NEWSLETTER
Committee on Intellectual Correspondence
Issue No. 2
An International Project sponsored by the Suntory Foundation (Japan),
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
In This Issue
Arts Policy
Arts Policy in a Democracy
The Kulturstaat
Japan’s Rising Support of the Arts
Being Creative
Electronic Connections
Online with Books and the Media
Demography
Population Implosion
Can One “Predict” Population Size? 7
India at Fifty
Snakes and Ladders
The Vision of Nehru
Tagore and Chaudhuri
Post-modern Hinduization
Indo Chic: The Rating Game
Reports from France and Italy
Communism & Fascism Equivalent?
Foucault Undone
Nolte and Furet
Disputing the United States
“Those Were the Days…”
Reports from England
Power to the People, i.e. Women
(continued on next page)
Spring/Summer 1998
Arts Policy in a Democracy
I n 1965 the United States Congress established the National Endowment for
the Arts as an independent agency of the federal government whose mission
was declared:
To foster the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in the United
States and to broaden public access to the arts.
The initiative was part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society enterprise, the effort
to remake America in the areas of health, education, and science as well as to
eliminate poverty. Behind it, however, were two other impulses. One was the
fabled memory of the depression-era W.P.A. (Works Projects Administration)
program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The W.P.A. supported many
artists, who later became famous in the emergence of abstract expressionism, in
creating murals and frescoes on schools and public buildings—similar to those
painted by the Mexican muralists such as Orozco and Rivera—and supported
many writers in composing the great historical guides to American cities, many
of which remain standard to this day. The second impulse was the idea that the
1 United States as a shining new power in the world—there was still the glow of
2 “the American century”—would support the arts as had every great historical
3 power in the past. Thus, populism and cultural greatness joined to undergird
this historic step in national policy.
4
Thirty-two years later Jane Alexander, the departing chairman of the
National Endowment of the Arts, spoke wearily of recurring Congressional
5 attempts “to drive a stake into the heart of federal funding for the arts.” And
she called these exorcistic rites—the hearings in the Congress on the appropri-
ations—“a nearly debilitating annual Sturm und Drang that threatens to suck
7 the life out of all arts advocates.”
At its peak, in 1992, the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts was
$175.9 million; in FY’98 it is $98 million, of which sixty percent goes for direct
grants to institutions and individuals and forty percent for grants to state arts
9 councils—surely a small sum compared to the $678 million allotted by the
10 German federal government, as reported in the following pages.
10 The story of this extraordinary change is a complex one—and will be a con-
11 tinuing theme of the Newsletter in subsequent issues. At the heart of the mat-
12 ter is the question that Tocqueville raised (but then, everybody quotes
Tocqueville, see page 36) of the tension between egalitarianism and elitism in a
democracy that prided itself on departing from older aristocratic cultures, and
13 the contemporary question whether arts in a democracy, where each arts group,
14 particularly minorities, claiming a share of the public purse in the name of
15 diversity, may not simply make a national arts endowment agency a multicul-
16
tural clearing house.
We intend to make this debate a continuing one in our pages. But to provide
17 some comparative perspective, we have asked our colleagues Wolf Lepenies and
Masakazu Yamazaki to write reports on cultural policy and its problems in
18 Germany and Japan. These follow below. We hope to continue this in our next
issue with reports on France and the United Kingdom. ◆
—Daniel Bell
 Arts Policy
Fay Weldon: Gender Switch
Reports from Germany/E. Europe
Arguments on Language Policy
Robert Gernhardt
On Ernst Jünger’s Century
Stjob: New Public Media Language
The Fall and Rise of Bertolt Brecht
Song of the Sirens
Romania: Hard Road to Normalcy
Mismanaged Cultural Transmission
Reports from Japan
Paradoxical Sense of Transience
Fresh Wind in Japanese Film
Furusato: Sociology of Remembrance
The New Japanese Literature
Su Tong and New Writing in China
Poetry
Adam Zagajewski
Robert Pinsky
Criticism and a Pot of Paint
The Soaking of Clement Greenberg 34
Whistler’s Mother 35
The American Scene
Everybody’s Tocqueville
The End of the American Epic?
Periodicals
On a Single Theme… 38
Susan Sontag on the End of Cinema 40
News from the Republic of Letters 41
Necrology
When a Sage Dies
Cornelius Castoriadis
David Rousset
Eric de Dampierre
Khone Shmeruk
George Solti
To Read an Obituary
Miscellany
British Reading Room
Out of a Time Warp
Big, Big Brother
Barbies and Ancient Rome
A Report to Our Readers
2
The Kulturstaat
18
and the Cultural Wars Within
19
20
21
21
T he prominent role that cultural policy plays in Germany can only be
understood in historical perspective. The philosophy of German ideal-
ism and the classic literature of Goethe’s Weimar established the idea of
a subjective inward Reich [a spiritual realm], which preceded the founding of
the German State by more than a hundred years. For a long time it was misun-
23 derstood as being itself a political act—that of renouncing politics alto-
24 gether—and as legitimating a withdrawal from society into the sphere of pri-
25 vate life. Germany always took pride in regarding itself as a Kulturstaat, keeping
the mere civilization of Western nations at a distance.
26
Even the profound political change of democratization after the end of the
Nazi regime did not alter the view that the State bears the major responsibility
27 for all matters of culture. However, there are problems with this view, and they
are becoming more and more prickly.
28
First, in the German constitution, the German states (Länder) have been given
29 a prerogative for which probably no word exists in any other language,
29 Kulturhoheit, i.e., a supremacy in cultural matters. The Länder want to preserve
30 their constitutional rights, but in order to finance huge cultural projects, they
need help from the federal government. Therefore, a complex relationship
between the federal government and the Länder has developed that is becoming
32 unmanageable. Especially in Berlin, the federal government and the local admin-
32 istration find themselves in an impasse over their relative obligations to finance
cultural institutions in the new capital.
Second, in the East, the unification of Germany is still seen, to a large extent,
as a “victory” of the West. Culture has become a refuge for political nostalgia:
theaters such as the Volksbühne in the former East Berlin try to preserve in their
productions and their outlook, which they regard as a distinct Eastern (“Ossi”)
mentality. Culture wars rage: ironically, while the President of the Republic,
36
Roman Herzog, pays tribute to Bertolt Brecht on his hundredth anniversary in
37 the company of his comrades from the old Berliner Ensemble, the conservative
Prime Minister of Bavaria claims Brecht, who was born in Augsburg, to be the
greatest Bavarian poet of the twentieth century.
Third, though all this illustrates the political importance given to culture, the
allocation of money is of equal importance. German culture is state-subsidized
to an extent that is hardly understandable to visitors from abroad: a good seat in
one of the three Berlin operas that may cost $50 is subsidized by the State at no
less than $200 per evening. (Production costs are incredibly high, due largely to
43
contracts which the unions refuse to alter). The city of Berlin alone has a yearly
43 cultural budget of almost one billion dollars. At the national level the German
44 taxpayers spend about 10 billion dollars a year on culture: the federal govern-
44 ment contributes approximately 5%, the German states about 46%, and the local
45 communities about 49%.
45 About 40% of the cultural budget is spent on theater and music. Revenue from
approximately 20 million visitors accounts for only about 13% of the cultural
46
budget for the more than 150 state theaters. The approximately 200 private the-
aters, with around 10 million visitors a year, as well as many free theater groups
8 receive high public subsidies, too.
The limits of this Subventionspolitik, however, have been reached by now. In
26
order to find more private sponsorship, attempts are under way to change German
31 tax laws that give little incentive for spending private money for public purposes.
42 In order to achieve this, Chancellor Kohl has formed a surprising coalition with
48 the Green Party which has advocated such a change most strongly. In the long
run, this may imply that the institutions of civil society and individuals will
become a second pillar of support for culture although, at present, they still buy
 Arts Policy
the influence they have by contributing less than 0.2% to the
cultural budget.
Fourth, equally in matters of culture it has become increas-
ingly difficult in Germany to reach decisions. The heated
debate over whether, where, and how to build a Holocaust
memorial provides a good example: Some time ago Chancellor
Kohl took a casual look at the four models under considera-
tion for the memorial, lingered briefly in front of the model
by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra, and even asked a ques-
tion. Next day, all German newspapers wrote: Eisenman and
Serra win competition for Holocaust memorial. Only those
who don’t know that Germany has been a monarchy for quite
a while now would be surprised. But, as yet, no final decision
has been reached.
This may change in September with the next elections. If
the Social Democrats and the Greens are able to form a coali-
tion government, cultural policy may be affected. Members
from both parties have indicated their willingness to create a
federal ministry of culture. But since the German states cer-
tainly will not renounce their constitutional rights in all mat-
ters of culture, we might see culture wars of a new kind. ◆ aters. Berlin has three opera houses, and the state government
—Wolf Lepenies
Japan’s Rising Support
for the Arts
T he year 1997 may well be remembered as a historical
watershed for government arts and culture administra-
tion in Japan. That year the New National Theater,
Tokyo’s fourth national theater and the first dedicated to mod-
ern performing arts, opened its doors. Previously, national the-
aters had been built for the classical Japanese performing arts:
Noh, Kabuki, and the Bunraku
puppet theater. The New Na-
tional Theater provided mod-
ern drama, opera, ballet, and a
modern dance with their own
national venue.
An equally momentous de-
velopment was the govern-
ment’s decision to defray not
only the new theater’s con-
struction and maintenance,
but also the costs of produc-
tion. In the first national the-
aters—used mainly for Kabuki
and Bunraku—the govern-
ment had paid only the operating costs. The financial author-
ities’ thinking was that all creative costs should be met from
box-office receipts.
State support for the arts in Japan comes out of the Agency
for Cultural Affairs’s modest budget and from the Japan Arts
Fund. The culture agency’s budget grows very little, and the
fund’s endowment has not been increased because of recent
ultra-low interest rates. Thus the change is a step forward.
Local governments are ahead of the central government in
this area; they have been funding artistic productions for
some time. In music, for example, Kanazawa, Kyoto,
Takasaki, and other cities have public orchestras. For ten
years forward-looking mayors and prefectural governors—
for example, in the city of Mito and in the Hyogo and
Saitama Prefectures—have led the way in building new the-
aters and allocating funds for performances. The budgeting
for the New National Theater has taken a page from their
book—a rare example of local governments initiating a
change in central-government policy thinking.
Of course, Japan has only taken the first small steps on this
new path. National theaters are still grossly underfunded. The
situation is especially pathetic when Japan is compared with
Europe, which has a long tradition of public support for the
arts. For example, in Sweden with a population of nine mil-
lion, the government disburses ¥19 billion for three national
theaters. The Japanese government is providing less than a
third that amount for production expenses at the New
National Theater. Japan, with a population of over 125 mil-
lion, should be able to invest ¥200 billion in its national the-
provided a subsidy of ¥20,000 per seat for every production,
a fact that Japanese taxpayers might consider nightmarish
rather than enviable.
There are a number of reasons for the weakness of modern
Japan’s arts administration and for the relative lack of pub-
lic criticism of this state of affairs. First, rapid industrializa-
tion fostered a utilitarian ethic and with it a tendency to
view the arts as an extravagance. Anything that did not con-
tribute directly to material prosperity was frowned upon, be
it high art or light entertainment. When it came to scholar-
ship and education, the Japanese were very generous. There
was no anti-intellectual backlash by ordinary citizens
against the government’s lav-
ish funding of schools. Art-
ists, however, responded to
official neglect by striking
an anti-popular, anti-estab-
lishment pose and declaring
that government assistance
would lead to interference
with free expression.
Peculiar to modern Japan,
another factor contributing
to the weak arts administra-
tion is the extreme diversity
of performing arts and the
lack of any that could be
labeled a “national art.” In the West, theater is theater. The
same actors can perform everything from Sophocles to Samuel
Beckett. In Japan, however, Kabuki and modern theater are
as different as opera and ballet; each has its own specialized
actors and its own audience. It is the same with different gen-
res of music and dance. All in all, more than ten different per-
forming arts vie for support. This has made it difficult for the
government to set funding priorities, but it was inclined
either to build a multipurpose hall or to provide assistance
3
 Arts Policy
for traditional performing arts.
If there is one cause for optimism over Japan’s cultural
future, it is the public’s relative lack of class-consciousness vis-
à-vis the arts. The Japanese are bemused by recent political
controversy in the United States over the National Endowment
for the Arts. According to the New York Times in the fall of
1997, some U.S. politicians regard the arts as elitist, and fund-
ing the arts with taxpayers’ money is seen as undemocratic.
Apparently many middle Americans tend to view the moral
freedom of contemporary arts as an elitist challenge. There is a
strong streak of anti-elitism in Japan, too, but such sentiment
is directed mainly against privileged lifestyles, not against the
arts and knowledge. In fact, the artists’ moral and political
defiance of the establishment often wins public plaudits.
The Japanese language distinguishes between “high art”
and “popular arts,” but the line between the two is rapidly
blurring. It is symbolic that 50,000 spectators, including the
emperor and empress, at the opening ceremony of the 1998
Olympic Winter Games in Nagano joined in singing the “Ode
to Joy” from Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9. One reason the arts
do not arouse anti-elitist antagonism is that since World War
II the distribution of wealth has largely evened out, and
upper-class patronage of the arts has disappeared. Postwar
society may have disparaged the arts, but the arts never
incurred the wrath of a specific class.
However, an arts policy is necessary in all postindustrial
societies. The arts stimulate people’s imagination and generate
works that provide the foundation for the exercise of reason
that leads to invention, discovery, and planning. Reason is
often guided by a particular orientation and operates within
a preset paradigm, but imagination can create new paradigms.
If Leonardo da Vinci, in trying to invent a flying machine, had
thought in terms of gliding rather than beating wings, even
with the technology and resources of his day, he might have
been able to develop the glider. History teaches us that ever
since ancient Greece, arts and sciences, thought and technol-
ogy progress in tandem.
If they realize that the major function of the arts is to foster
imagination, opponents of arts policies in both Japan and
America can be persuaded to support them. The Japanese
should recognize that the view of the arts as an extravagance
represents a belief belonging to an industrial society and that
imagination is indispensable to intellectual production in a
postindustrial society. And since artists’ anti-popular stance
was a rebellion against industrial society’s utilitarianism and
puritanical philistinism, there should be no need for such an
attitude in future.
Americans should remember that the arts, along with
sports, have facilitated upward social mobility and have given
young people from poor families opportunities to succeed.
Imagination is not as susceptible to environmental influences
as reason; it has the power to grow regardless of ones parents’
status. Moreover, just as the arts of indigenous peoples have
enriched the twentieth-century Western world, the imagina-
tion of the poor and oppressed, expressed through the arts,
can surely diversify the mentality of the elite.
—Masakazu Yamazaki
4
Being Creative
I n an effort to mobilize support for the arts and the
humanities, President Clinton in September 1994 cre-
ated a President’s Committee on the Arts and the
Humanities, chaired by John Brademas, President Eme-
ritus of New York University and a former Congressman
who had co-sponsored the original legislation for a
National Endowment of the Humanities. The Committee
consisted of thirty-two private members and thirteen
heads of federal agencies with cultural programs, includ-
ing “corporate executives, foundation presidents, artists,
scholars, and community leaders.” The First Lady, Hilary
Rodham Clinton, was the Honorary Chair.
In spring 1998, the President’s Committee produced its
report, Creative America, and then presented it at seven
regional forums for representatives from the arts and
humanities to consider its recommendations.
While the United States has accumulated a rich reserve
of “cultural capital,” Creative America argues that “the
health of our cultural life in the twenty-first century will
depend on the investments we make today.” So the report
calls on public and private agencies to increase funding
in support “of the creative individuals who contribute to
America’s diverse cultural tradition.”
The President’s Commission sees cultural exchanges as
strengthening democratic institutions and increasing Ame-
rica’s awareness of its own multicultural heritage. Hence,
public-private partnerships offer the greatest potential for
innovative developments. American multi-national corpo-
rations, it suggests, could support scholarly research on the
cultures of foreign countries in which they do business and
on American states and regions in which they operate.
Central to the report’s recommendations, according to
Mr. Brademas, is the call for a Millenium Initiative that
will “involve all Americans in preserving our cultural
heritage and appreciating creativity through the arts and
humanities.” Mr. Brademas stated: “We asked the
President and the First Lady to help us realize this ambi-
tious agenda, and they responded enthusiastically by
organizing a White House Millenium Council to lead a cel-
ebration that will, in the President’s words, ‘honor the
past and imagine the future.’”
Mr. Brademas concluded that “the recommendations in
the report have so many facets—from involving higher
education in the improvement of K-12 education to digi-
tizing cultural materials, assessing the nation’s preserva-
tion needs, and preserving folklore traditions—that they
can be implemented only with the help of every agency,
organization, and individual concerned with keeping our
cultural investment strong.”
Source: The quotations above are taken from the account of the
forum to consider the findings of Creative America in the Bulletin
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, May/June 1998.
◆
 Electronic Connections
Upward and Online with Books and the Media
T he Internet and its World Wide Web-sites have, in the last five years, grown at a rate that
has been unprecedented in the history of communications. No previous telecommunications
advance—not the telephone, the television set, cable television, VCRs, the facsimile
machine, not the cellular telephone—has penetrated the public consciousness and secured wide-
spread public adoption so quickly.
Until the 1990s, computers were not linked to each other in
any way comparable to the Internet. Today the Internet prob-
ably connects 30 million computers and tens of millions of
users in more than a hundred countries. Given the exponen-
tial growth, connections between 100 million computers is in
sight within a few years. New “affinity groups” spring up con-
stantly. On America Online (AOL), one of the largest access
services, during a typical evening more than a quarter of a
million users log on to one or more of the 8000 “chat rooms”
on the service, exchanging 80 million “instant messages” a
day. Such phenomena, on a much smaller scale, were typical
of “ham radios” and “citizen band” communication in the
early days of their founding. And how transient or permanent
these phenomena will be remains to be seen.
But what is clear are the extraordinary ramifications of the
Internet and instant communication on newspapers and
weekly news magazines, especially in the competition to be
“first” with the latest scandal; of the transformation of peri-
odicals not just as daily or weekly journals but as extensive
resource services through Web-sites; the creation of close con-
nections and exchanges between magazines into new elec-
tronic networks; and the beginning of scholarly publishing,
particularly journals and encyclopedias on CD-ROMs and
through electronic media rather than paper.
The most striking illustration of the rip-tide effects of the
Internet on news is the story of the “Drudge Report.” On a
late Saturday night at the end of January, a gossip-monger
named Matt Drudge, who has a Web-site on the Internet, pub-
lished a breathless report that Newsweek magazine had “killed
a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its
foundations.” It was the first hint of the Monica Lewinsky
affair. By 2:23 A.M. Sunday morning, the Drudge item was re-
posted on a half-dozen anti-Clinton talk groups and contin-
ued to surface among the excited conversations of Internet
news groups, to be picked up by an ABC (one of the major net-
work systems) news program, then by a CBS talk-radio show,
and then onto the round-the-clock coverage on CNN and
MSNBC (an all-news 24-hour cable network established by
NBC), and finally, Newsweek magazine—which had held up
the story because at that point it lacked sufficient
credibility—posted it on its Web-site before publishing a
story it had not been prepared to print.
The increasing competition between the media and the
macho need to have “the news beat and be first” has intensi-
fied the velocity and volatility of news reporting. All the
major newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New
York Times now have Web-sites on which they post their lead-
ing stories the night before their print appearance. Weeklies,
such as U.S. News and World Report, will post their major sto-
ries on the Internet several days before publication so as not
to have their stories “stolen” before their appearance in print.
Beyond that the online Web-sites have become an alto-
gether new form of journalism. The Wall Street Journal offers
an “Interactive Edition” at $49 a year (or $29 for print sub-
scribers) which provides focused news sections from which a
reader can select business news in Spanish and Portuguese,
search listings for technical and professional positions, as well
as material from other financial magazines such as Barrons
and Smart Money.
Business Week Online offers daily briefings (it is a weekly
magazine), topical collections of stories of interest to special-
ized audiences, six years of its archives available through a
key work index, and online conferences through its chat
rooms. In March the demand was so heavy that Business Week
was forced to suspend new subscriptions until it could han-
dle the volume of requests.
The Times Literary Supplement has issued a CD-ROM (from
October 1994 to December 1996, which will be updated annu-
ally.) You can search for a word or phrase in the complete text
of the TLS and retrieve complete articles and line drawings
(price: $470 a year). Subscribers to the TLS now can have
access on-line to any issue since October 1994 and even
receive their copy of the review “directly to your door.”
The Economist’s Web edition is free to its subscribers. More
than just a Web-site, it sends free weekly summaries to read-
ers every Thursday by E-mail, a day before the weekly edi-
tion is available on the Web and by mail. The Economist’s
“screensaver” has a world clock and provides information on
upcoming world events tied to a reader’s computer clock,
while also bringing detailed statistical analysis of more than
sixty countries. And it provides immediate access to more
than 6,000 articles.
In all these different ways, the Web editions of these maga-
zines go beyond the weekly print sections and are becoming a
new and different format from the traditional kind. Whether
readers will pay for these extra services remains to be seen.
The multiplication of all the Web-sites as well as the widen-
ing of resources—not only of the established Nexis (a citation
bank for news stories) or Lexis (on legal decisions) but also
the back issues of hundreds of newspapers and journals, as
well as the volumes in libraries—threaten to create a new
Borgesian Tower of Babel. A classics professor recently began
5
 Electronic Connections
searching the Internet for references to Plato and found 40,000
situations, including numerous references to a “suburb of
Chicago” and the Spanish word for plate. His solution was to
create a site called “The Fourth Tetraology,” to explore Plato’s
middle dialogues and three other groups. But then one had to
know the key word “Tetraology” to know where to go.
Inevitably, “search engines” have arisen as services for sub-
scribers to help classify the different topics available. But then
you need to know how search engines work. Using automated
software, search engines follow links across the Web and call
up pages wherever they can find them. Once a page fits a user’s
need, the search engine automatically indexes some or all of
the words on the page. Then, when a Web surfer punches in
search words, the engine looks up the word on its index and
calls up the appropriate Web address.
The largest search engine, HotBot, how-
ever, indexes only about 34% of the esti- The age of print—
mated 320 million pages on the Web.
One unique effort to facilitate ex- is it over, again?
changes between like-minded periodicals
and research organizations and founda-
tions is the Electronic Policy Network organized by the liberal
bi-monthly, The American Prospect. Each of the forty-six mem-
bers and affiliates, such as the Brookings Institution, the Russell
Sage Foundation, and the Twentieth Century Fund, have their
own Web-sites, presenting their own publications and research
reports. But the network also has a “search engine” that allows
researchers to search for material on specific subjects and, more
ingeniously, has a “virtual magazine” called Idea Central that
organizes the outputs of all the members by topic. So Idea
Central has ongoing “magazines” on health policy, welfare and
families, education, economics and politics, civic participation,
media old and new, as well as briefing books such as campaign
finanace reform (which include reports broken down by sub-
topic from seven of its affiliates), and all of these are available
on-line through the Internet.
The major developments in the scholarly fields are the growth
of comprehensive search and retrieval systems and the increas-
ing possibility of publication of journals by electronic means.
The most striking illustration of the vast expansion of schol-
arly search is JSTOR (short for “Journal Storage”), which
began in 1996 with a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
JSTOR is a database now comprising sixty-four journals in
twelve fields, half of which are already accessible. By the year
2000, more than one hundred journals in the fifteen fields will
be available on JSTOR database, in cooperation with 200 aca-
demic libraries. Thus, there are eleven journals in economics,
with the American Economic Review leading off; seven in phi-
losophy, starting with the Journal of Philosophy; eleven in
mathematics, with the Annals of Mathematics and the Journal
of the American Mathematical Society, etc., including journals
in the widely dispersed fields of finance, ecology, Asian stud-
ies, and higher education.
JSTOR’s search engine allows users to browse and search
individual journals, in some instances such as the American
Political Science Review going back to 1906, or to perform
cross-disciplinary searches of multiple journals in multiple
6
fields. Users can search the full text of articles or search by
topic, by authors, or by key words. The world of scholarship,
thus, is available at one’s own desk by clicking a mouse.
In similar fashion, more detailed materials such as survey
data—polls, opinions, voting analysis, and the like—are avail-
able on the Survey Data Documentation and Analysis Web-
page developed by the Survey Methods Program at the
University of California, Berkeley. The Web-site not only calls
up the collection of survey questions from, say, ten separate
studies, but also can run cross-tabulations on these data to
allow a researcher to test some of his or her own hypotheses.
The age of print—is it over? For encyclopedias, surely. The
Encyclopedia Britannica (EB), the oldest (230 years) and nomi-
nally the most prestigious encyclopedia in English, occupied
three feet of shelf space with thirty-two
volumes, 44 million words, and 72,000
articles and sold for $1500. Now it is on
two CD-ROMs which sell for £125 in the
U.K. and $125 in the U.S. And a subscrip-
tion also brings an Internet search ser-
vice to link up the EB with other sites.
The electronic mode has now become the certified route for
organizations publishing abstracts of their own research
reports. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER),
the largest in the field, publishes annually about 400 working
papers, and in the past would publish the quarterly Reporter
with several hundred-word abstracts of these papers for those
who would wish to order the full paper. The Winter 1997/8
issue is the last to include working paper abstracts. Future
issues will only list working paper numbers, titles and authors,
but the abstracts will be published only on the NBER Web-
site. That site also will now have a searchable index of over
5,000 working papers issued since 1978, in addition to a macro-
economic history database of over 35,000 time series, as well
as the Penn World Tables containing international economic
and demographic data.
And a book? To paraphrase Getrude Stein, a book, is a book,
is a book. No longer. Once published, a book sat for eternity
until it crumbled into dust. But James Kugel of Harvard, who
has written a book, The Bible as it Was (Harvard University
Press, 1997), concludes his preface with a note to readers:
Despite all the time spent assembling and checking the
material…no doubt errors of commission and omission
remain; moreover, texts now being published for the
first time or yet to be discovered will likely provide fur-
ther insights that might have enriched this study. And
so I cannot but make a request of my learned readers: I
will be most grateful for any corrections or additions
that you might be kind enough to pass along, either via
the publisher or to me by means of my Web-page,
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~jlkugel/, where I intend
to maintain a regularly updated information sheet about
this book and related matters….It is my hope that the
age of electronic publishing may yet provide a release
from the dire sentence of Eccles. 1:15. [A crooked thing
cannot be made straight.] ◆
—DB
 Demography

Population Implosion—and Dispersion

E ver since the Club of Rome report of 1973 we have

grown accustomed to thinking that the world is facing
a ticking population “bomb” threatening to undo our
relation with the environment and each other. But over the
past decade it has become increasingly clear to demographers
nationwide, tax-financed, pay-as-you-go pension programs.
This can be seen in the ratio of persons over sixty-five in the
population to those of working age. Even under today’s
straightened circumstances the ratio in developed countries is
only five to one, five workers for each retiree; by 2050 it should
that the picture is not only more complicated, but perhaps be less than two to one. Again, in some countries it would be
utterly different. It is now considered entirely possible that even higher: in Germany and Japan roughly five to three, in
within fifty years world pop- Italy an amazing five to four.
ulation will actually decline— But perhaps the most
with consequences no less Approaching the Limit? momentous social change
momentous for social life. In the issue of Science, March 27, 1998, the eminent nat- brought about by such demo-
In The Public Interest of Fall uralist E.O. Wilson sounds what he believes to be the graphic trends—should these
1997 demographer Nicholas claxon of alarm about population: “The global population U.N. estimates prove accu-
Eberstadt reports on the soon is precariously large, will grow another third by 2020, and rate—is that we would find
to be published revision of climb still more before peaking sometime after 2050…. ourselves living in a world
the U.N.’s biennial com- Human kind is approaching the limit of its food and water where most people’s only bio-
pendium, World Population supply.” Are these fears warranted? Here are two reports. logical relatives would be
Prospects, the oldest and larg- their own ancestors, their par-
est attempt to outline future ents, and their children—
demographic trends. After reviewing all the relevant limita- a world without aunts, uncles, and cousins. Throughout human
tions of any such demographic projections, he focuses on the history, Eberstadt notes, the extended family has been the pri-
report’s “low variant,” which the U.N. Population Division mary instrument of socialization. What will occur in families
considers “reasonable and plausible.” Taking into account that do not include any biological contemporaries or peers? It
migration, mortality, and fertility, the report calculates that is a disturbing question. ◆
in the year 2040 the next generation would be about 30% —ML
smaller than the current one. Population would reach its Source: Nicholas Eberstadt, “World Population Implosion?” The
apogee of roughly 7.7 billion at that time and would then Public Interest, Fall 1997.
decline by 25% with each succeeding generation.
On these assumptions, two significant features of depopu-
lation stand out. First, there would be a significant redistrib- Can One “Predict”
ution of the world’s population to the “less developed”
nations from the “developed” ones. Today the populations of Population Size?
Europe (including Russia) and the African continent are What makes it so difficult to find limits on human popula-
roughly equal; by 2050, Africans would outnumber tion size? Joel E. Cohen, who heads the Laboratory of
Europeans three to one. On the larger world scene, the popu- Populations at Rockefeller University, explains:
lation ratio between the “less developed” nations to the devel- How many people can the earth support? In 1679 Antoni van
oped nations is four to one; by 2050, it would be seven to one. Leeuwenhoek estimated not more than 13.4 billion. In 1994,
Indeed, not a single European state could match even the five authors independently published estimates ranging from
Phillipines in population. fewer than three billion up to 44 billion. Between 1679 and 1994
The second feature, which has already been noted in many at least sixty additional estimates were published, ranging
countries, is the radical aging of the population particularly in widely, from less than one billion to more than one thousand
the “developed nations.” The median age (the division by half) billion. One conclusion is immediate: Many of the answers can-
of the world’s population today is twenty-five; by 2050, the not be nearly right—or there is no single right answer.
U.N. “low variant” estimate is forty-two. In some countries, Why there is no single right answer becomes clear when the
the population would be even more aged: Japan’s median age methods used to obtain these estimates are examined carefully.
would be fifty-three, Germany’s fifty-five. In Italy barely two One method assumes that a single factor, usually food, limits
percent of the population would be under the age of five, more population size. (That population often grows fastest in the
than 40% over sixty-five. poorest countries with the least food and slowest in the
There are reasons to be guardedly optimistic about the wealthy countries where food is most abundant does not seem
macroeconomic consequences of this shift, says Eberstadt, to deter those who assume that food limits national popula-
since an aging population (assuming it is healthy) is still pro- tion growth.) The method takes the maximum possible annual
ductive, and can become more so through retraining at later global food production and divides this by an estimate of the
stages of one’s working life. The real challenge would be faced minimum food requirement per person to state the maximum
by the welfare state, which would find it harder to finance possible number of shares that the food supply could be

7
 Demography
divided into, and this number is taken as the maximum num-
ber of people the earth could support.
Yet this is quite simplistic. The maximum possible food pro-
duction depends not only on environmental constraints such
as soil, rainfall, terrain, and the length of the growing sea-
son, but also on human choices, individual and collective,
which cultivars are chosen; the technology of cultivation;
credit available to farmers; farmer education; infrastructure
to produce and transport farm inputs (including irrigation
capacity and hybrid seed development); infrastructure to
transport, store, and process farm outputs; economic demand
for food from other sect ors of the economy; and international
politics and markets that affect trade inputs and outputs.
Moreover, culture defines what is food. Where a Hindu may
see a sacred cow, an American may see a hamburger on
hooves. If edibility alone determined what is food, cock-
roaches would be in great demand.
The minimum food requirement depends not only on phys-
iological requirements (about 2,000 kilocalories per person per
day), but also cultural and economic standards of what is
acceptable and desirable. Not everyone who has a choice will
accept a vegetarian diet with no more than the minimum calo-
ries and nutrients required for normal growth.
Many authors of maximum population estimates recognized
the difficulty of finding a single answer by giving a low esti-
mate and a high estimate. This range of low to high medians,
from 7.7 to 12 billion, is close to the low and high U.N. pro-
jections for 2050: from 7.8 billion to 12.5 billion.
Recent population history has rapidly approached the
level of many estimated limits, and the U.N. projections of
future population lie at similar levels. Of course, a historical
survey of estimated limits is no proof that limits really are in
this range. It is merely a warning signal that the human pop-
ulation has now entered a zone where limits on how many
people the earth can support have been anticipated and may
be encountered. ◆ entrance hall reaches up through floors of reading rooms;
Source: Joel E. Cohen, “How Many People Can the Earth
Support?” Bulletin (of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences),
March/April 1998. Copyright © 1997 by Joel E. Cohen. Reprinted by permission.
8
Miscellany
British Reading Room
W hen in 1978 Shirley Williams, the Labour secretary
of state for education , announced the decision to
construct a new British Library—at a site in Euston adja-
cent to the St. Pancras Station—replacing the fabled old
reading room in the British Museum, a cry arose against
the cultural vandalism of this move. The sublimely beau-
tiful old domed room, the heart of the library, was dear to
those who cherished the images of Karl Marx or Bernard
Shaw dozing over their books. But there was also the prob-
lem of utility—how such an archaic jewel could be main-
tained for “modern” purposes.
When the utility question first arose, Patrick Gordon
Walker, the former Labour education secretary, proposed
an extension of the library in adjacent Bloomsbury .He had
not figured on the wrath of other Labour M.P.s such as the
wily left-wing Barbara Castle and the brawling right-wing
Bessie Braddock, who claimed that extension would mean
tearing down a few blocks occupied by the poor. What was
more important: books or people? And in this they were
supported privately by Richard Crossman, the Labour min-
ister of housing. So, Shirley Williams had to carry the load.
Move forward to the present. The new British Library
has opened, at least the Humanities Reading Room, the
first of nine. There will be the Rare Books Reading Room,
the Oriental and Indian Collections, the Manuscript
Reading Room, and finally the Science Reading Room in
mid-1999. So far the project has cost five times its original
budget. There is space for only one-third of its 3,500 regu-
lar readers, and the new British Library can store only 12
million of the 25 million books originally planned for.
And the verdict (one over-awed reader commented to the
London Review of Books): “The building is splendid. The
it is crossed over by high walkways and is penetrated from
top to bottom by a glazed shaft.” This will contain the
King’s Library in a display of leather bindings.
The lavishly leather-topped reading desks will be fed
books by a computerized retrieval system and equipped for
modem and Internet use—assets which may baffle the older
nostalgic pen-pushing scholars. The look is smart, comfort-
able, and conducive to earnest endeavor: marble columns,
soft-colored stone on the floor of the entrance hall, blue car-
pets in the reading rooms, pale oak, leather and brass, soar-
ing walls and curving ceilings awash with light.
As with the original reading room, there is a problem of
space. A plot had been set aside behind the new library for
expansion. But the Treasury wants to sell it, possibly to the
Sainsbury supermarket firm. As The Economist comments,
“Eventually the Treasury will have to choose between
catering for scholars of obscure Asian languages and con-
sumers of even more obscure Asian vegetables.”
Sources: Nicholas Barker, Prospect (London), December 1997.
 India at Fifty
India: Snakes and Ladders
O n August 15, 1997, India celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its independence. It is a stun-
ning feat in the history of democracy. India is the second most populous country in the world
with a population almost reaching a billion persons by the millenium. There are twenty-five
states, some of which are larger individually than the populations of Japan, Mexico, or France. Kashmir
and Kerala, at opposite ends of the Indian subcontinent, are as different as Sweden and Italy.
There are eighteen official languages, the largest of which,
Hindi, the official language, is spoken by about 30% of the
population, plus thousands of distinct dialects whose speak-
ers often cannot communicate with one another. There are
3,500 sub-castes with either distinct or subtle differences that
often keep the people apart from marriage, jobs, or social
intercourse. In the last election, there were 600 million regis-
tered voters for the seven national political parties.
Yet, except for the short period from 1973 to 1975, when the
then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitu-
tion, it has survived as a democracy. In fact, half of the peo-
ple in the world who live in a democracy live in India. There
is also another singular fact noted only by those who recall
Sherlock Holmes’s story of the dog that did not bark in the
night: namely that of almost all of the one hundred post-colo-
nial regimes in the world in the last fifty years, India has been
one of the few that has not experienced a military dictator-
ship. Its Asian neighbors, from Pakistan to Burma, and almost
all post-colonial African nations have had military regimes.
India has not.
There is also the history. Though Indian nationalists might
passionately disagree, English rule in India, going back two-
hundred years, was a benign force. There was the emphasis on
education, initiated by the English utilitarians; the Indian Civil
Service as a bedrock of administration; the English judicial sys-
tem, and the ethos of Sandhurst, the military training school
that produced among others Winston Churchill, and created a
professional Indian army that stayed out of politics. Today,
many of the institutions are eroding and English itself, the lan-
guage of the educated elite and the national newspapers of
India, is under sharp attack politically and culturally, though it
continues to gain in the business and technological worlds.
In a book with the intriguing title Snakes and Ladders:
Glimpses of Modern India, the writer Gita Mehta uses the
board game, for which that is the title, as a metaphor for
India. The roll of the dice determines “how many squares a
player may move. Starting at the foot of the ladder lets you
climb it, sometimes moving thirty squares in a single throw.”
Landing on a snake means you have to slide back down
“swallowed by past nightmares,” back to square one.
The faith ladder that India climbed was created by
Jawaharlal Nehru. It was a secular state, one that, as Amartya
Sen has written, made it possible to think a nation could inte-
grate Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsees, and a mas-
sive Muslim population which chose to stay on in India rather
than be “exchanged’ into Pakistan. There are in fact, he
writes, almost as many Muslims in India as in Pakistan, and
many more than in Bangladesh.
But secularism, as Nehru knew, was a sophisticated way of
life that might never be appreciated by the masses of Indians.
And since people live by myths (when not by religions), in his
Discovery of India (Oxford, 1990) Nehru created a fable, as
Edward W. Desmond writes, that celebrated the achievements
of Mughal emperors and Rajput maharajhas alike, playing
down the ceaseless conflict of fratricide. He gave a special
place to the visions of ancient emperors like the Buddhist con-
vert Ashoka of the third century B.C. and the Mughal Akhbar
of the sixteenth who could be portrayed as having a proto-
secular outlook in their efforts to harmonize contending reli-
gious forces within their empires.
But then there are the snakes. The Hindu nationalists see
India’s history as as one of a unified culture, the Hindu peo-
ple the “chosen people of the subcontinent” overcome by
alien forces, beginning in the eleventh century, who destroyed
temples, forced conversion by sword and imposed an alien cul-
ture. For them the glory of the past Hindu civilization based
on the Vedas and manly virtues, must be restored as the basis
of an Indian political identity, and all other religions and cul-
tures take a secondary place in this scheme of things.
Thus the stage is set for the coming years. With its institu-
tional underpinnings, India was cemented politically by
Nehru’s Congress Party, which, by the end of the half-century,
remained the only national secular party. After the death of
Nehru it was held together by a dynasty living on the origi-
nal charismatic capital, including Nehru’s daughter Indira
Gandhi and her two children Sanjay and Rajiv—one died in a
plane accident, the other, like his mother, assassinated by ter-
rorists. Sonia Ghandi, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, and her two
children are now moving to take control of a shattered
Congress party against the rising tide of Hindu nationalism
exemplified by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been
invited for the second time to form a national administration.
Since 1947, there have been twelve national elections for the
national parliament, but four within the last decade. In the last
elections, as various correspondents have reported, the level
of violence has been rising. The fateful question is whether the
political fragmentation and polarization which now exists in
India may finally result in the end of secular society. ◆
—DB
Sources: Amartya Sen, Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 8, 1997.
Lloyd & Susanne H. Rudolph, The New Republic, March 16, 1998.
Edward W. Desmond, The New York Review of Books, May 14, 1992.
9
 India at Fifty
The Vision of Nehru
O f all the books published to mark the fiftieth anniver-
sary of India’s emergence as an independent nation,
Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1997) generated the most introspective and con-
tentious debate. This vibrant account has a bold and striking
thesis: India was, at its core, a product of a political imagina-
tion. The “possibility that India could be united into a single
political community was a wager on the idea: the idea of
India.” The idea was given concrete form and practical real-
ity, not by Gandhi, who emerges in these pages as a rather
insignificant figure, nor by the other imaginings of India’s
past, but by Nehru.
At the center of this vision was the idea of a modern state—
and all the trappings that entailed. The Nehruvian vision, as
Khilnani describes it, centered upon a belief that the state
would reform the gamut of social and economic relations that
prevented India’s emergence as a modern society and it would
provide the locus through which the diverse fabric of India
would be woven into a consolidated nation. India, “an un-
gainly, unlikely, inelegant concatenation of difference,” could
not have been sustained as a viable entity without a modern
state, and its democracy would be unimaginable outside that
institutional setting. “What made democracy viable in India,”
Khilnani argues, “is not simply the appeal of the idea, of pre-
existing cultural and historical predispositions.” As “ideolog-
ically unwelcome and paradoxical” as it may seem to inhabi-
tants of the “virtual world of post modernism, it is in fact the
continuous stability of the state that has been essential to
India’s democracy.”
A modern state, envisioned on Nehruvian lines, allowed
India to have layered, fluid, and inclusive identity. It defined
citizenship on “civic and universalist criteria” and avoided
the temptations of a particularistic identity. It allowed all the
fundamental agencies and ideas of modernity to also become
irrevocably a part of its ongoing history. The secularism it
entailed allowed it to accommodate and integrate its religious
minorities. Even though Hindu nationalism makes an ominous
appearance in the final pages of the book, Khilnani appears
confident of the enduring plausibility of the Nehruvian vision
that rejected “the state of a singular religion, culture or eth-
nos—the torrid empty dream of Partition.” It was because of
Nehru’s stewardship that India emerged as a parliamentary
democracy based on universal suffrage, without religious
affiliation and committed to social reform. India would be
unimaginable and unsustainable without his vision.
At a time when many planks of the Nehruvian vision—its
commitment to secularism and state led development, in partic-
ular—seem under attack, this book reminds its readers of the
extraordinary magnitude of Nehru’s achievement. But despite
its verve and stylistic panache, it left many readers unconvinced
of its overall balance of judgments. Amartya Sen, in an other-
wise generally glowing reception, reminded his readers of the
failures of the Indian state’s mission to accomplish most basic
goals such as literacy and poverty alleviation, failures that in
part stem from misplaced ideological priorities of Nehru’s eco-
10
nomic vision. And he pointed out that too much of an emphasis
on Nehru’s improvisations led Khilnani to slight the social and
cultural linkages that made India’s unity possible.
For Bhikhu Parekh and Shashi Tharoor, the book was insuf-
ficiently attentive to the complex legacies of the nationalist
movement that prepared India for its subsequent democratic
experience. Khilnani’s claim that India acquired democracy in
a fit of absent-mindedness ignores the depth of consensus
forged early on by the nationalist movement and enacted in
the practices and sensibilities of its leadership. Indeed, it
failed to address the central question which the title of the
book suggests. What makes India, India? At some level all
modern societies are held together by states.
What is it that makes India distinctive? The terrain of much
of its politics has been animated by this question as much as
anything else; and it has never been clear that Nehruvianism
has been able to assuage the anxieties that this question gen-
erates. Hindu Nationalism is absolutely right to insist that the
setting in which these questions will be debated owes much
to Nehru. The extraordinary criticism of Nehru now under-
way owes more to him than it acknowledges. ◆
—Pratap Mehta
Sources: Amartya Sen, Times Literary Supplement, August 18,1997.
Bhikhu Parekh, Independent, August 17, 1997.
Shashi Tharoor, Foreign Affairs, February 1998.
Tagore and Chaudhuri
O ne of the virtues of a symbolic anniversary is the
opportunity to recall, and evaluate, and, when due,
praise the giants of the past who have lain in the dust.
Such is the instance with Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet
and recreator, in effect, of its literature. Tagore won the Nobel
prize in 1913 for his collection of poetry, Gitanjali, which was
embraced by W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound but today, as Amartya
Sen writes, “is in near-total eclipse in the rest of the world.”
In mid-1997, an anthology of Tagore’s work and a selection
of letters were published. These volumes were the occasion
for a remarkable essay spread across nine pages of The New
York Review of Books by Amartya Sen, himself a Bengali and a
world-class economist who was recently named Master of
Trinity College, Cambridge. Tagore was not only an immensely
versatile poet, but also a short story writer, novelist, play-
wright, painter (some of whose abstractions are beginning to
receive attention,) as well as the composer of the Indian
national anthem. He wrote widely on literature, politics, cul-
ture, and philosophy. But it is as a moral figure that Tagore
commands attention. In respect to the present, what stands
out is Tagore’s condemnation of Indian nationalism and the
realization (as Ziauddin Sardar writes in The New Statesman)
that “the spirit of violence,” which “lay dormant in the psy-
chology of the west has now come to the fore and drained
India of its moral autonomy.”
Tagore established a school at Santinketan, near Calcutta, as
an “Abode of Peace,” dedicated to exorcising that spirit. Some
of the most charming sections of Sen’s essay are devoted to this
school, since, he writes, he was educated there, his courses
 India at Fifty
moving openly from classical Western thought to the culture
of China or Japan “in sharp contrast with the cultural conser-
vatism and separatism that has tended to grip India from time
to time.” And, as Sen writes sweetly, the filmmaker Satyajit
Ray was also an alumnus of Santinketan and made several films
based on Tagore stories. As Ray wrote in 1991: “Santinketan
made me the combined product of East and West that I am.”
If Rabindranath Tagore was the complete Bengali who
became the citizen of the world, Nirad C. Chaudhuri was the
acerbic Bengali who became the last Englishman of the empire.
In 1951, at age fifty-four, Chaudhuri published his first book,
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. It was dedicated to
the memory of the British empire, “because all that was good
and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the
same British rule.” It was reviled and denounced in India, yet,
with its cadences of classical British prose and the picture it
drew of the displaced colonial Indian incapable of living in his
forefather’s way but unable to find a place in the new Indian
landscape, it has been acclaimed as one of the great books of
the twentieth century. This was followed by a second install-
ment of his autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, a volume
uncompromising in its intellectual elitism, including an
unwillingness to translate quotations from Latin and Greek.
In 1970, Nirad Chaudhuri migrated to England.
Now, at age one hundred, he has published a volume, Three
Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, the three being individual-
ism, nationalism, and democracy. As Amit Chaudhuri writes,
“it is a record of his growing disillusionment with the unvis-
ited Yarrow, the country of his imagination, after it became
the country of his domicile.” But the book is not a rant but a
set of epigrammatic observations on mass culture and the
decline of English life.
Since this is an anniversary and “cultural amnesty” has be-
come the order of the day, Chaudhuri has now received official
recognition from the department of culture—apparently will-
ing to overlook his reference to India as “a land of barbarians.”◆
—DB
Source: Amartya Sen, The New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997.
Ziauddin Sardar,, The New Statesman, August 29, 1997.
Pankaj Mishra, Prospect, November 1997.
Amit Chaudhuri, The Spectator, January 17, 1998.
Post-modern Hinduization
A s a one-time biologist, science writer, and a partisan
of science-for-the-people movements in India and the
United States, writes Meera Nanda in Dissent, “I
have watched with increasing unease the transnational
alliance that has emerged around the idea that the rationality
of modern science encodes Western and imperialistic social-
cultural values, and is therefore inimical to the interests of
non-Western peoples. The alliance brings together some of the
most avant-garde scholars in U.S. universities with the
neopopulist, cultural-nationalist, ‘postcolonial’ intellectuals
from the third world, most notably India.”
Indeed, the cluster of ideas that postmodernist intellectuals
deploy to deconstruct the supposedly Eurocentric assumptions
of modern science appears with high frequency in the dis-
course of Hindu fundamentalist parties. The Hindu right has
proclaimed the twenty-first century a “Hindu century” on the
theoretical grounds made respectable by left critics of science.
In this context, the Hindu nationalists have been able to
position themselves as the true defenders of non-Western ways
of knowing. Themselves leading the charge for “decolonizing
knowledge,” the Hindu fundamentalist parties began to
replace modern mathematics with so-called “Vedic mathemat-
ics” in public schools. One of the first acts of the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) after coming to power in the state of Uttar
Pradesh in 1992 (one of the poorest states in India, but the
largest with 120 million people) was to make the study of Vedic
mathematics compulsory for high school students. Explicitly
stating an interest in “awakening national pride” among stu-
dents, the government-approved textbooks replaced standard
algebra and calculus with sixteen Sanskrit verses proclaimed
by their author, Jagadguru Swami Shri Bharati Krishna Tirathji
Maharaj, the high priest of Puri, to be of Vedic origin.
Prominent Indian mathematicians and historians who have
examined these verses believe that there is nothing Vedic about
them, and that the Jagadguru has tried to pass off a set of clever
formulas for quick computation as a piece of ancient wisdom.
But that has not stopped BJP and other revivalist cultural
movements in India from equating Jagadguru with
Ramanujan—the great Indian mathematician, the subject of
the recent book by Robert Kanigal The Man Who Knew
Infinity—in their hagiographies of Indian knowledge systems.
Hinduization is not limited to mathematics alone. History
curricula have always been favorite targets of religious
nationalists. Under the growing influence of religious nation-
alists in the state and central governments, the earlier
emphases on secularism is being reversed. New history text-
books celebrate all things Hindu (including the caste system),
propagate the myth of India as the original home of the
“Aryan race,” and deplore all “foreigners,” including the
Muslims. The history of Indian science and technology is not
exempt. It is described as an unfolding of the Hindu genius,
although material accomplishments (ancient technologies, for
example) are emphasized over the penchant for critical
inquiry that exists in some Indian traditions.
Source: Meera Nanda, “The Science Wars in India,” Dissent,
Winter 1997.
11
 India at Fifty
Indo Chic: The Rating Game
I n the months before and just after the fiftieth anniversary
of India’s (and Pakistan’s) freedom, a gusher of articles,
exhibits, photographs, and special issues of magazines all
appeared in what Somini Sengupta characterized in The New
York Times as “Indo chic.” “Indo chic,” she writes, “is not lim-
ited to the highbrow, however. Consider the kitsch appeal of
Hollywood cinema—Bombay’s flourishing movie industry. Or
among American teenagers, the madness over the ancient
Indian and North African art of body painting, known as
mehndi, now sold as do-it-yourself kits at Urban Outfitters.”
The apogee of Indo chic, appropriately, was the special dou-
ble fiction issue of The New Yorker which
carried about twenty-five articles (only
four of which were fiction, the rest liter- The surprising
ary reflections, journals, and the
like).One of the interesting features was rehabilitation of
a group photograph of eleven Indian
writers, men and women, who had never Subhas Chandra Bose...
been gathered before for a common pic-
ture-taking and who, as Bill Buford, the
editor of the issue, remarks, unlike every other literary milieu,
did not know each other personally.
The major essay is by Salman Rushdie, whose novel
Midnight’s Children in 1981, according to editor Buford, made
it possible “to be an Indian novelist.” (Where, one may ask,
was V.S. Naipaul hiding?)
Rushdie concentrates almost entirely on Indian writing in
English and says that “to my own considerable astonishment”
there is only one Indian writer in translation who he would
place on a par with the Indo-Anglican, namely Saadat Hasan
Manto, an immensely popular Urdu writer of low-life fiction,
who wrote a masterpiece entitled Toba Tek Singh, a parable of
the partition of India in which it is decided that lunatics, too,
must be partitioned—Indian lunatics to India, Pakistani
lunatics to Pakistan, etc.
But his review of Indian literature has led Rushdie, as he
admits, to a “single—unexpected and profoundly ironic—con-
clusion,” namely—and this is the bomb that he has thrown:
The prose writing—both fiction and non-fiction—cre-
ated in this period by Indian writers working in
English is…a stronger and more important body of
work than most of what has been produced in the eigh-
teen “recognized” languages of India, the so-called
“vernacular languages.”
Admittedly, says Rushdie, he did his reading only in
English, “and there has long been a genuine problem of trans-
lation in India.” But he reiterates his conclusion that “the true
Indian literature of the first postcolonial half-century has
been made in the language the British left behind.” One can
imagine the exclamations of outrage in the eighteen “recog-
nized vernacular languages.”
The most startling essay in the issue is a long sympathetic
account by Amitav Ghosh, professor of anthropology at
Columbia University, of the Indian National Army and its
12
leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, whose 40,000-man army fought
with the Germans and the Japanese against the British during
World War II.
Bose, a Cambridge-educated Bengali, and competitor with
Gandhi and Nehru for the leadership of the independence
movement, had broken with Gandhi, who felt that no worth-
while end could be achieved by the use of morally compro-
mised means. “For Bose no means were unacceptable so long
as they contributed to the overthrow of the Raj.”
Bose arrived in Southeast Asia on July 2, 1943, after travel-
ling from Germany by submarine. In Singapore’s Cathay Theatre,
he took over the leadership of the Indian
National Army, adopting a military style
of dress complete with jackboots and tak-
ing the title of “Netaji” or “Leader,” and
created a “government in exile.” Moving
to Rangoon, at the end of 1943, he joined
the Japanese assault on India, with about
9,000 troops. The effort failed. On August
19th, after the collapse of the Japanese,
Bose boarded a plane at Da Nang, in Vietnam, which crashed
near Taipei later that day. Bose suffered extensive burns and
died. But the aura of mystery that surrounded his death—news
of which reached India only later—spawned a host of conspir-
acy theories and a cult of adulation that faded only slowly.
The bulk of Ghosh’s essay deals with today’s survivors of
Bose’s army and a military court-martial which tried many of the
officers. But the centerpiece, inevitably, is Subhas Chandra Bose.
What is striking in the essay is Ghosh’s failure to discuss the
dilemmas of other colonial and revolutionary leaders who led
independence movements. In Burma, Aung San, “the father of
the country,” had joined the Japanese, only to decamp when he
feared becoming their stooge. (He was assassinated after inde-
pendence and is revered for that role and as the father of Aung
San Suu Kyi, now under house arrest in Rangoon.) In Indonesia,
Sukarno had initially joined the Japanese against the Dutch,
and he, too, broke away. In Palestine, elements of the extreme
“Stern Gang,” including Yitzhak Shamir, later Israel’s prime
minister, flirted briefly with the idea of supporting Germany
against the British. But for Shamir, as for left-wing revolution-
aries in many countries, the final decisive issue was German fas-
cism. Ghosh’s essay does not discuss the issue of fascism.
Given the decline of the Nehruvian vision, the re-appraisal of
Subhas Bose is emerging. “All the wishful thinking about what
India might have been gets projected onto Subhas Bose now,”
Partha Chatterjee, a prominent historian, stated. “He’s become
a symbol of all the alternative possibilities in modern India.”
The final turn, as Mr. Ghosh reports: “In January, the gov-
ernment of India formally ‘rehabilitated’ Bose, celebrating the
hundredth anniversary of his birth with much official fanfare.
But for some Indians the official celebrations served only to
reinforce the ambivalence surrounding his memory.” ◆
—DB
Source: The New Yorker, June 23 and 30, 1997,
 Reports from France and Italy
Were Communism and Facism Equivalent?
Two Debates—Two Views
T he publishing event of the year in continental Europe was without a doubt The Black Book of
Communism, a three-inch thick, 800-page reference work on the “tragedy of planetary dimen-
sions” that began with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The book has sold 170,000 copies
in France alone and is now apearing in translation in virtually every other major European language.
The book is divided into five sections documenting the rise
of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, Comintern activities in the
inter-war period (including Spain), the East European experi-
ence, Asia, and the “Third World,” including Latin America,
Africa, and Afghanistan. The title echoes The Brown Book of
Nazi Terror which was published in the mid-1930s by Willi
Muenzenberg and written largely by Arthur Koestler and Otto
Katz, who ironically, was hanged by the Communist regime
after the Slansky trial in 1952 where Katz “confessed” to being
a Gestapo agent.
The book has been controversial both for what it says and
because of the European political context in which it has
appeared. The book was originally conceived as a compendium
of recent research into the global Communist experience writ-
ten by respected regional specialists. However, the book’s edi-
tor, historian Stéphane Courtois, a former Communist and cur-
rently editor of the review Communisme, added a preface
without consulting his collaborators, and it is this text that has
attracted the most attention. In it, Courtois asserts that not
only was there no essential difference between Leninism and
Stalinism, but also that the criminal essence of Communism
renders it indistinguishable from Nazism. He points out that
the systematic elimination of certain social classes and ethnic
groups began in the Soviet Union well before the Nazis took
power, and asserts that while the latter claimed roughly 25 mil-
lion victims, those of global Communism reach “nearly 100
million.” This figure has been judged to be inflated even by
his own research team which also objected to many of his for-
mulations, including the phrase “class genocide” and the fol-
lowing sentence: “the starvation of a kulak child in the
Ukraine, deliberately brought about by the Stalinist regime,
has the same ‘value’ as the starvation of a Jewish child in the
Warsaw ghetto by the Nazi regime.” Several of the book’s
authors have publicly distanced themselves from this preface,
though not from the rest of the volume.
The book has also been controversial in France and Italy
because Communist and ex-Communist parties currently share
power in coalitions there. Leaders of opposition parties, like
Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France,
have taken to carrying the book around and discussing it with
reporters whenever possible. This strategy has had little reso-
nance in Italy, where the main ex-Communist Party changed
its name to “democratic socialist” several years ago and has
become a rather centrist left party. In France, however, the
situation has embarrassed the Jospin socialist government,
which was forced to defend in parliament the patriotism of its
doctrinaire coalition partners. Still, these parties have come
under criticism in both countries for failing to confront their
past. For example, Salidro Viola, editorialist at the left-wing
La Repubblica, has called on the new “democratic socialists”
to end their “deafening silence” before the “infamous, bestial
carnage perpetrated by the Communists after 1917.”
A similar but more refined debate has also just been pub-
lished by the French journal Commentaire, a periodical
inspired by Raymond Aron. It involves the late historian
François Furet, author of a recent history of the twentieth cen-
tury (Le Passé d’une illusion, 1995), and Ernst Nolte, the con-
troversial German historian of fascism (see “Furet vs.
Hobsbawn”, CIC Newsletter, Issue No. 1). Nolte was asked by
the Italian journal Critica Liberale to respond to Furet’s book
and out of this grew a correspondence that lasted until Furet’s
untimely death last summer. The nine letters published there
constitute an extraordinary exchange about the historical and
moral relation between communism and fascism.
In his last book Furet considered several of the theses that
have been associated with Nolte’s work: that the period 1917-
1945 was a time of ideological “civil war” between commu-
nism and fascism in Europe; that Lenin’s policies prepared the
way for Mussolini, then Hitler; and that therefore Nazism was
not a unique product of German culture, but an indirect result
of a social revolution that began with Bolshevism. This
“genetic” approach by Nolte to postwar history is seen by
Furet in a generally favorable light, and they agree on the role
of “antifascism” in clouding the real challenge of communism
since the ‘30s. But Furet also criticizes Nolte’s attempt to
develop a “rationale” (which Nolte says is not an excuse) for
Nazi anti-Semitism in a perceived Jewish affinity for commu-
nism and other universal, anti-German ideologies. Furet called
these charges “shocking and false.”
In Nolte’s response and the letters that follow, two central
issues emerge, that of the “exceptional” and the “rational”
in history. Nolte argues that politics in our century grew in
reaction to the nineteenth century capitalist experience and
has been dominated ever since by messianic, universalistic
ideas, beginning with the “grandest illusion,” communism,
to which fascism was a pale response and imitation. Furet
points to the existence of an anti-modern literature in
Europe long before 1914, running back to the Counter
Revolution, a point Nolte accepts (even suggesting that the
French activist of the 1930s, Charles Maurras, not a German,
13
 Reports from France and Italy
may have been the first fascist). He also charges Nolte with
underplaying the economic and political factors—economic
depression, military defeat—that shaped different fascisms
in Italy and Germany, to which Nolte responds that greater
weight should be given to the fact that Mussolini was a close
reader of Lenin, and Hitler a close reader of Mussolini. And
in any case, Nolte argues, the important point is that fascism
like communism was an essentially new response to a crisis
of modern bourgeois life and not the mature fruit of a dis-
tinctly German tradition.
This brings them to the issue of German anti-Semitism and
whether it can be accounted for “rationally” in a genetic his-
tory of twentieth-century political history. Nolte insists on
the point, arguing that it was Hitler’s reading of anti-semitic
literature linking Judaism and Bolshevism, coupled with an
objectively large Jewish participation in left-wing move-
ments, that decisively turned his war against the latter into a
war against the former. He speaks here of a “causal nexus”
and writes: “I think the ‘final solution’ cannot be intelligible
without reference to ‘Jewish messianism’ as such, and as
Hitler and his adepts conceived it.”
Furet retorts that it is precisely such language that gives
Nolte’s readers the impression that he is exculpating Nazism
or, worse, blaming its victims. To argue that the Gulag pre-
ceded Auschwitz is true but meaningless; furthermore, the
Jews were attacked in Germany as a “bourgeois” class long
before 1917. The real issue, Furet concludes, is why Germany
made Jews into the scapegoats for every aspect of the modern
world it wished to reject, producing utterly irreconcilable
images of “Jewish influence.”
The correspondence concludes on this theme of anti-mod-
ernism, a subject on which Nolte has clear and strong feelings.
He applauds the workers movements leading up to the
Communist revolutions for resisting the march of the compet-
itive capitalist economy and states that without such resis-
tance “we would have to despair for humanity.” And even
today he sees “a concrete menace: that unfettered capitalism,
dominating the whole world, will create a vacuum that will
be filled by an ‘anti-fascism’ that simplifies and mutilates his-
tory, just as the economic system is standardizing the world.”
At this point it becomes clear that Nolte uses the equation of
communism and fascism to advantage, since the “rationale”
behind both movements was the resistance to the forces of
modernity. Readers will here be reminded of Martin
Heidegger’s statements before the war about the threats of
modernity and technology, and after the war about the equiv-
alence of East and West. And in fact Nolte devoted an entire
book to the Heidegger case (Martin Heidegger, Politik und
Geschichte im Leben und Denken, 1992), explaining and justi-
fying the philosopher’s early enthusiasm for Nazism and his
later disappointment. ◆ acidly, “There’s no community and no care.”
—ML
Sources: Stéphane Courtois, et al., Le Livre noir du communisme
[The Black Book of Communism], Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997.
François Furet and Ernst Nolte, “Sur le fascisme, le communisme
et I’histoire du XXe siècle” [On fascism, communism, and the his-
tory of the twentieth century], Commentaire, Fall-Winter 1997-98.
14
Foucault Undone
A lmost forty years ago, Michel Foucault pub-
lished his Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason (Plon, 1961). For
Foucault, madness was a disease “invented” by bourgeois
civilization to label and put away in asylums those who
elected to live out the chaos that “we” refused to confront
in ourselves. Madness, he said, became “silenced.”
Instead of a debate about our natures, it became a ther-
apy. The “ship of fools” became a hospital, an instrument
of social control in the name of the Enlightenment. It was
a view that found an immediate and large echo in the
writings of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the classicist
Norman O. Brown, and Frankfurt School theorists, such
as Herbert Marcuse, who denounced the “freedom” of
bourgeois society as “repressive sublimation.” It was a
view that became the leitmotif of the sixties, and estab-
lished itself as an orthodoxy in counter-culture psychol-
ogy and academic sociology.
Yet, it was a tumescent view that never sat well with
sober-minded historians, even those with radical sympa-
thies such as Lawrence Stone, who wrote an early attack
on Foucault’s views in The New York Review of Books.
Now, a massive work by five British historians, The
History of Bethlem (Routledge, 1997) may prick the
Foucault balloon. Bethlem—the infamous London men-
tal asylum, which celebrated its 750th anniversary last
fall—might just seem the place that exemplified Fou-
cault’s thesis, remarks Leo Carey. (Bethlem gave us the
word “bedlam,” the colorful catchall for pandemonium,
chaos, and insanity.) Yet according to the book’s co-
authors—Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter,
Penny Tucker, and Keir Waddington—Bethlem Hospital
was a place of considerable humanity.
What they found was that inmates were treated with
decency and respect throughout most of its history, but
more importantly in respect to Foucault’s argument, as
against the lock-em-up and throw-away-the-keys picture
chronicled by Foucault, Bethlem remained open to the
public through most of the eighteenth century. “Unlike
the silent mad in the Foucault model, the mad in Bethlem
were talking politics and they were talking religion,” says
Roy Porter, professor of the social history of medicine at
London’s Wellcome Institute.
Paradoxically, professionals today are increasingly
wary of throwing open asylum doors. Too often, de-insti-
tutionalization becomes a way for governments to cut
funding, disgorging onto the streets a stream of helpless
individuals too confused even to beg. As Porter observes
Sources: Leo Carey, “Bedlam Bound,” Lingua Franca, Feb.1998.
An exchange between Lawrence Stone and Michel Foucault,
The New York Review of Books, March 31, 1983.
 Reports from France and Italy
Nolte and Furet: A Comment on Historical Method
M ore than ten years ago, the German historian Ernst
Nolte had stirred a heated debate in Germany by
comparing the crimes of the Bolsheviks to those of
the Nazi Regime and by insisting that German National
Socialism had been, to a large extent, a reaction to the
Communist threat. In France, the recent publication of the
Livre Noir du Communisme has resulted in a similar quarrel
over the legitimacy of historical comparisons. In a long foot-
note in his last book Le Passé d’une illusion: Essai sur l’idée
communiste au XXe siècle, the late François Furet examined
Ernst Nolte’s hypotheses in critical affirmation.
Furet considered it Nolte’s merit to have broken a taboo
when he violated the ban on comparing Stalinism and
National Socialism. Furet shared Nolte’s conviction that, to
explain the emergence and development of the two murder-
ous ideologies of our century, a “historical-genetic method”
was needed that went beyond the purely formal comparisons
of two totalitarian regimes. Critically and “sadly”, however,
Furet noted in his book that Nolte had decisively weakened
the impact of his assertions by viewing the Jews as Hitler’s
organized opponents. A correspondence with Ernst Nolte
ensued after the publication of Le Passé d’une illusion; it was
abruptly broken off by Furet’s early death.
Though Furet joined the plea for a historical-genetic method
as the prerequisite for understanding Communism and National
Socialism, he opposed replacing the search for historical roots
and causes with simple chronology. That Lenin, for instance,
came to power earlier than Mussolini and much earlier than
Hitler does not justify attributing a merely reacting character
to Fascism, much less to National Socialism. Intentionally or
unintentionally, such an attribution must arouse a certain sym-
pathy and cannot avoid coming close to apologetics.
Drieu la Rochelle, the French fascist, already formulated this
argument in 1939-40 in a racist form: since the German always
contains a Slav, his reaction to Russian totalitarianism always
assumes the same destructive forms. Furet distanced himself
from the hypothesis of imitation that Nolte had put forward
with polite words and decided arguments: Fascism is not an
answer to Communism.
Rather, both ideologies—Communism as the ideology of
totalitarian universalism and Fascism or National Socialism as
the ideology of totalitarian particularism—are reactions
against the bourgeois-liberal world, against the “demo-liberal
century,” which both Mussolini and Charles Maurras date
from 1789. Additionally: anti-semitism is older than the
October Revolution, and the German Right did not have to
wait for the rise of Communism before despising democracy.
In a few sentences, Furet makes it clear that Nolte’s histori-
cal-genetic method is based on a truncated view of history that
loses sight, for example, of the role played in the formation of
the German Right and especially of the National Socialists by
the tradition of anti-semitically intensified cultural pessimism,
which goes back far into the nineteenth century.
Furet possesses the even-tempered view of the “longue
durée,” that historical consciousness in France which even
today takes, on all sides of the ideological spectrum, the inclu-
sion of the Middle Ages into French national history for
granted and which is the adjunct of a culture of memory that,
even in the present, creates identity across all partisan bound-
aries. In contrast to this long-ranging culture of memory,
German public opinion and German historiography are
obsessed with coming to grips with the recent past that, as a
rule, does not unite but separates the political camps.
Although it was precisely Nolte who wanted to embed
German history in the vast panorama of the European civil
wars and thus, in a certain sense, wanted to denationalize and
de-emotionalize that history, in comparison with Furet’s self-
critical composure, Nolte always seems excited and apoplec-
tic. It was not Ernst Nolte but François Furet, a French histo-
rian, who enabled the Germans to examine Communism and
its results with an intensity comparable to that directed
toward National Socialism. East Germany’s joining the Federal
Republic of Germany necessitated such an examination:
Communism is now part of a common German history. ◆
—Wolf Lepenies
Source: Wolf Lepenies, excerpt from a lecture entitled “The Past
and Future of German-French Relations” at the Carl Friedrich von
Siemens Foundation in Munich, March 11, 1998.
Parts of this talk appeared in Berliner Zeitung, April 4/5, 1998
(http://www.BerlinOnline.de/archiv).
15
 Reports from France and Italy
Disputing the United States
F rance did not become a focus of intellectual interest in the
United States until just after World War II. But for at least
two centuries, French thinkers and writers have peered at
the United States as if it were a crystal ball and they were dis-
cerning their own future. From Chateaubriand and Tocqueville
down to Sartre and Baudrillard, the image of l’Amérique or
l’outre-Atlantique has been the privileged focus of French self-
analysis. Works in this line have generally fallen into two cate-
gories: admiring treatments of the American frontier mentality,
so often compared to French notions of hierarchy and bureau-
cracy; and critical treatments of the aggressive yet ephemeral
quality of American life. With the end of the Cold War, how-
ever, all the standard clichés about America are being revised—
or rather, retranslated into new idioms. As three recent contro-
versies bear out, America remains at the center of the French
imagination, but in a new and somewhat oblique light.
The first controversy was set off by the publication in
French of a new book by the American physicist Alan Sokal
(of the “Sokal Affair”) and the Belgian physicist Alain Bric-
mont. Their Impostures intellectuelles (Odile Jacob, 1997) is a
relentless examination and critique of the writings of a num-
ber of French intellectuals who discuss science or use scien-
tific language and metaphors to write about other matters.
Their straightforward approach, which employs “damnation
by quotation,” leads them to conclude that most of what is
reputed to be a critique of science in France is, they say, based
on ignorance, imprecision, and superficiality.
The weekly Nouvel Observateur (Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 1997) de-
voted a large dossier to their charges and asked in the title,
“Are Our Philosophers Imposters?” This has led to some angry
responses by the authors so charged, among them the sociolo-
gist Jean Baudrillard, the feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, and
Bruno Latour, the leader of “science studies” in France. What
is striking is how nationalistic these remarks are in tone. A
reviewer of Baudrillard’s new book complains of “American
censors” who cannot appreciate l’esprit français, while Julia
Kristeva speaks darkly of “disinformation” put out as part of
an anti-French political-economic campaign led by
Americans. (She also excuses her scientific and mathematical
mistakes in an early book by relating that she was only
twenty-five years old when she wrote it and had the flu.) As
for Bruno Latour, whose work has a large following in Anglo-
American “science studies,” he claimed in Le Monde that
Sokal’s charges are part of a subtle campaign by the scientific
wing of the American military-industrial complex to regain
its importance after the end of the Cold War.
A different sort of dispute has been swirling around
American feminism in France. The French stereotype of
Americans as sexual puritans has proven difficult to dislodge,
and recent debates over affirmative action, sexual harassment,
date rape, homosexuality, and pornography have only rein-
forced the image. They have also led to a new, quasi-national-
ist feminism that celebrates a “French model” of healthy sex-
ual relations that comport with its republican political
16
tradition, and stands in contrast to highly politicized
American feminism that, it is argued, erases important gender
differences in its rush towards equality.
Elisabeth Badinter’s XY: On Masculine Identity (translation
Columbia University Press, 1995) is one book in this line, as is
Gilles Lipovetsky’s recent La troisième femme (Gallimard,
1997). But the most hotly debated book is surely Mona Ozouf’s
Woman’s Words: Essay on French Singularity (translation
University of Chicago Press, 1998). In a series of portraits of
French women from Madame du Deffand to Simone de
Beauvoir, Ozouf offers an account of how modern French gen-
der relations grew out of a court society that gave women great
liberty while preserving their distinctiveness, and combined
these aristocratic habits with democratic principles. This posi-
tion, bolstered by Ozouf’s long and vociferous epilogue on
American feminism, has been generally well received in
France but has attracted heavy criticism from American his-
torians such as Lynn Hunt and Joan Scott for anachronism and
complacency. (See their responses in the symposium devoted
to Ozouf in Le Débat, November-December 1995.) In a recent
article in New Left Review (Fall 1997) Joan Scott has further
argued that the new querelle des femmes is not about American
experience at all, but is actually part of an internal French
political dispute about the “parity movement” that is demand-
ing equal representation for women in decision-making bod-
ies, especially elected assemblies.
Yet the most highly charged term in French-American intel-
lectual relations today is surely “multiculturalism,” which
bears directly on the French immigration problem and, on its
face at least, seems utterly opposed to French civic principles
of universal human rights and equality before the law.
Concerned by the exaggerated image of American identity pol-
itics held by his fellow French intellectuals, political scientist
Denis Lacorne, perhaps the most respected American special-
ist in Paris, set out to tell the history of American debates on
this topic. His recently published La Crise de l’identité améri-
caine [The crisis of American identity] (Fayard, 1997) is, despite
its slightly racy title, an extremely sober look at the history of
American immigration politics that focuses on the transforma-
tion of religious and political notions of toleration into a new
ethnic and racial separateness. Although these trends worry
Lacorne, who favors affirmative action but would limit it to
African-Americans, in general he thinks that the American
example works admirably well and that France might draw
some guarded lessons from it in coping with its own unac-
knowledged diversity. But to judge by a symposium on the
book, again in Le Débat (“L’avenir du multiculturalisme,” Nov.-
Dec. 1997), this middle position pleases neither side in France,
neither those who fear for the purity of the republic nor those
who suspect every critic of America of harboring a reactionary
political agenda. When it comes to comparing France and the
United States, it appears that certain things just can’t be said
today. And they can’t be whistled either. ◆
—ML
 Reports France and Italy
“Those Were the Days….”
T he thirtieth anniversary of May ‘68 is upon us. To
judge by the number of articles that have already
appeared about it in the European press, three decades
distance may be just enough to begin judging the “events”
with the correct mix of historical perspective and mature
autobiographical reflection. It also provides an opportunity
to begin comparing and contrasting the ‘68 events as they
played themselves out politically and culturally in different
places. As a faux cabaret song of that time put it: “Those were
the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end….”
In its contribution to this literature, the editors of the Italian
journal MicroMega chose to empha-
size the personal element by asking
three well-known figures from differ-
ent countries—the German film-
maker Edgar Reitz, the Italian writer
Nadia Fusini, and the American
activist Angela Davis – to reflect on
how it feels today to look back on
what they were then.
Reitz and Fusini recount roughly
the same narrative: how the euphoric
utopian atmosphere of the sixties
ended in political disappointment in
the early seventies, to be followed by
a more violent dénouement in the late seventies. But here the
similarity ends. Reitz, among whose films is the highly influen-
tial epic Heimat, emphasizes that the German ‘60s can only be
understood as a delayed reaction of a younger generation to the
experiences of Nazism and war, and to their parents’ silence
(Sprachlosigkeit) about them. “In ‘68 the silent phase ended in
Germany, and after came the time for much talk.”
Reitz’s own brush with the “events” was short. He recounts
how Ulrike Meinhof, later of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist
group, began to frequent the studio where he was making a
film and raised so many questions about its relation to the
events in the street that eventually filming had to be aban-
doned, done in by political discussion. But this euphoria
quickly dissipated in the face of political earnestness and the-
oretical dispute, and the mood turned completely black in the
violent period that began with the Meinhof prison escape in
1970 and the murder of the German industrialist Martin
Schleyer in 1977. “Nobody smiled in those days,” he writes.
Today what he misses most is not the euphoria but the sense
of collegial solidarity, all the more necessary now that “the
Germans have again become the people of authority.”
What Fusini also remembers about the years following ‘68
was “a sense of enormous unhappiness.” Born into a left-wing
family that named her after Lenin’s wife Nadia, Fusini became
a Maoist early on, feeling that she was carrying on the strug-
gle of her father against the despised bourgeoisie. Then came
delusion, as the movements in the streets descended into
organized terror, teaching her that every society, even a just
one, would require order and self-sacrifice. She moved into
the university, only to discover that open admissions had
transformed it into a large parking lot for lost souls, alienat-
ing them further from Italian society rather than integrating
them. When the University of Rome exploded in 1977, the
mood was bitter and destructive, not hopeful or playful as in
‘68. In the end, she still feels lucky to have been part of the
‘68 generation rather than the one that followed since
“among our thousand stupidities and ridiculous undertak-
ings, we also put on a drama that still had rules of unity, we
wrote a piece of history fundamentally traditional in its
development.” That opportunity has been lost.
Angela Davis does not write about
her thoughts or feelings in ‘68, or even
about her politics. She writes about
her hair. “That” hair: the enormous
“afro” hairdo that transformed her
from an obscure professor of philoso-
phy in California into a poster-child
for the rage of youth. It has been a bit-
ter and humiliating experience, she
says, to learn that just one generation
after the events of ‘68 all that remains
of her militancy in public memory is a
photograph with that hair, which
recently reappeared in the New York
Times Magazine fashion supplement accompanied by the blurb
“Politics Becomes Fashion.”
The political story began in 1969 when Davis was dismissed
from the University of California at Los Angles for her mem-
bership in the Communist Party and ended with her on the
run from the police for the alleged smuggling of a gun into
prison for George Jackson, which resulted in the murder of a
judge and a prison guard. (She passes quickly over these
details.) By then she was on the FBI “Most Wanted” list and
her famous photo, which soon appeared in Life magazine, was
now pasted up in every post office in the country. Not sur-
prisingly, she got a haircut and began wearing makeup, an
effective disguise at the time. But when her autobiography
was published in 1974, her editor (the soon to be famous
writer Toni Morrison) encouraged her to return to the Afro, a
request she refused.
Since that time, Davis notes bitterly, her political and fashion
influence have developed in inverse relation. While her brand
of left politics finds fewer and fewer adherents even among
American blacks, more young people have begun aping her
style, down to the sunglasses, earrings, and fatigue jackets—all
of which, she notes, can be bought at any Army-Navy supply
store. Most frustrating to her was a photo-montage that recently
appeared in the magazine Vibe, showing the actress Cynda
Williams sporting an afro in a mock FBI photo under the titles
“Free Angela” and “Angela Davis, revolutionary of fashion.”
History need not even repeat itself to become farce. ◆
—ML
Source: “Sessantotto” [Sixty-eight], MicroMega, May 1997.
17
 England and Feminism
Power to the People, i.e. Women
A provocative excerpt in the New Statesman from
Natasha Walter’s book The New Feminism has aroused
fresh debate in England about the once and future life
of feminism: what has been achieved, what still urgently needs
to be done in the century to come. This is Walter’s argument
and question: in a world where women are striding into the
corridors of power, does a movement for women’s rights still
have a place? Her answer is emphatically affirmative: the gains
of feminism have been enormous, but they were largely
directed at the personal or cultural level rather than the per-
vasive social and economic inequalities that still exist.
The new feminism, Walter argues, must be pragmatic, inclu-
sive, and above all aimed at the imperative political objective of
unequivocal, unrestricted, uncompromised equality. By equal-
ity she means “equal rights and equal opportunities,” equality
of power and play in the workplace and the political arena. Too
many feminists in recent years, she believes, especially the
American contingent, have concentrated on personal and psy-
chological issues at the expense of larger, more unyielding polit-
ical and economic problems. Feminists have paid too much
attention to the way women dress or talk or make love, at the
expense of confronting the bitter challenge of inequality.
Walter, the daughter of a well-known English anarchist and
polemicist, Nicholas Walter, stresses two important facts
about feminism today: One, it is no longer an exclusively mid-
dle-class, professional-women’s movement. Her wide-ranging
survey of women in Great Britain revealed a much larger and
wider involvement. Two, she found that young women today
are reluctant to identify with a movement that is now seen as
man-hating, politically correct, and ideologically puritanical.
(Walter does not in the least object to painted toe-nails and
other kinds of self-decoration. The gaudier the merrier.)
Feminism should no longer seek to control women’s personal
or sexual lives, Walter feels. Pragmatism, not principled
purity, should be the mark of the new feminism.
In response to Walter’s thesis, the New Statesman assembled
a diverse panel of fourteen women (and one man)—writers,
journalists, administrators, a few of the 120 female MP’s now
in the 659-member House of Commons, and even two teen-
agers (seventeen and nineteen respectively) who applaud the
charismatic and glamorous personalities of the Spice Girls as
examples of young feminism today. (Natasha Walter also
admires the Spice Girls.) Most of the respondents registered
rather tepid agreement with Natasha Walter’s ideas, though
they would probably yawn their assent to the review by the
journalist Ann Leslie, a week later in the New Statesman who
found it all too Blairly sweet, reasonable, and dully written.
As Leslie could not resist sniping, “Feminism as a subject has,
frankly, become boring.” It’s old hat to “old” feminists, she
thinks, and the young generation feels that “feminists who
whine on constantly about female oppression are sad creatures
who should go get a life”—and another Spice Girls CD?
But Elaine Showalter, professor of English at Princeton and
one of the doyennes of American literary feminism, dissented
18
from this condescension. In her review of The New Feminism,
Showalter praised Walter’s gutsiness and—for a startling rea-
son—her defense of Margaret Thatcher as “a woman who nor-
malized female success.” Curiously, not one of the New
Statesman panel had mentioned this astonishing fact about
Walter’s book, not even Anne Applebaum, the conservative
columnist for the Daily Telegraph, who flatly denied that
inequality between men and women any longer exists today.
Showalter strongly agreed with Walter’s sobriquet for
Thatcher as “the great unsung heroine of British feminism.”
Apparently, political power, in a surprising shift for contem-
porary feminists, has replaced politically correct idealism as
the goal of a new generation and century.
But a nagging question remains. What does Walter mean by
equality and inequality? This is the question impatiently asked
by Mary Margaret McCabe, a professor of philosophy, in her
review of The New Feminism. She takes Walter to task for rely-
ing on slogans rather than thoughtful distinctions: “…what on
earth is involved in equal treatment? Are we talking here of the
allocation of rights, or of the distribution of goods? Are we talk-
ing about the equality of equals, or of equality tout court?” ◆
—Pearl K. Bell
Sources: Natasha Walter, New Statesman, January 16, 1998.
Ann Leslie, New Statesman,January 23, 1998.
Elaine Showalter, review of The New Feminism, The Guardian,
February 8, 1998.
Mary Margaret McCabe, review of The New Feminism, Times
Literary Supplement, March 20, 1998.
Fay Weldon: Gender Switch
I n the current debate about the status of feminism, it
was left to the witty and prolific English novelist Fay
Weldon, characteristically defying the received wis-
dom though she is a dedicated feminist, to take a different
tack altogether. Writing in The Guardian (December 21,
1997), Weldon declared that “it’s left to me to speak for
men.” By the late ‘90s, there is a “gender switch.” It is now
the men who complain of being slighted, condemned by
virtue of gender to automatic insult by women.
Young men of the ‘90s, Weldon points out, complain
that they are in a hopeless double bind. They earnestly
care for the good opinion of women, but if they show
sensitivity, they are despised as wimps. If they keep a
stiff upper lip, they are derided for their insensitivity.
Women treat young men as sex objects, but if a man
makes sexual overtures, he is accused of harassment.
Remember, she warns, that men are people, too, and we
must try to see them as persons first and of a certain gen-
der second, as once we beseeched men to do for us.
—PKB
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
The Arguments on Language Policy
1.Mono or Multi?
English is today’s limgua franca. Also, it is increasingly the
first foreign language taught in German and French schools. But
different conclusions can be drawn from these two facts. Should
educational policies reinforce or counteract these tendencies?
E nglish, as Joseph Hanimann reports, is increasingly
chosen as the first foreign language course in schools
in spite of contrary efforts in the South of Germany.
Even in Switzerland where both German and French are
national languages, a few cantons in the German-speaking
parts of Switzerland only offer French as a second foreign lan-
guage and start foreign-language training with English.
Claude Allègre, the French secretary of education, regards a
knowledge of English as absolutely essential and wants to make
the choice of it as first foreign language compulsory. At pre-
sent, about 10% of French pupils still choose German as first
foreign language, partly as a way to gain access to better school-
ing since the teaching of German has largely replaced Latin and
Greek at elite schools. Some people expect that the teaching of
German in French schools will rapidly decline without this elite
bonus if it may only be chosen as a second foreign language.
Allègre and most French German teachers argue that the intro-
duction of English teaching at an early stage will liberate all
other language studies from unequal competition.
In France, tri- (or more) lingualism is on the political agenda,
as a much debated issue because language-conscious French-
men are worried that the increasing use of pidgin English in
international communication between technocrats will trig-
ger a general atrophy of language. They argue that without an
active policy promoting multi-lingualism in Europe—not only
at the educational but also at the bureaucratic level—
European languages including English will suffer real damage.
Sources: Joseph Hanimann: “Adieu, deutsche Sprache” [Good bye,
German language], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 1, 1998.
2. Economy and Ecology
I n his address to the convention of German scholars of
romance languages and literature, Harald Weinrich, the
first foreigner in France to chair romance languages and lit-
erature at the Collège de France in Paris, takes on some of the
objections to the cultivation of multi-lingualism and linguistic
diversity, and rejects them by using an analogy with arguments
for the active preservation of bio-diversity and to some of the
less visible lessons we may only be able to learn from a study of
romance languages and literature (“Romanistik”).
The acquisition of several romance languages and the study
of the literature written in them make demands on students’
time which nowadays seem out of proportion to the costs
involved in the study of other subjects. Economics and cost
benefit analysis, then, serves as the basis for this reduction in
time. Weinrich, however, argues for an educational and cultural
policy actively supporting the languages and for an engage-
ment of scholars defending the values in their discipline.
The reading of novels serves as an example. The novel has
been the leading genre in literature for at least 150 years. But
considerations of the time budget of students have led to the
reading of shorter texts in schools and universities. Such a
focus on short stories and extracts from larger works resulting
from adaptations to economic arguments can only exert a dam-
aging and unfortunate influence on the reception of literature.
Reading long novels in foreign languages and learning some
of the nine romance languages, or even only some of the four
main romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese), is undeniably a time consuming task. A high
time-investment may well be a prerequisite for any fruitful
study of this discipline. Capital and time are scarce resources,
and the results of these calculations cannot be denied. Their
validity can only be challenged by showing that they need a
complementary ecological argument.
Weinrich here draws upon an analogy borrowed from biol-
ogists. They argue for the preservation of bio-diversity even
if special efforts to save almost distinct species involve con-
siderable costs. Weinrich defends linguistic diversity and
multi-lingualism as values which need not be justified as the
most economic means to other ends. In addition, their high
valuation may be justified as the more rational choice in the
long run, avoiding the later cultural costs. Just as in nature,
short-term profits often risk environmental damage which in
a long-term perspective may cause much higher costs. The
present disregard of the philosophies of science by rhetoric
and linguistics may be such an additional factor leading to the
spread of a virus or risk endangering future knowledge pro-
duction in a linguistic mono-culture.
There may even be a specific lesson, especially accessible in
romance languages, literature, and cultures, contradicting the
presupposition that the most economic use of scarce goods, like
time, is always the most rational way to reach a desired goal.
The oral and written forms of politeness in the western world
are widely viewed as a romance specialty and resource. All
forms of politeness involve an un-economic use of time, a more
indirect approach to whatever one is aiming at, an extra few
minutes not absolutely required by the task at hand.
According to Gracián, this extra effort “costs little but earns
much.” According to Schiller the first maxim of politeness is
to “preserve foreign freedom.” The German expressions for “to
preserve” and for “beautiful” (schonen and schön) according to
Weinrich have the same linguistic roots. Literature as part of
written communication may teach us something about the
more indirect, more protective, more beautiful, and more polite
forms of behavior and lifestyles. The multiple forms of polite-
ness and the study of romance languages and literature indi-
cate a connection between un-economic slowness and culture.
—MB
Source: Harald Weinrich, “Von den schönen fremden Freiheit der
Sprachen” [On the beautiful foreign freedom of languages],
Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 4, 1997.
19
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
Robert Gernhardt—A German Lewis Carroll?
W hich lines from poetic writing in Germany dur-
ing the last thirty years will be preserved in mem-
ory? Gustav Seibt, one of Germany’s leading crit-
ics who asked himself this question, bets that as long as the
kind of architecture it refers to exists, it will be the poem,
“After he walked through Metzingen” by Robert Gernhardt:
Nachdem er durch Metzingen gegangen war
Dich will ich loben: Häßliches,
du hast so was Verläßliches.
Das Schöne schwindet, scheidet, flieht -
fast tut es weh, wenn man es sieht.
Wer Schönes anschaut, spürt die Zeit,
und Zeit meint stets: Bald ist’s soweit.
Das Schöne gibt uns Grund zur Trauer.
Das Häßliche erfreut durch Dauer.
After he walked through Metzingen
I want to praise you: ugliness,
because of your relentlessness.
Beauty will fade, depart, take flight -
it almost hurts, when it’s in sight.
Who looks at beauty, feels time run,
time always means: soon you’ll be gone.
Beauty comprises a reason for sadness.
Something reliable in the ugly imparts gladness.
Not only Seibt but many others regard Gernhardt as a major
presence in German poetry. Recently Gernhardt has been can-
onized: the journal Text und Kritik devoted one issue to him,
Reclam, the publishing house of most classical literary texts,
published selections of his past work, and the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung celebrated Heine’s 200th birthday by pub-
lishing a series of poems by Gernhardt.
Such accolades may be due a writer who just celebrated his
sixtieth birthday, co-founded the satirical magazine Titanic,
and has been loved for his cartoons and comics, as well as for
his nonsense and light verse, a genre which brings to mind
poets such as Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, but no German
poets of equal fame.
This did not impede Gernhardt from inventing a tradition
for himself. Actually, he claims that most poems may be read
adequately as comic poems by anyone able to differentiate
between the sound pattern of a poem and its intention.
Intentions may fail, and where a poem does not manage to
make us forget for a moment its rules of form, there almost cer-
tainly will be something funny. Children writing poetry usu-
ally begin with funny nonsensical wordplay before they con-
struct sound-patterns and try to control the sense these
sound-patterns make. For Gernhardt there is a comical effect
20
in using rhyme and other older poetic rules earnestly today.
But he also claims to need rules because the comical element
always involves some rule breaking.
According to Seibt, Gernhardt has mastered all forms of
poetry, even more recent ones like those of Jandl. Dieter A.
Zimmer expresses the same judgment in claiming that there is
almost no other German poet for whom the poetic tradition
has been as present as for Gernhardt whose best poems, in
Zimmer’s view, test different forms of poetry. They listen for
wrong sounds and reach surprising results, such as his poem
which applies the Dante sound to a present everyday theme
and succeeds.
The essays in Text und Kritik show us Gernhardt the hugely
prolific writer and cartoonist who has also written prose
throughout his life as well as more melancholic poems recently.
But at the center of these essays, we find again and again
Gernhardt the poet writing in a tradition of light verse, a poet
who titles his Reclam collection of poems Reim und Zeit
[Rhyme and Time] by changing only two letters in Heidegger’s
title Sein und Zeit [Being and Time], a poet who, for example,
can even bring his omnipotence fantasies into a persuasive,
acceptable, and funny form in a poem called “Prayer,” the
poem highlighted at the end of this collection of essays:
Gebet
Lieber Gott, nimm es hin,
daß ich was Besond’res bin.
Und gib ruhig einmal zu,
daß ich klüger bin als du.
Preise künftig meinen Namen,
denn sonst setzt es etwas. Amen.
Prayer
God, do not refuse to see
that I’m something extraordinary.
And concede without ado
that I am brighter than you.
Praise in future my name then,
or you’ll be in trouble. Amen. ◆
—MB
Sources: Robert Gernhardt, Reim und Zeit, Stuttgart, 1996
Robert Gernhardt, Text und Kritik, Nr. 136, 1997.
Gustav Seibt, “Wer Schönes anschaut, spürt die Zeit” [Who looks
at beauty, feels time run] Berliner Zeitung, December 13, 1997.
Dieter E. Zimmer, “Der heiße Tag: Das Summen wilder Bienen” [The
hot day: the humming of wild bees], Die Zeit, November 14,. 1997.
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
On Ernst Jünger’s Century
Ernst Jünger, who died in February at age 101, was probably
the most controversial figure in German intellectual life in this
century. A man who praised war as the testing ground of man-
hood and mocked the Weimar Republic for its “decadent val-
ues,” he saw the world as battles between beetles and insects. He
was praised by Hitler, yet attacked by the SS. His writings raise
one of the most troublesome questions of morality. Does “great-
ness” as a writer excuse an anti-humanist point of view? The
same questions can be raised about Martin Heidegger, the extra-
ordinary German poet Gottfried Benn (who felt some sympathies
for the Nazis, at least for a short while), and the Communist
playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht. We deal with this question
in a number of reports and lead off with some reflections
(abridged from a longer essay) by our colleague Wolf Lepenies.
Modernity and Morals
W as art instruction in school to blame? In any case, I
long believed there was a close and almost natural
connection between artistic Modernism and democratic con-
victions. This belief was strengthened by the sequence in
which I read some important books. When The Magic
Mountain first cast its spell on me, I did not yet know that
Thomas Mann had written the conservative, nay even reac-
tionary, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen [Reflections of an
Apolitical Man] in the middle of the First World War; Ezra
Pound was, for me, the brilliant editor of T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land and not the seduced author of the Pisan Cantos,
and Weinhaus Wolf did not become a poor piece of German
prose because Gottfried Benn spoke on the radio to celebrate
the Nazis’ seizure of power as an evolutionary necessity. Only
gradually did the truth come to light: in its core, artistic
Modernism was by no means democratic; rather, it had a
politically authoritarian orientation and, in many painful
cases, its representatives were easy prey for totalitarian
seducers. In Germany, an influential posture was connected
with longing for the South, the reception of antiquity, and
fantasies of an eternal Rome. “Latinity” was the code word.
Those who finally felt repulsed by Germany’s National
Socialists could still succumb to the fascination of Italian
Fascism. After 1934, the year of the “Röhm Putsch,” which
opened the eyes of many sympathizers, Gottfried Benn and
Ernst Jünger were examples of German intellectuals who
would have gladly remained Fascists, if the Nazis had only
permitted it.
Bouillon de Culture
P ierre Hébey, the Parisian attorney, has written a fascinat-
ing book about the Nouvelle Revue Française under
German occupation. This was the time when Jean Paulhan,
with the gentle pressure of Gaston Gallimard, passed the edi-
torial work to Drieu la Rochelle to secure the magazine’s sur-
vival. In “Bouillon de culture”, Hébey and the other French
participants in the broadcast, including Bernard Pivot as the
host, are surprised at the extent of the collaboration of the
hommes de lettres in their country. But my objection is that
what is surprising is not that these literary people adapted to
the occupation, but rather that they wrote well even as “col-
labos.” In Nazi Germany, the German language put up
decided resistance—against the majority of speakers and
writers; there is no National Socialist literature of any rank.
Ernst Jünger did not always write equally well; there are triv-
ial and even kitschy passages in his work. But he did not
adjust his language to fit Nazi rule. Not that Auf den
Marmorklippen [On the Marble Cliffs] is a work of
resistance—Jünger would have been the last to agree with
this interpretation—or that the SS defamed him is what hon-
ors him the most, but that his language remained self-confi-
dent and independent. One never sees the best pens in the
service of bad things, Jünger once wrote. But this depends
on the language the pen writes.
Good-bye to All That
A short stroll starting behind the backs of the colleges
leads from Cambridge to Grantchester. If one arrives
there in the summer at tea time, one could imagine that
Bloomsbury is in flower again. Victoria Sackville-West,
Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf seem to picnic on the banks
of the Cam, surrounded by admirers wearing summer flannel
and making impressions with their coolness and hauteur. In
Grantchester, one can buy momentos of Rupert Brooke, who
fell in Greece in 1915. Reading his poems—the British
Museum preserves the manuscript of The Soldier, written in
1914:” If I should die, think only this of me, / that there’s some
corner of a foreign field / That is forever England”—or the
autobiography of Robert Graves, or, in France, the numerous
hymns to Lieutenant Charles Péguy, who fell in September
1914 at the beginning of the Battle of the Marne—heureux
ceux qui sont morts dans les grandes batailles—all these show
what a “normal” book Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern [In
Storms of Steel] was: in the First World War, bellistic euphoria
and the fascination of battle and struggle were a European dis-
ease. The Germans were not particularly in the forefront. The
situation changed in the Second World War, and it becomes
painfully visible how underdeveloped and unpopular skepti-
cism remained toward a form of politics that continued to pur-
sue its ends with military ferocity…. Robert Graves was as
courageous and firm as Ernst Jünger, and like him experi-
enced the most extreme terror. How much would have been
spared Europe in this gory century if those who returned from
the First World War had made the title of Graves’s memoirs
the guideline of their future politics: Goodbye to All That!
Changing Places
T he image is lasting: together, the German Chancellor and
the French President visit Ernst Jünger. It is not their
fragility that make Ernst Jünger and François Mitterand seem
kindred souls. This photo, which thus attains symbolic charac-
ter, clearly shows that, to this day, France and Germany repre-
21
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
sent two forms of political culture that differ in their relation-
ship to literature. German politicians, too, write books, but they
are not as a rule political authors, much less hommes de lettres.
In France, a well-written book is still a billet d’entrée into poli-
tics, while in Germany a brilliant style always arouses suspi-
cion that the author cannot be taken seriously and that he is
unsuitable for politics, since he has too much time for the incon-
sequential. If a German politician visits a meritorious author,
admiration or condescension always plays a role. In France, this
alternative does not exist: homme de lettre and homme politique
are closely related and encounter each other on the same plane.
Both know: How easily we could change places!
Domestic Animals and Explosives
N ew insights into Ernst Jünger’s work arise when his writ-
ings are compared with those of the philosophical anthro-
pologist Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976), which exhibit similarities
to Jünger’s thought even in specific figures of style and argu-
mentation. That in the heydey of National Socialism, Gehlen,
much more than a fellow-traveller but an active propagandist
for the Nazis, made a theory of milieu the basis of his anthro-
pology is no less disturbing than the stubbornness with which
Ernst Jünger took political positions only after aesthetic pre-
decisions. Self-discipline and conscious inhibition are Gehlen’s
key categories, and they turn up in similar form in Jünger.
Finally, the two share their valuation of second nature, which
is not at all identical to civilization: Jünger, too, observes pri-
marily in order to classify. His glance always takes in nature as
a terrarium or herbarium. In this connection, it is significant
that Gehlen’s concept of nature artificielle takes up the thread
of Georges Sorel, one of Jünger’s intellectual forebears. And a
surprising sentence like the following, which Gehlen formu-
lated in 1941 in his primary work Der Mensch, could have found
its place in Jünger’s early work: “In direct, first nature there
are neither domestic animals nor explosives.” ◆ result is always the same.”
Sources: Wolf Lepenies, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 25/26, 1995.
(On the occasion of Ernst Jünger’s death, French and Spanish
translations of the article appeared in Le Monde, February 20, 1998,
and in El País, March 7, 1998.)
22
Stjob: The New Public Media
Language of Russia
R ussia now has the freest, politically incorrect
public language—at least within Europe.
Freedom from censorship has led to the creation
of a new public media language: Stjob. It is predominant
in TV reporting and in newspapers such as Commersant
Daily or Moskowskij Komsomolez, which have been
newly founded or rejuvenated after the disintegration of
the Soviet Union. As Sonja Margolina reports, this pow-
erful new public media language is not only free from
any legal constraint, but it is also a sensitive indicator of
the sociological conditions and an expression of the
strengthened Russian society liberated from the over-
powering authority of the state. It develops, even, free
of any laws protecting minorities or individuals from
media attacks.
“Stjob,” the word for this new language style, is,
according to Wladimir Jellistratow’s Dictionary of
Moscow Jargon (1994), derived from slang terms mean-
ing “to whip,” “to chatter,” “to have sexual intercourse,”
or, as an adjective, meaning “strange” or “stupid.”
“Stjob” employs many sexual allusions, underworld
jargon, and quotations that invoke the context from
which they have been taken, this invocation of subcul-
tures providing a sort of semi-explanation trivializing
the new conditions and reducing them to the traditional
and familiar. In this language deplorable states of affairs
look like the changing masks of an eternal order as in
Bakhtin’s carnival, confirming Tschernomyrdin’s by now
proverbial motto “We wanted to make it better, but the
This style suggests the superiority of the public media
in comparison to the Russian conditions, but at the same
time only reproduces rhetorically these conditions. The
underworld jargon, especially, is not only widely dissem-
inated by the media but is used in the Duma where forty-
six of its members were previously convicted; it is also
used because it mimics present conditions and what is
called “bandit markets.”
Some intellectuals have tried to point out the dangers
in the widespread use of “stjob” which obliterates the
limiting lines between legal and illegal economic and
political action, but the style is even finding its way into
school books.
—MB
Source: Sonja Margolina, “Die Vergaunerte Zunge”
[Underworld Jargon: The Criminalized Tongue], Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, January 19, 1998.
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe

The Fall and Rise of Bertolt Brecht

1. As Poet Not Playwright 2. Konrád and Biermann

T he one hundredth birthday of Brecht caused a flood of

articles and heavily influenced this year’s theater and
television programs. His TV presence has been record
breaking: Such a large show of work by one writer on German
television is unprecedented. Brecht also experienced a height-
Among the many recent voices who have said something on
Brecht, that of Wolf Biermann belongs to a great bard and poet
and that of György Konrád to a famous Hungarian writer and
sociologist who has become a continuous presence in German
public debate since Konrád became President of the Academy of
ened visibility in print: Suhrkamp published a new edition of Arts in Berlin. Biermann moved to the GDR in 1953 and lost his
Brecht in thirty volumes, another edition of selected works in GDR citizenship in 1976 against his will while on a concert tour
six volumes, and still sells the old twenty-volume edition in West Germany. Konrad was a dissident of a “socialist brother
alongside many individual titles. Among the recent books on country” of the former GDR.
Brecht, the 1300-page Brecht Chronik by Werner Hecht is sure
to become a standard reference work. The scandal that John
Fuegi exposed—that many of Brecht’s plays were written,
often with unacknowledged collaborators—created a short stir
but was quickly put aside by most critics.
This is all very surprising in
W here you do not find any contradictions you are
sure to find something else: boredom. One cer-
tainly cannot call Brecht boring. With this state-
ment György Konrad invites the visitor to enter the Brecht
exhibition at the Berlin Acad-
view of Brecht’s varying for- Song of the Control Chorus emy of Arts in its accompany-
tunes. In the 1950s and ‘60s What baseness would you not commit ing catalogue.
Brecht’s presence in East and To root out baseness? Passing beyond good and
West German theaters was If, finally, you could change the world evil, we see the artist, Konrad
overpowering. In the ‘60s and What task would you be too good for? tells us, as an ultra-moral nat-
‘70s it was impossible to go Who are you? ural phenomenon. Today we
through school without learn- Sink down in the slime can read Brecht and leave our
ing about epic theater. Things Embrace the butcher worldview and the question
changed during the ‘70s, and But change the world: it needs it! as to whether we agree or dis-
in the ‘80s it became fashion- agree with what we read at
able to refer to the general From Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (translated by the cloakroom.
boredom felt by oneself or the Eric Bentley) justifying the murder of an emissary who threat- The only play Konrad men-
public with regard to Brecht. ened the mission by displaying compassion for a victim. tions is Die Massnahme [The
Today, more attention is being Measures Taken], written in
paid to Brecht, the poet and stage director. And the practice of 1930. In this Lehrstück, his tenth play, Brecht presented the
the stage director is being used to relativize some of the dicta Bolshevik value hierarchy up to its final consequences, where
of Brecht, the theater theoretician. compassion, feeling, opinion, solidarity, the human, the
Brecht was and is contentious. Many voices of now famous autonomy of the person, are all subordinated to the task one
writers and literary critics responded to the media and has been given by the party, and where the individual’s claim
defined their relation to Brecht and his work at his one hun- to autonomy or to our pity is regarded as a weapon in the
dredth birthday. These voices vary from those such as the hands of the class enemy.
Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson who find him absolutely Gustav Seibt, in an editorial on Brecht and the coldness of
despicable, to Michael Rutschky in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung this century, characterizes Die Massnahme as the most per-
who sees him now as a latter-day dandy, to someone like suasive attempt to provide insight into the psychic mecha-
Werner Hecht whose Brecht Chronik provides us with even nisms of the communist utopia. The members of the RAF (the
more information on Brecht’s everyday life than we have on German terrorists in the 1970s) still referred to sentences from
Goethe. While not many want to embrace the whole Brecht, this play in support of their case.
which parts of Brecht get chosen varies however from person But what has not been put into words cannot be discussed and
to person—the only common element being the selectivity cannot be changed, as Kurt Drawert says, interpreting Brecht’s
and decisiveness with which the choice is being made. And poem “Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik [A bad time for poetry].”
perhaps a certain not all-inclusive tendency to deflate Brecht’s As an introduction to Brechtian poetology, Wolf Biermann
fame as a playwright or to focus attention on the early Brecht takes two lines from Brecht which had been misquoted by the
and a few fragmentary plays, but to value him first and fore- Berliner Zeitung and analyzes the poetic motives and decisions
most as one of the major German poets of this century. ◆ which made Brecht write them exactly as he did. Brecht, for
—MB example, often breaks a line at a moment when there are two
Sources: Weekend cultural sections, Berliner Zeitung, Frankfurter possible continuations of a sentence, one expected by the
Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, reader, the other surprising and chosen by Brecht. One of the
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, February 7, 1998. characteristics of Brecht’s style is small changes of banal, trite

23
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
expressions which he transforms into something surprising
and markedly expressive.
This way of creating the largest possible effect out of a min-
imal cause is hard to translate into other languages. That is, as
Biermann says, the reason why some foreigners, having read
Brecht in translation, find it incomprehensible that Germans
are so impressed by some poems which seem trite. ◆ one thousand poems. Going by the number of poems of indi-
—MB
Sources: György Konrad, “Geleitwort” [Preface] in 1898/Bertholt
Brecht/1998: ‘... und mein Werk ist der Abgesang des Jahrhunderts’,
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1998
Wolf Biermann, “Nichtige Wichtigkeiten über Brecht”
[Small matters of great importance about Brecht], Berliner
Zeitung, February 7/8, 1998.
Gustav Seibt, “Brecht und die Kälte des Jahrhunderts”
[Brecht and the coldness of the century], Berliner Zeitung,
February 7/8, 1998.
Kurt Drawert, “Gute Zeit für Lyrik” [Good times for poetry],
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 7, 1998.
The Song of the Sirens
Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht are the presumed polar polit-
ical opposities in twentieth-century German writing. Brecht, of
course, was pro-communist, albeit in a complex cynical manner.
Benn, today largely neglected outside Germany, occupied a posi-
tion comparable to Ezra Pound’s. He was a
modernist whose experiments with lan-
guage and forms of verse did for poetry
what the Expressionists did for painting.
Yet in his espousal of a kind of atavistic
tribalism, he declared, when the Nazis
came in, for the “new State” and for a while
occupied a leading position in the official
Union of National Writers until, in 1936,
the Nazis declared his early work to be
immoral and “a stench.” Benn withdrew
into a mood of negation, rejecting all ideals
and politics, a mood summed up in an auto-
biography, The Double Life, published in
1950, defending his—and the German people’s—errors. The dis-
cussion in Germany today of the century of Ernst Jünger has
prompted renewed questions about the ideological impact of liter-
ary works and the relation of politics to aesthetics. These themes in
an influential essay by Frank Schirrmacher, an editor of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, come to a surprising conclusion.
B recht and Benn (together with Rilke) are widely
regarded as the most eminent German poets of the
twentieth century. One indicator of their status in the
German literary cannon is their representation in anthologies
of German poetry, for example in the Frankfurter Anthologie,
itself a remarkable publishing venture and an outcome of a
conscious effort to cultivate the reading of poems in these bad
times for poetry. Since the 1970s the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung has once a week reprinted a German poem together
with an interpretation especially solicited for this occasion
24
from various critics or present day writers. Once a year these
poems and interpretations have been collected in successive
volumes of the Frankfurter Anthologie together with an index
to the poems in the latest and all preceding volumes in print.
Altogether this collection has grown under the general guid-
ance of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki to more than
vidual writers in this collection, Goethe, Heine, Rilke, Brecht,
and Benn far outdistance all the others.
Both Benn and Brecht belonged to a generation which dur-
ing their lifetime changed everything, rethought everything,
rewrote everything, and had a strong belief in the totality of
art and in the changebility of life. Both died in the summer of
1956, bringing the self-experiment of the European con-
sciousness after 1900 to an end. The epoch had begun with
self-experiments not only in science and technology, but also
in literature where ideologies, thought systems, and social
change became experimental arrangements as means for self-
knowledge, for writing exact protocols of self-experience.
We have become used to reading artistic and literary forms
of the first half of the twentieth century as experiments of pic-
tures, expression, and content. Literature—poetry in the first
place—moved through all forms filling in all white spots in the
map of the aesthetic imagination. But this experiment was also,
as Schirrmacher argues, an experiment with consciousness
formed by literary language. Even the two major ideologies of
the century were, Schirrmacher says,
nothing else but a literal translations of
text into reality. The core motivation of
this desire was that what is being written
and read should become reality.
Both Brecht and Benn seem to be
extreme variations of an experiment
that failed politically and succeeded
aesthetically. Both were prophets who
lived long enough to see the terrible ful-
fillment of their dreams. Both suffered
in the end under a self-justification
complex which made them point to the
laws of history. Both believed them-
selves to be utterly different from the other and did not rec-
ognize the status of the other until their end. Both carried
literature to an unsurpassed height and exposed the subject
in their poems to experiences and experiments which have
become the inner voice of an uninterrupted debate within
the self of their readers.
Trust the inner voice—this message once gave modernity
its strength. If one reads what Brecht, Benn, and their genera-
tion did, thought, believed and wrote, one learns to distrust
one’s own inner voice, which is also the voice of their poems.
This voice is now broken, this voice which attracts and
destroys, this song of the sirens which still pursues us. ◆
Source: Frank Schirrmacher, “Der Gesang der Sirenen: Vor vierzig
Jahren starben Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht” [The Song of the
Sirens: Forty years ago both Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht died)],
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 14, 1996.
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe

Romania: On the Hard Road to Normalcy

The theme of the Leipzig book fair this spring was Romania.
The fair’s highlight was a speech by the philosopher and
Romanian foreign minister on security, Andrei Plesu, who with
his brilliant rhetoric and sovereign manner seemed to capture an
audience more quickly than the books exhibited.
Outside Romania famous Romanian writers are almost
exclusively emigrants, many of whom are not even identified
as Romanians by the reading public in the West. Some of the
Romanian writers and critics living in Germany have recently
taken on a mediator’s role, which may prove quite helpful.
But, as Andrei Plesu says, mentalities change slowly and

A fter two dictatorships and the repressive government

of president Illiescu, the situation has begun to
change since 1996. The feeling that Romania—
although surrounded by
Slavonic countries—really
the country has only just made a start. Under Ceaucescu,
once a year each writer had to type a page from one of
Ceaucescu’s talks and bring it to the police together with his
typewriter to get a permit
allowing him to use his type-
belongs to the West because writers during the next
of its romance language has twelve months. That is, per-
had its effects, too, on the self- haps, part of the explanation
image of the country. Roma- as to why Ro-mania did not
nians believe that it is part of have a Samisdat literature.
their self-image to believe that It is in the nature of books
there is no other country in that they open the pass to
the world so concerned about other books. Contrary to the
the image other countries nature of books, Romania
have of it. has long been a country in
The progress of the work of which the attempt was made
the team preparing the to make only one book the
Romanian country pavilion sole text, the sole inhabitant
at the Leipzig book fair was of souls and libraries.
therefore attentively fol- Normalcy is now gradually
lowed by the Romanian returning. But, as Plesu said,
Press; the cultural weekly in Leipzig there still were
Dilemma even devoted a spe- also all the unwritten books
cial issue to it. The book fair of those who had lost all
was seen as a singular oppor- courage to write or who had
tunity to disseminate some died in prison before they
information about Romania could give what they could
which went beyond typical have given. Now some writ-
clichés. The secretary of cul- ers have become publishers
ture provided financial sup- and some parliamentarians
port for the translations into or, like Plesu, foreign minis-
German and English of Romanian works of literature and ters. Until a new political class develops, Romanian intellec-
history. Much of this help goes into the translation of classi- tuals feel obliged to take on political responsibilities. This
cal Romanian writers. has at least two advantages: The Romanian intellectuals do
The situation of the young Romanian authors is still diffi- not take themselves too seriously, and they feel bound by
cult. They not only have to compete with a flood of transla- ethical values. ◆
tions from English and Western European languages, but also —MB
the legal protection of authors’ rights has just been introduced Sources: Joseph Croitoru, “Nachdenken übers uneinige Land: Auf
although it is not yet fully implemented. A high inflation rate dem schwierigen Weg in die Normalität” [Thinking about the divi-
has raised book prices to forbidding heights, and Romanian sions in the country: On the hard road to normalcy], Frankfurter
literature is only published in small press runs by the more Allgemeine Zeitung, March 24, 1998.
than 2,000 publishing houses, only thirty of which are repre- Andrei Plesu, “Die Überlebenden: Aus Andrei Plesus Rede zur
sented in the publishers’ association. Besides translations, the Eröffnung der Leipziger Buchmesse” [The survivors: Excerpt from
most successful genre are essay collections of Romanian essay- Andrei Plesu’s talk at the opening of the Leipzig book fair] Der
ists and cultural journalists; these provide access to the cul- Tagesspiegel, March 28, 1998.
tural journals which are too expensive to buy. In these vol- “Wir tun alles, um uns der Welt zu öffnen.” [We do everything
umes of collected essays, the huge battles about the identity possible, to open up to the world] (An interview with Andrei Plesu),
of Romania can be followed. Der Tagesspiegel, March 28, 1998.

25
 Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
A Mismanaged
Cultural Transmission
Through its English edition the Budapest Review of Books, “a
critical quarterly of the social sciences” edited by Gábor Klanizay
and Zsófia Zachár, wants “to make the debates within the
Budapest intellectual milieu accessible outside it.” It is a product
of the Hungarian book market where, because of cut-throat com-
petition, one third of over 3,000 newly founded private book pub-
lishing firms have collapsed; the rest publish over 8,000 titles a
year, although some have a print run of only 500 copies.
W hat happens to a well known English introduc-
tory sociology textbook when it crosses the
British Channel and the Hungarian border? Jósef
Böröcz discusses this question in a review of Anthony
Giddens’s Szociológia (Budapest, 1995). This is one of two text-
books on this theme in the Hungarian market (the other is by
the Hungarian sociologist Rudolf Andorka). Böröcz finds
transmogrification of the material presented “into a distinct
sociological situation comedy.”
From the few passages on Hungary and Eastern Europe in
this book, the Hungarian student will learn that “‘Eastern
Europe’ is one and indivisible”, that Central Europe does
not exist, and that there is hardly anything the British or
North American student needs to know about Central
Europe in order to pass Giddens’s exam. He will be able to
infer by implication from the almost complete lack of refer-
ences for the remarks on Eastern Europe that it has “not
been the subject of systematic, reliable, professionally
acceptable social scientific scrutiny, not even in the purely
descriptive sense.”. What is the Hungarian student sup-
posed to do? Forget what he knows better or echo Kundera’s
“Life is elsewhere?”
Böröcz focuses his review “on the two components of this
daring act of scholarly recontextualization.” First he considers
“how the text fits into its original context; second, ”he relates
“some ironies as they emerge as Giddens, this stranger”—an
expression derived from Simmel—“ambles through the wild,
wild world of Hungarians today.” Looking from Hungary at
Giddens’ sociology within the English context he finds in it
some of the defects: Sociology as a discipline was tainted with
[?] by its founding condition. “In this regard, the main respon-
sibility of today’s sociologists is to understand our discipline
as a selective self-reflection of western European modernity
and to try to overcome this defect of birth.”◆
Source: Jósef Böröcz: “Sociology is Elsewhere,” Budapest
Review of Books, English edition, Fall 1997.
26
Miscellany
Out of a Time Warp
E ngland, the Blair government has decided, has an image
problem: it is seen as a frump, as rooted in the past, and
too bound to tradition. Besides, the U.S. is claiming the
twenty-first century as the American century because of
its information industries and telecommunications. The
New Britain cannot allow all these to go unchallenged.
Thus, says the Blair government—in considering a Panel
2000—England needs to be “rebranded” and sold in a
high-gloss campaign to display its new vigorous and
vibrant energy. The effort is described by John Lloyd in
the New Statesman:
The inspiration for re-branding comes from con-
stituencies new Labour has made its own (the cynical
would say the constituencies made new Labour).
These are the advertising world; the new think-tanks;
and the consultancies, design agencies, creative busi-
ness and architectural practices, which now arrange
and plan and mount so many of the events and pro-
jects and diversions of our life and, in doing so, mobi-
lize a promiscuous profusion of insights culled from
academia: modern fiction, media studies, tabloids,
advertising, focus groups, the cinema, and religion.
The summation of this work came in a report last
September by Mark Leonard for the Demos think-tank,
whose director is Geoff Mulgan, an adviser to the Prime
Minister. His report was an extraordinarily effective blend
of what had gone before, of the cool with the patriotic, a
clear-eyed concentration on strengths defined in glowing
terms, while insisting that these were different from the
negative images of pride and arrogance. “A gulf,” wrote
Leonard, “has opened up between the reality of Britain as
a highly creative and diverse society and the perception
round the world that Britain remains a backward-looking
island immersed in its heritage.”
This effort to project Britain by stripping it of some of
its traditional symbols is now well advanced; its most
recent indicator is British Airways’s dropping of the
national colors from the tail of its planes—to the distress
of Lady Thatcher—in favor of the cool, anti-establishment
Virgin Airlines brand of Richard Branson.
None of the reports mention the flushed exuberance of
Carnaby Street and Fulham Road in the 1970s, which pro-
jected the image of Britain as a swinging society, a scene
flaunted by Michelangelo Antonioni in his film Blow-up.
Like the model Twiggy, that might be too thin and quirky.
As Lloyd, however, concludes, “Rebranding Britain is
serious business, and will become more so as other coun-
tries hit back with their version of modernity. We ap-
proach an era of global image wars—which is better than
the real thing, of course.”
Source: John Lloyd, “Cool Britannia Warms Up,” New
Statesman, March 13, 1998.
 Reports from Japan
The Paradoxical Sense of Transience
In Japan, Saigo no Shogun [The Last Shogun], a novel by the late Ryotaro Shiba, has been made into a year-long television drama
and is scheduled to be published in English this spring. Although Shiba has an enormous following in Japan, he is little known abroad.
Masakazu Yamazaki attributes this to other cultures’ inability to relate to the Japanese “paradoxical sense of transience.”
A s the twentieth century draws to a close, the phrase
“the end” is being used to characterize a great vari-
ety of turning points. Starting with “the end of the
cold war” and “the end of history,” people sometimes even
speak of growing cosmopolitanism as the loss of national
boundaries, that is, the beginning of “the end of nationhood.”
In his delineation of historical turning points, the novelist
Ryotaro Shiba focuses on the ends of eras. The awareness that
human lives and eras have ends lays bare the fundamental
truths of human existence. People who feel that turning
points mark the beginning of eras set up illustrious goals and
live under their influence, whereas those who see the same
turning points as the end of eras display a dispassionate spirit
that is not moved by the illusions of the times.
Tokugawa Yoshinobu, as depicted in The Last Shogun, typi-
fies the character of a figure who is conscious of the final
phase of an era. Yoshinobu, the last shogun in the Tokugawa
dynasty’s 250-year rule, contributed to one of Japan’s great
turning points when he transferred administrative power to
the Meiji government in 1868.
By nature, Yoshinobu lacked ambition. His immensely ambi-
tious father had great hopes for him, but Yoshinobu, at the
mercy of other people’s excessive drive, was, like Hamlet, inca-
pable of what might be called an irrational passion for action.
Yet, Yoshinobu was bright and intelligent. At a time when
Japanese ideology was being rent asunder, he was able to
understand the emperor-centered philosophy and advocated
the restoration of imperial rule and the concept of the nation-
state grounded in modern Western thought. A person with
internal motivation, such as a desire to be freed of suppression
or dissatisfaction, can easily choose an ideology. But Yoshinobu
had no such motivation, and because of his intelligence, he
was unable to make himself a follower of any school of thought.
Most importantly, however, he was a man of many talents
who was never bored. Conversely, this meant that he could
never become enthusiastic about anything in particular. People
who lack a sense of purpose have no need to attach meaning to
their actions and so make no
distinction between major and
minor matters. Moreover, be-
cause they do not envision a
future into which they should
plunge themselves, they com-
pletely immerse themselves in
the present.
I have called this attitude a
“paradoxical sense of tran-
sience.” A sense of transience
means not only that a person
sees everything in the world as
impermanent, but also that the individual is unable to discern
an ultimate purpose in the world and in life. Incompetent peo-
ple who have this sense degenerate into nihilism; capable indi-
viduals who have it, however, possess a fundamental certainty
that makes them put everything into the here and now. Japan
has the tradition of this sense of transience. One may say, in
fact, that transience is distinguished from the transcendental,
which underlies much of Western thought.
Their victory in the Russo-Japanese War at the end of the
Meiji Period, for example, meant for many Japanese intellec-
tuals the end of a shared sense of national purpose since they
had attained their purpose: the establishment of Japan as a
respectable modern state. Consciously or unconsciously, the
Japanese began to realize that what they had thought to be a
national identity was merely an illusion. One way out of the
uncertainty caused by a lack of a sense of purpose is aestheti-
cism. This aestheticism is found in novels of Junichiro
Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata whose characters live only in
the present. Western literature also has many similar figures
who express a feeling of impermanence.
But based upon the same sense of transience, there are also
people who, paradoxically, live more actively than idealists.
The novelist Ogai Mori wrote stories at the end of Meiji
period in which people do their daily boring, useless jobs
with impeccable efficiency and diligence, but still see them-
selves as others view them. While Western culture has many
figures who express a feeling of impermanence, there are few
in modern times who exhibit this paradoxical sense of tran-
sience and live more actively than idealists. Because this para-
doxical sense of transience has been difficult for people in
other cultures to understand, Shiba’s novels have not been
introduced abroad.
Throughout the world, ideologies providing people with a
facile sense of purpose are breaking down, and the inclination
to look at eras in their final phase is beginning to gain accep-
tance. The paradoxical sense of transience that has its begin-
nings in Japan may attain larger understanding in the next
century. Just as perhaps the
great Ukiyo-e woodblock prints
of the Edo period—the prints of
the “floating world”—have
found widespread acceptance in
the West today, Shiba’s novels
may be recorded among the
world’s great literary works. ◆
—MT
Source: Masakazu Yamazaki,
“Jidai o Owari No So de Miru,
[Looking at eras in their final
phase],” Shokun, February 1998.
27
 Reports from Japan
A Fresh Wind in Japanese Film
Born in 1944, Saburo Kawamoto has commented widely on topics including film, literature, and urban culture. In this look at
the world of film, he notes that although the Japanese market is flooded with foreign productions, Japanese movies have not seen a
drop in quality. This is evidenced by the popularity enjoyed by Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? following its release in New
York. Independent films produced by small companies have in recent years reached new heights of excellence. What are some of
the characteristics of these films?
J apan has its share of large, long-established film studios,
but in recent years smaller-studio independent produc-
tions—or “indies,” as they are called in the United
States—have attracted attention with their quality. Indepen-
dent films are a powerful expression of the individuality and
will of the director, and are well-received at foreign film festi-
vals. Last year’s festival at Cannes saw two Japanese films
receive laurels: Shohei Imamura’s Unagi [The Eel] took one of
two Golden Palms awarded, and Naomi Kawase won a Golden
Camera, a prize for cinematography given to a first-time direc-
tor, for her Moe no Suzaku [Suzaku]. Also in 1997, Takeshi
Kitano won the Venice International Film Festival’s Golden
Lion grand prize for his Hana-bi, and Jun Ichikawa took the
director’s prize at the Montreal World Film Festival for his
work, Tokyo Yakyoku [Tokyo Lullaby].
Suzaku tells the tale of one family, set against the backdrop
of a village in the mountains near Nara. The word “suzaku”
refers to one of four Chinese gods, and the film’s title suggests
a “verdant village under the god’s protection.” The village in
question is populated mainly by the elderly left behind as
the forestry industry stagnates; the father of the family
depicted in the film has lost his job and watches his very exis-
tence wither away. The movie, however, is no overbearing
socialist piece with rural depopulation and the decay of the
family as its main themes. Instead, Suzaku takes an intimate
approach to the villagers and paints a careful, tender picture
of life in their hamlet.
One of the more touching scenes in the film depicts an
elderly neighbor bidding farewell to the village where he has
lived all his life before he enters a nursing home. This sort of
scene can easily be overdone, but Kawase chooses a cool, quo-
tidian portrayal. Both the person heading for the nursing
home and the people seeing him off are elderly; they merely
look at one another and bow deeply. The viewer is astonished
by the depth of this form of goodbye: Has a bow ever seemed
so beautiful, so much more eloquent than words?
Born in 1969, Naomi Kawase is a young director, who dis-
plays a calm style that places great importance on form. She
does not ask her cast for exaggerated performances, avoids
brash music for her soundtracks, and pares spoken lines to a
minimum. Instead she tells her story through the poetic lan-
guage of the sound of the wind, the light of the sun, and the
green of the trees. She has created a movie of “quiet”—a trait
shared by many of the independent films of recent years.
In Kitano’s Hana-bi, the director himself plays the main
character, a police detective, who—like his wife—scarcely
utters a word throughout the film. But this does not keep the
couple’s love from coming across very clearly. The lead in
28
Imamura’s The Eel, too, is silent as he plays a hermit after his
release from prison, where he had been incarcerated for killing
his adulterous wife.
The influence of the old masters—Yasujiro Ozu and his con-
temporaries—looms large behind all these “quiet” movies. If
the 1980s were a raucous era, both economically and culturally,
then the 1990s may well be an era of stillness. This definition
recognizes speech as but one form of self-expression and is also
a reaction to the blaring noise of omnipresent video games.
But there remains one gaping difference between the era of
Ozu and the other giants of film and today: society has grown
infantile. There are no adults any more. In the present era,
behavior has become superficial, and attitudes lack dignity and
authority. It is the adult atmosphere found in older Japanese
films that Jun Ichikawa and the other new directors are trying
to bring back in their works. Ichikawa in particular selects sub-
dued themes for his films; through his directing style, devoid
of flashiness, he creates a changeless backdrop for his tales that
allow the viewer to breathe the air of a more mature era.
While the booming bubble economy of the 1980s saw an
emphasis placed on constant change, in this decade—now
that the bubble has burst—film creators have come to reject
that protean time. The recent wave of independent films
places a high value on the quality of changelessness. Ichi-
kawa’s Tokyo Lullaby is set in an old shopping district at the
edge of a newly developed area of town. Similarly, the detec-
tive in Hana-bi takes his dying wife on trips to quintessen-
tially Japanese vacation spots like the foothills of Mt. Fuji and
the old city of Kamakura.
Japan’s society has become urbanized at an incredible rate,
and true interpersonal communication is now infrequent and
shallow. As individuals seek some way to connect themselves
with new urban communities, they look to the unchanging
scenes present within a constantly changing Japan. They can
reuse aspects of the past in their attempt to restore the indi-
vidual. The adult, as portrayed by Ichikawa, is a polar oppo-
site of the lone individual locked within the context of the
city. Tokyo Lullaby depicts an adulterous, triangular relation-
ship, but the three players are all fully mature adults acting
against a backdrop of changelessness; this brings a miracu-
lous sense of harmony to their overall relationship.
One final common characteristic found in the new indepen-
dent films becomes clear when a family is depicted. One mem-
ber of the family—a parent or a child, a husband or a wife—
vanishes during the course of the movie. The “disappearing
wife” is seen most often. The husband, however, does not
come directly to grips with the fact that his wife is vanishing;
he merely watches her go. All that remains in the end is the
 Reports from Japan
memory of the time they spent together. In Federico Fellini’s
last film, La Voce della Luna (1990), there is a line that goes “to
live is to remember.” This describes perfectly the thoughts of
a husband as he watches his wife vanish. Reality is trans-
formed into something evanescent, and memory becomes the
true reality. Taking this construct even further, this memory
may not even be true, but may instead be a recollection of a
past that should have been.
The question is how to perceive this reversal of reality and
memory. Is it to be labeled a sort of fin-de-siècle illness? Or is
memory itself a new community for the people of the modern
age—to be affirmed as a means to recreate the individual? ◆
—MT
Source: Saburo Kawamoto, “Nippon Eiga no Atarashii Kaze”
(A Fresh Wind in Japanese Film), Asteion, Spring 1998.
“Furusato”—Sociology of
Remembrance
Born in 1949 in Osaka, Ryuzo Uchida studied at Kyoto Univer-
sity and the University of Tokyo, spent some time at Yale Univer-
sity, and currently teaches at the Tokyo University. A sociologist
specializing in modern societal theory and media issues, he notes
in this essay that the concept of furusato, the nostalgic rural
“home” which repeatedly appeared in songs sung at schools, from
the 1868 Meiji Restoration onward, does not so much refer to a par-
ticular place as to an abstract notion that can be at once everywhere
and nowhere. This, he says, has subtly colored the outlook of those
who live in cities, where human relations tend to anonymity.
T he recently fashionable philosophical debate on “the
politics of memory” seems to have arrived at a dead
end. The “politics of memory” movement is concerned
with exposing the various hidden political aspects of the
process whereby collective memories and traditions have been
built up historically to construct, strengthen, and maintain
the identity of a modern state and society. It is certainly true
that “memory” as a form of collective mentality has served as
a concealed emotional wellspring in the construct of the
nation-state, and even as a force behind an exclusive and mali-
cious racism. But within this kind of construct, the role of
memory has in fact tended to be minimized. The domain of
memory must be subjectified not on the level of the kind of
political symbolism and imagery involved in the creation of
the nation-state, but as something created from within,
grounded in human perception and perspectives, and given
concrete depth by various mechanistic relationships.
To exemplify this “mass memory” in Japan, Uchida analyzes
the songs of the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras (the three peri-
ods named for emperors from the late nineteenth-century to
the postwar periods), in particular those known as “Education
Ministry Songs,” which were supposedly those most steeped
in political rhetoric. The songs prescribed by the Education
Ministry have often been the subject of controversy, since
they are a characteristic medium for imparting state ideology
to students. This is true but looking beyond the surface func-
tions of the songs, one can also find them as expressing some-
thing of society’s unconscious impulses, and at the same time
feels that the societal factors underpinning these impulses
must also be understood.
A good example is the old and universally known Japanese
song “Furusato” [“My Old Home”], an archetypal Education
Ministry’s approved song. In this song, which appears to ring
with emotion, no particular “home” is specified; the words
refer only to “this mountain” or “that river,” so that a general,
abstract symbol of furusato is created that can be applied any-
where. The effect is to erase the differences between and indi-
viduality of villages in a process of generalization. By propos-
ing a sense of lost furusato that is everywhere and nowhere,
this song generates a reproducible image that can fill the
abstract void that has formed within society. This empty,
abstract space defies all perspective and is thus capable of rel-
ativizing even the “space” of the nation; it cannot be confined
to the tiny framework of the nation-state.
The formation of a new kind of perception was made possi-
ble by technological innovation. Even if the song “Furusato”
served as a means of social mobilization of the masses, it was
not simply mobilization at the ideological level geared to par-
ticular political goals and the ancient community mentality. It
was a renascent expression of social sensitivity among people
who, in relating not so much to the state as to capitalism, had
lost a basis for their existence. ◆
—KW
Source: Ryuzo Uchida, “Furusato no Kioku [Memories of Home]”,
Daikokai, No. 20, 1998.
The New Japanese Literature
Born in 1954, Mitsuyoshi Numano graduated from Tokyo
University and studied at Harvard University. He currently com-
bines teaching activities at his alma mater with his role as a
translator of contemporary Russian and Polish literature. He
analyzes the significance of writing literary works in Japanese,
which is a minor language from the international perspective.
T he environment for Japanese literature is changing dra-
matically. A significant number of non-Japanese have
a deeper knowledge of Japanese culture than most
Japanese, and there are even foreign authors who write novels
in Japanese. Conversely, there are also Japanese authors who
have crossed Japan’s linguistic and cultural borders to write in
other languages. This is reflected in the emergence of a new
tendency to view Japanese literature not as a unique phenom-
enon isolated from world literature, but rather as part of world
literature. This transition in Japanese literature is symbolized
by the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Yasunari Kawabata
and Kenzaburo Oe, which were separated by an interval of
twenty-six years.
Kawabata’s 1968 Nobel Prize was awarded for his Japanese
aesthetics, so different from those of the West. This is clearly
expressed in the title of his acceptance speech: “Japan, the
Beautiful, and Myself.” The title of Oe’s 1994 speech was
“Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself.” By this he meant that the
29
 Reports from Japan
essential task of Japanese writers was not to discover a “beauti-
ful Japan” with which they could identify, but rather to create
a literature that would be open to the rest of world by recog-
nizing the ambiguity of their own standpoints. As has been
suggested by Oe in his sympathetic comments on the works of
Milan Kundera, a Czech writer who defected to France, a work
written in a minor regional language can have greater universal
power than works written for distribution in more widely spo-
ken languages. Oe has certainly demonstrated this fundamen-
tal paradox of language and literature in his works.
Another writer who deserves recognition in relation to the
international characteristics of Japanese literature is Kobo
Abe, whose works seem to have no nationality. Abe’s dislike
of tradition and his foresight—including his early interest in
Creole—should be fully recognized today, now that we have
gone beyond criticism of Orientalism and deconstruction.
Interestingly, the global scope of Abe’s work has been inher-
ited in the context of Japanese literature by foreign writers
who are skilled in Japanese, such as Hideo Levy and David
Zappetti. The emergence of writers who were not born
Japanese but write in Japanese has, according to Levy,
destroyed the modern myth that Japan has maintained a
monolithic identity of race, culture, and language. It has also
released Japan from the bonds of the ethnic homogeneity ide-
ology. Levy is constantly aware of the distance between clas-
sical and modern, America and Japan, and he has honed his
Japanese through the practical use of language across these
distances. In this way, he has also provided the Japanese with
a dramatic new power. Swiss-born Zappetti has created a lit-
erary world in which he recasts the literature of Junichiro
Tanizaki in a modern context in the style of Haruki
Murakami. Instead of simply lapsing into Japanese lyricism,
he is seeking to transcend one border after another. He has
demonstrated the potential to create new a literary style not
despite being a foreigner, but because of it.
At the other extreme from Levy and Zappetti are Minae
Mizumura, who writes bilingual novels in Japanese and
English, and Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and
German. Mizumura’s unique novels have Japanese mingled
with English in lines that run from left to right. (Japanese is
normally written in vertical lines.) Mizumura lived in American
society for about 20 years from her teens onwards. During that
time she expanded her imaginings about Japan until she became
more fascinated with things Japanese than Japanese living in
Japan. By writing about the gulf between her imagined Japan
and the real thing, she has created a remarkable mechanism for
commenting indirectly on contemporary Japan. Tawada has
written fantasy novels that are deeply imbued with elements of
Japanese folklore, as well as numerous stories about searching
for one’s self when in danger of falling headlong into a foreign
culture. Her Kakato o Nakushite (Losing My Heels) won the
1991 Gunzo Literary Prize for New Writers. Her elegant style,
rich with unique physiological perceptions, perfectly matches
her uncertain identity.
When we look back over world literature in the twentieth
century, it becomes apparent that a significant number of
writers have worked across multiple ethnic groups and used
30
multiple languages. Examples include Samuel Beckett, Joseph
Brodsky, Elias Canetti, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, and
Salman Rushdie. In the manner of these cross-border authors,
Levy, Zappetti, Mizumura, and Tawada are releasing the peo-
ple of Japan from the Japanese framework, or releasing for-
eign readers from the preconceived notion of the exotic
beauty of the orient. In this way, they are exploring paths to
link Japanese literature with world literature. ◆
—KW
Source: Mitsuyoshi Numano, “Sekai no Naka no Nippon Bungaku:
Arata na Aidentiti o Motomete” (Japanese Literature in a Global
Context: Seeking a New Identity), Asteion, Summer 1998.
Su Tong and the
New Writing in China
The young pace-setters of the contemporary Chinese literary
scene have broken new ground with their nonideological ethnic-
ity and their boldly experimental use of language. Zhang Jing, a
scholar of comparative literature and culture, singles out Su
Tong’s work 1934 nian di taowang [1934 Escapes] for special
praise. Born in China in 1953, Zhang came to Japan in 1985,
earning his doctorate at the University of Tokyo. He currently
teaches at Kokugakuin University.
I n the mid-1980s a group of highly talented young writers
jolted the Chinese literary scene with works marked by
startlingly original story lines and language. Written in a
florid style that breaks violently with the past, these novels
captivate readers with their half-realistic, half-fantastic sto-
ries born of the authors’ fertile imagination. The works of
these young writers opened up a new realm of language,
utterly different from the tradition that had prevailed since
Lu Xun, and launched what amounted to a rebellion against
modern literature.
Members of the generation that lived through the Cultural
Revolution found it extremely difficult to throw off the shack-
les of ideology, but these younger writers easily crossed that
hurdle and were able to approach literature as an isolated lin-
guistic phenomenon. Free from ideological fetters, they were
able to pour all their energies into constructing highly origi-
nal linguistic worlds.
Another factor in the development of their literature was the
pronounced influence of modern Latin American literature.
These writers found that they had much more in common with
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges than with
Marcel Proust or James Joyce. Their spiritual dialogue and
communion of sensibilities with these Latin American contem-
poraries helped them to discover the rich literary possibilities
of matters close to home and thus to open up new territory in
subject matter and develop a more deeply expressive style.
One of the most brilliant of these young writers is Su Tong.
His 1934 Escapes is a masterpiece that has secured a perma-
nent place in the history of contemporary literature. The story
concerns an ordinary peasant household and relates their
births and partings, their joys and sorrows. The protagonist
 Reports from Japan
Shen Baonian, the narrator’s grandfather, marries a woman
named Jiang, but then flees the village, claiming that his new
wife is destined to bring ill luck to those around her. In town,
he builds a profitable business making bamboo utensils.
Hearing of his success, the other men of the village follow suit
and leave their homes, and Shen Baonian’s eldest son begins
an apprenticeship under his father. When the protagonist’s
mistress Huanzi becomes pregnant, however, he sends her to
live with his wife. Huanzi has a miscarriage, whereupon she
disappears with Jiang’s one remaining child, the father of the
narrator. Shen Baonian is eventually caught in a trap laid by
his employees, falls ill, and dies. Throughout this narrative
the author interweaves scenes with hidden import—a myste-
rious death in the home of a wealthy man, the spread of an
epidemic, the divinations of a sorcerer, stolen glimpses of sex-
ual liaisons—and the story gradually falls into place like the
pieces of a puzzle.
One superb feature of the book is the shifting time frame of
the narrator, who speaks both as a contemporary of the reader
and from the standpoint of one who directly witnessed events
that occurred in the past. When he “witnesses” his own
father’s birth and his grandfather’s liaisons, his vantage point
is on a plane with the characters involved; his is by no means
the omniscient, omnipotent God’s-eye view narrators so often
adopt. The unique world of the novel springs from the inter-
twining of these two space-time frameworks.
Sustaining this world is a highly refined literary style that
leaves a powerful impression on the reader. Su Tong restruc-
tures and transmutes accepted modes of expression in a per-
ilous and pathfinding experiment that instantly expands the
expressive possibilities of contemporary Chinese.
In addition to its richly poetic style, the novel is notable for
its subject matter. Chinese fiction was long burdened by the
obligation, imposed by the political circumstances in which it
arose, to treat subject matter appropriate to the ideology it
espoused. Until recently, modern Chinese novels tended to
adhere to a simple formula of justice fighting villainy, pros-
perity against poverty, oppression versus resistance, and so
forth. Even when they focused on an earlier historical era, as
1934 Escapes does, they tended to be consciously retrogres-
sive or nostalgic. Su Tong’s writing, however, never lapses into
ideological didacticism.
1934 Escapes is set in a peasant village sixty years ago for
this reason: In order to grasp the present in its raw, naked
form, we need to focus our attention on our primitive cus-
toms—our forgotten experiences and culture—in all their var-
ied manifestations. Centering on a mysterious curse, the story
drifts among folk customs, superstitions, and accidental
occurances, and in the process highlights the raw conflict and
struggle of human life. The indomitable spirit of people liv-
ing amid the squalor and ugliness of the pre-modern era, the
futility of human works when in the end we find ourselves
powerless despite all our efforts to live heroically—to shed
light on such themes, the author reveals to the reader, through
vivid use of language, the mystery of folk beliefs and the
ethnic essence of a people.
Rejecting the kind of “absolute truth” or ideology that can
accept the existence of only one reality and working in a lit-
erary dimension utterly different from that of their predeces-
sors, Su Tong and his contemporaries have used the native
ethnic mentality of a people to probe and portray the sources
of contemporary humanity’s spiritual drift at the deepest lev-
els of the psyche. That is why their works connect with the
raw passions of contemporary readers and leave a deep and
lasting impression. ◆
—MT
Source: Zhang Jing, “Toki Hanatareta Minzoku no Sozoryoku,
[The Ethnic Imagination Set Free]”, Asteion, Spring 1998.
Miscellany
Big, Big Brother
Y ou probably have never heard of the Axicom Corp., a
giant information service tucked near the rolling
Ozark foothills in Arkansas. But chances are that Axicom
knows quite a lot about you. Twenty-four hours a day,
Axicom electronically gathers and sorts information about
196 million Americans. Credit card transactions and mag-
azine subscriptions. Telephone numbers and real estate
records. Car registrations and fishing licenses. Customer
surveys and demographic details.
Axicom can determine whether you own a dog or a cat,
enjoy camping, read the Bible or lots of other books. It
can pinpoint your occupation, the car you drive, your
favorite vacations. And by analyzing the equivalent of
billions of pages of data, it projects for its customers who
should be offered a credit card and who is unlikely to buy
a personal computer.
What Axicom does is perfectly legal—bringing
together an array of facts from scattered sources. The
practice is known as “data warehousing” or “data min-
ing.” In a flash, data warehouses can assemble electronic
dossiers that give marketers, insurers, and, in some cases,
law enforcement officers a comprehensive look into the
needs, life-style, and spending habits of individuals.
The number of data warehouses, large and small, using
faster computers and the Internet, now exceeds 1,000—
a ten-fold increase in five years. These include retailers
such as Sears, Roebuck, gift shop firms such as Hallmark
Cards, and insurance companies such as All State. And
there are the information service companies such as
Metromail and R.L. Polk, but few are as large as or as
powerful as Axicom.
Firms like Axicom are under few obligations to divulge
their files to consumers. So this explosion of data ware-
housing has sharpened the ethical, legal, and political
questions about an individual’s right to privacy in an
increasingly “open” society
Source: Washington Post Weekly Edition, March 23, 1998.
31
 Transatlantic Poetry
Adam Zagajewski: From History to Mysticism
I n the title poem of a new volume by the Polish poet Adam
Zagajewski, Mysticism for Beginners, the author takes us
to an Italian hill town, Montepulciano in Tuscany, where
among the quiet beauty of the place (“the dusk erasing the
outlines of medieval houses,”) he confesses his belief that the
world given to our senses may not be all there is, that all this:
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed
The phrase “mysticism for beginners,” comes from the cover
of a book on the lap of a German tourist, ironically, perhaps
another New Age guide “higher spiritual awareness.”
The contrast between the serious, straightfoward declara-
tion of a mystical premise and the ironic trivialized context in
which the word “mysticism” appears, writes Jaroslaw Anders,
point to the central question of Zagajewski’s poetry in a cul-
ture in which ideas of mystery and mysticism are most likely
associated with The X-files or The Celestine Prophecy. Or, to
reverse the question: Can serious poetry survive without mys-
tery and ecstasy; can it be sustained by irony alone, which
the poet in “Long Afternoons”calls, “the gaze/that sees but
doesn’t penetrate.”
This is the question that is now the resting point for a poet
who began with politics and history, during a condition of
Robert Pinsky: Poetry “Soaked in the Cells of Life”
R obert Pinsky is the Poet Laureate of the Library of
Congress, the ninth in that designation since the
appointment of Robert Penn Warren in 1986.
(Previously, poets were called consultants and included
Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and
Elizabeth Bishop.) The effort is to raise the public awareness
of poetry and give it a new status in American life.
Pinsky may be the first, however, to lead poetry in a differ-
ent direction from his predecessors. He is, as Cal Bedient has
observed, “of a generation that exposed the arbitrariness of
both tradition and rebellion,” and so seeks to establish new
poetic forms. He also believes that poetry is appreciated best
when read aloud because the act “engages the mind and body
in a genetically primary sensation that involves a column of air
in the trunk and the production of syllables,” a sensation that
“causes comfort and alertness.” So he has initiated a set of pub-
lic performances including his own reading of poems on the
Public Broadcasting System for ceremonial and other occasions.
And he is sufficiently intrigued with technology and digital
culture to serve as the poetry editor of the weekly Internet mag-
azine Slate, while continuing to teach at Boston University.
Yet Pinsky is far from the populist street vendor of blank
verse while jingling rings on his toes. He is a poet’s poet with
a mastery of complex, technical modes, with a freedom and
32
struggle, and found that realm empty as the ground for
poetry. Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945 and emerged as
one of the leading voices of Solidarity in 1974 with the publi-
cation of The Unrepresented World, a critical manifesto which,
as Stanislaw Baranczak wrote in The New Republic “stirred up
one of the greatest controversies in postwar Polish culture”
by attacking those who fled from politics in their writing and
did not join him and a kindred group of young writers in their
ironic defiance, their weapons of choice, in exposing ideolog-
ical rant. Zagajewski espoused what he called “critical real-
ism,” a theme which became the manifesto of the group.
Yet Zagajewski parted ways—poetically, not politically—
with his friends. As he wrote later, cultural struggle against a
collectivist idea tends to impose a rigidity of its own.“ To be a
Pole,” he wrote, “to participate in the work of Polish litera-
ture, is practically the same as becoming a member of a reli-
gious order with very strict rules.” Zagajewski left for Paris,
where he has lived to this day.
In this flight from a politically engaged view of poetry,
indeed, the antinomy between politics and poetry, or
between history and art, or between the collective and the
private, as Adam Kirsch has remarked, has been the main
burden of his mature work.
These concerns are pronounced in his book Solidarity/
Solitude, a collection of essays that appeared in 1990.
Solidarity, here, is the political movement, solitude the retreat
fluidity that has brought him the approbation of his peers.
The author of five books of poetry, Pinsky came to the atten-
tion of a wider literate audience with a stunning verse trans-
lation of Dante’s Inferno in 1994. Translating Dante is the most
difficult challenge for a major poet. The speech is simple and
direct yet has the weight of gravitas. The verse form is the
terza rima which Dante invented, a set of interlinked lines that
control the rhyme sequences and gives the narrative a strong
forward sweep. What Pinsky did, as Bernard Knox pointed
out (in the New York Review of Books) was to preserve Dante’s
pattern through the systematic use of rhyme by the same con-
sonant sounds—however much the vowels differed. It was a
method drawn from Yeats, “a master of such consonantal
rhymes.” Thus, Pinsky created such rhymes as swans/stones
rather than the “hard rhyme” but full combination as
bones/stones. It was an outcome that created a freshness and
rhythm in a contemporaneous expression, yet maintaining a
sense of the original narrative form. (And since Pinsky wants
poetry to be read aloud, he has recently written a “theatrical”
version of the Inferno with different voices speaking the
anguished laments in the cantos.)
This reworking of forms to “soak in the cells of life,” (to use
the phrase of Cal Bedient) characterizes Pinsky’s latest collec-
tion, The Figured Wheel. And it is the thread of an extended
 Transatlantic Poetry
to the world of epiphanous experience. He acknowledges the
force of that “piercing sense of community..that half leg-
endary country of Poland..all that is social, common and col-
lective.” Yet, “not everything belonged to everybody…we
also experience things which social groups will never know.”
His writing, again, is an attempt to diagnose the deformities
of a poetry under too much public pressure, a poetry that feels
a duty to participate in politics. Poetry, then, becomes a call-
ing in a zone of solitude, of “immobility which is necessary
for writing perfectly achieved poetry.”
This is the background, then, for the turn to mysticism. But
it is not a mysticism of a doctrine or a system of a single truth.
He is, as Adam Kirsch writes, paradoxically “a mystic poet of
the liberal imagination,” seeking to catch the elusive moments
between an ecstasy that is more intellectual than emotional or
spiritual, and an irony that is more emotional than detached.
It is the “sensuous apprehension of thought,” which T.S. Eliot
once praised as the true measure of poetic achievement. As
Jaroslaw Anders concludes:
Zagajewski is…a very modern mystic, one who realizes
that the mystical pursuit is essentially a contradictory one:
Endless postponing of the ‘test’ as the title poem suggests,
is often a part of the course. It is his mixture of skepticism
and passion that makes him one of the most interesting
poets of his generation writing in any language.
Sources: Jaroslaw Anders, L. A. Times Book Review, Feb. 1, 1998.
Adam Kirsch, The New Republic, March 23, 1998.
Edward Hirsch, essay introducing six poems by Zagajewski,
Doubletake, Fall 1997.
appreciation of Pinsky’s poetry in Salmagundi. We print here
extracts from Bedient’s essay leaving out some of the detailed
examination of particular poems but providing an apprecia-
tion of Pinsky’s style:
A typical new Pinsky poem has no address—it floats, emi-
grates, circles back, is unable to rest in a single interiority of
substance or subject. The title of the show-stopper among the
new poems, “Impossible to Tell,” underscores the near-impos-
sibility Pinsky now finds himself in (and this is his distinc-
tion) when he writes a poem. It is the purest achievement to
have come so far from all provinciality, to know the genuine
complexity of the relations between the particular and the
general, to know it along the tangled nerves.
An extreme fluidity of form—loose or complex, meander-
ing or braided—is peculiarly, if not solely, American. “Song
of Myself” and Moby Dick remain the greatest instances.
Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, Frank O’Hara and John
Ashbery—the examples are numerous. But each new inven-
tion within the form has, of course, its own character and
meaning. Pinsky’s is most like Melville’s and Whitman’s in
motive, most like Melville’s in anguish—yet new. It is haunted
by the limit at which the universal is deaf to everything.
The poem “Voyage to the Moon” knows both the heart’s
penchant for catastrophe—the richest stories have heaviness
in them, grief, ruin—and that it wants, even so, for the world
to “go on ending endlessly….”
Mysticism for Beginners by Adam Zagajewski
The day was mild, the light was generous.
The German on the cafe terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
Mysticism for Beginners.
Suddenly I understood that the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
and the white herons standing-yesterday? the day before?-
like nuns in a field of rice,
and the dusk, slow and systematic,
erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
and olive trees on little hills,
abandoned to the wind and heat,
and the head of the Unknown Princess
that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of a trip,
is only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed.
In his work from The Want Bone on, Pinsky is often where
the heart of Western literature itself most monsters up its rich-
ness. He has gone to the “riven hub.” His hands are on the pot-
ter’s wheel of “passions” and “misfortunes,” which, in their
rapid whirl, come to have much the same feel. “Voyage to the
Moon” is the sweetest of monsterings, the most entrancing
expression of his Freudian realism about the realism of the
heart. Climaxing its fluid interminglings of weight and flota-
tion, rage and love, war and peace, the poem allows us at the
end the simultaneous recognition of the heart’s destructive-
ness and its dream of happiness….
Maker and Breaker with his crown of glass
In spikes like icicles, his violent paws
Of metal, his many arms, his orbs and swords
Doubled like his reflection in the moat
Around the palace of the Moon—where now
The pair have landed with their little dog.
That spiked heaviness should have risen to the Moon is, of
course, reason to expect the worst. But we knew to expect
that, we “in the pack” who, when “The black captain stran-
gles his wife,” “applaud and applaud, the sound of our hands/
In a fluttering mass around that heavy act.” Meanwhile, to
have allowed the pair of lovers to reach the Moon, “with their
little dog,” is an almost heart-breaking gift.
Source: Carl Bedient. Salmagundi, Fall/Winter 1997.
33
 Criticism and a Pot of Paint
The Soaking of Clement Greenberg
I n the hey-day of “abstract expressionism,” the period
from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, the champion of
those artists and, in consequence, the arbiter of taste in
the art market was Clement Greenberg. The dominance of this
style was so high, in fact, that a left-wing critic, Serge Guil-
baut, charged that New York had “stolen” the crown of the
art world from Paris, as a plot of American imperialism, insti-
gated by Nelson Rockefeller and the Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA). A strange charge in that during the first decade after
World War II, MOMA had ignored
the abstract expressionists in its
major shows, and this had led to man-
ifestations and the picketing of the
museum by the artists.
Yet it was Greenberg’s powerful
assault that led to the changes in the
judgements of other critics, the art
dealers, and market, and finally the
opening of the museums to these
painters. For Greenberg, abstract
expressionism was exemplified by the
drip painting of Jackson Pollack, the
pools of color of Mark Rothko, the
monochromatic darkness of Barnett
Newman. Since Pollack could not
represent the external world, wrote
Greenberg, he turned instead to his
self. Ironically, Pollock’s style, and his
flinging of the pot of paint onto the
raw canvas was more attuned to the
phrase “action painting,” coined by Harold Rosenberg, than
to the layered impasto of Willem de Kooning, whom Rosen-
berg had championed.
The publication this year of Clement Greenberg: A Life by
Florence Rubenfeld is the first full-length biography of
Greenberg since his death in 1994, though there have been
critical studies of Greenberg’s criticism by Donald Kuspit, and
a four volume collection of Greenberg’s writing, still ongoing,
edited by John O’Brian (University of Chicago Press). These
volumes have become the occasion of a set of re-appraisals of
Greenberg, most notably, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.
Clement Greenberg was born in 1909 and became known as
one of the first generation of “the New York intellectuals,”
which included among their number Lionel Trilling, Sidney
Hook, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, Harold Rosenberg, Mary
McCarthy, and other of the so-called Partisan Review circle.
Greenberg’s first job, before World War II, was in the Customs
Service. Not so strange—such jobs were the “fate” of most of
the New York intellectuals, a few of whom were instructors in
colleges for long periods (Trilling was an instructor at
Columbia for fourteen years before being promoted) or were
supported by their wives, who were schoolteachers. Clement
Greenberg started an editorial career along with Nathan
Glazer on the Contemporary Jewish Record, a journal pub-
34
lished by the American Jewish Committee during the war,
which became transmuted in 1945 as Commentary magazine,
where he was joined by his younger brother Martin, a trans-
lator of Kleist and other German writers.
Like many of his contemporaries, Greenberg in his early years
was a Marxist, and the major focus of attack was the use of cul-
ture as a commodity. Greenberg made his first reputation with
an essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” which appeared in the
Partisan Review in 1939. This foreshadowed Dwight Macdo-
nald’s later ridiculing of “middle-
brow” culture and the inflated style
which the French call pompier and
Susan Sontag’s later description of
“camp” which, parodying lowbrow
style, becomes a badge of mockery.
In turning to art criticism, Green-
berg became influential first in the
pages of The Nation and then, after
leaving the magazine (he accused The
Nation’s front section of being pro-
Stalinist), in the pages of the Partisan
Review and Artforum.
Greenberg has been characterized
(by Marxist critics such as T.J. Clark)
as a “formalist” and by Adam Gopnik
of espousing a “decorative presence.”
Gopnik defines this: “The most radi-
cal and most original possibility for
renewal, he felt, could be found in
the most decorative, feminine and
complacent-seeming corners of modern art, particularly the
art of Matisse and Monet.” Both views, I think are
wrong—Gopnik’s wildly so.
The starting point for abstraction was the realization,
increasingly, of the loss of “interior distance” in painting. One
sees this in Munch’s use of foreshortening, where the young
girl at the edge of a bed is “pushed up” at the viewer or in
Vuillard, where the patterning of the woman’s dress in the
foreground repeats or is suggestive of the wallpaper in the
background. Much of this is summed up in the famous phrase
of Maurice Denis: “We must close the shutters.” There can no
longer be “illusionist painting.” It is all on the surface. It is a
theme that was explored in lectures by Meyer Schapiro (only
now appearing posthumously) and that view clearly influ-
enced Greenberg.
The idea of “the decorative” as a replacement is wrong.
Decoration, as Schapiro pointed out many times, though it
eliminates the figurative, as in Islamic art, is repetitive and
finite in its patterns and thus has no capacity for surprise.
What characterizes art, he insisted, is it capacity for surprise.
And this is what is evident in the paintings of Pollack or the
luminosity of Rothko, which is not at all decorative.
And Greenberg was not a “formalist,” if by formalism one
means the exploration of an underlying structural principle
 Criticism and a Pot of Paint
of a genre, as in the sonata form in music or perspective in
painting. What he championed was materiality and texture,
the centrality of the paint, not an image on the canvas, or later,
as in the innovations of his protégé Helen Frankenthaler, the
staining and soaking of unprimed canvas with paint.
Greenberg did seek to trace an historical lineage for this
mode of abstraction by linking this style to Monet and espe-
cially to Monet’s water lily paintings which encircled the walls
of the Jeu de Paumes in Paris. As with Monet, what abstract
expressionism signaled was the end of the easel painting most
sought after by the nineteenth-century bourgeois collectors.
Greenberg became known for his brawling style of life, a fea-
ture of celebrity often more appealing for its notoriety than for
any detailed confrontation with his judgments. In his “theory,”
as I have indicated, Greenberg was not original and was popu-
larizing some of the ideas of Meyer Schapiro. Yet he did have
an “eye” for particular painters. In the “first generation,” he
championed Pollock, Rothko, and Newman. Their banner, he
insisted, was carried on by the color-field painters such as
Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Morris Louis. And, as a
final round, he promoted Jules Olitski and Larry Poons.
Thereafter, for almost twenty years, he was silent.
Abstract expressionism was overtaken by the minimalists
such as Judd, Morris, and Flavin, with their spare geometric
forms that come to final singularity with Sol LeWitt. The geo-
metric forms were given roman-candle color by Frank Stella.
Johns restored images, such as his flags and beer cans, but
placed the stamp of materiality and impasto on his canvasses.
And Andy Warhol trumped them all by combining avant-
garde, kitsch, and camp in his phosphorescent silk-screen
portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,
and the epicene likeness of Mao Zedong.
In the end, avant-garde art, so-called, has become the most
(financially) rewarding speculation of them all. Modern harsh,
atonal, or mathematical serial music finds no listeners because
of its difficulty. Modern art, however, has no such problem.
Avant-garde art can be sold before and after. “That’s my latest
painting on the wall,” said the Duchess. And she need not
even know that it was a poem. ◆ paint, which had beautiful effects initially but deteriorated
—Daniel Bell
Sources: Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, Scribner,
1997.
Adam Gopnik, “The Power Critic,” The New Yorker, March 16,
1998.
Whistler’s Mother
I n News From the Republic of Letters (see page 41) the art
restorer Sarah Walden has persuasively subverted the
conventional view of Whistler’s portrait of his mother as
a Norman Rockwellish act of filial piety. In a literally eye-
opening analysis of Whistler’s most famous painting (formally
titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black: A Portrait of the
Artist’s Mother”), Walden, who spent many months in her
London studio restoring the work for the Louvre, found mys-
tery and ambivalence in the painting rather than the filial
devotion which has long been the accepted view of the
Mother, as she calls it. Everything about the Mother, Walden
observes, “seems shrouded in uncertainty”—what the artist
intended to convey and, most important, how he went about
the actual transfer of vision to canvas.
To begin with an obvious part of the mystery, Walden asks
why this nominally all-American portrait hangs not in New
York or Washington but in Paris (it was recently moved from
the Louvre to the Musée d’Orsay). When the Mother was first
exhibited in the United States in 1881, ten years after Whistler
had painted it, it caused no stir. No one wanted to look at it,
much less buy it for the $1500 Whistler hoped to get.
Eventually it was acquired by the French government for
$1000. Yet by 1932, when the Mother came back to America,
on loan from the Louvre to an exhibition at the New York
Museum of Modern Art, it had a triumphal tour and was
viewed by adoring millions during the year and a half it trav-
elled to cities all over the country. It even inspired a three-
cent postage stamp in honor of Mother’s Day, though the
imposition of flowers on an empty corner of the original image
infuriated many American artists at the time.
To the ordinary American museum-goer, the painting was
seen as a celebratory portrait of themselves, though in its early
years it had been embraced by French aesthetes, astonish-
ingly, as a prime example of dandyism and decadent sophisti-
cation. For Americans, much later, it was converted into “a
symbol of plain, puritanical homeliness.” What Walden finds
intriguing about the attitude toward the painting, among
other things, is the neglect of its stylistic qualities in favor of
its corny symbolism.
What Walden points out is that Whistler’s painterly train-
ing had all along been erratic and inadequate. His most
impressive technical effects were achieved in etching, where
he could work at the tonal atmospheric variations of light and
dark, black and white, that interested him the most. Because
of his limited experience with oils, however, the Mother was
painted on almost raw canvas, which Whistler scoured and
blotted and scraped as though he were preparing the ground
of an etching. On to the raw canvas he brushed highly diluted
in rapid order.
For the restorer the problems were all but insurmountable:
Yet the effects of time and air and dust have not, in Walden’s
view, seriously diminished the mysterious beauty of the por-
trait and its style. Though most Americans insist on behold-
ing in this familiar work only sentimental homage to the
great institution of motherhood, it has for Walden a far more
evocative strangeness and power and even foreshadows
many aspects of twentieth-century American painting. At
one point when she was doing the most limited restoration
possible, the Mother, Walden tells us, found itself in her stu-
dio next to Ingres’ great portrait of Napoleon and “the
pinched little widow from South Carolina held up remark-
ably well in this company, somehow retaining her own com-
manding presence.” ◆
—PKB
Source: Sarah Walden, “Secrets of an American Masterpiece,”
News from the Republic of Letters, No. 3, 1998.
35
 The American Scene
Everybody’s Tocqueville
Many, many Europeans have visited the United States, from Mrs. Trollope to Charles Dickens to Lord Bryce, and written acidly or
solidly about this country, but no one has been cited, quoted, featured, mentioned, affirmed, applauded, or claimed more widely,
deeply, or broadly than Alexis de Tocqueville. Over historical time he has been hailed by the left and right and center, and all parties
in between. How could this be? Professor James Kloppenberg tells us why. We abridge here his article.
T he first American edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America was published in 1838 with a
preface written by the Whig attorney John C. Spencer
who identified the multi-dimensionality of Toqueville’s analy-
sis as one of the two reasons for the immediate flurry of inter-
est in the book. The second rea-
son, which John Bigelow
expanded in his 1889 introduc-
tion of the reprint, was that “it
was the first book written about
the United States by any
European of repute that was
not...in a spirit of disparage-
ment and detraction.” In his
1995 book, Self Rule: A Cul-
tural History of American
Democracy, Robert Wiebe, cata-
loguing the numerous traveler’s
accounts written by Europeans
in the early nineteenth century,
wrote that the typical portrait of
Americans placed them some-
where between pigs and dogs in
their appetites and habits.
Toward the turn of the cen-
tury, the book which had been
wildly praised and widely
adopted as a textbook, fell out of fashion—and out of print.
The explanation was, apparently, the growing emphasis of his-
torians and social commentators on conflict in American life,
as indicated by the almost complete lack of interest in
Tocqueville by the most prominent progressive historians
such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard.
The resurgence of American interest in Tocqueville dates
from the publication of George W. Pierson’s landmark study
of Tocqueville and Beaumont in America in 1938 and the sub-
sequent republication of several editions of Democracy in
America in the mid- to late 1940s. This wave crested twice,
initially carrying the arguments of Tocqueville’s first volume
into American political discourse, then extending the subtler
arguments of his second volume into broader and deeper
assessments of American society and culture.
Americans in the 1930s and 1940s were searching for
explanations of how European democracies such as Germany
and Italy could have gone so wrong and how the Soviet
Union could have devolved so rapidly from a utopian exper-
iment into a dangerous dystopia. Democracy in America
seemed to offer a clue—or rather many clues. The first was
Tocqueville’s warning that in the quest for equality the
36
voices of dissent were stifled by an oppressive conformism,
and the second, the fear of an all powerful centralized gov-
ernment or a combination of the two that seemed ominously
familiar in the 1940s.
The concomitant disillusion with radicalism in the 1950s,
as indicated by Daniel Bell’s
book The End of Ideology, may
have signaled a turning away
from Marx. Whereas American
thinkers in the first half of the
twentieth century might have
looked toward Jefferson and
those embracing conflict theory
in the 1930s toward Marx, a
new generation looked instead
to the less comforting but
apparently more incisive
thought of Max Weber, who
made his first appearance in the
late 1940s in translation and
replaced the faith in an all-
embracing philosophical sys-
tem with a pervasive skepticism
of ideological politics.
As an idea of American
democracy emerged as a norma-
tive concept in both the critical
and celebratory studies of American consensus produced in
the early years of the Cold War, Tocqueville was everywhere.
Perhaps Tocqueville’s deepest impact registered in sociol-
ogy, thanks to the dramatic success of David Riesman’s The
Lonely Crowd (1953), hailed by academic specialists and the
popular press alike as the key to understanding modern
America. Riesman littered his books with quotations from
Tocqueville, whose insights into the dangers lurking beneath
prosperity framed and informed the book’s analysis. Beyond
the shift form nineteenth-century “inner-directed” to post-
World War II “other-directed” individuals, Riesman held out
an ideal of “autonomy” for those strong enough, and far-see-
ing enough, to embrace the ironic sensibility he seemed to
derive from, and to identify with, the wisdom of Tocqueville.
The defense against mass culture, and the shield that pro-
tected American from the tyranny of the majority, could be
found through careful study of Democracy in America.
Throughout the 1950s and long 1960s, which ended only in
1974 with the resignation of Richard Nixon and America’s
withdrawal from Vietnam, Tocqueville was a staple in the cur-
riculum of American universities. For conservatives such as
Robert Nisbet at Berkeley (or Vincent Starzinger at Dartmouth
 The American Scene
College), Tocqueville was a sober prophet who saw through
the promise of material prosperity and egalitarian ideals to the
hollowness at the core of modern democratic cultures that had
lost touch with the values of tradition and authority. For mem-
bers of the New Left, Tocqueville was the scourge of con-
formism, a sober prophet who saw through the promise of
material prosperity and egalitarian ideals to the invisible
oppression that Herbert Marcuse was laying bare in books like
One Dimensional Man and Essay on Liberation.
In the last decade and a half the “Tocqueville” that has
emerged is both the one associated with the decline of com-
munity and the rich “associational” life of voluntary organi-
zations in the U.S. This cuts across the older definitions, at
least intellectually, of “left” and “right” in the scholarly world
and has become a staple of political rhetoric.
In the intellectual world, this includes the group associated
with Robert Bellah in the project that became Habits of the
Heart; Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who has
savaged the absurdities of Rights Talk, to use the title of her
unclassifiable book; historians such as Thomas Bender, whose
studies of community and public life have helped keep alive
Tocqueville’s own insights into American democracy; those
political activists allied with Senator Bill Bradley who share
the reasons for his dissatisfaction with both the Democratic
and the Republican parties; political theorists such as William
Galston, who served for several years as a domestic advisor in
the Clinton White House; Jane Mansbridge, who has shown
the breadth of social scientists’ dissatisfaction with the reduc-
tionist attribution of all human behavior to self-interest; and
Jean Bethke Elshtain, who argues in her recent book
Democracy on Trial that Americans’ growing cynicism about
politics, the absence of civic mindedness, and a destructive
obsession with right have sapped the mutual respect, empa-
thy, and understanding that are necessary for the survival of
a democratic community.
The first President of the United States to quote Tocqueville
was Dwight D. Eisenhower (whose speech writer was
Malcolm Moos of Johns Hopkins.) Since then his words have
appeared in the speeches of every President and any politi-
cian aspiring to portentous greatness. Thus, Newt Gingrich,
addressing the Republican Party National Convention in
San Diego on August 13, 1996, praised the contributions of
churches and neighborhood organizations and concluded
that nothing less than “the moral case for lower taxes” is to
be found in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. And the
President who quoted Tocqueville most frequently was
Ronald Reagan, whose speechwriters, like Gingrich, detached
Tocqueville’s emphasis on civil society from his emphasis on
the ideal of reciprocity. In fact, probably the only things Pat
Buchanan and Hilary Rodham Clinton, individualists and
communitarians, have in common is their willingness to place
Tocqueville on their banner.
Tocqueville himself foresaw his fate. In a contemporary let-
ter to his friend Eugene Stoffels (printed in the 1899 Bigelow
edition), Tocqueville wrote: “I please many persons of oppo-
site opinions, not because they penetrate my meaning, but
because, looking only to one side of my work, they think they
find in it arguments in favor of their own convictions. But I
have faith in the future, and I hope that the day will come
when all will see clearly what only now a few suspect.
The life of Tocqueville in America, already reflecting the cir-
cuitous path of democratic theory and practice over a century
and a half, seems destined to continue indefinitely. That inter-
est persists, however, for reasons that owe more to Americans’
irresistible urge to simplify Tocqueville’s ideas than a willing-
ness to acknowledge his ambivalence or to keep in focus the
multiple dimensions of his complex analysis of American
democracy. In that sense, most Americans are equal. ◆
Sources: James T. Kloppenberg, The Tocqueville Review, 1996,
vol. XVII, no. 2.
(The Tocqueville Review is the journal of The Tocqueville Society,
a bilingual French-American scholarly society based in Paris and
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not to be confused with the Alexis
de Tocqueville society, a Republican-oriented organization based
in Virginia.)
The End of the American Epic?
A merica is awash in new epics: long poems about
the Battle of the Alamo, historical novels about
the Civil War, movies about the experience of
slavery. But in what sense can it be said that American
experience today has an epic character? This is the ques-
tion posed by Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer in a
recent issue of the quarterly The Public Interest.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the closest America
comes to possessing an epic poem, is an attempt to see
the whole of our democratic experience through the eye
of a single human being, who sings the “Song of Myself.”
But in Glazer’s view the myths that dominated the tradi-
tional American epic have become eroded. The old myths
took up the American idea or creed or experiences that
defined the nation as a whole: the winning of the West,
manifest destiny, the Civil War, imperialism, the World
Wars. Its epic characters were pioneers and warriors.
In more recent times this kind of optimistic epic has
faded in the face of more pessimistic myths concerning
group diversity—racial, ethnic, sexual—and their claims
for recognition. Some maintain that the challenge of this
diversity is itself a fit subject for epic treatment, but
Glazer doubts “whether the improving of group relations
can replace the conquest of a continent as the subject of
epic.” Americans may be able to live without an epic
sense of their experience, but can they escape the
demands of the epic form?
—ML
Source: Nathan Glazer, “American Epic: Then and Now.” The
Public Interest, Winter 1998.
37
 Periodicals
On a Single Theme…
In this section we select a number of periodicals which have
published single issues on some unifying theme, thus providing a
summing up or reference point for readers.
 Daedalus
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, devotes its Winter 1998 issue, its fortieth anniver-
sary, in homage to its founder Gerald Holton.
The issue leads off with a paper by Holton on a theme that
he has made his own in recent years, “Einstein and the
Cultural Roots of Modern Science.” Holton recounts his efforts
to understand a paradox: the “rebellious” role of Einstein in
science and his other persona as a cultural traditionalist. It is
the first aspect that has received most of the biographical
attention, while the second has been largely ignored.
A paper by Peter Galison, historian of science at Harvard,
deals with “The Americanization of the Unity of Science.” The
unity of science is a theme associated with the Vienna Circle,
the fabled founders of logical positivism, which included
Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap. Galison’s
paper traces the effort to recreate the movement on American
soil, after the war, largely through the efforts of Philip Frank,
the philosopher of science at Harvard.
Lorraine Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science in Berlin, provides a fascinating account of
the time when the rift opened between art and science and
when science began to distrust the imagination. It was “the
newly erected divide between the objective and the subjec-
tive—the very words first enter dictionaries as a pair in
German, French, and English in the 1820s and the 1830s….”
Where in the eighteenth century artists and scientists had seen
no conflict in embracing both standards simultaneously, a cen-
tury later the chasm had forced an either/or choice in the way
perceptions were judged.
“Science in Culture,” Daedalus, (Cambridge, Massachusetts),
Winter 1998.
 Representations
Representations is a cross-disciplinary journal started a
dozen years ago at the University of California at Berkeley by
the literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt and the art historian
Svetlana Alpers to deal with the questions of “reality” and its
representations. Greenblatt has moved to Harvard but remains
its editorial chair. The journal is now edited actively by Carla
Hess, the French historian. Often the journal runs special the-
matic issues, and the latest one is devoted largely to the work
of one person, Clifford Geertz.
Clifford Geertz of the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton is without question the most important living
anthropologist in the English-speaking world. Over the years
his writings on the nature of culture have encouraged an
“interpretive turn” in anthropology that still distinguishes it
from the other social sciences. As Geertz nears retirement, the
editor’s representations have offered up a Festschrift of sorts,
38
that raises the question: what is living, and what is dead, in
the idea of culture? What is it, and how can we know it? The
contributors here do not focus on epistemological issues
exclusively. Instead, several raise the provocative question of
whether the phenomenon of place-rooted cultures is simply
disappearing in the jumble of globalization and so-called
“popular culture.”
Among the notable articles is one by Greenblatt, the
“father” of new historicism, who holds Geertz up as an exam-
ple of how prizing interpretation — whether of literature or
entire cultures – need not lead to abandonment of the empiri-
cal world or to the belief that there is “nothing outside the
text.” A more critical view of Geertz’s concept of culture is
given by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod in her article on
popular television in Egypt, where she argues that television
is just one technology rendering obsolete the notion of cul-
tures as localized communities in a shared web of meaning.
“The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond.” Representations,
(Berkeley), Summer 1997.
 Parnassus Poetry in Review
The issue, edited by Herbert Leibowitz, is a garland of essays,
poetry, movie stills, and interviews, threaded loosely on the
theme of “cinematic poetry.” Stuart Klawans points out that this
emphasis on imagery was used by the French to assert artistic
distinction. David Yezzi employs the concept in a review of the
book Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema by Andrei
Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker, whose religious films
were often disfigured by authorities. Mindy Aloff writes a fas-
cinating account of the relation of the film about Pablo Neruda,
Il Postino, to its original source, the novel Ardiente Paciencia
[Burning Patience]. There is a conversation with the German
filmmaker Werner Herzog, and a lament for the cinema by
Susan Sontag, extracts of which appear on page 40.
“The Movie Issue,” Parnassus Poetry in Review, (New York), Vol. 22,
Nos. 1 and 2.
 Intertexts
Spring 1997 inaugurates Intertexts as a journal of compara-
tive literature to be published twice a year. The “statement of
purpose” indicates that it will probe the spaces between liter-
ature and society as well as stray beyond nationally defined
boundaries (“subvert” and “deconstruct” are the predictable
code words). The first issue focuses on Latin American and
Latina women writers. Women, says the journal, write notori-
ously out of bounds; otherwise they tend not to write at all.
And intellectually adventurous Latin American women are
often (in)famously aligned with supra-national, or Pan-
American causes. Patriotism and patriarchy sound more than
etymologically connected in a Romance language.
Rosemary Feal claims to Latin-Americanize “queer theory”
by appropriating the North American reading practice for
texts that feature lesbian subjects elsewhere, for example in
the Barcelona of Cristina Peri Rossi’s Uruguayan heroine. And
 Periodicals
Debra Castillo explores the mutual cruelties of a heterosexual
affair between a Salvadoran refugee and his Sanctuary worker
in Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez. Other essays feature
the fate of traditional women in a changing world, the inter-
rupted identifications between reader and addressee, and a
fresh reading of the founding text for Latin American femi-
nists: the nun Sor Juana’s seventeenth-century refusal to heed
her confessor and stop writing.
“Claiming Voices, Seizing Spaces: Latin American and Latina
Women Writers,” Intertexts (Texas Tech University), Spring 1997.
 Foundation Saint-Simon
The Foundation Saint-Simon is a new and unique French
institution. Currently directed by Pierre Rosanvallon, it is an
assembly of leaders in business, the civil service, the univer-
sity, and the press, which meets frequently for non-partisan
discussions of public policy issues. This report on the condi-
tion of the French welfare state arises from the Foundation’s
discussions and occasional papers. It examines how France –
and indeed all European nations – might find a way to reform
its welfare state in a manner consistent with its social-democ-
ratic traditions. The report focuses mainly on the sclerotic,
bureaucratized education system, unemployment assistance,
health, and retirement benefits. Its main argument is that
equity and not equality should govern the reform of social
programs, which would imply greater flexibility in education
and fewer middle-class breaks in other programs.
“Pour une nouvelle république sociale,” Foundation Saint-Simon,

(Paris), 1997.
Granta
The sea invites endless fascination from Homer’s Odyssey to
James Agee’s Permit Me Voyages, the restless accounts of wan-
derings marked by changes of fortune. It is a recurrent theme
of weary editors often in need of a topic to fill their pages. Yet
the special issue of Granta is the exception. It is full of stories
and travel accounts, ruminations and fantasies by the likes of
James Hamilton-Patterson, Orhan Pamuk, the tireless Paul
Theroux, Haruki Murakami, and Neal Ascherson, the British
journalist whose book Black Sea is a superb account of the area,
with the deadest and the most fertile locales in the world,
which divides Europe and “the other.” It is best read on a voy-
age or on “the shore of a sounding sea.”
“The Sea,” Granta, (Cambridge, England), Spring 1998.
 East European Consitutional Review
Since the East European revolutions of the last decade,
many publications devoted to developments in this region
have been founded. One significant English-language journal
deserves special note: the quarterly East European Consti-
tutional Review, which is published by New York University
Law School and the Central European University. It offers an
excellent guide to recent developments in the internal poli-
tics of Eastern Europe and publishes useful comparative and
country-by-country studies. Recent issues have been devoted
to constitutionalism in Poland and the problem of crime across
the region. The review publishes 4000 copies in English and
3000 in Russian, and is now required reading in many East
European law faculties. (Subscriptions: EECR, Nador u. 11,
1051 Budapest, Hungary. E-mail: rosea@osi.hu)
 Transitions
Another important English-language journal on East Europe,
the glossy monthly Transitions, is currently edited by former
New York Times bureau chief Michael Kaufman and edited in
London and Prague by the Institute for Journalism in Tran-
sition. It has an enormous range, as can be seen in the recent
Special Book Issue (February 1998), and contains reports on
crime novels and science fiction in Russia, self-censorship in
Slovakia, Czech best-sellers, Czeslaw Milosz’s recent poetry, and
Ukranian post-modern fiction.
(Subscriptions: IJT, Washingtonova 25, 110 00 Prague 1,
Czech Republic. E-mail: transitions@ijt.cz)
 Modern Language Notes
The rehabilitation of Raymond Aron in France in the 1980s
has been followed by that of Albert Camus. Several critical
works have appeared in recent years, most notably Olivier Todd’s
monumental biography, now in (truncated) English translation:
Albert Camus: A Life (Knopf, 1997). This special number
devoted to Camus reflects the new interest in his work and
includes worthwhile articles on the Algerian background to
his work, his politics, and humanism, and his relation to Sartre.
“Camus 2000,” Modern Language Notes, (Baltimore),Sept. 1997.
 Government and Opposition
One of the least studied aspects of liberal democratic poli-
tics is the role of political opposition. Yet this question has
become increasingly important as liberal-democratic regimes
have spread and been transformed throughout the globe: from
Africa, where they are new; to the East Bloc, where they are a
distant memory; to Western nations such as Italy and Spain,
which had no postwar alternation of government; and to
Japan and Mexico, which are still dominated by single par-
ties. This issue of Government and Opposition is a survey of the
state of political opposition in all these regions and also con-
tains a theoretical article on the function of opposition by Jean
Blondel of the European University in Florence.
“The Repositioning of Opposition,” Government and Opposition,
(London), Autumn 1997.
 Limes
Limes is a geopolitical review published simultaneously in
Italian and French. Although modeled after the American
Foreign Affairs, its issues are entirely thematic and, besides arti-
cles, also contain useful maps and statistical dossiers. The fall
issue is on the “new Africa.” The review takes an obligatory
look at the role of the Great Powers in recent African conflicts
but then turns to examine the growing autonomy—or “self-
conquest”—of the continent. There are several articles on eth-
nic issues in different nations, as well on as the new roles of
South Africa and the North African states as regional powers.
“Afrique. La Fin du bas empire,” Limes, (Paris) , Fall 1997.
39
 Periodicals
Susan Sontag on the End of Cinema
S usan Sontag is one of the most astringent and brilliant
cultural critics in the United States, as well as being a
novelist, filmmaker and theatre director. Her passion-
ate views have aroused marked hostility at different times,
from right and left. But more importantly, she has honed a sen-
sibility which is the stamp of a distinctive mind. She is nei-
ther avant-garde nor traditionalist—nor is it easy to summa-
rize her complex views and enthusiasms. In the special issue
of Parnassus on poetry and movies, Ms. Sontag has written
an eloge on “A Century of Cinema.” We can only print here
some excerpts which we hope will not “flatten” the nuanced
exposition and the essay’s historical detail.
“Cinema’s hundred years seem to have the shape of a life
cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories,
and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible
decline. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more new
films that one can admire. But such films won’t simply be
exceptions; that’s true of great achievement in any art. They
have to be heroic violations of the norms and practices which
now govern movie-making everywhere in the capitalist and
would-be capitalist world—which is to say, everywhere. And
ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is,
commercial) purposes, will continue to be astonishingly wit-
less; already the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to
their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great
film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achieve-
ment, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated
derivative film-making, a brazen combinatory or re-combina-
tory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes. Every film
that hopes to reach the largest possible audience is designed
as some kind of remake. Cinema, once heralded as the art of
the twentieth century, seems now, as the century closes
numerically, to be a decadent art.
“Perhaps it is not cinema which has ended…but only
cinephilia—the name of the very specific kind of love that
cinema has inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that
cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the con-
viction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessen-
tially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious
and erotic and moral—all at the same time. Cinema had apos-
40
tles (it was like religion). Cinema was a crusade. Cinema was a
world view. Lovers of poetry or opera or dance don’t think
there is only poetry or opera or dance. But lovers of cinema
could think there was only cinema. That the movies encapsu-
lated everything—and they did. It was both the book of art
and the book of life….
“No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals—
erotic, ruminative—of the darkened theatre. The reduction of
cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipula-
tion of images (faster and faster cutting) to be more attention-
grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema
that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention. Images now
appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in
a theatre, on home screens as small as the palm of your hand
or as big as a wall, on disco walls and mega-screens hanging
above sports arenas and the outsides of tall public buildings.
The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined
the standards people once had both for cinema as art at its
most serious and for cinema as popular entertainment….
“Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. People still like
going to the movies, and some people still care about and expect
something special, necessary from a film. And wonderful films
are still being made: Mike Leigh’s Naked, Gianni Amelio’s
Lamerica, Fred Kelemen’s Fate. But one hardly finds any more,
at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of
movies, which is not simply love of but a certain taste in films
(grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and re-seeing as much as
possible of cinema’s glorious past). Cinephilia itself has come
under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For
cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic
experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the Hollywood remake of
Godard’s Breathless cannot be as good as the original. Cinephilia
has no role in the era of hyper-industrial films….
“If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too…no matter
how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If
cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth
of a new kind of cine-love.” ◆
Source: Susan Sontag, “A Century of Cinema,” Parnassus,
Volume 22, Nos. 1 and 2, 1997.
 Periodicals
News from the Republic of Letters
N ews from the Republic of Letters is a literary journal,
issued at irregular intervals, by Saul Bellow and
Keith Botsford in Boston. The title, as those who are
literate would know, comes from the Nouvelles de la republique
des lettres, one of the first learned journals of its kind, pub-
lished by the French philosopher Pierre Bayle from 1684 to
1687. (The source is given a “wink” by Keith Botsford, who
in each issue writes a Notebook under the signature of Pierre
Bayle.) Pierre Bayle was the great skeptic of the seventeenth
century, the man who devised the
method of subversive criticism which
was eagerly adopted by the eigh-
teenth century Encyclopedists. He
did this, for example, by using
Scripture to introduce indecencies.
Bayle was best known for his Diction-
naire historique et critique (1697) and
among other innovations, according
to Anthony Grafton, was the found-
ing father of the modern footnote.
But his fame rested largely on an
almost savage Pyrrhonism, a skepti-
cism which wreaked havoc on cur-
rent orthodoxies, not seeking a new
and better world emerging from his
criticism, nor, as Richard H. Popkin—
no mean skeptic himself—writes,
“seeing the need for a better one.”
Bellow, the famed Nobel laureate in
literature, undoubtedly is a skeptic.
Botsford comes close, playfully, to
Pyrrhonism. Yet it is not the intention
of the pair to be negative and destructive. Quite the contrary,
their ambition is to produce a journal which, fashioned by
their tastes, prints literate commentary, short stories, and
short novels, often by writers unknown in the English-speak-
ing world, and essays in each issue by Bellow and Botsford
themselves. It is a personal and old-fashioned journal in the
best senses of those once commendable words.
Three issues have now appeared. The first, in 1997, opened
with a piece by Bellow, “View from Intensive Care,” labeled
“from a work in progress.” Its motif was the hallucinatory
sense of death crowding his mind, against which his memory
was fighting. There is a long story “The Sirens” by Arturo
Loria, a contemporary of Svevo and Montale, whose work has
“slipped into oblivion” and which the journal seeks to res-
cue. There are extracts from the work of Emilio Lascano Tegui,
an Argentinian writer, illustrated by some striking woodcuts
and reviews of books and music.
Issue No. 2, 1997, features a complete short novel by Louis
Guilloux (1899-1980) who is thought by many “to be the most
important novelist writing in France between the inter-war
years and 1960.” The short novel about republican refugees of
the Spanish Civil War, is folded quarto into the magazine, and
readers are asked to recut the pages. But the most striking
essay in the issue is a harrowing account by Bellow of an
episode in the Carribean in 1994 when he came down with
what eventually was discerned as food poisoning, and which
had left him almost paralyzed and close to death. It is clearly
the background of the novelistic extract in the previous issue,
but this straightforward account has a terrifying immediacy
that even a novel cannot often convey. The account ends with
a meditation on the physician and the patient (“…science does
not see nature as having a soul—
much less a compassionate soul. Doc-
tor X may not have known it, but he
did have a soul”) which reminds one
of the closing pages of Mr. Sammler’s
Planet, one of the most powerful end-
ings in modern fiction.
Issue No. 2 is broader in scope than
the first and contains a long section
on the correspondence between
Christopher Ricks and William Emp-
son, and two retrievals from the
archives of Samuel Butler, “Quis
Desiderio…” on his literary experi-
ences and a marvelous essay by the
Italian psychiatrist and penologist
Cesare Lombroso on “Crazies Lite-
rary, Political and Religious.” Death
and dementia as a theme—it seems to
ride through a number of the selec-
tions—is the subject of a reflection
by the English neurologist Raymond
Tallis and a report by the novelist
Philip O’Connor, of the day before he was admitted to the hos-
pital at age eighty-two “for yet another cancer operation.” Yet
humor is retrieved by an essay by Mr. Bellow, “Graven
Images,” on what it is like to confront one’s image of oneself—
photographed, cast in bronze, and being painted. (“Considering
the bronze head on display [in the Chicago Public Library], I
think Pablo Picasso would have done it better.”)
Issue No. 3, 1998, extends the range of the journal. There is
a complete short novel by Keith Botsford, “O Brother.” Bellow
writes of the time in the late 1950s when Ralph Ellison moved
in with him at his house in Tivoli, New York. (“He came down
to get his breakfast in a striped, heavy Moroccan garment. He
wore slippers with a large oriental curve at the toe. He was a
very handsome man.”) Martin Amis writes an “Aria” on “road
rage” and the automobile culture. A long extract from his
memoirs, by the late Samuel Lipman, relates his early life as a
musical prodigy and his friendships with Lionel and Diana
Trilling. Sarah Walden writes an absorbing account of the
“reconstruction” of the painting of “Whistler’s Mother” (see
page 35.) And the theme of death recurs, again, in the “dia-
logue” written by Giacomo Leopardi in 1824.
Bellow’s name carries the weight of the journal, but he also
41
 Periodicals
gives full credit to his collaborator. “Thirty years ago,” he
writes, “he and I brought out a literary journal called The
Nobel Savage [five numbers which appeared from March 1960
to October 1962]…He had a nose for magazines as well as for
journalism in general; some of his subjects being gastronomy,
sports and literature, in all of which he has been a columnist,
currently for the Independent in London and La Stampa in
Italy. He is a polylinguist and translator, whose hand is on
nearly every page of this magazine.”
Most extraordinary, perhaps, is Botsford’s statement in his
Notebook:
…one of the magazine’s exotic virtues is that it is not
supported by anyone or anybody save ourselves. It’s not
bankrolled by wedding money, by holding out a tin cup
to a publishing house (assuming any were still inter-
ested in such things) or a foundation. It’s not supported
by a university. We pay its bills, its printers, its mail-
ing, its rapacious distributors (65% of the cover price),
the privatized U.S. Post Office, and all too modestly, its
writers. If we survive it will be because its readers want
it to go on. ◆ Dowling argues that the rapid disappearance of schol-
—DB
The Republic of Letters, 120 Cushing Ave., Boston, MA 02125.
Subscription price: $20 for five issues in the U.S., $25 in Canada, and
$30 anywhere else in the world, or the equivalent in local currency.
Follow-up
Bertelsman Behemoth
In issue No. 1 of our Newsletter, “U.S. Publishing—Change
and Disarray” listed ten major foreign owners of U.S. publish-
ing houses. Now Bertelsman of Germany has announced its
purchase of Random House (which includes Knopf), which it
will merge with its previous acquisitions of Bantam, Double-
day Dell into a single house.
But Random House is more than an American house. In the
U.K., it includes Jonathan Cape, Secker and War-burg, and
Chatto and Windus, and owns Transworld, the largest mass-
marketing book company which dominates booklists, shelves
at airports, the W.H. Smith bookstores, and the supermarkets.
Bertelsman will be the world’s largest English-language
publisher. In the U.K., according to an article in Prospect, the
new giant will control perhaps 40% of the British fiction mar-
ket and 30% of bookstore sales. In the U.S., the combined
group had 32.8% of all hardback bestsellers and 40% of all
paperback bestsellers in 1997.
Bertelsman has been buying companies throughout Eastern
Europe and is negotiating with the largest publishing group
in France. It owns the largest book clubs in Britain and the
U.S., and is setting up Books Online, which may yet become
the largest Internet bookseller in the world. It is, needless to
say, the largest publisher in Germany and, in fact, the world.
All of this leaves W.W. Norton as the only major U.S. pub-
lishing house that is American-owned and independent. What
has happened, one may ask, to U.S. “cultural imperialism?”
—DB
Source: Andrew Franklin, “Behemoth of Books,” Prospect, (London),
May 1998.
42
Miscellany
Barbies and Ancient Rome
W illiam Dowling, a professor of English at Rutgers
University in New Jersey, wanted to buy a book,
as professors often do. It was a slightly obscure book—a
scholarly study of the Roman writer Aulus Gellius—so
Dowling was not terribly surprised not to find it even at
an academic bookshop in nearby Princeton. But while
searching for it on the shelves, his eyes began to wander
and landed eventually on Barbie’s Queer Accessories, a
study of the doll’s clothes published by the respected
Duke University Press and written by a self-described
“dyke activist.” This was an epiphany. Dowling spent the
next hour reading this strange work, several months read-
ing other new works in gender and cultural studies, and
longer still discussing with editors at university presses
across the country what he discovered. What he learned
was discouraging.
arly monographs for small audiences and the boom in
“hot” racy works need not be related, but in fact are due
to the economic and cultural forces at work at university
presses. He asks why it is that commercial publishers have
not captured the market for sensationalist works of cul-
tural studies since sensationalism is, after all, their spe-
cialty, and they have resources to put behind their prod-
ucts. And the reason, in Dowling’s view, is that there is a
certain rush or frisson in seeing a supposedly august insti-
tution stoop to conquer. A larger public is hardly inter-
ested in fulfilling such a “transgressive” fantasy, but cer-
tain scholars are. And that is why Dowling concludes that
there is a zero-sum relation between the markets for schol-
arly books on Barbie and those on ancient Rome: the more
scholars are interested in children’s dolls, the fewer are
interested in Latin literature. And as the market for books
on the latter declines,they quickly fall beneath the thresh-
old of profitability. Monographs that once would have
sold in the range of 2500 copies now typically sell 800 to
900. It is rare for them ever to reach over 1000.
This shift in scholarly publishing is also having an
effect on the research agendas of the university itself.
Young professors in fields that have traditionally relied
on the monograph—classics, art history, literature—are
having trouble finding publishers willing to take their
work, and therefore finding it harder to get tenure.
Meanwhile, books on “hot” topics are taking over the lists
and are being considered seriously by tenure committees.
It may only be a matter of time before we see a book on
Gellius’s “accessories”….
—ML
Source: William C. Dowling, “The Crisis in Scholarly
Publishing.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, April 1997.
 Necrology

“When a Sage Dies…” Cornelius Castoriadis

Nekros, in the Greek, means the dead. In some cultures, necrology is intertwined
with necromancy, the manipulative effort to reveal the future by communicating
with the spirits of the dead. We seek no such communication.
F rench intellectual life had few inde-
pendent spirits, and with the death
of Cornelius Castoriadis it now has one
For W.H. Auden, necrology was Nones (the ninth day before the Ides), the sur- fewer. Castoriadis’s parcours through
prising moment awed by death which we “misrepresent, excuse, deny/mythify….” the political and philosophical mine-


We make no excuses. We mourn. fields of French life was utterly unique.
Born to Greek parents in Constantinople
in 1922, he grew up in Athens, where he
witnessed the Second World War and
Two Geniuses of the Word, Isaiah Berlin and Meyer Schapiro the Greek civil war. He joined the Greek
“When a sage dies,” says the Talmud, “all are his kin,” Leon Wieseltier reminds Communist Party in 1944 but soon fell
us. The rabbis were speaking practically, not metaphysically. When a sage dies, afoul of the Stalinist elements, and with
everyone must observe some of the practices of mourning. In the past year and a number of other intellectuals soon to
a half, two of our Jewish sages, two geniuses of the word, Isaiah Berlin and make their mark on the Paris scene—
Meyer Schapiro, are gone. Kostas Papaioannou, Kostas Axelos—he
We mourn, expressing the tears of sorrow at the passing of our kin.At the set sail for Paris. There he also joined the
memorial service for Isaiah Berlin at the Hampstead Synagogue, on 14 January Communist Party, only to find the
1998, Noel Annan remarked: Stalinist atmosphere even more oppres-
No one else was remotely like him. Of course he had charm, but he had sive than in Greece. Along with Claude
more than that. He was a Magus, a magician when he spoke, and it was for Lefort, philosopher and contributor to
his character and personality as much as for his published works that so Les Temps Modernes, he left the party
many honours fell upon him. The Evening Standard spoke truth when it and formed a new left-wing group with
said “the respectful sadness that met his death and the enormous regard syndicalist leanings called “Socialisme
in which he was held shows that intellectuals can still be prized as civiliz- ou barbarie” (SB), a phrase from Marx
ing influences in Britain”. He was loved by people with whom he had on the polar outcomes of the future.
nothing in common—millionaires, obscure writers, world-famous musi- Socialisme ou barbarie was also the
cians, public figures and young unknown scholars to whom he listened. name of the group’s tiny review, which
Whatever the circle, he civilized it; and the world is a little less civilized began in 1959 as a poorly produced
now that he has left it. political rag like so many others, but by
Both Isaiah Berlin and Meyer Schapiro were cosmopolitan figures who its last number in 1965 had become of
emerged from the ferment of the secularized Jewish intelligentsia between the great relevance on what would later be
wars—Berlin in his passage from Eastern Europe to Oxford, Schapiro within the called the “New Left.” If Castoriadis and
European-oriented world of the New York Intellectuals. In that quarrelsome SB had a theme, it was the omnipresent
world, Schapiro was universally admired as “our genius.” and destructive presence of bureau-
As Morris Dickstein wrote in Dissent, (Fall 1997), a charismatic teacher whose pas- cracy in modern life. But they also
sion and erudition were astonishing, Schapiro trained generations of art histori- maintained against orthodox French
ans and opened the eyes of others to the visual field around them. His range was leftists that communism was totalitarian
enormous, from the discussion of frontal and profile images in painting to and would remain so, so long as it was
Romanesque art, the subject of his 1929 dissertation at Columbia University, to wedded to the “leading role” of the
impressionism—in particular a lifetime identification with Cezanne—to the party. Castoriadis believed in the syndi-
abstract expressionism of his time. calist notion that every society and each
Always alert to contradictions, Schapiro insisted that there are truths about group within it was capable of govern-
art that can be established in “a collective criticism extending over generations.” ing itself if it was not distorted by the
He showed how Freud misread da Vinci, how Heidegger mistook van Gogh, each powers of state, party, or organized
reading into the subject their own predelictions. When Heidegger saw in van monopoly. It was this liberationist doc-
Gogh’s shoes the sturdy pair of a peasant, he found there, Schapiro pointed out, trine of autogestion that found an echo
what he wanted to find in his search for soil (and soul). among the Situationists and other
Though his interests turned in many directions, Schapiro was perhaps our groups behind the events of ‘68.
greatest expositor of modernism. He noted that the modernity embraced by the Castoriadis’s articles for SB were writ-
early avant-garde had grown problematic and pondered how much may have ten by night under pseudonyms, usually
been lost in turning away from figurative representation. But he also opened “Paul Cardan.” By day he was an econo-
our eyes to the spiritual adventure of modern art, the depth of feeling, the unex- mist for the OECD (Office of Economic
pected beauty, and the personal power of what remained when freedom of the Cooperation Development) in Paris.
artist was genuine. Only in the mid-’70s did he begin to
publish under his given name and first

43
 Necrology
came to the attention of a wider French
public with his book L’institution imagi-
naire de la société (1975) and his short-
lived review Libre. When French intel-
lectuals finally came to grips with the
reality of communism in the late 1970s,
they also tardily discovered Castoriadis.
But by then he had moved on, retiring
from his OECD job to take up psycho-
analysis, which he began to practice,
and to write more ambitious (and some-
times impenetrable) books about the
imaginative “labyrinth” of social and
psychological life. He died on December
26, 1997 in Paris.
[We note the recent publication of
two anthologies of Castoriadis’s writ-
ings in English translation: World in
Fragments (Stanford University Press)
and David Ames Curtis, ed., The
Castoriadis Reader (Blackwell). There
also is a website devoted to his work:
http://aleph.lib.ohio-
state.edu/~bcase/Castoriadis.]  Rousset was born in January 1912 in
—ML
David Rousset
D avid Rousset was arrested by the
Gestapo in 1943, accused of writ-
ing anti-Nazi propoganda, and deported
to Buchenwald. When the American
troops liberated the camp in 1945, Mr.
Rousset was, in the words of his friend,
the writer Mauruce Nadeau, “an old,
wrinkled child, a little pile of bones.”
He was one of the first to return from
hell, and to write about it.
But his spirit was unbroken, and in
1947 Rousset published Univers Concen-
trationnaire [The Concentration Camp
Universe]. Rousset defined the Nazi
extermination program less as a mon-
strous aberration of war than as an inte-
gral part of German society, a product
of its ideology and a factor in the
German economy. Both the concentra-
tion camps and the death camps were
driven by the belief that certain groups
of people were not human beings. The
book won the Prix Renaudot, the pres-
tigous French literary award, in 1947.
Like many French intellectuals of the
day, Rousset thought that the “old
Europe” was broken and finished. And,
with Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1948 they
formed the Rassemblement Democra-
44
tique Revolutionaire as a new Third
Way. But the movement broke up a year
later when Rousset, then a left-wing
socialist, called for an investigation of
Soviet concentration camps and was
subsequently denounced by Sartre and
Simon de Beauvoir for making “an anti-
Communist diatribe.” Rousset was also
accused by Pierre Daix, the editor of the
leading Communist weekly of falsifying
documents, and in 1951 sued for libel, a
case which, for the first time brought a
number of survivors of the Soviet camps
to testify in France. Rousset won the
case. But given the domination of
French intellectual life at that time by
the Communists, Rousset was isolated
and vilified as “an American agent.”
In 1968, he was elected to Parliament
on the Gaullist ticket but resigned
three years later, describing himself,
still, as a “madman who wants to
change the world.”
Roanne, in the Loire valley, the son of a
Protestant minister. He received a degree
in literature at the Sorbonne, but spent
most of his life as a journalist. He was
eighty-five at the time of his death. 
Eric de Dampierre
E ric de Dampierre, described in Le
Monde as “Un ethnologue d’une
grand culture,” died in March 1998 at
age sixty-nine.
Dampierre was probably the most
widely admired of the first generation
of French social scientists after World
War II. Quiet, handsome, of aristocratic
mien (“un seigneur dans l’Universite,”
wrote Jacques Lautmann), he won im-
mediate attention for his charm, cul-
ture, and learning. He was, said his close
friend Henri Mendras, a man of the
eighteenthth century for whom conver-
sation was one of the great pleasures of
life. He was the second of the generation
to go, following the death a few years
ago of the modest yet great social theo-
rist Francois Bourricaud.
Dampierre placed his stamp on
French intellectual life in three ways. As
a director of the publishing house Plon,
he initiated the first translations, in the
1950s and 1960s, of the works of Max
Weber, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton,
Frederick Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Karl
Popper. And together with Claude
Tardits, Gilbert Rouget, and Michel
Leiris, he founded l’association
Classique africains which has brought
out twenty-six volumes in bilingual edi-
tions and provided the foundation of
traditional African literature.
Dampierre’s desire to create an interna-
tional milieu for the social sciences led
him in 1960, together with Raymond
Aron, to create the tri-lingual Archives
européenes de sociologie, which published
in German, English, and French. The first
editorial committee included, as well,
Ralf Dahrendorf and Michel Crozier. The
journal continues to this day.
But it was as an ethnographer that
Dampierre made his mark. He spent
some time each year until 1991 in the
Central African Republic at Bangassou.
His thesis, Un ancien royaume Bandia du
Haut-Oubangui (Plon, 1967) written in
a beautifully classical French, explored
the history and aesthetics of its culture.
And in 1965, he created the first “labo-
ratoire d’ethnologie de sociologie com-
parative” at Nanterre (University of
Paris) which became the model for other
French social science centers.
But it was aesthetics which was his
lasting love. In 1995 he published a
masterpiece, Une aesthetique perdue:
Harpes et harpistes du Haut-Oubangui.
The book explored the lost art of the
Zandé harpists of the Upper Oubangi.
As in his earlier work, Poètes nzakara
(Paris, 1963), Dempierre explained how
formal beauty, derision, tragedy, and an
obsession with death combine in the
unique aesthetics of this African soci-
ety. Here he focused on the harpists,
who are masters of poetry, music, and
sculpture. The harps of the bards are
not modeled on a common style, as is
typical elsewhere in Africa. Instead,
each is produced by the poet as a singu-
lar object that he uses throughout his
active years. This uniqueness confirms
what Dempierre considered to be the
fundamental principle of Zandé thought,
a focus on singularity which recognizes
few class concepts. This, he believed, dis-
proved Lévi-Strauss’s portrayal of the
“primitive mind” as fundamentally “a
classifying machine.” 
—DB
 Necrology
Khone Shmeruk
O n July 5, 1997, the foremost Yiddish
scholar of the postwar generation,
an Israeli citizen, died in Warsaw,
Poland, and was buried there in the
Jewish cemetery on Okapowa Street.
The scholar, Khone Shmeruk, was
born in Warsaw in 1921, and his early
education in that city reflected the cul-
tural ferment of Jewish life in the then
newly reconstituted Polish republic.
Following the German occupation of the
city in September 1939, he fled into
Soviet territory, where he stayed for the
duration of the war.
Returning to Warsaw in 1946,
Shmeruk found nothing left of his
home. Though he considered settling in
Warsaw, after his marriage in 1946, he
and his wife decided there was no
future for them in Poland and moved to
Jerusalem in 1949. At the age of thirty,
Shmeruk resumed the university career
he had interrupted twelve years earlier
and joined the first Yiddish class at the
Hebrew University. Once Shmeruk
entered the university, he never left it,
and took up a full-time teaching posi-
tion in 1961, the year he completed his
doctorate. He was chairman of the
department of Yiddish from 1970 to
1982, was elected to the Israel Academy
of Sciences in 1986, and was awarded
the Israel Prize, the state’s highest civil-
ian award, in 1996. His was an exem-
plary career.
What sort of scholar was he? He was
attracted by Yiddish writers who
reminded him of his Warsaw home—
I.L. Peretz and Isaac Bashevis Singer—
and responded to the reach for national
coherence in literature by writing about
it in the works of Sholem Aleichem and
the Soviet-Yiddish author Der Nister.
In fact, Shmeruk had come to the
study of Yiddish out of a commitment to
an ideology—Yiddishism—which held
that the language itself, and the culture
expressed in that language, could sus-
tain the life of a secular Jewish commu-
nity. Just as the Polish tongue expressed
Polish identity, so the vernacular of
European Jews had been imprinted with
the moral and ethical content of
Judaism, making modern speakers of
Yiddish the carriers, by definition, of
Jewish values. His attitude changed,
however, when he began a serious study
of the literature. For one thing, by sepa-
rating Jewish civilization from its reli-
gious wellspring, the Yiddishist move-
ment had narrowed it; no one, Shmeruk
recognized, could properly understand
Yiddish without encompassing the full
Jewish tradition, especially as it
expressed itself in Hebrew.
The tragic evaporation of the lan-
guage made it that much more urgent to
develop Yiddish as a vital branch of
Jewish learning. The pride Shmeruk
had once invested in speaking Yiddish
he now reinvested in scholarship, deter-
mined to prove to his colleagues that no
one could truly grasp the last thousand
years of Jewish life in Europe without
access to the language in which so much
of it had been lived. Although inter-
ested in the modern period, he spent a
great deal of time in the Bodleian library
at Oxford familiarizing himself with the
beginnings of Yiddish literature in the
15th and 16th centuries; some of his
most influential works are on this era.
When Shmeruk officially retired from
the Hebrew University in 1989, he
divided his time between Warsaw and
Jerusalem, teaching and guiding
research in both places but with the
stronger pull coming from Europe. How
many reasons, in addition to the fact of
his new family, one might offer for his
attraction to Poland! He would certainly
not have been the first Israeli to chafe at
the constrictions of a tight society or to
leap at the opportunity to spend time
abroad. Cut off for so many years, he
now had access to Poland’s archives and
its scholars. A lifelong teacher, he wel-
comed the chance to pioneer Yiddish
studies in a new country: he could do
more to protect the Jewish past in
Poland by training Polish students in
Jewish research than by preparing stu-
dents for the task in Israel.
Now that Poland was free again, what
was to prevent that man from starting
all over in the city of his youth, in the
university that had once humiliated
him; what was to prevent him from cre-
ating a new Polish-Jewish symbiosis in
his own person?
What interested Shmeruk was the
unequal way the common legend devel-
oped in Polish and Yiddish literature.
Whereas modern Yiddish writers were
aware of and responded to the various
Polish versions of the legend, Polish
writers in general paid scant attention to
the Yiddish. Shmeruk’s study interprets
this as still another paradigm for the
inequality at the heart of Polish-Jewish
relations. But his study itself, simply by
virtue of existing, establishes a connec-
tion between the two cultures that the
cultures had failed to make and consum-
mates a kind of union between two peo-
ples otherwise doomed to remain apart.
During the last stages of his illness,
when he flew from Jerusalem to Poland
where he wished to be buried, he
imprinted a wound on the hearts of his
countrymen. I cannot speak for his
daughters, his colleagues, or his stu-
dents, but I know how his attraction to
Poland affected our own relations over
the past decade and how a sense of rejec-
tion has compounded my grief. In effect,
everything that his postwar life, the land
of Israel, and scholarly achievement had
brought him could not replace what he
had lost in Warsaw. His life also reminds
us that, even in the newly constituted
Jewish commonwealth, Jewish dreams of
exogamy, in both the personal and cul-
tural sense, are not soon likely to fade.
—Ruth R. Wisse
Source: Commentary. November 1997.
Sir George Solti
I n the first week of September 1997,
Sir George Solti died at the age of 84.
Dean of the world’s conductors, perhaps
the best loved of them all, he ruled podi-
ums in both the United States and
Europe, particularly in Chicago and
London, his musical homes. With Solti,
more than a man passed from the scene;
a musical era—the tradition of the dom-
inating Central European conductor—
went with him, writes Jay Nordlinger.
He worked vigorously until the end.
His style—before an orchestra and in
life—was always driven, nearly manic.
He had planned to conduct a Verdi
Requiem in London to honor the de-
ceased Princess Diana. A month later, he
was to conduct his thousandth concert
with the Chicago Symphony. And on the
day he died, he applied the finishing
45
 Necrology
touches to his memoirs, to be released on
October 21, his eighty-fifth birthday.
Urbane and aristocratic in manner,
Solti was born in 1912 to a humble
Jewish family in Budapest. But Mórícz
Stern must have had higher aspirations
for his children because he gave them a
different surname—“Solti,” after a small
Hungarian town—in order, as the con-
ductor writes, “to facilitate our careers.”
After graduation from the prestigious
Liszt Academy (where his teachers
included Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály),
Solti went to the Budapest Opera as a
répétiteur—a staff member or coach—
and learned the ins and outs of his com-
plicated trade. In 1937, he had the for-
tune to work with Arturo Toscanini in
Salzburg. The magisterial tyrant ad-
dressed but a single word to him: bene,
good. Solti confides that, in over six
decades of near-constant praise; it was
the nicest compliment he ever received.
The following year, Solti had the
opportunity he had long awaited: to
raise his baton at the Budapest Opera, in
Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. The date,
March 11, 1938. was inauspicious:
Hitler’s troops had crossed into Austria
and were heading to Vienna. Solti
remained in Budapest until August
1939, when he made a brief trip to
Switzerland to seek out Toscanini at the
Lucerne Festival. His father accompa-
nied him to the train station. Solti never
saw his father again.
Without a visa to the U.S., Solti spent
World War II in Switzerland. The war
stunted his musical growth. He was
unable to conduct, but he coached
singers, studied scores, and practiced
the piano (and, in fact, won the Geneva
International Piano Competition in 1942).
After the war, Solti went to Germany.
He explains that the “prime of my life”
had been “wasted” and that “the desire
to conduct was an irresistible force in
me.” Conducting opportunities were
plentiful in Germany, where American
de-Nazification was in full flower and
German conductors—including many
of the world’s most celebrated—were
banned from their own podiums. How
else could a young, inexperienced
Hungarian expatriate assume the direc-
torship of the Bavarian State Opera,
“one of the most important conducting
46
positions in the world?” Solti took
advantage of the situation and began his
heady ascent to international fame.
Solti studs his memoirs with facts,
impressions, portraits, truths. Paul Hin-
demith was renowned as a compositional
revolutionary, but, by the time Solti met
with him, he looked and sounded “more
like a Swiss banker.” Solti, too, is free
with his opinions, which is an invaluable
and unusual quality in a musical mem-
oirist. He expounds on the differences
between European and American orches-
tras, and speaks frankly about his diffi-
culties with the notoriously prickly
Vienna Philharmonic.
When Solti took over the Royal Opera
at Covent Garden in 1961, the house was
in disarray. Solti quickly asserted his
iron control over the company, demand-
ing numerous meticulous rehearsals, ruf-
fling British reserve, and insisting on
first-class musicianship. He went to
Chicago in 1969, beginning a conductor-
orchestra relationship that ranks in pop-
ular appeal and commercial viability
with Eugene Ormandy-Philadelphia,
Herbert von Karajan-Berlin, and Leo-
nard Bernstein-New York. The orchestra
had always been excellent but lacked an
international reputation. Solti remedied
this with a European tour. Two years
later, Time magazine put Solti on its
cover as “The Fastest Baton in the West.”
Even when his musical views are icon-
oclastic (Bartók’s Mikrokosmos is “no
less important” than Bach’s Well-tem-
pered Clavier), they are stimulating. Yet
his astonishing strength is his under-
standing of people: their nobility and
frailty, their heroism and vulnerability.
“I have had an enormously lucky life,”
Solti concedes. Many do not regard him
as the finest conductor who ever lived.
But surely no conductor—and few peo-
ple—ever wrote memoirs more com-
pelling or durable than these.  is significant: another example of the
Source: Jay Nordlinger, in The Weekly
Standard, October 20, 1997, (a review of
Solti on Solti, Memoirs, Knopf, 1997).
We are saddened by the death in April
1998 of our friend Octavio Paz. An appre-
ciation will appear in our next issue.
To Read an Obituary
R ead biography, said Disraeli, for
that is life without theory. And
to grasp the truth of that remark,
wrote John O’Sullivan, read an obit-
uary. But obituaries in the United
States, he complains, are usually per-
functory, at best, while those in
British newspapers—notably The
London Times and the Daily Tele-
graph—are long, serious, and (some-
times) frank.
Editor of The National Review and an
Anglo-Irishman, O’Sullivan observes
that obituaries are the most popular
pages in a newspaper. “I used to think
that this was because elderly readers
turn to them in a spirit of cut-throat
competition: ‘Aha. Saw him out.’”
But there is, says O’Sullivan, a
deeper reason. Taken together, obit-
uaries over several years constitute
the nation’s history, a history that is
fuller, richer, and truer because it
lacks theoretical intent, and on occa-
sion, a single obituary can give us a
panoramic view of society as surely
as a great novel.
Mr. O’Sullivan’s musings were
prompted by an obituary in The
London Times of Michael von Clemm,
an American educated at Exeter and
Harvard, who did postgraduate
work in anthropology at Oxford,
spent two years with a tribe in
Tanganyika, joined the London
office of Citibank where he helped
found the “Eurodollar,” and ended
as a President of Templeton College,
the business college of Oxford. In all,
a slice of history.
And O’Sullivan concludes, “…our
relative neglect of the obituary form
ongoing national lobotomy we call
American culture.”
Source: John O’Sullivan, The National

Review, December 8, 1997.
 A Report to Our Readers
(continued from page 48)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
odicals, other than Commentaire—a journal edited by Jean-Claude Casanova, in the BYLINES IN THIS ISSUE: Michael Becker is
heritage of Raymon Aron—reprint articles from other countries. a sociologist of science and an associate at
In England a new magazine, Prospect, is attentive to other countries (unlike such the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Daniel
weeklies as the Labourite New Statesman and the Tory Spectator, which remain bril- Bell, emeritus professor of sociology at
liantly insular.) The Economist has a monthly section called “Review of Books and Harvard University, is scholar-in residence
Multimedia,” which carries reportage (such as the phenomenon in Poland where at the American Academy of Arts and
the media today appreciates imported culture but not its own) and a rotating Sciences. Pearl K. Bell is a literary critic
monthly article on fiction in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and even China. The who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
London Review of Books remains quite solid in its devotion to intellectual issues. James T. Kloppenberg is professor of
And the Times Literary Supplement is nonpareil. Without compromise, it will run a American Studies at Brandeis University.
dozen concentrated sections during the year on the classics, linguistics, feminism, Wolf Lepenies is director of Wissenschaft-
scholarly journals, and the like, calling attention to significant books in a field and skolleg zu Berlin and the author of Saint-
providing lucid (if controversial) judgments. And its “Letters” section provides end- Beuve: Auf der Schwelle zu Moderne [On the
less delights on such outre controversies as whether Ludwig Wittgenstein threat- Threshold of Modernity]. Pratap Mehta is
ened Karl Popper with a hot poker on the occasion of a talk by Popper at the Moral associate professor of government and
Sciences Club in Cambridge, an exchange between philosophers that has run over social Studies at Harvard University. Mark
many weeks and even attracted the “Arts and Ideas” section of the New York Times. Lilla teaches political theory at New York
But, given all that, we think there is still a place for the Newsletter of the Committee University and has been a member of the
on Intellectual Correspondence. The reaction to the first issue was overwhelmingly, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton,
and spontaneously, positive. We printed 1500 copies: 300 went to our colleagues in New Jersey. Masayuki Tadakoro is profes-
Japan for distribution to periodicals and individuals there (as well as the translation sor of International Relations at the
of the articles by Japanese journals), 200 went to Germany, again for similar distribu- National Defense Academy in Yokosuka.
tion. The remainder went to periodicals and writers in the U.S., England, and some Kiyokazu Washida is a professor at Osaka
of the countries in Western Europe. The print run was exhausted, and we printed an University. Masakazu Yamasaki is artistic
additional 500, fortunately so when an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, perhaps director of the Hyogo Prefecture Theatre in
the most prestgious paper in Europe, prompted requests for fifty more copies. Kobe. His new play, The Twentieth Century,
There was uniform praise for our format, simple yet distinctive and elegant. There will open at the National Theatre in Tokyo
was some disagreement, less on the contents of the issue than the length of the arti- in November.
cles. Our friend Robert Solow complained that the articles were too short, for being CITATIONS FROM SOURCES: Former vice-
a busy man, if he was going to read about cultural developments abroad, he wanted chancelor of the University of London
a fuller exposition. Our friend Bernard Bailyn exclaimed, “Excellent. Keep the pieces Noel, the Lord Annan, is the author of
short, they give me all I need to know.” One is reminded of the story attributed to Our Age: Portrait of a Generation. Morris
Franklin D. Roosevelt who purportedly said, “Some of my friends are for high tar- Dickstein is professor of humanities and
iffs, some of my friends are for low tariffs; I am for my friends.” We shall try to vary director of its graduate center at the City
the lengths, and friends can choose accordingly. University of New York. Ruth R.Wisse is
We seek to cover the significant but neglected cultural developments, issues, and Professor of Yiddish and comparative liter-
debates in the countries where we have friends to report them. Japan today is, unfortu- ature at Harvard University.
ately, terra incognita, especially since the brilliant wartime cadre of interpreters such as DESIGNER: Glenna Lang also illustrates for
Donald Keene, Edward Seidensticker, and Herbert Passin, have now retired. Our col- the Atlantic Monthly and has published four
leagues, Masakazu Yamazaki and Masayuki Tadakoro, write and coordinate the reports children’s picture books with David Godine.
on Japan. At the Wissenscaftskolleg zu Berlin, Wolf Lepenies and Michael Becker write THANKS: We are grateful to Sulochana
reports from Germany. Mark Lilla reads the French and Italian press and writes those Raghavan Glazer for help with material on
reports. Daniel Bell is the editorial coordinator of the issue. India, and to Doris Sommer for suggestions
Our initial focus, stated in our first issue, is the cultural periodicals in a half-dozen about Latin America. Clare Cavanagh trans-
countries, that want to reach out beyond their borders. We now have seventy coop- lated the poem by Adam Zagajewski which
erating periodicals from which we draw material, and it is our hope that these peri- appeared in Doubletake, Fall 1997.
odicals, in turn, will use the reports in the Newsletter and more will want to obtain LETTERS: ■ Todd Gitlin writes that the Com-
and reprint in full the articles that we have cited in our reports. With such reprints, mittee on Correspondence mentioned in
we seek to widen the ripples in the waters into which these stones have been cast. our first issue came into being in 1959
We are not a “closed endeavor.” We are seeking to widen our group of active col- because of the nuclear arms race, and was
laborators, and some of these are acknowledged gratefully in the follow-up column initiated by Erich Fromm with David Ries-
on this page. But we welcome the cooperation of all our readers, in particular with man. ■ Paula Dietz says that the abridge-
suggestions of articles in different journals that are worthy of wider attention. We ment of “Letter from Greece” in the last
have begun in this issue a discussion of cultural patronage of the arts to provide a issue inadequately represented its scope.
comparative view. We welcome suggestions about other questions that are impor- Readers can consult The Hudson Review,
tant to the life of our milieu. ■ Summer 1997 for the full account.

47
 A Report to Our Readers
THE COMMITTE ON
INTELLECTUAL CORRESPONDENCE
is an International Project spon- A Report to Our Readers
sored by the Suntory Foundation
This is the second Newsletter of the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence.
(Japan), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu In our first issue, we noted that “…in this post-ideological age, there has been a
Berlin and the American Academy thinning of intellectual debate. Passions are fueled by ethnic and religious attach-
of Arts and Sciences. ments which further divide the discourse between intellectuals.” And we said, as
our intentions, that we hope to “re-take the common terrain…to contribute to the
DIRECTORS renaissance of a cultural milieu where intellectuals as well as scientists and public
Daniel Bell figures can learn about the cultural and intellectual issues in other countries.”
Associate We began our efforts over a year ago. Since then there have been a few heartening
Mark Lilla developments. The New York Times now devotes on Saturdays two or more pages to
“Arts and Ideas.” Such a move may have been part of the effort to thicken the paper,
Wolf Lepenies such as devoting a Monday section to the information industries and a Thursday
Associate section, “Circuits,” to new developments in computers and the Internet. The choice of
Michael Becker “Arts and Ideas” may be a sign of the times, if the swallows follow. (And we are pleased
Masakazu Yamazaki that the Times devoted an early story to the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence.)
Associate The Wall Street Journal has begun a weekly section called “Weekend,” which is
Masayuki Tadokoro designed for the urbane leisure pursuits of the wealthy, such as wines, travel, books,
music, film, art, and a page called, oddly, “Taste” which covers cultural issues. There
Graphic Designer is an occasional hint of sometimes strident interventions in the “cultural wars,” but
Glenna Lang there have also been efforts at cultural reportage such as a story on the conference
at the University of Virginia organized by Richard Rorty and Paul Berman to “re-
Administrative Assistant affirm” American patriotism for the Left.
Patrick T. J. Browne These are new bright spots. The back-of-the-book of the New Republic, edited by
Leon Wieseltier, runs some of the best (and longest) review essays on serious books
U.S. Address: in the U.S. The Los Angeles Times has one of the liveliest book-review sections in
American Academy of Arts and Sciences the country. In one issue it ran a set of essays—one of the few periodicals in the
136 Irving Street country to do so!—on the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto, with arti-
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 cles by Eric Hobsbawm, Daniel Bell, Martin Malia, William Pfaff, and Russell Jacoby.
Telephone: (617) 576-5000 And the bi-weekly New York Review of Books remains the premier intellectual jour-
FAX: (617) 576-5050 nal, after thirty-five years, a singular accomplishment. Yet it is largely an Anglo-
American journal in its writers and reviews. It has devoted considerable space to

E-mail: CIC@amacad.org
the wars in the Balkans and to infringements of human rights, yet other than an
occasional essay, say, on Carl Schmitt or Jacques Derrida (the one a new, the other a
The Committee on Intellectual worn-out subject), it has not been involved with the intellectual issues, or the nov-
Correspondence acknowledges with els and theatre, of countries in Europe and Asia.
gratitude the financial support of the The German press, the weeklies and dailies, are remarkable in their reportage of
Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan, cultural developments in other countries, and little escapes the curiosity of the feuil-
in underwriting the project and the leton sections of Die Zeit and F.A.Z. In France Le Débat, edited by Pierre Nora and
Newsletter. Marcel Gauchet, is a model of serious intellectual controversy, but few French peri-
(continued on previous page)

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

136 Irving Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

48