee of
one Euro per year. Addressing the trustees
on the eve of the double ceremony,
Holbrooke emphasized how enormously
important this is for us. We had only a 15-
year lease and there were only 11 years to
go. The fifty-year lease will strengthen
our position for fundraising and planning
immeasurably. o
German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger
presented Richard Holbrooke, former US
Ambassador to Germany and chairman
of the American Academy, with the
Grand Cross of the Order of Merit at a
ceremony in Washington on July 17. The
decoration is the highest award bestowed
by the Federal Republic of Germany.
The ceremony, followed by a festive
black-tie dinner, took place at the
German Ambassadors residence. Guests
included Federal Reserve chairman Alan
Greenspan, Senator John Glenn, and film
producer George Stevens.
Ischinger conferred the award in
acknowledgment of Holbrookes contin-
uing achievements in fostering US-
German relations, his historic role in
brokering the Dayton Peace Agreement,
and his outstanding service as UN
Ambassador for his country.
Holbrooke, as Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Canadian Affairs,
was the ranking American at the Dayton
peace negotiations of 1995. Ischinger, at
the time Director General for Political
Affairs for the German Foreign Office,
represented Germany at Dayton. The
Dayton peace agreement was a tough
piece of work, Ischinger said. It would
not have come about without your great
personal leadership, tenacity, and cre-
ativity. I feel proud and privileged that I
was part of this historic mission. The
German Ambassador also highlighted
Holbrookes tenure as Ambassador to the
United Nations from 1999 to 2001, dur-
ing which he helped convince American
legislators to end the Congressional
standoff with the UN. You resolved
what had become a major point of fric-
tion between the US and a very large
number of UN member countries, and
you helped preserve and promote a
functioning UN which contrary to what
some seem to believe continues to be a
fundamental cornerstone of the present
world order. o
Top: Berlin s Mayor Klaus Wowereit, left, with
Anna-Maria and Stephen M. Kellen.
Bottom: Ambassador Holbrooke, with Jutta Falke,
Kati Marton, and Ambassador Ischinger.
The Doyen of
Diplomatic Tenacity
Holbrooke Awarded Grand Cross of the Order of Merit
Passionate about Berlin
Steven Kellen Receives City s Highest Honor
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In its fall 2002 semester, the American
Academy welcomes three Distinguished
Visitors to the Hans Arnhold Center
lm director Terrence Malick, economist
Robert Glauber, and writer William
Styron as well as a number of other spe-
cial guests, including Michael Ignatieff,
James Hoge, Norman Mailer, and George
Plimpton.
Robert Glauber, chairman and CEO of
the National Association of Securities
Dealers, gives two talks this October:
Financial Markets in the EU: the appro-
priate Role of Private-Sector Regulation
as part of the Berlin Economic Policy
Forum, and in Dresden Financial
Markets in a Time of Globalization: the
Benets of Private-Sector Regulation.
The Dresden lecture marks the
Academys rst collaboration with the
Drger Stiftung and was also hosted by
Dresden Heritage e.V.
Author William Styron and his wife
Rose Styron will arrive at the Academy
this December. The Styrons visit to
Europe coincides with the world pre-
miere in London of Nicholas Maws opera
Sophies Choice, based on Styrons cele-
brated novel. The Royal Opera House
production will be conducted by Simon
Rattle and directed by Trevor Nunn.
Styrons 1979 novel, which won the
National Book Award, was made into a
successful lm in the 1980s. Other books
include the novel The Confessions of Nat
Turner, which won a Pulitzer Prize in
1967, and more recently, Darkness Visible:
a Memoir of Madness (1990).
In addition to the presentations given
by current Academy fellows, the fall pro-
gram is, as usual, replete with special lec-
tures and events. One week after the
German national elections, Wolfgang
Ischinger, the German Ambassador to
the US was publicly interviewed by John
C. Kornblum former US Ambassador to
Germany and an Academy trustee
about the outlook for German-American
relations in the wake of Chancellor
Schroeders reelection. A frank exchange
ensued between Ambassador Ischinger
and the audience of 130 business, politi-
cal, and cultural leaders. Paul Volcker,
former chairman of the Federal Reserves
board of governors, gave the inaugural
Stephen M. Kellen Lecture in early
October. In mid November, current
Berlin Prize Fellow Vincent Crapanzano
will give the annual Lisa and Heinrich
Arnhold Lecture, in cooperation with
Dresden Heritage e.V. A few weeks later,
in early December, John Lipsky, chief
economist at J. P. Morgan Chase will give
a talk on Lessons Learned about Market
Liberalization as part of the ongoing
series of J. P. Morgan Economic Policy
Briefs.
Various concerts and presentations on
music were slated to take place as well.
These include a discussion between this
falls Holtzbrinck Fellow and New Yorker
music critic Alex Ross and Kent Nagano,
Music Director of the Deutsches
Symphonie Orchester, on Rationality
and Spirituality in the musical thinking
of Olivier Messiaen. Academy Alumni
composers were showcased at various
concerts of chamber music and lecture-
recitals that took place throughout
the fall.
Other gatherings and special visits
enriched the ofcial Academy program.
Michael Ignatieff, Carr Professor of
Human Rights Practice at Harvards
Kennedy School of Government led a pri-
vate seminar in which he outlined his lat-
est book, Empire Lite: Nationbuilding and
the New American Imperialism, to be pub-
lished in France this fall and in the UK
this spring. Later in September, James
Hoge, editor of the distinguished
American policy journal Foreign Affairs,
spoke to a small group of foreign corre-
spondents and Academy fellows about
transatlantic issues.
Receiving word that a literary troika
was to be in Europe, the Academy sponta-
neously opened its doors to George
Plimpton, Norman Mailer and Norris
Church Mailer. Plimpton, writer, editor,
and founder of the literary magazine the
Paris Review, stayed for a few days at the
Hans Arnhold Center with his wife Sarah.
The Academy co-organized a public read-
ing of Plimptons play Zelda, Scott and
Ernest, which brings together excerpts
from the published correspondence of
Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the
writings of Scotts wife Zelda, and the let-
ters that both authors wrote to Maxwell
Perkins, their legendary Scribners edi-
tor. The company was feted on the
Wannsee the following evening by the
Academy fellows and their German
counterparts. o
Maughan Joins
Academy Board
The American Academy welcomes Sir
Deryck C. Maughan, Vice Chairman of
Citigroup, to its board of trustees.
Sir Deryck, who is responsible for
Citigroups mergers and acquisitions
activity, its internet strategy, cross mar-
keting activities, and its business in
Japan, visited the Academy last April and
held a seminar on the post-Enron world
economic outlook. Prior to joining
Citigroup, he was the co-chief executive
ofcer of Salomon Smith Barney, and
before that, chief executive ofcer of
Salomon Brothers. He served as vice
chair of the New York Stock Exchange
from 1996 to 2000.
We are enormously pleased that
Deryck Maughan has joined our Board of
Trustees. Sir Deryck brings to the board
academic distinction, experience as a
government ofcial, outstanding success
in business endeavors, and an active con-
cern for social issues, said the Academys
president Robert H. Mundheim. o
The Scholar as Mentor
Lecture Series Named After Fritz Stern
An annual lecture has been endowed in
honor of the distinguished scholar of
modern German and European intellec-
tual history, Fritz Stern. In addition to his
scholarly work, he has made important
contributions to German-American intel-
lectual and political dialogue. Born in
1926 in Breslau, Stern emigrated to the
US in 1938 and went on to become one of
the worlds most perceptive scholars of
the Germany of his generational
antecedents in his words, its the
Germany I didnt know that I know best.
Sterns early books on German
politics and history were pathbreaking.
They include The Politics Of Cultural
Despair: a Study in The Rise Of The
Germanic Ideology (1961); his classic
work on German political culture,
The Failure of Illiberalism(1972); and
Gold and Iron (1977), a masterful study
of Bismarcks nance minister, Gerson
von Bleichrder. Two of his more recent
books are Dreams and Delusions: The
Drama of German History (1989) and
Einsteins German World (1999).
The emeritus professor at Columbia
University where he taught from 1963
to 1997 is a founding trustee of the
American Academy in Berlin. He has also
served as a mentor in several other con-
texts: as Senior Advisor to the U.S.
Embassy in Bonn 199394; as a member
of the Trilateral Commission 198390;
and as senator of the Deutsche
Nationalstiftung since 1994.
Professor Stern gave the second
annual Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold
Lecture, on the Contortions of German
History, last fall in Dresden.
Professor Dieter Grimm, Rektor of the
Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, will give the
inaugural Fritz Stern lecture in May
2003. Professor Grimm has served on the
German Constitutional Court and is a
noted legal scholar. o
Guest Appearances
Visiting Speakers this Fall
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A Philosophical
Outtake: Schlndorff
on Malick
Terrence Malicks visit to the Hans
Arnhold Center in mid September was
accompanied by the public screenings of
his films Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven
(1978), and The Thin Red Line (1991).
Malick also led a private seminar with
fellows and invited guests. At that time,
Academy Trustee Volker Schlndorff,
director of The Tin Drum and The Legend
of Rita, among other films, made the
following remarks:
There is something that distinguishes
your work from that of all other American
filmmakers, and it may well be a touch of
philosophy. You just told us about how
you were once sent to Colombia on a
reportage and that, after weeks of
investigation you decided not to turn in
your paper. You claimed that you didnt
understand anything. Now i snt that a
philosophers attitude? It certainly does
not mean that you didnt understand what
you saw, but rather, that you refused to
understand it. Any other journalist or
filmmaker would have delivered a definite
analysis. They d have figured it all out
after a few hours at the bar of the best
hotel in town: whos who; what the
connections are; and how the behavior
of all the participants is crystal clear.
Whereas you after weeks in the field,
having seen so much claimed to be
simply too astonished by what you saw
to understand it.
These are films in which somebody is
constantly astonished by what is
happening in front of the camera. I ts as
if you hadnt staged it. Instead of using
storyboards, you say l et s see what
happens. And all along, you dont even
pretend to figure out whats happening or
what youve been doing. I think that is a
philosophical approach to filmmaking.
I t s a rare luxury and the reason why
yo u ve made so few films. You are refu-
sing the rules of audience manipulation.
Another interesting device of yours is
to multiply narrators. As I understand,
you shoot a lot of material like an
anthropologist without it ever being
from any particular characte r s point of
view. Then you talk with your actor-
characters and record some of their
impressions, thoughts about their parts,
and their observations during the
shooting. You then proceed to make a
montage of these heterogeneous pictures
on the visual side, and use these narrated
parts on the audio-track. The audience
becomes aware of the worlds complexity.
Again, I d say that this is a pretty Socratic
approach and i ts quite unexpected in a
major studio picture. o
Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick
Artist jenny holzer (spring 00) has
been commissioned to design a steel
obelisk for the Federal Republic of
Germanys Press and Information Ofce.
It will be her rst open-air installation in
Berlin. The surface of the obelisk carries a
continuous display of current interna-
tional news. holzers work OHis now a
permanent installation at the Neue
Nationalgalerie. sarah morris (Philip
Morris Artist, 19992000) is working on
a new lm project, to be shown in
February 2003 in Wolfsburg. Recent
work by sue de beer (Philip Morris
Artist, 200102) will be shown this fall at
Berlins Kunstlerhaus Bethanien
(October 31November 17). The material
was exhibited earlier this year at the
Sandroni Rey gallery in LA and this fall in
Milan. Cartoonist ben katchor (spring
02) is at work on The Slug-Bearers of
Kayrol Island, a music-theater show, with
composer Mark Mulcahy.
Composer laura schwendinger
(spring 00) has moved to Cambridge for
a year-long Bunting Fellowship at
Harvard. She will be in Berlin in January
2003 for a premiere of her work, per-
formed by the Berlin based ensemble
Spectrum Concerts. Academy trustee
Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, director of
the Berlin Philharmonic, has initiated a
series on American music to take place in
early 2003. On January 21, 2003 works of
Academy alumni composers martin
bresnick (spring 01) and michael
hersch (spring 02) will be performed at
the Philharmonic. michael herschs
Octet for Strings premiered this August at
the Schloss Neuhardenberg in
Brandenburg. Both bresnick and his
wife, pianist Lisa Moore, are teaching at
the Eastman School of Music, Moore as a
visiting Associate Professor of Piano and
Bresnick as visiting Professor of
Composition. (He continues to teach at
Yale.) bresnicks score to the major pbs
2-hour documentary lm Mohammad:
Life of a Prophet will air in the US on
December 18.
The Academys rst Distinguished
Senior Fellow, arthur miller (fall 98),
received Spains most respected literary
award: the Prince-of-Asturia-Prize. He is
its third non-Spanish recipient. Middlesex
by jeffrey eugenides (spring 01),
published this September, has received
considerable attention. Michiko
Kakutani of the New York Times has
described the novel as an uproarious
epic, at once funny and sad, about mis-
placed identities and family secrets.
Laura Miller, also in the Times, called it a
colossal act of curiosity, of imagination
and of love. Writer and scholar aris
fioretos (fall 01) spent last year as a
visiting fellow at All Souls College,
Oxford, and will join the German
Department faculty at Rutgers University
next spring. His new novel Die Wahrheit
ber Sascha Knisch will be published in
German translation next February. The
novel that ward just (spring 99)
worked on during his residency at the
Hans Arnhold Center, The Weather in
Berlin, was published early this summer.
Andrew Nagorski, writing in Newsweek,
praised the novels precisely etched
scenes, the elegiac passages that have the
taste of a full-bodied wine and the rumi-
nations and conversations that are more
in keeping with early-20th-century
American literary tradition than with the
staccato style of most contemporary nov-
els. Writer ann harleman (fall 00)
was a featured reader at the second annu-
al pen/New England Eros Night. Her
short story Nothing was included in
The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-
2000. Another story, Meanwhile,
appeared in the summer 2002 issue of
Southwest Review, and she has lately
written several reviews for the New York
Times Book Review and the Boston Globe.
sander gilman (200001), whose
biography of East German writer Jurek
Becker has just been translated into
German, returned to the Hans Arnhold
Center this October to discuss the work
in a public dialogue with Klaus Scherpe.
Literary scholar and translator mark
harman (200001) spent six weeks in
Ireland this summer at the Tyrone
Guthrie Centre, an Irish arts colony. He
worked on the new translation of Kafkas
The Man who Disappeared [Amerika].
Harmans essay Making everything
uncanny: Kafkas Deletions in the
Manuscript of Das Schloss and What
They Can Tell us about his Writing
Process, was recently published in the
Kafka Companion. He also was a consult-
ant for the exhibition The City of K.: Franz
Kafka and Prague currently on view at the
Jewish Museum in New York.
Scholar daniel boyarin (fall 01)
was in Berlin to deliver a lecture
Shattering the Logos. Between Church
Fathers and Talmudic Masters in the
HaAtelier series organized jointly by
the Jewish Museum and the Freie
Universitt. Anthropologist ruth
mandel (fall 00) with Caroline
Humphrey co-edited the volume Markets
and Moralities: Ethnographies of
Postsocialism, published this June.
Margari ta tupi tsyn (spring 00),
curator and art historian of the Russian
avant-garde, saw the publication of
Malevich and Filmthis May. Her book
Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina:
Between the Private and the Public will
come out next June. Musicologist and
Bach biographer christoph wolff
(spring 01) will co-direct the 2003
Leipzig Bach Festival, together with the
festivals current musical director Georg
Christoph Biller and Elmar Weingarten,
director of the Frankfurt-am-Main-based
group Ensemble Modern. Last April,
wolff was honored by Foreign Secretary
Joschka Fischer for his role in returning
the Berliner Sing Akademie archive to
Berlin.
Architect hillary brown (spring
01) is a member of the jury of an interna-
tional design competition for the rst
phase master plan of the American
University in Beirut. Bosch Fellow derek
chollet (spring 02) has been appoint-
ed foreign policy advisor to Senator John
Edwards of North Carolina (D). howard
m.wachtel (fall 99) received the
McKeever Institute of Economic Policy
Prize for his article Tax Distortion in the
Global Economy, the subject of his lec-
ture at the Academy during his stay as
Distinguished Visiting Scholar. He has
also completed the book he was working
on at the time: Street of Dreams
Boulevard of Broken Hearts: A History of
Wall Street, to be published in the spring
of 2003. Bosch Fellow john j. judis
(spring 02) recently co-authored The
Emerging Democratic Majority with Ruy
Teixeira, published this August.o
Alumni Accomplishments
An Update
The Berl i n Journal 21 The Berl i n Journal 21
Sue de Beer, Tina Gray, C-print, 1999.
Door and Mirror, C-print, 2000.
Courtesy of Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles.
More images available at http://www.sevenseven.com/debeer
Have you heard Tom Farmer tell the story
of how in 1961 he secured the release of a
young US citizen from a Stasi prison in
East Berlin? This is the short version:
The Berlin Wall had gone up a week
before, and an American graduate stu-
dent named Frederic Pryor was missing
somewhere in East Berlin. His distraught
parents were advised to procure the serv-
ices of a Washington lawyer named Tom
Farmer. Farmer had once worked for the
cia and had excellent contacts at the
White House and the State Department
due to his ties to the Kennedy administra-
tion. He set his political contacts into
play on behalf of the Pryor family.
Although no one in the West knew it,
the student had been languishing in jail
under suspicion of spying. He was in fact
entirely innocent. His dissertation on
East German and Soviet economic rela-
tions was what got him into trouble. The
day he was arrested he had been deliver-
ing copies of it to colleagues at the
Humboldt University who had helped
him with his research. The Stasi discov-
ered that the thesis contained classied
information. Pryor protested that he
had, in fact, found it at the library, but
the Stasi were convinced that they had
uncovered an elaborate case of espionage.
It took months to forge the deal secur-
ing Pryors release. It was for reasons not
connected to the hapless graduate student
a period of extraordinarily high tension
between White House and Kremlin, and a
full-blown diplomatic crisis was under-
way. The US refused to recognize East
Germany at the time and was dealing
exclusively with the Soviets. Pryors
release took place six months later, on the
same day in February 1962 as a high-
prole spy trade on Berlins Glienicke
Bridge: the Russian Abel for the American
Powers. Farmer had quietly arranged that
Pryors release would be part of the deals
small change. This saved the Russians
and East Germans the embarrassment of
admitting their error. And it got Frederic
Pryor back to Yale. He was left at Check-
point Charlie and slipped back into the
West without fanfare.
That was fun, Farmer recalls. The
long months in the gray zone between
politics and intelligence activities gave
him an exclusive glimpse behind the Iron
Curtain. I like to do unorthodox things,
he says with a mischievous smile that
belies his 79 years.
The anecdote contains many of the
ingredients that make up Farmers com-
plex personality. There are elements of
legal practice and economics, an undeni-
able pinch of intelligence work, and of
course plenty of international politics.
Most important is his style, which pairs
discretion with efciency. Even when he
deals with politics at the highest level
which he often does Farmer always
keeps a low prole.
Farmer effortlessly crosses borders of
all kinds territorial, cultural, linguistic,
professional, and personal. In Germany
people rarely change horses in mid-
stream; once a civil servant, always a civil
servant, as the saying goes. But Farmer
has made change his modus operandi
switching between government agencies,
private practice, and public causes.
Moreover, his career testies to the
American determination not to forsake
Germany. It is exactly Farmers mixture
of self-condence and concern that has
saved Germany from going to the dogs.
If serialized biographies of Farmer
have not yet appeared, blame it on his
self-deprecating manner and preference
for sober facts. From Day One, my life
had something to do with German-
American relations, says Farmer. He was
born in Berlin to German-American par-
ents. His American father, Dr. Laurence
Farmer, was trained in Berlin and taught
at the Charit Hospital in the early 1920s.
He married Else Dienemann, a fellow-
doctor who came from a cultured, well-
to-do German-Jewish family. Else Farmer
became an American citizen, and the cou-
ple raised their son as an American. (He
can still remember the excitement of
Charles Lindberghs arrival in Berlin and
the American pennant that decorated
his boyhood bicycle.) When Hitler came
to power, the Farmer family did not hesi-
tate; they left for New York City on
September 26, 1933. Tom was ten.
His father went on to teach at Cornell
Medical School, and his mother prac-
ticed as a pediatrician.
Arriving at Harvard in 1940, the
young man encountered a decidedly iso-
lationist majority of fellow students and
faculty. The editorials he regularly sub-
mitted to the Harvard Crimson urged the
US to join the war. They went unpub-
lished until Pearl Harbor, when they
Trustee Profile: Thomas Farmer
The Discreet Charm of the
Transatlantic Advocate
By Jrgen Hogrefe
Thomas Farmer (left), with Gilbert Kujovich
of the Council to the Intelligence Oversight Board,
and President Carter.
Courtesy of Jimmy Carter Library and Museum.
landed him a spot on the editorial board.
Finally, after graduating in1943, fate
offered him the chance to set his political
ambitions into motion.
After a stint in the infantry and time
with a unit of Japanese code breakers
(he spoke not a word of Japanese),
Farmer was nally moved to the
Pentagon, where the tailor-made job of
locating and evaluating German military
units awaited him. His war work contin-
ued a year after VE-Day. During that
time, forty of the German Wehrmachts
brightest surviving staff ofcers had been
brought from powcamps to Maryland to
share details of their military training
methods with a team of allied British,
American, and Canadian ofcers. Farmer
led one of the teams in the extended intel-
ligence-gathering mission.
His postwar legal studies which
included two years at Oxford and a
Harvard Law degree were pursued with
an eye on Germany. In 1949, while still a
law student, the Rockefeller Foundation
funded Farmers rst trip back to
Germany and he saw his native city for
the rst time since 1933. While in
Germany, Farmer approached the US
High Commissioner in Bonn and offered
to contribute a study on the question of
whether the allies should recognize the
validity of Germanys pre-war commer-
cial treaties, which had been disrupted by
war and unconditional surrender. Were
the postal treaties valid under interna-
tional law? How did things stand with
German copyright laws? To Farmers
delight, his conclusion that the pre-war
treaties were legally valid was incorpo-
rated into the Allied-German treaty that
resulted in the establishment of the
Federal Republic of Germany.
Farmer graduated in June 1950, just at
the beginning of the Korean War. Many
of his Harvard Law class were recalled to
military service. Farmer became a covert
operations ofcer in the cia. Adventu-
rous? It certainly was. But it was also
work of everyday secrecy in a time of
growing confrontation between two
superpowers. Alongside a lot of work in
the third-world, he was also active in the
German section.
With the wars end in 1954, Farmer
thought it was high time to try my hand
at my actual profession: practicing law.
He joined the white-shoe rm of
Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett in New
York in 1954, where his excellent German
brought him a number of special tasks.
One project involved persuading the
State Department to reverse its policy of
breaking up the German steel and coal
empire of Krupp. It gave me unusual
insight into German postwar politics and
economics, says Farmer.
A few years later he moved to the
rms Washington branch and began to
work for jfks election campaign after
hours. He had been impressed by
Kennedys imaginative speech calling for
America to serve as an honest broker
between independence movements in the
third world and the former colonial pow-
ers. After the victory, he advised on
appointments to the State and Defense
Departments in the new administration.
President Kennedys assassination did
not end a brilliant international career.
In 1964 President Johnson appointed
him General Counsel for the Foreign Aid
Agency, where he dealt mainly with Asia
and Latin America and helped to estab-
lish, among other things, the Asian
Development Bank.
In 1976 he joined Jimmy Carters elec-
tion campaign and found himself in the
best of both worlds for the next four
years. By day he worked as a Washington
lawyer for the small rm he had joined in
1967. By night he went to his White
House ofce, where he chaired President
Carters bipartisan Intelligence Oversight
Board, which had been set up in the wake
of the Watergate scandal by President
Ford. President Carter, to whom Farmer
reported directly, was extremely interes-
ted in all sensitive intelligence opera-
tions. The other members were former
Senator Albert Gore senior and the for-
mer Pennsylvania Governor (and Fords
US Ambassador to the UN) William
Warren Scranton. The assignment
involved much liaison work with British,
German, and French intelligence chiefs.
In his dealings with Germany, Farmer
worked with Helmut Schmidts chief of
staff and deepened his contacts with
Germans across the political spectrum.
Professional networkers are astound-
ed at the extent of Tom Farmers network
and its relevance to todays power struc-
tures. It is no surprise that in 1994
Richard Holbrooke, then the US Ambas-
sador in Bonn, saw Farmer as an ideal
Founding Chairman for the American
Academy in Berlin, together with Henry
Kissinger and Richard von Weizscker.
Farmer is at home in both Germany and
America, equally uent in the spheres of
politics and economics. He is gifted at
bringing people together even appar-
ently irreconcilable opponents. At a time
when some critics suggested that the
Academy had unrealistically ambitious
aims, Farmers personal attributes his
creativity, self-awareness, and credibility
were indispensable.
Farmer is willing to take on the chores
inherent to initiating big projects. In this
case, taking the working oar meant not
only contributing to the discussion about
the Academys mission (Would it be an
academy of art or a political institute?)
but also helping to nd a house for the
Academy, bringing exceptional members
to the board, and starting the process of
nding private funds. His skill and hard
work paid off; without Farmer and his
efcient work at the outset, the American
Academy would certainly not be where it
is today. On leaving government service
in 2001, Ambassador Holbrooke agreed
to succeed Farmer as chairman and has
built on this sturdy foundation.
Fifty years after Hitler, can Berlin
should Berlin become the sort of intel-
lectual metropolis that once drew his
American father to it? Farmers answer is
yes. The American Academy should
make a signicant contribution to the
cultural development of the German cap-
ital so that it can become a world-class
city again.
By the way, have you ever heard Tom
Farmers story about how he met Richard
Holbrooke? It was on one of his journeys
to Vietnam, during Farmers time in the
Foreign Aid Agency. On July 1, 1965 he
landed with Air Force One in Saigon. The
talent and diligence of one of the ofcers
there impressed him. When Farmer got
back to Washington, he spoke to the
State Department about a young man
whom he could recommend for higher-
ranking assignments. But that is another
story . . .
Jrgen hogrefe is a Berlin-based editor at
Der Spiegel. He is author, most recently, of
Gerhard Schrder: Ein Portrt.
paid special attention to it. Music, writes
Christensen, was considered a challeng-
ing subject for philosophical analysis;
an opaque language system to decode;
and an acoustical phenomenon to ana-
lyze mechanistically. The chair of the
music department at the University of
Chicago is writing a volume on the eigh-
teenth century for the Oxford University
Press series Music and Ideas. How, he
asks, did the ideals and ideologies of the
Enlightenment have an impact on musi-
cians? This fall the Anna-Maria Kellen
Fellow investigates a trove of period
music theory on hand in Berlin, includ-
ing technical and pedagogical music
manuals and theoretical treatises. The
result will be a kind of hermeneutics of
music pedagogy a picture of the prac-
tice of eighteenth-century musicians and
the philosophers who inuenced them.
Christensen has authored a prize-
winning monograph on Rameau and
articles ranging in subject from
Schoenberg to four-hand piano transcrip-
tions. He performed some examples of
the latter with pianist George Rousseau
at a lecture-recital this fall.
Legal scholar and senior fellow at the
World Policy Institute Belinda Cooper
spent seven years (198794) in Berlin
working as a journalist and observing the
impact of the fall of the Wall on a range of
legal and social issues. This fall the Berlin
Prize Fellow will assemble material for
her book The Involved State: Single
Motherhood and Social Policy, which
examines European particularly
German family law. Cooper, whose
work combines scholarly research with
rst-hand reporting, wants to stimulate
discussion among US policymakers.
America has traditionally dened family
well-being in terms of an ideal, placing
the chief responsibility for childrearing
on parents. How, she asks, might
Europes alternative methods help the
US approach family policy more realisti-
cally? The project scrutinizes tax incen-
tives and welfare entitlements in addition
to looking at social attitudes toward sex
education and working mothers, for
example. An additional eld of interest
for Cooper is the International Criminal
Court, and she will lead a seminar on the
topic in mid November with a talk on its
problems and prospects.
Returning for a second term at the Hans
Arnhold Center is Berlin Prize Fellow
Vincent Crapanzano (Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellow, Fall 01), professor of
comparative literature and anthropology
at the City University of New York. He is
preparing his book The Imaginative
Horizon: Toward an Anthropology of the
Imagination for publication in addition to
beginning a new series of thematic essays
about how people narrate their lives in
By Miranda Robbins
What does the great 1997 Japanese crash
in property prices have in common with
the overall Southern Asia economic crisis
of the late 1990s and Wall Streets more
recent troubles? Is it extraordinary that
three major economic bubbles have burst
in the past ten years? Robert Z. Aliber, win-
ner of J.P. Morgan International Prize in
Finance Policy and Economics at the
American Academy this fall, has won-
dered aloud whether such bubbles burst
with the same statistical regularity that
airlines crash. Sometimes, to everyones
horror, there are three in a row. Unlike
plane crashes, however, economic crash-
es are not freak events. Bubbles burst for
a reason. Aliber has taught at the
University of Chicago since 1965, where
he is professor of international econom-
ics and nance at its Graduate School of
Business. The title of the public lecture he
presented in Berlin this September was
Its a Bubble, Stupid! The Outlook for
the US Economy Following the Implosion
of the Asset Price Bubble.
Nina Bernstein, who joined the New York
Times in 1995 as a national correspon-
dent for legal affairs and investigative
projects, has spent most of the last
decade covering poverty and the impact
of welfare and child welfare changes in
the US. She has considerable experience
in Germany and Europe, too, having
reported for Newsday from Berlin in
199091 and Bosnia in the summer of
1992. This fall, the Holtzbrinck Fellow
turns her attention to social welfare
matters in Europe. In addition to writing
a series of dispatches from Europe for the
Times, Bernstein has titled her long-term
project Women and Children First:
Social Welfare in a Time of Globaliza-
tion. Its scope includes single mother-
hood and childcare, orphanages and
adoption, prostitution, and the front
lines of the current debate over the cul-
tural assimilation of immigrants. Berlin,
writes Bernstein, is a unique laboratory
for studying the problems and alternative
solutions emerging under the strain of a
global trend toward retrenching state-
guaranteed social welfare.
Kant wrote that instrumental music was
more pleasure than culture, a view that
was widespread before 1790. By the time
the French Revolution had run its course,
however, a new attitude prevailed.
Instrumental music had come to be seen
as the bearer of social, moral, and even
political ideas. Musicologist Mark Evan
Bonds attributes the intellectual shift not
only to Beethovens mighty symphonies
but also to developments in philosophy
and political thought. The revival of aes-
thetic idealism, for example, made it pos-
sible to hear music as a reection of a
higher, more spiritual realm lying beyond
the world of phenomena. Having shed
its status as secondary art, the symphony
went on to enjoy unprecedented social
importance between 1790 and 1840.
Bonds book-in-progress, The Music of
Ideas: The Culture of the Symphony in the
Age of Beethoven, will give
special attention to the
rise of German national-
ism. The German sym-
phony, a communal
genre surrounded by vig-
orous festival culture,
had broad appeal as a
metaphor for the emerg-
ing state. The
DaimlerChrysler Fellow
is professor at the
University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Kant may have stated
that music was more
pleasure than culture,
but according to Thomas
Christensen, many Enligh-
tenment thinkers in fact
LI FE & LETTERS at t he Hans Ar nhol d Cent er
Proles in Scholarship
Introducing the Academy Fall Fellows and their Projects
Scholars in the grass (from left): John Phillip Santos, Thomas Christensen, Belinda Cooper, Simone Di Piero, Nina Bernstein,
Mark Evan Bonds, Vincent Crapanzano, Caroline Bynum, Paul Schwartz, Richard Danielpour, Robert Aliber, and Alex Ross.
P
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t
r
a
it
s
: M
ik
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M
in
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a
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the wake of traumatic change. The Ima-
ginative Horizon begins with a series of
questions about the images, dreams,
projections, calculations, and prophe-
cies that give form and substance to
the human conception of the beyond.
How, he asks, do our images of the
beyond rattle our assumptions about
the reality from which our constructions
are made? This complex project
addresses phenomena as diverse as Hopi
grammar, the cargo cults of New Guinea,
and Christian fundamentalism in the US.
Crapanzano gives the Lisa and Heinrich
Arnhold Lecture in Dresden this
November.
Richard Danielpour has composed for
many of todays great musical talents,
among them Dawn Upshaw, Yo-Yo Ma,
Jessye Norman, Frederika von Stade, and
Emanuel Ax. Last season included the
premieres of his double concerto for vio-
lin and cello In the Arms of the Beloved, for
Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, and the
Iris Chamber Orchestra, and Piano
Concerto No. 3 (Zodiac Variations), for
Gary Graffman and the National
Symphony under Leonard Slatkin. The
November 2001 premiere of the monu-
mental choral American Requiemwas ded-
icated to the victims of September 11,
and a recording of it was released earlier
this year. This fall, as Alberto Vilar Music
Fellow, Danielpour will compose part of
his rst opera, Margaret Garner. Toni
Morrisons libretto is based on historical
events in the life of Garner, a Kentucky
woman who managed to escape slavery
with her children. When captured, the
desperate woman drowned her children
but did not succeed in taking her own
life. The subsequent trial was notorious
in antebellum America for the debate it
sparked: should Garner be charged with
murder or the destruction of property?
San Francisco-based poet, essayist, and
translator W.S. Di Piero is on leave this
semester from Stanfords English depart-
ment. The Berlin Prize Fellow is prepar-
ing two books: a collection of poetry (his
eighth) and a volume of essays about art
(his third). Di Piero has spent consider-
able time in Italy and has translated
Leopardi, among others. Now, on his rst
visit to Berlin, he is keen to explore the
citys fabled art collections. Di Piero
writes about art in the Threepenny Review
and has a regular art column in the San
Diego Reader. Among other honors, he
was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 2001. The title of his
next book of art essays I Made You Look:
New and Selected Essays comes from a
favorite childhood rhyme: I made you
look, you dirty crook,/ I stole your moth-
ers pocketbook./ I turned it in, I turned
it out, I turned it into sauerkraut.
His most recent book of poetry is
Skirts and Slacks.
New Yorker Journalist Jane Kramer
(Holtzbrinck Fellow, Fall 01) returns to
the Academy this fall to take up the Ellen
Maria Gorrissen Fellowship. She is the
author, most recently, of Lone Patriot: The
Short Career of an American Militiaman,
an examination of the militia movement
in the United States. Of this book, Ward
Just notes that Kramer has summoned
all her formidable intelligence, usually
lavished on Paris and Berlin, to describe
some angry Americans in rural
Washington State. The results are bril-
liant. Jane Kramer is a poet of discontent
and delusion, and in Whatcom County
she has found a great subject. Her
thoughtful prole of German opera direc-
tor Nikolaus Lehnhoff appeared in the
fall 2001 issue of the Berlin Journal.
Apart from the odd surgical strike
abroad, the New Yorker music critic Alex
Ross seldom gets to observe a musical
scene outside New York for an extended
period. Writing of a visit to Berlin made
some years ago, Ross noted that the
music scenes in Berlin seemed less
parochial, more open to each other, more
prone to synthesis. There was a feeling
that something extraordinary was about
to happen. Ross takes up his
Holtzbrinck Fellowship with several proj-
ects in mind. His New Yorker articles cover
Berlins classical world, including Sir
Simon Rattles much-anticipated arrival
at the Berlin Philharmonic. He is simulta-
neously plotting out a biography of
Richard Strauss whose polymorphous
world is the focus of a long-term project
and continuing to search for the traces
of Berlins musical 1920s the period in
which the city harbored Schoenberg,
Weill, Klemperer, Furtwngler, Busoni,
and Hindemith, among so many musical
legends. Ross participated in a public dia-
logue on the work of Olivier Messiaen
with Kent Nagano and give a lecture on
modernist politics and the broken
friendship of Strauss and Schoenberg.
Writer and lmmaker John Phillip Santos
will devote his Berlin Prize Fellowship to
researching and writing a sequel to his
family memoir, Places Left Unnished at
the Time of Creation. As the rst book
delved into the history of his fathers
Mexican family, the new book takes as a
point of departure the richly documented
history of his mothers family. This fami-
lys Spanish-colonial Tejano roots in the
New World reach as far back as 1710.
Inspired by recent readings in genetics
and cosmology Santos plans to explore
more than his own genealogy. The book
is a meditation on history that reaches
farther back than any familys memory
to the history that can now be read in our
dna. If Berlin seems an unlikely base for
preparing an account of a mestizo life at
the turn of the millennium, Santos sees
it as the ideal setting for working out
some of the questions his project encom-
passes. If a family history extends to
even older places of origin, how do new
developments in areas as diverse as
genetics, digital media, astronomy, and
cosmology change our notion of human
identity?
After September 11, 2001, intensied
concerns for public security led lawmak-
ers in both Europe and America to seek
better ways of sharing and coordinating
data. The task of harmonizing disparate
international standards of data protec-
tion to enable, for example, the efcient
sharing of information about terrorists,
their bank accounts, and their communi-
cations has become especially urgent.
So have caveats from data privacy advo-
cates. Paul M. Schwartz, a professor at
Brooklyn Law School and leading inter-
national expert on information privacy
law, is scrutinizing the range of recent
changes. The Berlin Prize Fellow has sin-
gled out two categories: the international
harmonization of data protection
regimes and the convergence of various
laws about intercepting communications
media for everything from wireless
phones to modem cables into one uni-
tary standard. Comparing the American
approach to telecommunication law and
laws of nancial privacy to similar poli-
cies in the EU and Germany in particular,
Schwartz will try to suggest a best policy
response for the new century.
Stephen S. Szabo, professor of European
studies at Johns Hopkins, has been fol-
lowing German and European security
and diplomacy for years. During his
short-term Bosch Public Policy
Fellowship at the American Academy he
turns his attention to European-
American relations in the post-
September-11 world. While divergence
in transatlantic relations is hardly new,
notes Szabo, the gap between US and its
nato allies seems to be widening
despite the outpouring of support that
came from Europe in the wake of last
September 11. In addition to the imbal-
ance in military power and technology,
Szabo sees the outlines of a burgeoning
crisis of condence among those nations
closest to it in values, culture and inter-
ests. If the US Administration is indeed
moving away from the pillars of its cold-
war strategy of deterrence and contain-
ment and toward a new Bush Doctrine
of preemptive action against states and
terrorist groups that develop weapons of
mass destruction, what will the long-
term effects be for transatlantic diplo-
macy, for the Middle East, and for the
world at large?
Journalist and Asia watcher Marsha Vande
Berg is editor of the World Report, a
bimonthly newsletter that highlights
drivers of globalization in the interna-
tional political economy and their effects
on business and public policy for an
audience of global marketplace execu-
tives. The paper is organized by region
and describes potential for points of
friction, country to country and the pri-
vate sector versus public interest. Vande
Berg is also principal of International
Business Advisors, which supplies risk
analysis and other research for business
and foundation executives concerned
with Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
She arrives at the Academy mid-semester
to take up a short-term Bosch Public
Policy Fellowship with a project focusing
on the relationship of the transatlantic
alliance with Asia. o
Aliber Bernstein Christensen Cooper Crapazano Danielpour DiPiero Kramer Ross Santos Schwartz
The historian Caroline Bynum is at work
on a study of the astonishing promi-
nence of blood in late-medieval religious
practice. Germany, she says, was once
dotted with holy sites that claimed to
house not the symbolic representation of
Christs blood but the actual substance
itself.
It seems that Christian piety in late-
medieval Europe was awash in blood.
Painted crucixions show blood spilling
from Christs wounds and from his
thorn-encircled brow. Bloody imagery
also permeated theological writings, such
as those of Saint Catherine of Siena, who
exhorted her confessor to be aame
and drowned in this [Christs]
sweetest blood.
Devotional relics at cult sites in
Germany included vials of the blood
Christ shed on the cross and blood-
stained artifacts of the crucixion. A dif-
ferent, but equally revered, type of object
was related not to Calvary but to the
Eucharist, especially the host, believed to
be the esh of Christ. Cults sprang up
around miraculous hosts alleged to
have shed blood. An additional category
of relic consisted of devotional images
like paintings and crucixes that bled.
Bynum argues that not all these forms
of blood worship t into a single
Eucharistic interpretation. Each blood
cult had a different set of historical, theo-
logical, and social circumstances sur-
rounding it. The cults surrounding
Calvary relics and bleeding devotional
objects, for example, do not relate to the
Eucharist, while the phenomenon of the
bloody host obviously does.
Bynum, whose research is largely
focused on the history of the body, holds
Columbia Universitys highest faculty
honor: a University Professorship. Her
many books include Holy Feast and Holy
Fast (1987) and, more recently,
Metamorphosis and Identity (2002).
The Resurrection of the Body in Western
Christianity, 2001336, published in 1995,
was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize
from the American Philosophical Society
for the best book in cultural history.
This fall, as the American Academys
Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow, she is pur-
suing a number of case studies. One con-
cerns a blood sample brought to
Schwerin by the crusader Henry the Lion
and installed in a dedicated chapel there.
In addition to plotting routes between
Wannsee and sites like Schwerin, Bynum
is giving special attention to paintings of
the Gregorsmesse, which show the
encounter of Saint Gregory (540-604)
with a bleeding crucix. She is exploring
why this sixth-century blood miracle was
so popular in Germany between the years
1400 and 1550.
The legend of the bleeding host has
been connected to charges of host dese-
cration made against Jews. One familiar
type of account involves Jews who buy (or
steal) a host and subsequently stab it
with a knife or use it for their own rituals.
The host begins to bleed. A blood miracle
is born. Bynum points out that Jews were
not alone in being accused of host dese-
cration. Gentile women of the lower
classes were also charged, often in con-
nection with fertility rituals. But the
themes popularity is illuminating for
what it says about the growth of anti-
Semitism.
While one group of scholars continues
to peer into the ecclesiastical politics sur-
rounding various cult sites; another deep-
ens the already well-studied connection
between such cults and eucharistic theol-
ogy; and another focuses on how certain
cases pertain to anti-Semitic blood libels,
Bynum has taken on the task of tying
these various scholarly interests together.
The result is sure to be a sensitive
overview of bloods importance in late-
medieval religious life. A study of blood
metaphors and blood devotion tells us a
good deal about the development (both
sinister and glorious) of piety in
Germany on the eve, and during the rst
decades of the Reformation. o
Fellow Focus
Caroline Bynum Examines a Medieval Obsession
often spools his narrative back-
wards like a Super-8-lm, careful to
include the whirring and chirping
of the soundtrack. He abruptly
leaves characters behind who no
longer play an important role, and
sometimes he even addresses the
reader directly in the Homeric style.
Eugenides has called Franzen a
post-postmodernist, and he
would surely afx the label to him-
self without hesitation. Both
authors grew up backwards;
weaned on Joyce, they discovered
Tolstoy only later. They perfected
experimental writing before the
conventional or more accurately,
experiment was their convention.
Before we learned how to tell sto-
ries, we deconstructed them. But
that is now history. In the mean-
time, Eugenides is just as skilled as
Franzen at creating a whole from
broken pieces. Even if it does take
some time.
Eugenides worked on Middlesex
for eight years, three of them in
Berlin rst on a daad fellowship,
then as a fellow at the American
Academy, and nally as a poetic
Gastarbeiter in Schneberg. For
German readers who must wait
until next fall for Rowohlt Verlags
translation to appear, the authors
stay here only increases the novels
appeal. In fact, Eugenides added
several passages to Middlesex that
take place in contemporary Berlin,
and they are some of the most
serene and appealing of the
entire book.
It is near the end of the story that
we see Cal, or Callie (or maybe
Eugenides himself ) sitting in one of
the forlorn leather chairs in
Mies van der Rohes Neue National-
galerie, contentedly smoking a
Davidoff Grand Cru No. 3, as the
lights of the new Potsdamer Platz
glow in the background. S/he is on
the verge of falling in love, and we
begin to realize how well-spent the
daad and American Academy fel-
lowship money was. For it lured
Eugenides to Berlin, where he now
lives with his wife and daughter. It
has been a fortuitous investment for
both the author and for Berlin.
By Heinrich Weng
From the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, September 26, 2002
John Corigliano, 64, bears no
resemblance whatsoever to the
disheveled, professorial contempo-
rary composer native to these parts
the quintessential dinosaur, that
is, dragged along by the culture
industry without so much as a
whimper, never bothering to ask
himself if the reason no one listens
to his music is because of the all too
frequently misunderstood, fty-
year-old term avant-garde.
At least this is how John
Corigliano sees it. He is both direct
and relaxed, and always eloquent.
The Oscar and Pulitzer Prize win-
ner, one of Americas most highly
regarded composers, has been invited
by Alberto Vilar to stay at the
American Academys Wannsee villa
for two weeks. He is set to celebrate
his symphonic debut in Germany at
no less prestigious a venue than the
Berlin Philharmonic, under the
direction of Seiji Ozawa.
Ozawa was determined to bring
Coriglianos Symphony No. 2 to a
distinguished institution on this
side of the Atlantic, a symphony
that he commissioned for the
Boston Symphony Orchestra in
2000. Ozawa is convinced of the
quality of the piece, which evolved
from a string quartet written for
the disbanding Cleveland Quartet
and was then revised for a string
orchestra. Corigliano never tires of
sure to spawn amazement, curiosi-
ty, and disbelief all the ingredients
for a literary bestseller.
Middlesex is many things simulta-
neously. It is a fty-year-long family
saga of Greek immigrants in the US;
a chronology of the rise and fall of
the American automotive industry;
a carefully constructed puzzle for
classical philologists; and a lively
treatise on the question of whether
a persons fate is determined by
hereditary factors or society a
question the novel answers in a
manner that remains true to current
trends. Above all else, though, it is
an account of the tremendous jour-
ney of a mutated gene through the
blood of three generations, and its
subsequent bloom within a small
child the bizarre drama of an
American hermaphrodite who, as is
explained on the rst page, was
born twice: First, as a baby girl, on a
remarkably smogless Detroit day in
January of 1960; and then again, as
a teenage boy, in an emergency
room near Petoskey, Michigan, in
August of 1974.
Calliope Helen Stephanides
called Callie in the rst (female)
part of her life, then later, after the
redesignation, called Cal is not
only an almost mythological cre-
ation because of her ancient name:
s/he is a medical wonder, a being
straddling genders. S/he suffers
from 5-alpha-reductase deciency
syndrome, which causes a newborn
to appear female until s/he under-
goes puberty, at which point the
male chromosome takes over.
Eugenides description of the pains
this mixed creature endures when
beginning to grasp that s/he is liv-
ing inside a boys body, his portray-
al of the artful affectation of a suc-
cessful New Yorker sexologist, who
thinks he has found the discovery of
a lifetime in Cal, and his representa-
tion of the rage of the Greeks during
the sacking of Smyrna by Turkish
troops in 1922 are all terrifyingly
good it is magnicent literature.
Eugenides is a realist with a sharp
attention to detail, an archivist of
unforgettable images, and a collec-
tor of smells from the stench of
burning skin to the smog of
Detroits automobile factories. . . .
But he is also a virtuoso of coinci-
dences and a narrator who never
hesitates to step into the text to
comment on and resolutely steer
the action. He jumps back and
forth, buzzing to and from plotlines
like a messenger of the gods. He
Katchor drawing
Fictional
Inheritance
Jeffrey Eugenides is Americas
Latest Literary Superstar
The editor Jonathan Galassi took a
gamble when he encouraged the
novelists Jonathan Franzen and
Jeffrey Eugenides to meet one
another eight years ago. At the time,
both writers were living somewhat
isolated lives in New York, and nei-
ther had been especially blessed
with success. Both were under con-
tract with the same publisher
F.S.G. and struggling with huge
projects. Eugenides described the
rst meeting with Franzen as a liter-
ary blind date. It could have easily
ended in an explosion of vanity,
neurosis, and envy.
Despite initial caution, however,
the meeting was the beginning of a
lasting friendship. [. . .] Almost
exactly one year after the publica-
tion of Franzens monumental novel
The Corrections, Eugenidess no less
monumental Middlesex has
appeared. It looks like it might
duplicate the unprecedented suc-
cess of his friends book.
American critics have, at any
rate, fallen over themselves to
praise it. [. . .] There is no question
that Middlesex is the literary sensa-
tion of the fall, just as Franzens
The Corrections was twelve
months earlier.
The two novels have been fre-
quently compared to each other,
and despite their very different lit-
erary styles, the comparisons are
justied. [. . .] Both deliver nothing
less than a great American tragedy.
Middlesex and The Corrections in
500 and 700 pages respectively
panoramically portray the fate of
two mid-western families scattering
apart with the force of an exploding
grenade. Both books are con-
sciously placed within literary tradi-
tions that seemed long ago to have
been disassembled, and curiously
enough, both books suffer from the
weakness of their endings. [. . .]
The prospects are promising;
Eugenides is adept at captivating his
readers. As in his rst novel, The
Virgin Suicides, which began with
the clinically accurate portrayal of a
teenagers suicide, Middlesex opens
with a truly explosive effect.
Eugenides has created a protagonist
who, through her mere existence, is
On t he WATERFRONT
John Corigliano, an
American Syncretist
His Symphonic Debut in Berlin
trying to explain the problems he
encountered during this process,
using his score to illustrate the com-
plexity of the undertaking. The
new version was reformatted from
an almost rhythmless fugue to a
rhythmically precise piece written
for a large ensemble.
Corigliano, whose father was
the concert master of the New York
Philharmonic Orchestra for
decades, is an eclectic. In 1991 he
composed The Ghosts of Versailles,
not only the rst original opera pre-
miered at the Met in twenty years,
but an opera adored by virtually
every prominent singer, including
Rene Fleming, who performed it at
her debut. He also wrote the Oscar-
winning score for the 1999 lm,
The Red Violin.
Afterward, nothing really
changed for me. Well, the piece
gained some notoriety, primarily
because the film depicts how live
music is performed. But were
exotic in America. [. . .] Do we have
to sit by and allow czars of taste to
prescribe what we should and
should not listen to? The world is
so colorful! Why cant music be just
as colorful?
By Manuel Brug
From the Berliner Morgenpost
June 6, 2002
The spring 2003 Berlin Prize
Fellows will include historian James
Hankins (Harvard University),
architectural historian Wallis
Miller (University of Kentucky),
legal scholar Henry E. Smith
(Northwestern University), and
philosophy professor Allen Speight
(Boston University). Composer
Kurt Rohde holds the Alberto Vilar
Music Fellowship and Karen
Yasinsky is the Philip Morris Artist.
Comparative literature scholar
Hayden White (Stanford
University) will be a
DaimlerChrysler Fellow.
The J.P. Morgan Fellowship in
Finance Policy and Economics is
held by journalist Amity Shlaes
(the Financial Times). Finally, inde-
pendent scholar David Rieff will
inaugurate the Haniel Foundation
Fellowship. Distinguished Visitors
in the spring will include Harry
Frankfurt, Lukas Foss, Henry Louis
Gates, and Harvey Pitt. o
Sneak Preview
The Spring 2003 Fellows
On October 3, the twelfth anniver-
sary of German reunication,
the American Academy in Berlin
joined Axel Springer Verlag and
former German chancellor Helmut
Kohl in announcing a new fellowship
program bearing the name of
George Herbert Walker Bush.
Richard C. Holbrooke, Chairman of
the Academys Board of Trustees,
said on the occasion: We are
extremely honored that former
President Bush has agreed to the
establishment of a chair in his
honor. No American played a more
important role in assisting
Germany as it moved toward
unication. This fellowship will
enshrine the memory of his achieve-
ments and symbolize the continu-
ing strong relationship between our
two countries.
The timing of the announcement
was apt. As the Academys Executive
Director Gary Smith added,
It reminds us, despite the rhetoric
of transatlantic tension in recent
months of just how sound the foun-
dation of German-American friend-
ship has become in recent decades.
If anything, German reunication
marked another watershed in this
relationship and underscored the
former American presidents con-
structive policy and farsightedness
at that historic juncture.
The fellowship is an important
addition to the American
Academys existing Berlin Prize
Fellowship program. With the
George Herbert Walker Bush fellow-
ship, the Academy supports excep-
tional scholars from the humani-
ties, social sciences, public affairs,
the arts, and journalism, whose
presence in the German capital will
make important American view-
points on issues in their eld readily
available. A principal purpose of the
fellowship is thus to establish deep-
er and constructive relations with
the fellowship recipients German
and European counterparts.
That Axel Springer Verlag is the
philanthropic pillar behind the
George Herbert Walker Bush
Fellowship will come as no surprise
to veterans of the transatlantic rela-
tionship. This venerable Berlin pub-
lishing house has been a strong sup-
porter of the US from its inception.
In the words of Mathias Dpfner,
Chairman of the Axel Springer
Board, With this fellowship, we
intend to promote gifted
Americans, but also want to express
our gratitude the gratitude of a
Berlin publishing house, of a house
situated near the former border
zone for George Bushs efforts in
the process of reunication. The
close ties with the US established by
its founder Axel Springer continue
to be cultivated as part of his legacy.
The publishers support of the
Fellowship is thus a sign of tradition
and continuity. It has generously
underwritten the award for an ini-
tial period of three years.
Each academic year, one to two
Fellows will be welcomed to the
Hans Arnhold Center for a term of
residency of between four and nine
months. The Academy will host the
rst George Herbert Walker Bush
Fellow during the 200304 academ-
ic year. Candidates must be perma-
nently based in the US and may
come from American universities,
government agencies, policy insti-
tutes or think tanks. Fellowship
recipients are chosen by an inde-
pendent committee of scholars,
experts, and professionals appoint-
ed by the Academy.
The new fellowship is in keeping
with the American Academy in
Berlins mission of creating new,
post-cold-war academic and profes-
sional networks that bond the US
and Germany. The Academy, a
politically independent and priv-
ately funded center for advanced
study, is especially pleased that this
new fellowship will further secure
the idea of the extended fellowship
at the heart of this initiative.
In a moving document of his
affection for Germany, former
President Bush expressed his per-
sonal gratitude in the following
words: Germany holds a special
place in my heart. It was my privi-
lege and honor to serve as our
nations chief executive when the
Berlin Wall fell and when your
nation achieved its long-cherished
dream of unication under the
superb leadership of Chancellor
Kohl. My trips to Berlin always feel
like visits to old friends. No country
in the world makes me feel more
welcome.
I am deeply honored at the
establishment of the George
Herbert Walker Bush Fellowship at
the American Academy in Berlin. I
hope that this fellowship, which will
bring to Berlin a new generation of
American scholars in elds such as
political science and public affairs,
will create an important new tie
between our two great countries.
For Atlantiker like Richard
Holbrooke, it is contributions such
as this fellowship that continue to
augment the relationship between
Germany and the United States, a
relationship that is as robust as ever
in the cultural and commercial
spheres. Such concrete measures
will abide long after the rhetorical
lapses have been forgotten.o
Building on Strength
Berlin Fellowship Honors
P
h
o
t
o
g
r
a
p
h
: R
a
in
e
r
U
n
k
e
l
President George H.W. Bush with
Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Bonn.
September 27, 1994.
Cultures of Abandonment
The New Foundling Movements
in Germany and America
by Nina Bernstein
At Berlin s police unit for
crimes against children,
Detective Gina Graichen
(below) keeps a supply of
teddy bears for the children
she interviews.
P
h
o
t
o
g
r
a
p
h
r
a
p
h
y
: N
ik
o
la
u
s
G
e
y
e
r

the late summer of
2002, an unnerving
police poster appeared
in the U-Bahn station
beneath Berlins
Wittenberg Platz:
Baby Murder Who
saw this Woman?
Staring from the police artists sketch, her dark hair
swept back from a young, unsmiling face, the
unknown suspect awkwardly held an infant-shaped
bundle. She had been spotted in the station the
morning of July 8, and again later at the western end
of the line. That afternoon, police said, in the citys
prosperous Zehlendorf neighborhood, she and an
older woman left the bundle in a so-called
Babyklappe, a kind of depository slot in the outer
wall of a hospital. Such slots are intended to allow
the safe and anonymous abandonment of unwanted
newborns. But to the horror of the hospital atten-
dants who retrieved the swaddled form, the infant
boy inside had been stabbed to death hours earlier.
The unsolved killing, which drew extensive
media coverage, was unique yet eerily familiar.
It twisted together the most nightmarish aspects
of infanticide and infant abandonment the very
cases that were supposed to be prevented by the
anonymous baby depositories that have proliferated
in Germany in the last three years. As a reporter for
the New York Times covering social welfare, I
had followed a parallel phenomenon in the United
States. There, beginning late in 1999, more than 35
states had enacted so-called safe-haven laws. The
legislation offers anonymity and varying degrees
of immunity to a person who leaves an unharmed
infant in a designated safe place, typically a re
house or hospital helped by projects with names
like Baby Moses and A Secret, Safe Place for
Newborns.
Supporters said the projects, if publicized,
saved infant lives and stopped women from desper-
ate acts. Critics contended that instead, women who
would never have endangered their baby were being
enticed to use a legal abandonment that ignored
fathers, left children without a family history, and
diverted them from the safer options: a hospital
delivery and more informed choices between adop-
tion and ways of keeping mother and child together.
Statistics were scant. But in states that had the legis-
lation, babies continued to be found dead or in
unsafe places, sometimes more frequently than in
states without the laws.
As I studied the wanted poster in Berlins
Babyklappe murder, a larger mystery struck me:
Why two countries with such different demographic
and social welfare realities would suddenly revive
the same solution for unwanted pregnancy a solu-
tion that was resoundingly rejected as a failure in
the late nineteenth century.
Infanticide and infant abandonment have a
long history in Europe and America, but the subject
periodically seizes the public imagination anew, in
ways that beg explanation.
For about a decade in eighteenth-century
Germany, no literary theme was more popular.
Beside Goethes Gretchen, who drowned the infant
fathered by Faust in a t of madness and guilt,
there is Schillers Luise in the ballad Die
Kindsmrderin, Heinrich Leopold Wagners
Kindermrderin, Gotthold Friedrich Studlins
Seltha, die Kindermrderin, and Johann Friedrich
Schinks Empndungen einer unglcklich
Vefhrten bey der Ermordung ihres Kindes
(Sentiments of an unhappy seduced woman while
murdering her child). All were all written in the
1770s or early 1780s, notes Susanne Kord, a profes-
sor of German literature at Georgetown University.
Scholars suggest these tragic treatments of
seduction typically shown as the betrayal of a
middle-class girl by a man of higher social rank
reected growing tensions between a rising bour-
geoisie and a waning aristocracy. The theme became
a way of showcasing the bourgeoisies claim to supe-
rior moral values, expressed as the need to control
sexual behavior and reproduction. Like many of her
literary sisters, for instance, Schillers Luise killed
her child in a t of madness in part because it resem-
bled the unfaithful upper-class lover she curses on
the way to the scaffold, before warning others,
Trauet nicht den Rosen eurer Jugend, / Trauet,
Schwestern, Mnnerschwren nie! [Never trust
the roses of your youth, / Never trust the oaths of
men, oh sisters!]
As court records from the period indicate, the
case of a 20-year-old servant impregnated by a
farmhand is more representative of reality. Failing
to support herself and her child by spinning, the
homeless maid nally sat down on the banks of a
river and tried in vain to nurse her baby. For three
hours she wept while her child screamed with
hunger, she told the court at her trial. Suddenly it
occurred to her that since she could not feed the
four-month-old infant, she should just put it in
the river.
In nineteenth-century America, too, a single
womans nancial inability to raise a child made
infant abandonment commonplace. In 1868, New
York City police alone were picking up 162 babies a
year from the streets. But in a Gilded-Age society
teeming with new immigrants and widening
inequalities, infanticide became a public preoccupa-
tion. After lurid newspaper accounts and moral
debates, nuns in 1869 opened the rst of several pri-
vate foundling hospitals the safe havens of their
day. Two decades later, the police were still collect-
ing 170 babies from the alleys yearly and hundreds
more were dying in the asylums. Paradoxically,
American foundling institutions had been inspired
by a key feature of the European models long in dis-
repute and already being closed: the revolving door
in a niche in the wall, which allowed anyone to
deposit a baby without being observed. At the
height of the practice in the eighteenth century, 10
to 25 percent of all births in Europe ended in aban-
donment, John Boswell wrote in his classic history
of foundlings, The Kindness of Strangers.
The problem of foundlings dwindled and then
virtually disappeared from public consciousness in
the twentieth century. Better birth control no doubt
helped, but social historians give most of the credit
to government aid for mothers raising children
alone. Now, when Babyklappe billboards offer,
Well take your child when no one else will, and a
$500,000 New Jersey advertising campaign promis-
es No Shame, No Blame, No Names, the question
is why a culture of abandonment is being reinvented
in the twenty-rst century.
In one sense, of course, the new foundling move-
ments respond to particular cases. A newborn is
found in a trash container in Hamburg in late 1999,
and early the next year on Goethestrasse, a childcare
agency opens the rst Babyklappe in Germany. A
baby in Indianapolis freezes to death in a hospital
parking lot in 2000, and with little discussion,
Indiana joins a legislative tide. For years, however,
similar cases evoked no such response.
If anecdote falls short of explanation, so do
numbers. In the US, champions of the laws often
speak of a national epidemic of infant abandonment
and assert that many discarded infants are never
found. But their only gures are sketchy. A federal
computer survey culled news accounts of 105 dis-
carded babies nationwide in 1998 (33 of them dead)
compared to reports of 65 incidents in 1991. The
study itself said the increase to an average of 2.1
babies per state out of 4 million births could sim-
ply be the result of an expanding news database and
growing media interest in such incidents. For many
In
years now, experts say, babies abandoned unsafely
or killed have mostly been linked either to a mentally
ill mother, or to a distraught teenager who never
acknowledged that she was pregnant, and after
delivering alone, smothered or discarded her new-
born in a panic.
A reporter for Die Zeit investigating
Babyklappe fever reached similar conclusions.
She found no substantiation for advocates claims
that forty to sixty babies were unsafely abandoned
in Germany annually and no reason to think the
number had increased. Nevertheless, the rst
Babyklappe in Hamburg has mushroomed into
more than 45 around the country, staffed 24-hours-
a-day. There are three in Berlin, with three more
planned.
Gesine Wischerhoff, a social work director at
the Protestant Adoption Center in Dsseldorf, is
one of several observers who suggest that adoption
hunger, not abandoned babies, drives the expan-
sion of the Babyklappe. In Germany where private
adoption is illegal and state support for single moth-
ers is strong there are fourteen couples waiting to
adopt each infant relinquished through conven-
tional means, Mrs. Wischerhoff said. Only 6,373
adoptions took place in 2000 in all Germany, and
two-thirds of these were by stepparents. The compa-
rable gure in the US was twenty times higher in
1992, the last time a national estimate was attemp-
ted. There too, however, in a ourishing (and
scandal-prone) private market, demand for adop-
tive infants has long outrun supply.
A broad coalition of German legislators now
supports proposals authorizing women to give birth
anonymously in hospitals at public expense. In con-
trast, France is ending an option of anonymity that
was introduced during World War II, partly to help
women hide liaisons with German soldiers. The
option has been challenged by adult adoptees seek-
ing to know their origins. How is it possible that a
legal approach that has come seriously under pres-
sure in France serves as a new model for social poli-
cy in Germany? asked Dr. Kirsten Scheiwe, a pro-
fessor of law at the University of Hildesheim. How
can we understand that this is happening at a
moment when numbers of infanticide and child
abandonment are relatively low, different from, let
us say, the 1950s?
Some topics are invested with enormous social
importance but blessed with very little reliable
information, wrote the late historian of science
Stephen J. Gould. When the ratio of reliable infor-
mation to social impact is so low, a history of scien-
tic attitudes may be little more than an oblique
record of social change.
With Goulds insight in mind, I have come to
believe that the American safe haven movement is
part of the oblique record of the nations welfare
overhaul. Perhaps, like the push to revive orphan-
ages, the rush to establish safe havens tacitly accepts
tough consequences from a shrunken safety net for
poor mothers, and from efforts to discourage out-of-
wedlock births by re-stigmatizing unwed preg-
nancy. Federal welfare legislation includes funding
for abstinence-only sex education, a ban on direct
aid to teenaged mothers, and family caps used by
some states to deny cash aid to babies conceived
when a mother was on welfare. At the same time,
the campaign to criminalize abortion has made
abortion harder to obtain in many places.
In Germany, however, the situation is very dif-
ferent. Unwed parenthood, birth control, and even
abortion are relatively uncontested. Compared to
the US, births to teenagers are rare. There are strong
new pressures to reduce or restructure Germanys
welfare state, yet even in the last days of a hard-
fought election campaign, calls from left and right
were for more day care slots or more Kindergeld, not
for fewer single mothers. Indeed, it seems that
German women are having too few children to suit
society, not too many. But in that context, too, a
public obsession with harvesting babies can be seen
as a displacement of broader social concerns, even
as an articulation of unspoken anxieties.
That is the view of Reinhart Wolff, a thoughtful
social welfare professor and practitioner who con-
siders the attention devoted to creating the baby
slots wildly disproportionate to the problem. It is a
reaction to the sharp drop in the birthrate, asserted
Professor Wolff, a past dean of the Alice Salomon
School of Social Work in Berlin and founder of a
national network of family-therapy-oriented child
protection centers. It is used as a metaphor for the
difculty of reproduction, as society becomes aware
of the risks of not having children.
Fertility in the former East Germany plum-
meted after German reunication, dropping by half
in one year of rising unemployment and uncertain-
ty. Gert C. Wagner, research director at the German
Institute for Economic Research, calls the drop to
a total rate of .8 from 1.6 children per woman of
child-bearing age dramatic, unbelievable one of
the biggest sociological phenomena that one can
observe. Even after increases in the prosperous
mid-1990s, the overall German fertility rate is still
only 1.38, he said one of the lower rates in Western
Europe. Yet for years, it remained taboo to link gov-
ernment family policy to fertility, added his col-
league, C. Katharina Spiess. In the Nazi [period],
mothers got a medal for having babies for Hitler,
explained Dr. Spiess, an expert on the economics of
childcare. Nobody talked about using family policy
to increase the birthrate because this was [associat-
ed with] the Third Reich.
The rst break in the silence became a scandal.
After Chancellor Schroeder proposed importing
20,000 Indian computer technicians to jump-start
Germanys high-tech sector, the response from a
hard-pressed cdu campaign in North Rhine
Westphalia was the slogan Kinder statt Inder
([German] children, not Indians). To be sure, the
phrase was loudly denounced as racist, and the can-
didate who lost disavowed it. But the episode
underlined the silence that still reigns over an issue
uncomfortably freighted with the German past, yet
increasingly difcult to ignore: a perception that
foreigners and their offspring are replacing a dwin-
dling German population as the Germans know it.
Political elites now have a polite way to express
the link between the future childbearing choices of
German women and the need to import outsiders. In
the last days before the 2002 election, for example
amid growing media discussion of the inadequate
social integration of the children of immigrants
Deutsche Bank warned that Germanys population
could fall from 82 million to 65 million in fty years,
with the work force shrinking by 27 percent, unless
politicians allowed more immigration and provided
incentives to women to combine a career with child-
rearing. A belated feminist agenda seems to have
become the carrier of an oblique message about
immigration: If workforce participation by German
women can be expanded without eroding birthrates,
then presumably, fewer immigrants will be needed.
Strangely absent from these ofcial discussions
of legal immigration and future womens work is the
present inux of women working in Germanys shad-
ow economy women on tourist visas from the
ruined economies of the former Soviet bloc and the
Balkans, laboring illegally as house cleaners, as pros-
titutes, as caretakers for the elderly.
No estimates for illegal immigration exist, said
Dr. Wagner, who was just appointed to the Federal
Council on Immigration. He added that it is not an
issue because, in contrast to the US, Germany does
not grant automatic citizenship to children born on
its territory. Foreigners have no incentive to have a
baby in Germany, he said.
If immigration policy tiptoes around the ques-
tion of ethnic difference, the anonymity of a Klappe
simply erases it. There is no way to know whether the
few who have resorted to the baby depositories
include illegal women workers or even men pro-
tecting a concept of family honor. The babies emerge
from the Klappe as German.
The Babyklappe also magically erases tensions
in womens roles. The material and psychological
problems of motherhood are banished from the pic-
ture, noted the law professor Dr. Scheiwe, since the
Is the safe haven
movement a symptom
of welfare overhaul?
unwilling (bad) mother gives away the child, and a
longing, good adoptive mother can care for it.
The Klappes appeal made the Berlin murder all
the more monstrous, and public interest in solving
it was strong. Dozens of callers thought they recog-
nized the women from the police sketches. They
appeared to be from central southern Europe, Gina
Graichen, who heads the police unit that investi-
gates all crimes against children in Berlin, said of
the two women being sought. From their skin color
not really dark, but olive people said perhaps
they came from Bulgaria, Turkey, even Hungary.
The press reported that the murdered baby, too,
appeared to be Central European. But the tips led
police to women who had alibis, or whose dna did
not match the dead babys when they submitted
saliva samples voluntarily, Ms. Graichen added.
Investigators turned back to the Zehlendorf
Klappe itself, and to the Waldfriede Hospital that
houses it. With no other leads, police asked all 450
of the hospitals female employees to supply a dna
sample and sit for a mug shot. Results from the
costly tests would take months; women who refused
would face police questioning. Suddenly, in late
September, the case was back in the news, now laced
with civil liberties concerns the same kind still
swirling around a case in Storm Lake, Iowa, that hit
American front pages last summer.
Die American Academy
und PwC haben
vieles gemeinsam.
Menschen unterschiedlicher Kulturen,
die sich mit Kompetenz und Erfolg Wis-
senschaft und Wirtschaft widmen.
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www.pwcglobal.com/de
Wirtschaftsprfung Steuer- & Rechtsberatung Corporate Finance-Beratung Advisory Services
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Volker Booten, Lise-Meitner-Str. 1, 10589 Berlin, Tel: 0 30-26 36-52 17
More than a year after Iowa enacted its own
safe haven law, a baby was found dead in a garbage
recycling plant, and authorities, with no suspects,
demanded the names of every local woman who had
been tested for pregnancy in the previous nine
months. Many doctors quietly complied; only
Planned Parenthood deed the subpoena.
It seems that safe havens and baby slots raise
the stakes for law enforcement when they fail. If so,
then the promise of anonymity for the few can
quickly turn into a loss of privacy for the many.
Sexual reproduction makes all women suspect, their
behavior and their bodies subject to new forms of
scrutiny. And the failures may be unavoidable.
We want mothers to get help here, said
Gabriele Stangl, the Protestant pastor who founded
the Berlin Babyklappe and also runs a crisis pro-
gram for pregnant women. Some who seek help
from the program are homeless, the pastor said.
Some are in Germany illegally, or in ight from a
violent husband. Some have been impregnated by
uncles or brothers and do not dare to tell that they
are pregnant, she added.
In a police ofce decorated with drawings by
her own children, Detective Graichen pulled out the
only known count of infanticides and discarded
babies in Berlin handwritten entries in a lined
ledger that she began keeping ten years ago. Among
the four recorded last year when the Klappe net-
work was in full operation was one the detective
called classic: a terried 15-year-old delivered alone,
covered the babys mouth with a cloth when she
heard her parents coming home, and later hid the
small body in a trash bin. When young girls bring a
child to the world and kill it, the detective said,
these stories are all the same.
There is no trend discernable in her ledger, only
uctuations that average out to about two such inci-
dents a year among about a dozen child homicides.
Most cases concern older, battered children, but there
were two infant deaths in 1991, when the total of all
dead children was 17. There were two in 1992, when
the total was eight. There were none out of ten in 1997;
then four out of ten in 1999, including the infant
corpse retrieved from the plumbing of a staff toilet in
KaDeWe, the department store in Wittenberg Platz.
That case, like many, is still unsolved.o
The Farthest Home
is in an Empire of Fire
A Work-in-Progress
By John Phillip Santos
Pedro Lujar,
Enchanted Rock, n.d.
Ludovico (Lico) Lopez
in Monterrey, Mexico,
in the 1940s.
Opposite page:
the photograph s reverse,
inscribed by Lico to his
nephew in 1987.
words, though I wanted to. My lips were bruised,
my gums tender, one side of my jaw scraped purple
and stinging in the salty Catalan air of Barcelona.
I took in a deep breath and wondered if I had really
survived my rst day, shedding blood, in the
Madre tierra, Espaa.
I hadnt gone to Barcelona in search of eternity,
but I had come close to nding it. I was on a long
university break, encouraged by my Uncle Lico to
go and have a look at the country my mothers
family had come from and to report back. I was a
devotee of Lorca, so Granada would be my nal des-
tination. But my day of arrival turned to an ex-
tended carouse, as I got caught up in the festivities
of Dia de Mexico in Barcelona. Since I was as close to
a Mexican as they could nd, Catalanos all around
the Ramblas made me their guest of honor. Much
later, searching for my pension alone, I was mugged
by a group of revelers whose mood had turned ugly.
Though some of my ancestors were Spanish
Tejanos early settlers in the rugged northern fron-
tier of colonial Mexico, later Texas I had never felt
particularly connected to Spain. The Lopez and
Velas, my mothers paternal and maternal families,
may already have been in Spain hundreds of years
before the rst European encounters with the New
World. Who knows? Perhaps Christian, perhaps
Jewish, perhaps Muslim, or perhaps some mixture
of the three. But no one in the family had ever spo-
ken of Spain. That time in our past was entirely lost.
There would have been some grandfather or
grandmother, or both together, who decided to risk
everything they had known on a caravela journey
across the vast ocean to the New World, likely never
to see Spain again. Now, after ve hundred years,
there were no living memories of Espana in the
Lopez-Vela families. No one knew who that rst
ancestor from the Old World might have been
except for Uncle Lico, the familys self-appointed
genealogist. He was certain we were descendants of
a certain King of Spain, whose name, unfortunately,
had been forgotten.
Of course, Uncle Lico would have liked to tell
the tale himself, rather than hear it in the voice of
his nephew emissary. He would have imagined it as
a wondrous noble, if rough-hewn, epic, a transcrip-
tion of the Poema de Mio Cid into the forgotten,
unlovely South Texas dust of our origins. My uncle,
Ludovico Lopez, was born in 1922, in Cotulla,
Texas, among the ruins of the onetime northern-
most reaches of Nueva Espana. He was the youngest
of my mothers brothers, after Leonides and Lauro,
and just younger than my Aunt Lydia. It was really
his idea that there was a Lopez-Vela tale in the
rst place.
Not that it should come as a surprise every
family has a forgotten tale of where it came from, an
invisible genealogy imprinted in indelible, ery
molecules inside the heart. But who is driven to tell
it, and why? Why not just let it be forgotten and
move on? Why not stay with the onward, unbur-
dened by the vexations and mysteries of retrospec-
tion? If there were anything worth remembering,
surely it would have been, passed on from life to life,
unbroken through time. Everything else was just as
well left behind. Why get into all of that again? I
never asked my uncle those questions.
Uncle Lico was no Herodotus of Tejano anti-
quity. He had barely nished high school in San
Antonio before joining the army for World War II.
Later, hed say he had the gentlemans degree. And
after the war, he became, along with his brother
Lauro, a businessman an occasional realtor, a
landlord of properties, mainly nightclubs of dubi-
ous worth, and toward the end of his life, a member
of the San Antonio Board of Property Tax Assessors.
Whence his calling to discover and pass on the
old tale of the familia? How far back in his own life?
As far back as I can remember, it was his obsession.
Undoubtedly, I would never have told the tale
in the way he might have, but every month, he
would send me a manila binder folio containing
holographs of the latest family document he had
uncovered. A fat envelope in the mail from Uncle
Lico might contain a sketch of a family tree in thick,
glistening black pencil marks on the back of a
grease-stained brown paper bag from Henrys Puffy
Tacos. Sometimes it would contain shaky and
blurred carbon copies of transcriptions he had
made on a Remington portable typewriter from
the baptistery register of an old town chapel some-
where in the lush San Fernando Valley of South
Texas. More often, the envelope would contain
another half-dozen copies of one of his familiar
lists of ancestors and their begats, or the codex
of the earliest references to the Lopez family he had
found, from 1710, in the colonial village of Mier,
today a town on the Mexican side of the Texas-
Mexico border.
From the time I began writing poems and sto-
ries as a teenager, Uncle Lico chose me as the reposi-
tory for his gleanings from the lost annals of our for-
gotten ancestors the remorseless, abandoned
progeny of Iberia in the lands of the Mundo Nuevo
that would come to be known as Texas.
Cenote Speaks:
Why not farther outward? Why not traverse our clear
silent void, frictionless, without threshold, leaving
behind the dear, the familiar, the alabaster cistern
where I washed my face at dawn in the limpid arctic
water? Then the lot of us, soldados primos, running
out to the tip of the small rocky pine island and jumping
naked into the crystalline lake. Why not a vast ribbon of
aurora borealis, the silver magenta one of the night
before, but untethered, disappearing into the ebony sky
like a lost balloon? Memory was always supposed to be
about the future, the onward, no?
The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire is a memoir
in a science ction key. Alongside stories of my fam-
ilys origins in Mexico, Spain, and earlier, you will
read of the visions of a character named Cenote
Siete (the name means literally Jungle Spring
Seven). His is one of the central voices to emerge in
this new work. Hes a broken-down cyborg Quixote
from the future (in the text I call him my great great
grandfather from the future), who tracks through
this tale in increasingly strange ways. Dwelling
mostly within what has become a Galactic Wide
Web, he is an errant knight whose quest is a search
for the remains of human memory. Cenote Siete
makes his rst appearances in these excerpts from
the early part of the book.
From Chapter 1, A Book of Swoons
Inside a lightning arc struck in reverse, careening, accel-
erating backward through a heavy mist that streaked by
me in comet tracks of rust and vermilion, and it was a
complete roaring into erce oblivion, trying to glance
back against the wind, rain stinging my face in a tem-
pest void, until I blinked, focused, and I thought I saw a
landscape, far off below me, pinwheeling and receding,
faint beige crescents, dull bronze squares, and shimmer-
ing capillaries of rivers and creeks running all through.
Then as suddenly, I was speeding just above the wet,
desert oor, and its grainy surface smelled like the skin
of an enormous machine. I reached out to touch it.
This light is impossible, I thought.
It is the hazy daytime of eternity, someone said.
I thought I heard the slow, distorted tremolos
of the old pump organ that quavers at the beginning
of Strawberry Fields Forever, faintly playing back
and breaking up into thick radio static, over and
over again.
I awoke suddenly and made out uneven shapes
of a at, grey beach and slow blurs of dancing light
on an empty, motionless bay. The sound of lapping
water was mufed, far off, mixed with echoes of car
horns and trafc.
Impossible light. . .
It was hard to move my mouth to speak those
surface of the water it contained was covered by a
web of tiny clover-like leaves, mottled with dozens
of red tube-shaped owers that had fallen from a
bush just above, coming to rest on this bed of green
nothing.
Beneath the sheath of green, small goldsh
swam lazily around the beams of sunlight. The
stonework was meticulously nished in chips of
black volcanic rock that gave the grotto an ancient
aspect. It was probably at least one hundred years
old, anyway.
The stones of the grottos crescent wall had been
applied like a mosaic, and every meter or so there
was a miniature shell, pale white in color, breaking
up the grim shade of the rock. When I saw those
shells, late in the afternoon light, I remembered the
shell I had seen before.
Was it the night before? Was it the week before?
When had I had that dream? Or did I even have it at
all? Could I have remembered a dream that I never had?
An old black lady in the garments of a washer-
woman gave me a great shell the size of a large water-
melon. I dont remember where I was, only that I was
traveling, in a village with cobblestone streets. I had
to hold it with both of my hands, feeling its consider-
able weight, turning it over to see the opalescent
glows of its pearly interior as vivid and diaphanous
as a thousand galaxies.
How would I pack it, I thought, to take it home
especially considering that I was traveling uncharac-
teristically light, with only one bag?
And then, not too long ago, I had a dream that I
visited a beautiful antique villa, which seemed to be
in the hot southwestern territories of my homelands
in Texas or northern Mexico. The architecture was
Spanish colonial, decorated in scrolling yellow-and-
blue Poblano tile, decked with royal blues, mustard
yellow and magenta owers. A spacious courtyard
garden of bougainvillea, honeysuckle, and white ole-
Surkamp Verlag
This is not the story Uncle Lico would have
told. In the rst place, I left it off long ago, without
nishing the tale. Uncle Lico died nearly ten years
ago, without completing his search to nd the
ancestor who brought us to the New World. But
when this all began again, after twenty years or
more my tale I mean these were the rst of his
words, my other guide, Cenote Siete. The rst words
were written down early one morning in New York
City, as if still asleep. I realized I had been hearing
the song of his voice already for years, before I knew
the story was starting to unfold once more. Between
batteries of sharp ps and ts, his voice has an
unabashed Castilian lisp, spoken in rapid sure-step-
ping riffs, imperiously correct, but with a metallic
machine sound that feels cold and robotic, yet car-
ries a tender echo of the rst unnamable sadness of
the human.
From the rst Dichos de Cenote Siete, my great
great grandfather from the future:
Cenote Speaks:
It began as a childhood game, a juegito triste, a
way, I can see now, in the midst of our dwindling ordi-
nary lives, to touch el innito, the boundless ineffable
sublime. Children who have a hunger for that will
always nd each other and make their mischief to nd
the way to the mystery. In ochre late-afternoon light, we
would clamber up the hanging tungsten mesh over the
great swaying electrical pylons strung taut with plat-
inum gossamer across the Llano plain. Scaling to the
peak of the tower, the arm braces hung out into the
nada, whistling in high beacon tones, and when we
shimmied out to the end, one after the other, gripping the
beam, we would look down and see the giant red granite
dome of Enchanted Rock, the veins of dry river sand, all
of the reticulum of our lost homes.
Then we would swing out, swaying back and forth
like reeds in the hill country breeze, watching to see who
of us would trace the longest crescent, stay in motion for
the longest time. We were all adept and fearless, acting
as if we were masters of the void we were dipping our
bodies into.
Hermano Caracol, more fearless than any of us,
was the rst to let go. Releasing his grip, he did not fall,
hurtling like a meteor toward the earth. Instead, he van-
ished in a whipcrack of light that echoed out along the
cables in every direction. Suddenly, the silence of the
nada grew quieter still. We hung perfectly still, looking
at each other.
Eventually, each of us followed him in explosions
of serape-colored light.
That was how we came to dwell inside La Zona
the machine of creation pilgrims inside the innumer-
able luminescent streams, inside the centripetal forces of
time, trailing vast parabolas into the past, drawing
accelerating ellipses into the future, all the while disap-
pearing and reconguring by algorithmic nanobytes
into these solar hours of the borderless ether mind.
We bathe in the shadows cast by distant planets,
190 million miles away.
And I, Cenote Siete, always with my dearest, ick-
ering memories of the wild world of the long before.
Before Cenote Sietes story began to emerge in
my head, I didnt know I was searching for anything.
I didnt know I was waiting for a sign that the story
had begun again, taking up where I had left it off
years before. My dreams began to point the way
back to Uncle Licos lost, unnished tale of the
Lopez and Velas.
I hadnt remembered the enormous shell until I
saw the little crescent-shaped grotto, the one along-
side a cool little covered patio, overlooking the
Brazilian city of Salvador de Bahia, behind the
house of Xango, in the compound of the Axe Opo
Afonja, a cult of worshippers of the Orishas. The
pond was hardly bigger than an oil drum, and the
ander surrounded a tranquil pool that looked invit-
ing in the heat of a late afternoon.
As I walked through a door that opened into
the courtyard, I entered a room full of people, who,
though strangers, seemed familiar to me. There
were the Mexican Americans of my parents and
grandparents generations, distinguished, noble in
their posture, the well-dressed men in pressed shirts
and suits, the ladies in simple, dignied dresses and
elegant shoes.
They were talking among themselves, sipping
from tiny cups of chocolate, tea, and coffees that
some had perilously perched on their knees. On
tables covered in lace manteles, there were trays of
pan dulce, leche quemada candies, and tiny marzipan
fruits. The room smelled of cinnamon, pomade, and
Old Spice cologne.
I realized that I had come to a place of my
ancestors, a villa somewhere in eternity. One lady
who looked like my great aunt Pepa welcomed me
with a warm smile and an abrazo, and when she
announced me to the rest of the gathered folks, they
nodded and ahhed and gently applauded. An old
man in a tattered brown wool suit stood up and
spoke about the nobility of book learning and how
we must always remember the ancestors. One of the
little old ladies put a tray before me that was set with
stuffed chiles, cheeses, and small orettes of pickled
cactus.
And just as I was feeling as if this were a place
where I might dwell forever, the lady who looked
like my aunt Pepa rang a tiny silver bell and every-
one grew quiet. She reminded me of how I must be
setting out, and that I should leave before it grew
dark.
Where am I going? I remember thinking
to myself.
Time is short, I heard a voice reply, its velvety
machinic hum barely detectable.o
Villa Grisebach Auktionen Fasanenstrae 25 D- 10719 Berlin
Telefon +49- 30- 885 915- 0 Telefax +49- 30- 882 41 45
www.villa-grisebach.de auktionen@villa-grisebach.de
Ein groes Haus der klassischen Moderne
Auktionen im November und Mai
Kunst des 19./20. Jahrhunderts und Photographie
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Kayaks
Beyond the soggy garden, two kayaks
oat across mild clear water. A red sun
stains the lake like colored glass. Day is stopping.
Everything I am feels distant or blank
as the opulent rays pass through me,
distant as action is from thought,
or language is from all things desirable
in the world, when it does not deliver
what it promises and pathos comes instead
the same pathos I feel when I tell myself,
within or without valid structures of love:
I have been deceived, he is not what he seemed
though the failure is not in the other,
but in me because I am tired, hurt or bitter.
Henri Cole
Henri Cole was a Berlin Prize Fellow at
the American Academy in spring 2001.
The poem Kayaks is included in Middle Earth,
his fth collection of poetry, to be published
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April 2003.
From Days Of Heaven,
a Screenplay by Terrence Malick
***
29 EXT. WHEAT FIELDS DAWN
The sun peers over the horizon. The wheat makes a sound like a water-
fall. It stretches for as far as the eye can see. A PREACHER has come
out, in a cassock and surplice, to offer a prayer of thanksgiving.
PREACHER
... that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your chil-
dren, in the land which the Lord swore unto your fathers to give
them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.
The harvesters spit and rub their hands as they wait for the dew to
burn off. They have slept in their coats. The dawn has a raw edge, even
in summer.
30 TIGHT ON WHEAT
Chuck looks to see if the wheat is ready to harvest. He shakes the
heads; they make a sound like paper. He snaps off a handful, rolls them
between his palms, blows away the chaff and pinches the kernels that
remain to make sure they have grown properly hard.
Tiny sounds are magnified in the early morning stillness:
grasshoppers snapping through the air, a cough, a distant hawk.
He pops the kernels into his mouth, chews them up, and rolls the wad
around in his mouth. Satisfied, he gives a nod.
Benson makes a tugging signal with his arm. A Case tractorforty
tons of iron, steam-driven, as big and as powerful as a locomotive
blasts its whistle. This is the moment they have been waiting for all
year.
31 OTHER FIELDS SERIES OF ANGLES
A SIGNALMAN with two hand flags passes the message on from the
crest of a nearby hill. In the far-flung fields of the bonanza other trac-
tors answer as other crews set to work.
Abby and Bill join in, Bill reaping the wheat with a mowing machine
called a binder, Abby propping the bound sheaves together to make
bunches or shocks.
A cloud of chaff rises over the field, melting the sun down to a cold red
bulb.
The harvesters itch madly as the chaff gets into their clothes. The
shocks, full of briars, cut their hands. Nobody talks.
Ursula, plucking chickens by the cookhousea shack on wheels
steals a key chain from an unwatched coat.
Benson follows the reapers around the field in a buggy. He keeps their
hours, chides loafers, checks the horses, etc. The harvesters are city
people. Few of them are trained to farming. MostAbby and Bill are
no exceptionhave contempt for it and anyone dull enough to prac-
tice it. Tight control is therefore exercised to see that the machines
are not damaged.
32 CHUCK AND BENSON
Lightning shivers through the clouds along the horizon. Chuck looks
concerned. Benson consults a windsock.
BENSON
Should miss us.
CHUCK
They must be having trouble over there, though.
Abby, passing by, lifts her hat to wipe her face. As she does her hair
falls out of the crown. Women are rare in the harvest fields. One so
beautiful is unprecedented.
CHUCK
I didnt know we had any women on.
BENSON (surprised)
I thought she was a boy. Should I get rid of her?
CHUCK
No.
33 MONTAGE
A COOK stands on the horizon waving a white flag at the end of a fish-
ing pole. Ursula bounds through the wheat blowing a horn.
Benson checks the large clock strapped to the back of his buggy, then
fires a smoke pistol in the air.
Their faces black with chaff, the hands fall out in silence. They shuffle
across the field toward the cookhouse, keeping their feet close to the
ground to avoid being spiked by the stubble.
34 EXT. COOKHOUSE STUBBLE FIELD IN B.G.
The COOKS, Orientals in homburgs, serve from planks thrown across
sawhorses. The hands cuff and push each other around as they wash
up. The water, brought up in wagons, fresh from the wells, makes them
gasp. An ice wagon and a fire truck are parked nearby.
Most sit on the ground to eat, under awnings or umbrellas dotted
around the field like toadstools. The Belvedere is visible miles away on
the horizon.
Bill is carrying Abbys lunch to her when a loutish MAN makes a crack.
MAN
Your sister keep you warm at night?
Bill throws a plate of stew at him and they are quickly in a fight. The
others pull them apart. Bill storms away, flicking mashed potatoes off
his shirt.
35 EXT. GRAIN WAGON STUBBLE FIELD IN B.G.
Bill and Abby sit by themselves in the shade of a grain wagon.
Demoralized, Abby soaks her hands in a pail of bran water. Bill inspects
them anxiously. They are swollen and cracked from the mornings
work.
ABBY
I ran a stubble under my nail.
BILL
Didnt you ever learn how to take care of yourself ? I told you to
keep the gloves on. What can I do if you dont listen?
Bill presses her wrists against his cheek, ashamed that he can do
nothing to shield her from such indignities.
BILL
You cant keep on like this.
ABBY
What else can we do?
She nods at the others.
ABBY
Anyway, if they can, I can too.
BILL
That bunch? Dont compare yourself to them.
She flexes her fingers. They seem lame.
BILL
You drop off this week. I can make enough for us both. It was a
crime to bring you out here. Somebody like you.
(pause)
Right now, what Im doing, Im just dragging you down.
(pause)
Maybe you should go back to Chicago. Weve got enough for a
ticket, and I can send you what I make.
He seems a little surprised when she does not reject this idea out of
hand. Perhaps he fears that if ever she did go back, he might never see
her again.
*** *** ***
137 EXT. PRAIRIE SERIES OF ANGLES
They play golf on the infinite fairway of the prairie. Bill and Abby make
a team against Chuck and Ursula.
BILL
You liking it here?
(she nods)
Feel good?
(she nods)
Feels good to feel good.
He smiles, satisfied that he has done well by her, and lets a new ball
slip down his pant leg to replace the one he played.
139 EXT. BELVEDERE
They walk home. Bill stays behind to work on his strokes. Ursula sends
the dogs after the balls.
BILL
You shag them, not those dogs. They might choke or run off
with them.
URSULA
Who made you the boss? Shag them yourself.
BILL
Listen, some day this is going to be mine. Half is. Somebody like
that, you want to get on his good side. You want to do what he
says.
He steps off a few paces of his future kingdom and draws a deep
breath.
140 BILLS POV AND TIGHT ON BILL
In the distance he sees Chuck put his arm on Abbys waist and whisper
something in her ear. This intimacy rubs him the wrong way. He gives
his clubs to Ursula and starts after them.
141 INT. KITCHEN
Bill finds them in the kitchen. Chuck goes into the other room to look
for something. Abby lifts the cigarette out of Bills mouth, takes a
drag and does a French inhale. Bill kisses her.
ABBY
Nobodys all bad, are they?
BILL
I met a few I was wrong on, then.
Suddenly, they hear Chucks footsteps. They pull back just in time,
Abby returning the cigarette to him behind her back.
BILL
I have a headache. I probably shouldve worn a hat.
Abby rolls her eyes at this improvisation. No sooner does Chuck turn
his back than Bills hand darts out to touch her breast. He snatches it
away a moment before Chuck turns back.
Together they walk into the living room.
*** *** ***
233 ABBY
Whyd you have to come back?
BILL
Im not going to hurt you. I only want to talk with you.
She stops and hides her face in her hands. Gently he draws them away.
BILL
I didnt come back to make trouble for you. I guess we were
fooling each other to think it could last. I mean, what was I
offering you anyhow? A ride to the bottom.
Her eyes close and she sinks to the ground, as though in a trance.
234 TIGHT ON BILL
Bill, taken by surprise, goes up and kneels down beside her. He picks a
fox-tail out of her hair.
BILL
Howd we let it happen, Abby? We were so happy once. Why
didnt we starve? I love you so much. What have I done? Youre
so beautiful. What have I done?
He touches his lips for a fraction of a second to hers, notices another
car approaching down the road. He picks her up like a doll and carries
her back to the Overland.
235 EXT. BELVEDERE - CHUCKS POV
They have arrived back at the Belvedere.
ABBY
Im sorry.
She touches his face. What has she done to him? He kisses her neck
and leads her toward the front door.
236 CRANE TO CHUCK
The camera rises to the uppermost story of the Belvedere. Chuck has
seen them. Hot tears leap to his eyes. Before Bill left for the winter he
often observed such intimacies between them. But now it all looks
different somehow.
237 CHUCKS POVS (HIGH ANGLES)
He looks around at his estatehis barn, his auto, his great house and
his granary. None of them is any consolation now. For a moment it
seems to him as though he lived here in some time long past.
238 INT. BEDROOM
Abby notices Chuck watching her outside the bedroom door.
ABBY
You want something from me?
CHUCK
No.
ABBY
Will you hand me that magazine?
He gives her the magazine she wants.
ABBY
Whats the matter?
He seems for a moment to consider telling her, then shrugs and goes
downstairs.
239 INT. LIVING ROOM
He stumbles into a bird cage but hardly notices. The jostled birds raise
a fuss.
240 EXT. FRONT PORCH
He runs into Bill on the front porch.
BILL
Ive been looking for you. I have to leave again, real soon here,
and...
Chuck puts a hand on Bills shoulder, stopping him. They look at each
other for a moment, then he passes on. Bill seems puzzled.
241 EXT. FIELDS
Chuck walks out into his fields. The wheat, a warm dry gold, is almost
ready to take in. He sits down and rests his head against a furrow,
powerless to think.
He puts his hands over his heart and breathes in gasps. He could not
himself quite say what it is that he knows.
242 EXT. BONANZA - SERIES OF ANGLES
Late that afternoon disaster strikes as a swarm of locusts sweeps
down on the bonanza. We do not see where they come from.
They seem to appear from out of nowhere, unnoticed. Ursula works
in the kitchen, Bill by the barn. Chuck lies asleep in the field, Abby
upstairs in bed.
243 ANIMALS ON BONANZA
The animals sense it first. The buffalo move off in a mass. The horses
become uncontrollable. One runs around the barn in a panic. Bill
watches, puzzled.
A dog in the treadmill races in vain to escape, driving the machine to
a feverish pitch. The shadow of a giant cloud moves over the hills.
244 EXT. FIELDS
Everything at first seems normal in the fields.
Then, as you listen, a strange new sound begins to rise from them, a
wild sea like singing. As the camera moves over the fields and down
into the wheat it swells in a crescendo until...
245 TIGHT ON LOCUSTS
Suddenly we see them up close, devouring the stalks in a fever, the
noise of their jaws magnified a thousand times.
They slip into the Belvedere, under the sash and wainscoting, turning
up in places it would seem they could never get into: a jewelry case,
the back of a radio, the works of a music box, etc.
246 EXTREME CLOSEUPS
Their eyes are dumb and implacable.
247 INT. KITCHEN
Little by little they gather in numbers. Ursula sees one on the drain-
board. She swats it with a newspaper. Others sprout up. One by one she
picks them up with a tongs and drops them into the stove. This
method is too slow. She begins to use her fingers. She moves with a
quick, nervous energy. She spins around with a shriek.
248 INT. MASTER BEDROOM
In the bedroom overhead, Abby wakes up from one nightmare into
another. She jumps out of bed and goes to the window. The locusts
pelt the glass. Suddenly a crack shoots through it. She jumps back in
horror, and they are free to enter.
249 SERIES OF ANGLES
They are everywhere: on the clothesline, in the pantry, in hats and
shoes, and in the seams of clothing.
250 TIGHT ON CHUCK SLOW MOTION
Chuck, asleep in the wheat, bolts up in slow motion. His hair is
seething with locusts.
251 EXT. BONANZA FURTHER ANGLES
Panic hits the bonanza. Workers tie string around their pant cuffs to
keep the insects from crawling up their legs, then rush out to the
fields with gongs, rattles, pot lids, scarecrows on sticks, drums, horns
and other noisemakers to scare them off.
A storm flag is run up the flagpole. A tractor blasts out an S.O.S. The
peacocks huddle under the stoop.
*** *** ***
*** ***
***
Watching an idea grow into an insti-
tution is a privilege. Participating in
that growth, through mentorship and
generosity, is even more rewarding.
Now in its fth year, the American
Academy in Berlin is an exceptional
example of how the personal efforts
of dedicated individuals can make a
difference. The Academy has rmly
established itself as a respected insti-
tution in Berlin, gaining strong
support from Germanys business,
political, and cultural leaders.
Indeed, it has become Germanys
most visible center for transatlantic
discussion and activity.
Many individuals, corporations,
and foundations have contributed
generously to build the American
Academy in Berlin. In particular,
Stephen M. and Anna-Maria Kellen
and the descendents of Anna-Marias
parents, Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold,
have provided the Academys found-
ing gift. Through their continued
generosity, they remain principal
benefactors of the Academy.
Others, too, continue to support
the Academy, and last years benefac-
tors are listed here. Through their
generosity the Academys programs
are able to grow, enriching Berlins
and Germanys intellectual life and
building enduring relationships on
both sides of the Atlantic.
Founders Circle
$1,000,000 and above
Anna-Maria & Stephen M. Kellen and the
descendants of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold
Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH
Chairmans Circle
$500,000 and above
Lufthansa AG
Trustees Circle
$100,000 and above
Mr. & Mrs. Henry Arnhold
Robert Bosch Stiftung
Credit Suisse First Boston
DaimlerChrysler Fonds im Stifterverband
fr die Deutsche Wissenschaft
Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz
Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband
Fidelity Investments through the
Fidelity Foundation
Haniel Foundation
J.P. Morgan Chase
Axel Springer Verlag
Robert H. Mundheim
Alberto Vilar
Trustees of the American Academy in Berlin,
to endow the Stephen M. Kellen Lectureship
Presidents Circle
$25,000 and above
City of Berlin
Werner Gegenbauer
Philip Morris GmbH
Weil, Gotschal & Manges llp
Benefactors
$10,000 and above
Anonymous
Gahl Hodges Burt
Julie Finley
John C. Kornblum
kmpg Berlin
Shearman & Sterling
Kurt Viermetz
Patrons
$2,500 and above
Chase Manhattan Bank
csc Ploenzke AG
Deutsche Bank AG Region Ost
Hans-Michael & Almut Giesen
Claus M. Halle
Robert & Elizabeth Pozen
Heinrich & Annette von Rantzau
Dr. Schmidt AG
All other contributors
Hansjoachim Bauch
Gnter & Waltraud Braun
Leopold Bill von Bredow
Bundespresseamt
Christies Deutschland GmbH
Carl H. Hahn
Klaus & Lily Heiliger
Jrg & Eva Kastl
Klaus Krone
Renate Kchler
Enzio von Kuhlmann-Stumm
Landeszentralbank Berlin
Yasmine Mahmoudieh
Charles Maier
Jerome Marak & Andrea Lawrence
Mirant Holding AG
Barbara Monheim
Radio 100,6
Albert J. Raedler
William Sadlack & Rosemarie Pauli
David & Marjorie Sievers
Gary Smith
Ullstein GmbH /Axel Springer Verlag AG
Susanne Thaler
Donations to the American Academy in Berlin
July 2001 September 2002
THE
AMERICAN
ACADEMY
IN BERLIN
Hans ArnholdCenter
Michael Hersch
Tramontane for solo
piano, 2000. Performed
by Michael Hersch.
Private recording
(21C Media Group).
Courtesy of the composer.
1. 10:42
Martin Bresnick
Bird as Prophet for violin
and piano, 1999.
Performed by the Da Capo
Chamber Players: Lisa
Moore, piano, and Eva
Gruesser, viola. From the
recording Opere della
Musica Povera (Composers
Recordings, Inc., 2000).
Courtesy of Carl Fischer,
LLC and Composers
Recordings, Inc.
2. 12:03
Betsy Jolas
Plupart du Temps II, 1989.
Performed by Les
Nouveaux Interprtes/
Radio France. From the
recording Contemporary
Anthology of Music by
Women, compiled by
James Briscoe (Indiana
University Press, 1999).
Courtesy of James Briscoe.
3. 10:05
John Corigliano
To Music, 1995. Rudolf
Werthen, conductor /
I Fiamminghi, The
Orchestra of Flanders.
From Telarc CD-80421 /
1996 Telarc International
Corporation.
(www.telarc.com).
Courtesy of G. Schirmer,
Inc. and Telarc.
4. 5:21
Richard Danielpour
Sanctus and Benedictus,
2001. From An American
Requiem. Pacific
Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Carl St. Clair;
Stephanie Blythe, mezzo-
soprano; Hugh Smith,
tenor; Mark Oswald,
baritone; Pacific Chorale,
artistic director John
Alexander. (Reference
Recordings, 2002).
Courtesy of G. Schirmer
and Reference Recordings.
5. 9:46
Laura Schwendinger
Chiaro di luna, 1999.
Performed by the Franz
Liszt Chamber Orchestra
of Hungary. Private
recording. Courtesy
of the composer.
6. 3:55
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