Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Unmasking Multiculturalism
Muslim Memoirs Probe the Limits of Tolerance
by Claudia Koonz
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Number Twelve | Spring 2006
Since September 11, 2001 hard-liners
have blamed a tolerant society for allowing
terrorists to ourish in Europe. The popu-
lar Italian author Oriana Fallaci has called
Islam a fraud, and in her latest book, The
Force of Reason, she predicts that increasing
numbers of immigrants with high birth
rates will transform Europe into Eurabia.
In an essay this February in Der Spiegel, the
controversial German playwright Botho
Strauss ridiculed feckless Europeans for
their inability to defend core Western val-
ues against Islamists who are prepared to
ght for their faith. During the riots last fall,
French journalists quipped that Muslim
youth had created their own Paristan.
In a new book called While Europe Slept,
Bruce Bawer, an American writer who has
spent years in Amsterdam and Oslo, warns
against multiculturalism and the Muslim
self-segregation it has fostered.
Against such dire warnings liberals
stand rm, insisting that all non-Western
cultures be respected, including Islam.
After September 11, Edward Said argued in
the Nation that a small group of deranged
militants is not representative of the
Muslim world and ought to be treated
like any other group of crazed fanatics.
Skilled police work, tough anti-discrimina-
tion laws, and equal opportunity are the
most effective means of undermining the
inuence of fringe groups, insists James
A. Goldston, director of the Open Society
Justice Initiative. And of course the bien
pensants on Europes left have become more
multicultural at least in their appreciation
of the cuisine, lms, fashions, and music of
the migrants in their midst.
Thus, conservatives who defend Euro-
pean core values against a hostile Islam
disagree vehemently with liberals who wish
to integrate newcomer Muslims. The battle
lines between roll back and dtente remain
as xed as ever.
A
new genre of popular nonction
has opened up in the no-mans-
land between the two sides. Best-
selling memoirs by Muslim and
ex-Muslim women about their encounters
with Islam in Europe have destabilized
both conservative and liberal standpoints
by appropriating elements of each position.
Like conservatives, they decry a multicultur-
alism that blinds Europeans to the violence
within many Muslim families. Like liber-
als, they appeal to human rights doctrine
and deplore the patriarchal principles of
Islam. They call for less tolerance of Muslim
misogyny and more rights for Muslim
women. Unlike the highly educated pundits
who debate the merits of roll back or dtente,
these women speak with the authority of
their own experiences. Their lives have been
torn apart by a clash of civilizations.
Most of these writers belong to the sec-
ond generation of Muslim immigrants
who have assimilated to a far greater extent
than their parents. Born in the 1970s, they
experienced the contradictions between
family customs and Western cultures
as teenagers. Deprived of the freedoms
enjoyed by their brothers and classmates,
Muslim daughters chafed against their
connement. With puberty, they felt the
full force of paternal authority, often strug-
gling for years to escape. The genre has a
few rags-to-riches narratives, such as those
of the popular singers Senait Mehari and
Djura, who overcame great obstacles to
achieve fame and fortune in Germany and
France respectively. For most, however, the
ability to live an ordinary life constitutes a
triumph. A few writers have not even man-
aged to achieve this and fear to write under
their own names: The Austrian author
Sabatina moves constantly to escape death
threats; Aysl struggles in Germany simply
to become literate; and Inci Y., the author
of Choke on Your Own Lies (Erstickt an euren
Lgen), has not dared to tell even her chil-
dren that she wrote the book.
The pattern of these personal narratives
may be all too familiar, but the breaking
point in each authors life is distinct. The
Kosovar-Albanian Hanife Gashi could not
prevent her husband from murdering their
eldest daughter because he believed she dis-
honored the family by hanging out with her
friends. Several authors attempted suicide,
and one almost killed her child. At age 14,
Algerian-born Samira Bellils boyfriend
turned her over to his friends to be gang-
raped after she rejected him. Human rights
lawyer Seyran Ates barely survived an assas-
sins bullets. Imprisoned for ten years as a
young bride in Pakistan, Nasima Nazar out-
witted her family and returned to Germany,
the country of her birth. These accounts are
hair-raising, and the authors courage is awe-
inspiring.
At rst glance, the genre seems to be
part of a ood of recent memoirs in the
tradition of Betty Mahmoodys Not without
My Daughter and Mary Quins Kidnapped
in Yemen that document womens ght
against Islamic tyrants in the Middle East.
But European Muslim authors describe
their tribulations in the lands of Recht und
Freiheit, libert et galit. Their books have
colorful covers, usually bearing an iconic
veiled woman, and attention-grabbing
titles like the French best-sellers Forced
Marriage; Dishonored; Burned Alive;
Disgured; and In the Hell of Gang Rape,
and the popular memoirs in German Dead
among the Living; My Pain Carries Your
Name: an Honor Killing; Nobody Even Asked
Me; Veil of Silence: Condemned to Death by
Her Own Family; and You Must Die for Being
Happy: Imprisoned between Two Worlds.
Written in fast-paced, rst-person prose, the
narratives chronicle devastating tragedies
caused by fathers who beat their daughters,
terried mothers who acquiesce, and in-
laws who tyrannize everyone in the name
of family honor. Blurbs like Her familys
quest for vengeance ultimately struck her
reinforce the sensationalism implicit in
such titles.
Writing their memoirs has helped these
authors assuage their trauma and provided
hope to girls and women trapped in similar
situations. But their harrowing accounts
have also found audiences much farther
aeld: in the anti-immigrant camp. In the
hands of certain readers, such life stories
invite a kind of voyeurism that, if anything,
reinforces the prejudices of those already
hostile to the others in their midst. As one
self-appointed reviewer put it, The readers
eyes will be opened to an inconceivably
gruesome and loveless world.
In the last decade in Germany about forty women have fallen
victim to so-called honor murders by male relatives, most
of which remain unsolved.
Unlike the highly educated
pundits who debate the
merits of roll back or dtente,
the writers of these memoirs
speak with the authority of
their own experiences. Their
lives have been torn apart by
a clash of civilizations.
The Berlin Journal
But the authors aim to do more than
play to stereotypes of misogynistic Muslim
patriarchy. They call for European govern-
ments not to countenance terrible violations
of human rights in the name of cultural
tolerance. The authors want to reach large
audiences and uphold core European values
of justice not contribute to Islamophobia.
This is a delicate balance to achieve.
Like xenophobic politicians, these criti-
cal Muslim authors call attention to atypical
cases and rarely mention the millions of
Muslims in Europe who lead unremarkable,
and possibly even happy, lives. The former
fulminate about Islamist sleeper cells in
mainstream society, while the latter expose
the invisible crimes committed in the name
of honor by Muslim men. Needless to say, it
is unusual for cultural conservatives to nd
themselves in the feminist camp. Indeed,
they typically admire the strong patriarchal
authority and large families of Muslim
men precisely those traditions feminist
Muslims deplore.
A
handful of writers living in
France and Germany have man-
aged to gain sufcient education
and self-condence to move beyond
the inspirational tone of survival narratives
and to make their political message explicit.
Of course, authors like Chahdortt Djavann
and Amela Federa in France and Necla
Kelec in Germany deplore the Muslim patri-
archy in which they grew up. But they direct
their deepest outrage at European multicul-
turalism for turning a blind eye to violence
in the Muslim community.
These writer-activists strategies vary
according to the contrasting political con-
texts in France and Germany. One obvious
difference is demographic. France is home
to Europes largest Muslim population,
estimated at between four and ve million
(about 10 percent of the population), most of
whose forebears came from Northern Africa.
About 2,500,000 Muslims (about 3 percent
of the population), mostly with Turkish
backgrounds, live in Germany. The contrast
between the two civil societies, though less
obvious, is decisive. France has the highest
naturalization rate in Europe, whereas citi-
zenship in Germany is difcult to achieve.
French tradition has created a monocul-
tural political regime, while Germany has
embraced multiculturalism.
In France, where separation of church
and state forms the bedrock of the French
political order, the ethnic or religious
identities of citizens cannot ofcially be
acknowledged. To be an equal citizen
in secular France means to be the same.
Consequently, no census records ethnicity
or race; it is impossible to count the number
of minorities in police and civil service jobs,
managerial positions, or other professions.
Afrmative action, of course, is out of the
question. Since the mid 1990s, feminists
from Muslim backgrounds have accorded
top priority to promoting a ban on Muslim
headscarves in public schools, arguing
that family pressure must not impede
girls access to the French values taught in
school. Down with the Veil!, by Iranian-born
Parisian Chahdortt Djavann, makes its
political point in an authentic voice: I wore
the veil for ten years. It was the veil of death.
I know what Im talking about. Having
been imprisoned in the darkness of the
veil, she lashes out at a bizarre form of
ecumenism that expects Islam to adapt to
modern society.
Activist Amela Federa writes about grow-
ing up as one of ten siblings in a devout
Muslim family living on the outskirts of the
French industrial center Clermont-Ferrand.
Until she was told to raise her hand when
a teacher asked how many foreign stu-
dents were in the class, Amela saw herself
as French. Suddenly, she felt excluded from
La France de la Libert, de lgalit et de la
Fraternit. If descendents of immigrants
expect their countrymen to ignore their
ethnic differences, she reasons, then they
must shed signs of their ethnic origins.
A classroom devoid of religious symbols
represents an important rst step toward
giving girls an opportunity to absorb
French values. In March 2003, the cam-
paign against headscarves resulted in an
immensely popular law banning religious
apparel from public schools.
But feminists from Muslim-French back-
grounds do demand that ethnic difference
be acknowledged when it comes to protect-
ing women and children from the patriar-
chal customs of village Islam. To achieve
those goals, Federa asks that Muslim
slums receive adequate police protection
and public services. Samira Bellil, in her
memoir about family violence, homeless-
ness, educational deprivation, and sexual
victimization, provides a chilling portrayal
of the consequences of the misogyny ram-
pant in the slums and praises the curative
power of friendship, French literature, and
psychotherapy. By breaking the code of
silence among Muslims she alerts main-
stream readers to the plight of Muslim
women. After a hard-fought battle, Bellil
won her legal case against the men who
raped her, which inspired the optimism of
the last words in her book. I am Samira. I
am 29 years old. I believe in life, and I hope
for happiness. Together with Amara, she
organized a national campaign to improve
the lives of women who live in the impover-
ished enclaves known to most non-Muslims
as no-go zones. Although it might seem
inconsistent, these authors promote equal-
ity by erasing difference in the secular public
sphere at the same time that they call atten-
tion to difference in order to combat violence
against women and girls.
In Germany, where the constitution
mandates equal treatment of all religions,
statisticians gather data on ethnicity, reli-
gion, and race. Because the memory of the
Holocaust has sensitized Germans to the
dangers of prejudice, the state has advocated
a tolerant, multicultural civil society in
which bigotry has no place. Muslim femi-
nists break these taboos when they speak
out against misogyny in the Koran and
Muslim mens abuse of women and girls.
While French Muslim activists have made
a priority of the ban against the Muslim
headscarf, in Germany domestic violence
heads the list of top concerns. Too often,
activists charge, police simply do not inves-
tigate crimes against Muslim women. Even
when the perpetrators are apprehended,
The pattern of these personal
narratives may be all too
familiar, but the breaking
point in each authors life is
distinct. Their accounts
are hair-raising, and their
courage is awe-inspiring.
Although it might seem inconsistent, these authors promote
equality by erasing difference in the secular public sphere
at the same time that they call attention to difference in order
to combat violence against women and girls.
defense lawyers
have argued that a cultural
decit constitutes a mitigating circum-
stance. As Necla Kelec, author of The Foreign
Bride, puts it, the lawyers shrug their shoul-
ders and say thats just how they are. A
1999 legal case illustrates what Kelek calls
false tolerance. A Bremen court found
Turkish assassins guilty of killing a couple
whose marriage deed the orders not only
of their parents but also of a local Kurdish
political leader. But the murderers believed
they had committed an execution ordered
by authorities they respected. The defense
lawyer argued successfully for a lenient sen-
tence, saying that because of their strongly
internalized native worldviews, they had
not been conscious that their motives
would be considered especially reprehen-
sible and socially reckless.
Although statistics on domestic vio-
lence in Germany are fragmentary, sur-
veys suggest that as many as half of all
Muslim wives did not choose their hus-
bands, and most of them probably had
been living in remote villages until they
married their husbands in Germany. Most
adapted quietly to their fate. But Muslim
women constitute a disproportionate share
of the women in shelters. When they run
away, they incur the wrath of male rela-
tives who blame them for besmirching
family honor. In the last decade about forty
women have fallen victim to so-called
honor murders, most of which remain
unsolved.
The lawyer and writer Seyran Ates,
author of The Great Journey into the Fire,
asks her German readers to wake up from
the false dream of tolerance and stop
being hypersensitive about offending
ethnic minorities. Necla Kelek charges
that a fty-year experiment with integra-
tion has allowed Islam-Fascism to gain
strength. The generation of 1968 has been
so preoccupied with expiating the guilt for
Nazi crimes, she says, that it has ignored
the injustice before its eyes. Somehow the
vicious cycle of nave tolerance and silence
about family violence in minority cultures
must be broken. Serap Cileli, author of We
Are Your Daughters, Not Your Honor and
recipient of the 2005 Federal Republics
Cross of the Order of Merit, insists it is only
logical to expect that people who come to
our country respect our values.
In many of the memoirs by Muslim and
ex-Muslim women, anger at parents who
placed obedience to clan elders ahead of
their childrens well-being is balanced with
contempt for Western liberals who worry
more about offending Muslims sensibili-
ties than about girls and womens rights. At
the same time that the conservative nostal-
gia for strong (i.e. patriarchal) family values
exposes the most vulnerable members of
immigrant communities to danger, the lib-
eral attachment to abstract principles be it
monoculturalism in France or multicultur-
alism in Germany ignores womens and
childrens human rights. According to the
logic of these writers, the time has come to
break the deadlock between Islamophobic
conservatives and idealistic liberals.
Islamic Citizens,
Secular Societies
A Conversation
H.D.S. Greenway, with Barbara John,
Ian Johnson, and Others
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10 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
H.D.S. Greenway: Its impossible to general-
ize about Islam because what you just said
is absolutely true in some cases, but in other
cases it isnt. Yes, I have talked to people
who worry that secular Europe is going to
rob their children of their religion. And of
course there are tendencies in Muslim com-
munities to try to isolate themselves. It is
not unlike the Nation of Islam in America,
which wanted in some way to isolate itself
from white society. I have talked to people
in Europe who think that their children are
going to be robbed of their religion, and they
worry about it. I remember one Muslim in
Britain who said, We hoped the churches
would ally with us to ght atheism, but we
nd they havent. Ian Johnson is the man
who really knows a great deal about this. He
has written a wonderful series on Islam in
Europe for the Wall Street Journal, which I
clipped before I came. Ian, on this question
of secularism, do you nd in your research
this factor of the second generation being
more religious than their parents? Or would
you say that the greater trend is for Muslims
to become secular?
Ian Johnson: Of course its hard to general-
ize. A lot of people are secularizing, but there
is an interesting development among the
very pious. Young people will say, Im not
Moroccan or Im not Algerian, Im Muslim.
But I dont think you can say that this is the
trend across the board by any means.
But let me turn the question around to
you. When you were summarizing these dif-
ferent countries in Europe, I couldnt help
interpreting that you thought the British got
it more right and that the French got it the
most wrong, and that Germany was sort of in
the middle in a wishy-washy position.
Greenway: Well, the French insisted on
assimilation. You can come in but you have
to be just like us. The British tried integra-
tion in the sense that they tried to t the
Muslim parts into the British whole. Until
1999 the Germans tried accommodation,
one dictionary denition of which is provid-
ing a room for the night. Germany hung on
to the myth of eventual repatriation longer
than most, saying You can come in but
dont even think about becoming German.
Citizenship is a matter of German blood,
not where people happened to be born or
where they have lived for generations. Thats
changed now, and Germany is going more
toward the British model than the French.
The British have allowed more space for
Islam than the French, because the French
ideal of galit, inherited from the French
Revolution, did not allow for separateness.
Germany is somewhere in between France
and Britain in this regard.
But then Olivier Roy, the French expert on
Islam, says its wrong to think that creating
more space for Islam is the answer. These
are already secularized and urbanized young
kids. In Roys opinion, alienation isnt really
a matter of being Muslim. Its simply not
being accepted as truly French and being
discriminated against in the job market.
Perhaps it is more a matter of racism.
Johnson: Let me push you to make a value
judgment then. Which of the countries do
you think has offered the best solution?
Greenway: I am trapped by my own upbring-
ing in America, which forces me to think
that the German and British models are
probably going to be more successful in the
end. But the French model is the ideal. That
would be the ultimate melting pot if they
could pull it off. So far they havent. As for
the American model, its hard to say since we
dont really have a Muslim problem. There
are so few Muslims in America: four to seven
million in a country of nearly 300 million is
only about 1.5 percent.
John: Well, in Germany we have 3 percent,
but only 20 percent of those are practicing
Muslims.
Greenway: The question of just where
Muslims are going to t into American
society hasnt become part of the national
conversation as it has in Europe. I think this
is because the immigrants in the US come
from backgrounds that differ from those
of immigrants to Europe. There are not so
many from the rural poor. Also, because we
are obsessed with the problem of absorb-
ing Latin Americans, for dozens of reasons.
Im not saying we would do it any better if
those immigrants were Muslim. Maybe we
wouldnt. But Muslim immigration in the
US just hasnt really become a big issue. My
basic point is that, regardless of the num-
bers, Muslims simply do not loom large on
the American scene when the talk turns to
problems with immigration. The millions
pouring into Europe from Africa are largely
Muslim. Ours, pouring over the Mexican
border, are Latin American Catholics.
Muslims do not dominate the national con-
versation as they do in Europe.
Steve Chapman: Do you have a sense of which
European country has the highest incidence
of political or religious extremism within its
Muslim population?
Greenway: Thats a great question and I tried
to nd that out. I never came up with a satis-
factory answer because its very hard to mea-
sure extremism. You can have strict funda-
mentalist Muslims who have nothing to do
with terrorism. Not every fundamentalist is
a potential terrorist. And so I never could get
anything straight on that.
Claudia Koonz: What lessons, if any, do you
think French Muslims and non-Muslims
have learned from the riots that took place in
the country last November?
Greenway: Well, I came back convinced that
the riots in France were really not an Islamic
phenomenon, and that if you talk to people
youll hear that it really was a social upris-
ing. Lack of jobs and the like. Now of course
most of the people who were rioting were of
Muslim background, but I dont think they
did it for particularly Islamic reasons. I talk-
ed to the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois where all
the trouble started. He was very pessimistic.
He said that everything has gone back to
normal. We got all these promises. They
said weve learned our lesson, but we havent
learned our lesson and nothings happen-
ing. In that town, he told me, we have all
these unemployed people but we dont have
a tram to take them out of the town. The
regional train is in the next village. Well
need a tram. We also need a police station.
Youd think after what happened in Clichy-
sous-Bois youd want a police station nearby,
but, no, the police station is in the next town.
So he was very discouraged about the lesson
being learned.
From the Audience: You just said that the
riots in France can be traced back to social
problems. Would you interpret the fact that
we didnt have riots in Europe following the
A lot of people are secularizing, but there is an interesting
development among the very pious. Young people will say,
Im not Moroccan or Im not Algerian, Im Muslim.
I came back convinced that the riots in France were really not
an Islamic phenomenon. If you talk to people youll hear that
it really was a social uprising.
The Berlin Journal 11
Danish cartoon controversy as a positive
sign? Is it an indicator that we have created a
different platform for dialogue, for interfaith
dialogue?
Greenway: I think one of the big stories in
Europe is the lack of violence over the car-
toons here. I think its very encouraging.
John: I agree with you, although very few
people have mentioned this. I think its note-
worthy. Because everybody thought that inte-
gration hasnt been working and that a crisis
like this would inevitably result in riots and
violence. Nothing happened.
Greenway: Nothing has happened so far.
From the Audience: Mr. Greenway, when
you mentioned in your speech the Hoover
School in Berlin and its rule that all stu-
dents speak German even during breaks,
I had the feeling you were recounting it a
little bit ironically. Isnt it good for a country
in which a lot of Muslims are living to ask
them to learn the language of the majority?
French Muslims speak French. They already
learned it in Algeria. The same is true for
British citizens from India and Pakistan.
But Turkish Muslims often dont speak
German when they arrive, and I would like
to know whether the way we integrate them
in terms of language is appropriate or not.
Greenway: I didnt mean to sound critical
of that decision. I thought the important
thing about that story was that the parents
and students agreed to the all-German
language rule. I would have thought
that maybe the parents would object to
it, but apparently they did not. So, yes of
course I think that people who want to be
German citizens should learn the German
language. We have the same debate in
America with Spanish. America has in its
history absorbed almost every language in
the world. The famous publisher Joseph
Pulitzers newspapers were rst in German.
But Spanish is the one language where you
could get such a critical mass of people
speaking it that not everybody feels it nec-
essary to learn English. And you nd this
in parts of Miami where people say, Well I
dont need English to get along. And I think
this is a fatal mistake because if you dont
know the language of the host country, ulti-
mately you are condemned to a lower status.
Yes, I am all for everybody who is living in
Germany speaking German. I think its a
good idea. Not just a good idea: a necessary
idea.
From the Audience: In the long term, its
important to integrate children through edu-
cation into their society. Did you examine the
different educational systems and the reac-
tions of the parents in the European coun-
tries you looked at?
Greenway: I think that in general Muslims
in France, Germany and Britain would like
to have Islam taught in the school systems.
Instead of talking about a Judeo-Christian
tradition, Muslims would like to have us
expand that to an Abrahamic tradition
taking in all three of the great monotheisms.
Sarmad Hussain: There is a paradox that I
have experienced personally as a German
of Pakistani descent. The German constitu-
tion is very tolerant toward all religions, but
Germans can be quite psychologically hos-
tile toward Muslims. What can be done to
overcome that hostility and to achieve a cer-
tain kind of peaceful coexistence?
Greenway: I dont mean to duck that question.
Its a very good and important one. But I dont
think Ive been here long enough or know
enough to give you a real answer. Barbara?
Youve been doing this for twenty years.
John: We can learn from our mistakes. We
can observe day by day that the gap between
Muslims and non-Muslims is somehow
widening. While we are becoming proud to
be a country of immigration, we dont allow
for the appropriate follow-up. Namely, for
greater pluralism of ideas, of religions, of
cultures, and so on. But let me turn this into
a question for Mr. Greenway: it came as a
surprise to me to see the American stance on
the issue of the Danish cartoons, and espe-
cially that of the American president. This
was quite different from what we saw here in
many European countries. While Americans
generally say that freedom of speech is an
absolute value and shouldnt be bargained
against any sort of compromise, they reacted
more cautiously this time. Why was the
American mood so different from what we
saw here in some of the European countries?
Greenway: I dont know why it was differ-
ent. Maybe the American administration is
beginning to realize what a problem it has
in terms of anti-American sentiment among
Muslims. I did think that the best com-
ment made on this whole situation was: just
because you have a right to say anything you
like doesnt mean you always say everything
you have a right to. I didnt think it necessary
to poke this in the Muslims eyes.
When I was running the editorial pages of
the Boston Globe, I always had problems with
the cartoons. The cartoons would always get
the most readers angry. They would call up
and shout. The effect of such strong visual
comments would also completely diminish
the editorials. I once wrote what I thought
was a balanced editorial about China and its
human rights problems and how we nonethe-
less have to keep relations with them. And our
cartoonist drew a cartoon of some dissidents
being hung by their thumbs in a Chinese jail.
Well, guess how readers interpreted the edito-
rial opinion of the paper? I nally had to say to
the cartoonist, Look, Im not going to censor
you, but please dont trash our editorials on
the same day we print them. You know, wait
till the next day. Looking back, I remember
that whenever a cartoon would run of the
pope, we would get very strong reactions
from Boston readers, which is probably the
most Catholic city in America. You could
make fun of the pope a little, but if he looked
grotesque there were really furious phone
calls. So it isnt just Muslims who get mad at
cartoons poking fun of religious gures. The
cardinal of Boston once held a press confer-
ence to denounce me for allowing a cartoon
that showed two Irishmen an ira guy and
a Protestant sitting together at a bar and
deciding that theyre really together because
they both like violence. And the cardinal
thought this was an outrageous slur against
Catholics, and he demanded an apology. It
isnt just the Muslim world that can get very
touchy about these things.
I did have to laugh at one cartoon in France,
though. It showed Muhammad looking at the
cartoons and saying, This is the rst time
the Danes have made me laugh.
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The Berlin Journal 13
A recent government report in the
Netherlands identied many of the condi-
tions that have fostered violence among
Muslim minorities in recent years. These
included the presence of a destructive,
exclusive ideology; the widespread percep-
tion of injustice; the absence of a shared nar-
rative between the minority and the major-
ity; the prevalence of dehumanization of the
other; and mutual feelings of anger and
victimization on both sides along with the
resulting desire for revenge.
In this context, the eventual return of
the European jihadists currently in Iraq will
undoubtedly complicate matters further.
There are various estimates of the number of
European passport holders ghting in Iraq;
most indicate it is at least several hundred.
Given the ease with which citizens can move
within the EU, these jihadists will pose huge
security risks to the continent when they
return. They also pose a risk to the US, since
European passport holders usually enjoy
visa-free access. Like the mujahideen in
Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya, these
ghters are so ideologically transformed
by their wartime experience and so deeply
believe that the US and its allies are ene-
mies of Islam that they are eager to use their
guerrilla tactics in new combat zones.
As the July 2005 London bombings
demonstrated, terror attacks can be carried
out by assimilated, middle-class European
Muslims. In fact, what is painfully clear is
that the West is not able to handle the prob-
lem at hand. In an mi5 document leaked
to the Sunday Times this January, the Joint
Terrorism Analysis Centre admitted that
it knows little about how and when the
attackers were recruited, the extent of any
external direction or assistance, and the
extent and role of any wider network. How
is this lack of knowledge possible over four
years after September 11?
First of all, Western policymakers and
security analysts have trouble understand-
ing extremism, and thus do not know how
to respond to it. They are faced with conser-
vative Muslims who do not actively take part
in politics and with Muslim extremists who
regard liberal democracy itself as haram a
system forbidden by God and destined for
destruction. As one of the suspected mem-
bers of the Dutch Hofstad terrorist group
declared in court, We reject you. We reject
your system. We hate you and thats about it.
The Western secular framework has inher-
ent difculty comprehending and respond-
ing to a threat posed by extreme interpreta-
tions of religion.
Secondly, European policymakers have
not adequately recognized the need for their
Muslim citizens to play a meaningful and
respected role in the civic and political life of
their countries of residence. Many European
countries are only now beginning a painful
debate over the effectiveness of multicul-
turalism, the policies of which have often
served to sweep the social needs of Muslim
communities under the rug reecting a
deep prejudice that European values must
be applied only to native Europeans. The
continent still faces a long-term struggle to
reconnect with its marginalized communi-
ties, one similar to that of the US during the
century stretching from the Civil War to the
civil rights movement.
Thirdly, Europeans have been even
slower to address the sense of spiritual
alienation among Muslim immigrants.
European ofcials lack the knowledge and
theological authority to shape religious
attitudes within Muslim communities,
and are often incapable of distinguish-
ing moderates from extremists who cloak
themselves in tolerant rhetoric.
It is often argued that neither the origin
nor the cure of this issue is in Europe and
that it would be futile to focus on European
Muslims because Islams future will be
determined in the Middle East. Such views
reect a common error: conating the con-
cepts of the Middle East and the Muslim
world. It should be noted that only 18 per-
cent of Muslims live in the Middle East. The
vast majority live in societies far removed
from the broader Arabian Peninsula, such
as Indonesia, Turkey, and the Indian sub-
continent. However tangible the local griev-
ances in Arab countries like Syria and Saudi
Arabia, they should not be confused with
the long and rich tradition of the multi-
national and multi-cultural religion that is
Islam.
Indeed, the Middle East has not had an
exclusive hold on a leadership role within
the broader Islamic world. From the medi-
eval kingdom of al-Andalus in Spain to
that of Bukhara in Central Asia; and from
the Muslim societies of India, Indonesia,
and Malaysia to those of Turkey and the
Balkans, there have long been centers of
reformation, renaissance, and enlighten-
ment within Islam that are outside the tradi-
tional Islamic Middle East. Recognizing
the need to coexist and to understand
the other in order to facilitate trade and
interaction, these Muslim societies made
great advancements in economics, science,
technology, and theology. As heirs to all of
these traditions, especially that of Ottoman
Turkey, European Muslims can very well
contribute to a new renaissance in the
Islamic world as they discover new ways
of reconciling their faith with the modern
European context.
The relationship between European
Muslims and their countries of origin is
dynamic and interactive and has the
potential to become even more so. For
example, Europe serves as an attractive
refuge for prominent Muslims, such as the
Egyptian scholar and distinguished human-
ist Nasr Abu Zayd, who
have made notable
contributions to the
broader debate within
Islam. Moreover, many
Muslims especially
Iranians have left
their repressive societ-
ies and gone to Europe
to practice their version
of Islam. If Muslims in
Europe can nd a way to achieve active inte-
gration into European societies, the benets
will ow back to the Middle East along the
same international networks that currently
spread messages of extremism and hate.
Given the urgency of the problems posed
by radical extremism, Europeans have no
option but to nurture the birth of a more
moderate European Islam by integrating
their own citizens into a tolerant, multi-
ethnic society. European governments that
have been confronted with crises like the
Madrid and London bombings, the riots
in the French suburbs, the murder of the
Dutch lmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the
recent Danish cartoon incident, realize that
they have to improve their efforts to address
immigration, integration, and extremism.
Yet, in doing so, they nd it extremely dif-
cult to maintain a careful balance in the
triangular relationship between the state,
mainstream majority society, and minor-
ity communities, as mutual mistrust and
fear have grown substantially. It is not easy
to promote integration and at the same
If young European Muslims are perceived
first as Muslims and only second (if
ever) as Europeans, and if that identity is
equated with terrorism, radicalism, and
even backwardness, they may turn from
rebels without a cause into rebels with one.
14 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
time counter extremism when extremists
are perceived to be receiving passive support
from Muslim communities.
Thus, what is now needed is a third
approach that simultaneously works
along the two tracks of multiculturalism
and assimilation to develop a genuinely
European Islam. The rst track recognizes
the need for European societies to actively
reassert their basic values and laws as well
as the need to defend those laws through
cultural, educational, judicial, police, and
military means. The second track focuses
on integration by building an inclusive
culture based on the common European
cement of democracy, the rule of law, and
human rights. In the new approach, Europe
must move away from the exclusive shared
narratives of its nationalist past and allow
for differences of religion and outlook to
be included under a broader conception of
what it means to be European. It should
have a rm core of political and social prin-
ciples, but should also feature an outer shell
porous enough to allow us and them to
come together. Although it will be a difcult
balancing act, the essence of the European
project is reected in its motto: In Varietate
Concordia (Unity in Diversity) a motto
that should also resonate in a country
framed according to the principles of
E Pluribus Unum.
The US can help Europe in this historic
challenge in two key ways. It can share its
own experience of successfully integrating
its small Muslim population thanks to the
concept of what it means to be an American
and the possibilities offered to people of all
ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds
by the American Dream. The US can also
help Europe look at Turkey in a new light. As
the country of origin for almost four million
of Europes Muslims, as a trusted nato ally
that twice commanded natos operation
in Afghanistan, and as a candidate for EU
membership, Turkey has several valuable
lessons to offer Europeans Muslims and
non-Muslims alike.
For one thing, the liberal approach to
Islam taken by the Ottomans in Turkey
is not very well known in Europe. The
Ottoman caliphate did not resemble the
extremist utopian vision promulgated by
groups like al-Qaeda today. In the Islamist
view of an ideal society, non-Muslims
should at best hold the status of second-
class citizens. The Ottomans, on the other
hand, granted non-Muslims the status of
dhimmi (protected people), preserving
the Christian communities of Greece and
the Balkans and later becoming a haven for
Jews eeing the Spanish Inquisition. Later
on, as it reformed, the Ottoman state abol-
ished the dhimmi status entirely, extending
full citizenship to all non-Muslims. These
changes were undertaken with the approval
of Ottoman religious leaders. Full knowl-
edge of these historical facts is important to
Europeans and Americans as they seek to
defeat the propaganda of radical groups.
Secondly, Turkey and its history pro-
vide an essential example to counter the
pan-Islamist rejection of integration into
European society. Currently, Islamists tell
Muslims that they are permitted to steal
from the indels and
to ignore European laws,
which are not based in
sharia. However, this
notion is not based
on Islamic teachings.
Rather, its roots lie in
postcolonial resent-
ments in the North
African and South Asian communities.
Because Turkish Muslims do not share this
colonial past, and have instead enjoyed sev-
enty years of relative prosperity and stability
under a Western legal system in their own
homeland, they are capable of demonstrat-
ing the compatibility of Western democracy
and Islamic faith.
Thirdly, the unique organizational sys-
tem of Turkish Islam is potentially relevant
to European Islam. For over eighty years,
Turkish Islam has coexisted with a secular
state, a situation largely due to the unique
institution of the Diyanet, the organization
that oversees Islamic religious facilities and
education. At once public, independent, and
civic, the Diyanet is not very well under-
stood in the West. Enjoying freedom of
inquiry, it derives its authority and respect
from its expertise in Islamic scholarship.
Responsible for 75,000 mosques within
Turkey as well as the religious communi-
ties of the Turkish diaspora, the Diyanet
promotes a moderate interpretation of Islam
via its training programs for imams and in
its religious scholarship. All Diyanet imams
are required to complete a college education
and to pass cultural and linguistic examina-
tions thus protecting Turks against the
dangers of radical preaching. Although
Europeans have raised several objections
to the Diyanet model from its close links
to the government to its often rm control
over Turkish mosques within Europe itself
these concerns may be alleviated as the
Diyanet continues its own internal reform
process. As Turkey proceeds in its accession
negotiations with the EU, Europe will also
be able to provide input into these reforms.
In turn, however, it would also be benecial
for Europeans to allow the Diyanet, with its
rich store of theological expertise, input into
the development of European Islam.
It is certainly true that some aspects of
the Turkish case cannot, for reasons of his-
tory and local circumstances, be replicated
either in Europe or in other Islamic coun-
tries. However, some elements have the
potential to be applied elsewhere. For exam-
ple, unlike many of its counterparts, Turkish
Islam has traditionally held that there is
no fundamental incompatibility between
the teachings of Islam and the principles
of democracy. Standing rm against those
calling for sharia, Haci Karacaer, leader of
the Turkish-Dutch organization Northern
Milli Grs , has publicly declared that, As
I believe in Allah, I believe in Dutch justice;
the Dutch Constitution is my sharia. It is
critically important for Europes future that
such views become mainstream Muslim
approaches.
The best allies in the struggle against
radical Islamists are moderate Muslims.
They need to be given political space so that
mainstream Islam is no longer in the hands
of the radicals, with the moderates pushed
to the sides of the debate. Neither the US
nor European countries can engage in a
battle of ideas within Islam; they can, how-
ever, support the real moderates so these
people can, as former Indonesian president
Abdurrahman Wahid argued in a 2005 Wall
Street Journal article, propagate an under-
standing of the right Islam, and thereby
discredit extremist ideology.
M
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z
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a
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l
/
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e
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t
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s
/
C
O
R
B
I
S
Reformist MPs on the eleventh day of a sit-in at the Iranian Parliament, Tehran, January 2004.
The Berlin Journal 23
the Supreme Leader in Iran. To the pros-
ecutor, such parallels deserved only scorn
and smacked of unbelief. Aghajari, in his
speech to the Hamadan university students,
lauded the Protestant Reformation and the
Enlightenment for valuing the individual
and placing man at the center of things; the
prosecutor used precisely that view to accuse
Aghajari of undermining belief in the
supremacy of God.
Aghajaris trial graphically illustrates an
Iran suspended between the forces of reform
and reaction. The short-lived reform move-
ment that was launched with the election of
Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997
was the result of complex factors; but it was
also driven made possible by powerful
ideas. These were ideas regarding the rule
of law, individual rights, freedom of speech,
association and assembly, accountable gov-
ernment, and the centrality of civil society to
a humane political system. These concepts
formed the basis of Khatamis election cam-
paign in 1997 and account in large part for
the unprecedented voter turnout in the elec-
tion and the large majority by which Khatami
won.
This cluster of ideas was originally
explored and developed by a small group of
intellectuals writing in one or two journals
of opinion, principally the monthly Kiyan.
But by the time of Aghajaris trial in 2002,
these ideas had gained considerable public
currency. Even a prosecutor in a provincial
town had to address questions dealing with
individual rights and clerical authority, and
to do so in a vocabulary that resonated with
Western terms and concepts. The prosecu-
tor, too, had to talk about sekularism and
address the problem of moderniteh and to
speak about the inuence praiseworthy or
reprehensible of Martin Luther.
The spread of these concepts was due
mainly to the work of a group of academics,
journalists, and political activists. For want
of a better term, I will call them public intel-
lectuals, using the term broadly to include
men and women everything from universi-
ty professors to newspaper columnists who
advanced political ideas in the public arena
and who achieved a degree of prominence
that allowed them to shape and speak for a
larger body of public opinion. These men
and women laid the groundwork for the ideas
that propelled and came to dene the reform
movement. And once Khatami was elected
they popularized these ideas in the daily and
weekly press. These same ideas shaped both
the policies and strategies of the Khatami
government in important ways.
In the rst years of the Khatami presi-
dency, Iran appeared to be poised for a major
political transformation. That did not hap-
pen. But I would like to use the case of Iran
and the Islamic Republic to examine the role
of ideas and intellectuals in making demo-
cratic transition possible.
Irans reformist intellectuals were not,
of course, an organized group. To speak of
them collectively is not to deny that they rep-
resented a spectrum of views. But they did
see themselves as sharing a common body of
goals and ideas. They came to identify them-
selves as reformers, as part of the Second of
Khordad movement, which took its name
from the day in the Iranian month in which
Khatami was elected president. They tended
to coalesce around one or two journals, and
eventually around a number of newspapers
and political leaders. They were not revolu-
tionaries in that they did not want to over-
throw the regime. They certainly did not
favor violent methods. On the contrary, they
were strong believers in peaceful change.
They saw themselves as agents of a demo-
cratic transition, of a transformation of the
Iranian political system. They believed that
if they freed up the press, opened up politi-
cal space, and allowed professional and civil
associations to proliferate, they would create
the conditions for a democratic transition.
Once the Khatami team was in ofce, indi-
vidual ministers and their advisers acted on
these assumptions.
For example, Khatamis rst minister of
culture liberally issued licenses for news-
papers and journals. His rst minister of
interior issued permits for new political
and professional organizations, a policy that
proved effective. One of the leading reform-
ist newspapers was closed down three times
in succession in a matter of a few weeks.
Each time, it reappeared within days under a
new license, name, and masthead, but with
exactly the same editorial staff, reporters,
and editorial policy. Strictly speaking, politi-
cal parties were still not allowed, but sev-
eral of the political associations the interior
ministry sanctioned evolved into something
approximating political parties.
These public intellectuals came from
different backgrounds. A number were
academics like Aghajari or the philoso-
pher Abdolkarim Soroush perhaps the
single most inuential thinker in Iran of
the 1980s and 1990s. But these academics
made it a habit to comment on major public
issues. Even university faculty who did not
normally comment on public affairs played
an indirect role in spreading reform ideas
by introducing students, a number of whom
became prominent players in the reform
movement, to the ideas of Max Weber and
Jrgen Habermas, and to the ideas of lead-
ing British and European eighteenth-cen-
tury political philosophers.
A number of these intellectuals were
clerics. Mohsen Kadivar and Mohammad
Mojtahed-Shabestari, two prominent clerics
identied with the reformist cause, trained
in the traditional curriculum of the semi-
nary but sought to interpret Islamic politi-
cal traditions in a manner compatible with
democratic principles. Before becoming
president, Khatami, himself a cleric, wrote
a book on Western political thought that
prominently features John Lockes advo-
cacy of limited constitutional government
based on the consent of the governed and
the rights of the individual. He depicted
Locke as a religious man who nevertheless
believed in tolerance for different faiths,
separation of Church and State, and the pri-
macy of government over religion.
Some of these public intellectuals were
technocrats or senior civil servants who also
wrote for serious journals or the daily press.
An excellent example is Said Hajjarian,
who emerged as Khatamis principle politi-
cal adviser and strategist. Hajjarian, from
a working-class background, had been a
secondary school Islamic activist under
the monarchy. After the 1979 revolution
he worked in the security services and was
the architect of the law that established the
intelligence agency of the Islamic Republic.
But somewhere along the way he became a
newspaper columnist and an ardent advo-
cate for civil society institutions and demo-
cratic reform.
l
n
ideas, the intellectuals generated concepts
that resonated powerfully with the public
once they were made available to a larger
audience through the political press and in
the course of election campaigns. But there
was a catch; the reformists never adequately
grappled with the problem of reconciling
the idea of liberal democracy with the real-
ity of the Supreme Leaders vast powers.
Perhaps this problem might have been man-
aged. But the mere assertion that there was
room under the Constitution for both the
concept of absolute vice-regency and liberal
democracy proved too facile.
But what about leadership? As president,
Khatami seemed to have all the neces-
sary qualities. He enjoyed widespread and
enthusiastic support. He was charismatic,
well-spoken, and had a winning personality.
His political agenda clearly excited Iranians.
Even in 2001, when reformist fortunes were
already on the wane, voters endorsed him
in large numbers for a second term. But
Khatami proved reluctant to use the popu-
larity he enjoyed to mobilize the public for
political action. After his rst few weeks
in ofce, he did not call or address a single
large let alone a mass meeting. He shied
away from the political confrontations that
would have been necessary for his political
agenda to prevail against political oppo-
nents who controlled many of the real levers
of power and did not hesitate to use violence
to achieve their ends. He had many admira-
ble moments, but there were also too many
critical junctures where he failed to take a
stand. He did nothing, or little, when some
of his own high ofcials and principal sup-
porters the mayor of Tehran, his rst min-
ister of interior were arrested, tried, and
jailed on specious charges, or when newspa-
pers that had taken great risks for him were
shut down and their journalists jailed. In
the long run, these retreats proved costly. A
major turning point perhaps marking the
loss of the student movement occurred in
1999, during the student demonstrations
at Tehran University to protest the closure
of a popular newspaper. The president was
silent and absent, both during the protests
and when they were put down by club- and
chain-wielding thugs.
And organization? Khatamis lieutenants
proved adept at mobilizing voters for elec-
tions; people turned out in large numbers
to vote for Khatami and reformist candi-
dates in two presidential, two parliamentary
and at least one local council election. But
the reformists failed to build parties or
other organizations that could keep voters
engaged in politics between elections. The
principal gures in the reform movement
were intellectuals and technocrats, not
politicians. The most prominent parlia-
mentary deputies of the reform movement,
representing the large urban constituen-
cies, built up national reputations, but they
spent little time on grass roots organizing.
There was no counterpart in Iran for the
Polish Shipyard Workers Union. The politi-
cal leaders of the reform movement repeat-
edly explained their failure to mobilize the
public by arguing that they wished to avoid
street clashes and violence. But this seem-
ingly sensible position became a rationale
for avoiding hard political decisions. When
the crackdown on the reform movement
came, recently-established civic associations
such as the journalists union proved too
weak to resist effectively; and the public, by
and large, stayed home.
T
he election of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad as president in 2005 is
a clear marker that Irans reformist
moment has passed at least for the
time being. Iran now has a new president
who draws on a different base of support and
who has a markedly different agenda from
his predecessor. However we might charac-
terize President Ahmadinejad as populist,
radical conservative, a throwback to the early
years of the revolution, spokesman for a new
revolutionary generation that, angry and
aggrieved, wants its turn at power and privi-
lege it is clear that democracy and Irans
integration into the international commu-
nity are not high on his list of priorities.
However, the powerful ideas that
launched Irans reformist experiment are
dormant, not dead; they constitute an idea of
political order one among others Iranians
have experienced in recent decades, includ-
ing monarchy, imperfect parliamentarian-
ism, and Islamic republic to which they
may choose to return. When the elements
necessary to make such a return possible
will come together again it is, of course,
impossible to predict.
The Scramble
for New Business
Models: Medi a in
the Digi tal Age
Eric Pooley, Managing
Editor, fortune
Iran bet ween Reaction and
Reform
Shaul Bakhash, Clarence Robinson
Professor of History, George Mason
University, and C.V. Starr Distinguished
Visitor at the Academy
The Twisted Tript ych:
Consti tutional
Presidenti al
Hegemony, Bush Justice
Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb
University Professor, Harvard
University, and Citigroup
Distinguished Visitor at the Academy
Supreme Change: The Impact of
a Makeover in the Makeup of
the US Supreme Court
Katheryn Oberly, Vice Chair and
General Counsel, Ernst & Young LLP,
and BMW Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy
The Poli tics of Fear: From
McCarthyism to the War on
Terror
Haynes Johnson, Writer, Professor,
and Knight Chair, Philip Merrill
College of Journalism, University
of Maryland, and Citgroup
Distinguished Visitor at the Academy
2/21
2/21
2/23
3/09
3/15
3/21
3/23
Story telling
wi th Images
Michael Ballhaus,
Director of
Photography 2/07
March
Anna-Maria Kellen and Pamela Rosenberg
The Berlin Journal 29
alumnus Mason Bates, who spent
last spring in Berlin. And many
vips from the diplomatic and
scholarly worlds accepted the
Academy founding chairman
Richard C. Holbrookes invitation.
By the time dinner was served
on $25,000 tables decked with
Berlin teddy bears the debutante
had made it clear that expres-
sions of philanthropic generosity
would not be given short shrift
next to these intellectual enter-
tainments. The Academys rst
performance on American soil
was a transatlantic feat in which
export could no longer be distin-
guished from import. Its goal of
adding to the Academys endow-
ment will allow the institution to
maintain its nancial indepen-
dence from state funding. The
evening raised almost half a mil-
lion dollars, which will help serve
as a basis for a stronger Academy
presence in America. So it was a
very American event for the ben-
et of an institution that is not
intimidated by national borders
and challenges itself by bringing
a bit of America to Germany, and,
in return, a bit of Germany back
to America.
Since the arithmetic came
out right in the end, Sir Simon
could devote his attention to the
Academys main objectives. And
when he spoke of collecting and
distributing, he was not talking
about money but about ideas.
by Jordan Mejias
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
January 27, 2006
XXX, Richard C. Holbrooke
Anna-Maria Kellen, Sir Simon Rattle, and Marina French
Karl von der Heyden and Richard Holbrooke
Gahl Hodges Burt
Poetry Reading
Vincent Katz, Art Critic,
Poet, and Translator
A Conversation wi th
the Honorable Zbigniew
Brzezinski
Counselor, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, and former
US National Security Advisor
3/29
3/30
The Importance of
Nothing: Beyond Art
and Archi tecture
Aaron Betsky, Director,
Netherlands Architecture
Institute
Interpreting Fascism
Robert O. Paxton, Mellon
Professor of Social Sciences
Emeritus, Columbia University,
and Anna-Maria Kellen
Distinguished Visitor
JPMorgan Economic Policy
Briefs: Pursuing Effecti ve
Economic Policy
Gary H. Stern, President, Federal
Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Irans Nuclear Program:
The Diplomatic Challenge
Gregory L. Schulte, Permanent US
Representative to the International
Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna
Global Insecuri t y and
American Power
Jim Hoagland, the Washington Post
Mark Twain in Germany:
A Not- So- Innocent Traveler
Abroad
Fred Kaplan, Distinguished Professor
of English Literature, Queens College
and the Graduate Center, CUNY
4/05
4/01
4/11
4/25
4/26
5/02
April May
Photographs by Michael Dames
30 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
When Robert Mundheim
and I rst met over breakfast in
Washington DC, the American
Academy was hardly out of the
starting gate. In 2000, the institu-
tion was two years old, and it had
had a heady, entrepreneurial start.
Henry Kissinger had just agreed
to take the chairmans helm from
Richard Holbrooke, who had
joined the Clinton administra-
tion as the US Ambassador to the
United Nations. But we needed a
president.
Gary Smith, our executive
director, was stretched even to his
limit managing the Academys
quick success. Many individuals
and corporations were, at rst,
reluctant to support a new orga-
nization nancially. Thanks to
Academy trustees Stephen and
Anna-Maria Kellen, who so gener-
ously funded the renovation of the
Hans Arnhold villa which houses
the Academy, we were off to a
promising start. But the future
was uncertain.
We had spent months look-
ing for that unlikely person who
combined academic credentials
with serious standing in the pro-
fessional, academic, and even
governmental worlds. And, of
course, it would be ideal if this
person had a biographical bond
to Germany. Thanks to Lloyd
Cutler and Jonathan Fanton, we
discovered the perfect individual.
Both had come to know Bob
Mundheim through their work at
the Salzburg Seminar.
Bob Mundheim was the right
person at the right time for the
American Academy. No sooner
did he take the job than he
started to work wonders for the
Academy, showing great energy
and generosity. Five years on, all
of us have had occasion to see
the degree to which his efforts
helped sharpen our academic
prole, preserve our scal health,
and enhance our reputation on
both sides of the Atlantic. Not
only did Bob Mundheim attract
terric new members to our
board, he also brought some of
Americas most esteemed gures
from nance, journalism, the
legal profession, and the arts to
our doorstep in Berlin. We have
much to thank him for.
Bob Mundheims many
skills had undoubtedly been
honed in years of professional
service as General Counsel of
the US Treasury, the dean of the
University of Pennsylvania Law
Counsel to the Academy
Robert H. Mundheims Successful Presidency
School in the 1980s, co-chair-
man of Fried, Frank, Harris,
Shriver & Jacobson, general
counsel of Salomon, Inc., and
in private practice at Shearman
& Sterling. He helped the
Academy formulate a sound
development strategy, began
to put the Academy on a solid
nancial footing, and enabled
us to concentrate on the essen-
tial goal of developing our
endowment.
In addition, Bob Mundheim
guided the ever-important
renement of our fellow selec-
tion process. Each year we are
gratied to receive applications
from many outstanding candi-
dates and are fortunate to draw
on a community of exceptional
reviewers and selection com-
mittee members to guide us
through the process.
Bob Mundheims steady
leadership as president pro-
vided the Academy with many
continuing benets. His guid-
ance and advice were almost
always developed through the
consensus that he built within
the Academy family. Now, as
Bob Mundheim steps down as
president but remains active
as a trustee of the American
Academy in Berlin, we look for-
ward to his continuing counsel
and participation.
By Gahl Hodges Burt,
Vice Chairman
Celebratory Gathering
Honoring Trustee Fri tz
Stern on his eightieth
birthday
Fri tz Stern Lecture
An American Empire?
Reflections on Uni ted States
Weltpoli tik
Charles Maier, Leverett Saltonstall
Professor of History, Minda de Ginzburg
Center for European Studies, Harvard
University
Yeats and the Public Poem
Helen Vendler, Poet and Porter University
Professor, Harvard University, and Stephen
M. Kellen Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy
Foreign Policy Forum
NGOs and Building Democracy
Worldwide
With Lorne Craner, President of the
International Republican Institute, and
Kenneth Wollack, President, National
Democratic Institute for International
Affairs
JPMorgan Economic Policy Briefs
Three Years of Reform in the US
Securi ties and Exchange
Commission
Harvey Goldschmid, Dwight Professor of
Law, Columbia University, and Distinguished
Visitor at the Academy
Art and Archi tecture
Maya Lin, Artist and Designer,
and Distinguished Visitor
at the Academy
5/04
5/16 5/04
5/30
6/13
6/15
June
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Named First Dean
of Fellows
At its spring meeting this
May, the Academy board will
welcome three new members.
William von Mueffling
is as much a transatlantic
gure as the Academy itself.
Born in New York to parents
of European descent, he holds
both US and German passports.
Dubbed the wunderkind of the
investing world by Forbes maga-
zine in 2001, he is the founder
and president of Cantillion
Capital Management, a rm
with over $8 billion in assets.
Previously, he was a managing
director at Lazard Freres in New
York, where he headed their
hedge fund business, and he
began his career as a European
company analyst at Deutsche
Bank in Germany. His interests
range far beyond the realm of
nance. An amateur photog-
rapher as well as a collector of
photography and art, Mr. von
Muefing is also a trustee of
the International Center of
Photography and treasurer of
the French American Cultural
Exchange. I am delighted
that my old friend William has
joined the board, said trustee
Andrew Grundlach. My grand-
father, Stephen Kellen, greatly
respected Williams grandfa-
ther, Mark Millard, and knew
him well from Wall Street and
beyond. That friendship has
Trustees on Board
Introducing William von Mueffling, Christopher von Oppenheim, and Neil Rudenstine
been passed down for three
generations, kept alive in part
by our families mutual com-
mitment to the cultural ties that
bind Berlin and New York, as
well as Germany and America
more broadly. William will add
greatly to this institution, and
especially to its growing roster
of young leaders.
Christopher von
Oppenheim represents
the seventh generation of a
long line of distinguished
public gures in German life
and nance. The son of two
Academy friends, the late Alfred
von Oppenheim a recipient
of the Croix de Commandeur
from the French Legion of
Honor and prominent art
patron Jeane von Oppenheim,
he has himself had a consider-
able career spanning two conti-
nents. He has worked at Citicorp
in New York, Bankhaus M.M.
Warburg-Brinckmann, Wirtz
& Co. in Hamburg, and is cur-
rently one of ve partners of Sal.
Oppenheim, Germanys largest
family-owned private bank. As
well-versed in the political as
the nancial side of the transat-
lantic partnership, his signi-
cant international experience
led him to participate in the
German Foreign Ministrys stra-
tegic planning team in 1998
1999. Mr. von Oppenheim is
equally at home in the humani-
ties, and is a serious bibliophile
with an exceptional collection of
early printed books and poetry
manuscripts.
Poetry, claimed Sir Philip
Sidney, has this end: to
teach and to delight. Neil
Rudenstine is one of those
rare literary critics whose career
has managed to make it do
both. Currently the chair of the
advisory board for artstor at
the A.W. Mellon Foundation,
Rudenstine joins the Academys
board with a full career in
educational administration
behind him. As a member of
the New York Public Library,
the Barnes Foundation, the
American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, and the Council on
Foreign Relations, Rudenstine
is an important presence in a
broad spectrum of institutions.
But the former president of
Harvard who led the largest
fund-raising campaign in the
universitys history is as effec-
tive with poetry as he is with
people. The author of Sidneys
Poetic Development and co-editor
of English Poetic Satire: Wyatt
to Byron, Rudenstine has more
recently focused his writing on
the US educational system, pub-
lishing In Pursuit of the Ph.D. in
1992 and Pointing Our Thoughts
in 1994.
d. f. m.
Arnulf Conradis office on the sec-
ond floor of the Hans Arnhold Center
faces the driveway. A blessing for
the Academy, since it keeps the pas-
sionate ornithologist from devoting
too much scrutiny to his fine feath-
ered friends on the Wannsee. The
former publishers new position as
dean of fellows will, however, enable
him to observe birds of a more schol-
arly and culturally colorful feather:
the Academys fellows, guest speak-
ers, and distinguished visitors. All of
them can count on Arnulf Conradi to
make them feel at ease in their new
surrounds.
A brilliant figure in the German
and international publishing worlds
for some three decades, Conradi
retired last year from the prestigious
Berlin Verlag, which he founded in
1992 with Elisabeth Ruge. Trained in
comparative literature, he became
chief editor at the famous house of
S. Fischer Verlag in 1983. Our new
dean will not only ensure the overall
happiness of fellows and the smooth
operation of the Academys programs.
He will also launch a series of high-
level literary, political, and scholarly
dialogues that will generally enhance
the Academys visibility in Germany.
M. E. R.
The Berlin Journal 31
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32 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
For two months this semester
as George H.W. Bush Fellow,
Steve Chapman, a columnist
for the Chicago Tribune, wrote
transatlantically-inspired arti-
cles on everything from Alitos
Supreme Court election to the
dwindling birthrate in Western
Europe. A former editor for the
New Republic, the libertarian-
leaning Chapman publishes his
twice-weekly columns in some
sixty papers in addition to con-
tributing articles to the American
Spectator, the Weekly Standard,
and National Review. During his
talk at the Academy, he pondered
whether it is still possible for
the American government to be
based on the Lockian consent
of the governed when even the
best-informed citizens not to
mention the best-informed poli-
ticians are faced with such an
impenetrable cloud of complex-
ity and obscurity. Citing that the
United States Internal Revenue
Code spans a monolithic 2.8 mil-
lion words triple the length of
War and Peace Chapman asked
probing questions about the con-
temporary expression of collective
will. Tackling topics national and
international, social and eco-
nomic, Chapmans omnivorous
approach to writing has made
him what Slates media critic calls
a polymath, a creative policy wonk,
a tap-dancing writer, a true son of
liberty.
New York Times columnist and
writer-at-large Roger Cohen
has had a career of enviable
travels, global rovings both
intellectual and physical. As a
writer for the New York Times, the
International Herald Tribune, the
Wall Street Journal, and Reuters,
he has reported from the Balkans,
Berlin, Paris, South America
and the Mediterranean. Cohens
twice-weekly columns in the
International Herald Tribune
traverse an equally broad stylis-
tic terrain. He can write elegiac
ruminations, such as his piece
on the director general of the
Iraq Museum, an exile within
his own museum, condemned
to contemplate his own and his
countrys fate in rooms emptied
of visitors. But he is equally adept
with hard facts, writing detailed
columns charting the ssures in
transatlantic relations. During
his time as a Bosch Fellow at
the Academy in April and May,
his columns from Berlin will
do both. Melding acute political
commentary with a penchant for
anerie, Cohen sees himself in
search of the citys elusive heart,
whose secrets say so much about
Germany and Europe.
The cardinal of Boston once
called a press conference to con-
demn H. D. S. Greenway for
an offensive cartoon printed
under Greenways watch as head
of the editorial page at the Boston
Globe. But this distinguished
columnist at various points in
his career a reporter for TIME,
the Washington Post, and Foreign
Affairs is anything but unrea-
sonably inammatory. His mea-
sured, thoughtful prose has taken
him as a foreign correspondent
to Hong Kong, Saigon, Bangkok,
Jerusalem, London, and, this
winter, Berlin. For his two-month
Bosch Fellowship at the Academy,
Greenway explored the subject of
Islam in Christendom, contrast-
ing the often tense interactions of
secular Christians and religious
Muslims across a spectrum of
European societies. Following
the November riots in Paris and
coinciding with the cartoon con-
troversy in Denmark, Greenways
investigation in Berlin could not
have come at a more pertinent
moment. After September 11,
writes Greenway, Americans have
become intensely aware that mili-
tant Islam is no longer conned to
the Islamic countries themselves.
With his reective writing, this
veteran reporter is working to
develop this awareness into a more
nuanced American perspective.
The prominent black abolitionist
Frederick Douglass wrote three
autobiographies. Each contained
information that contradicted the
other two, recasting the story of
his life and remaking his public
persona. His long-time mistress,
German migr Ottilie Assing,
was a notable journalist whose
columns contained a similar
penchant for self-reinvention;
not only was Assing a Lutheran
convert from Judaism, but her
contemporary critics also labeled
her feminist and suffragist
writing a performance of con-
tinuous intellectual cross-dress-
ing. Holtzbrinck Fellow Joyce
Hacket t takes Assing and
Douglass relationships with
their own identities, their respec-
tive political movements, and with
each other as the basis for her
second novel. Tentatively entitled
Reconstruction, the novel employs
this tumultuous post-Civil-War
love affair to explore the con-
struction of racial, religious, and
sexual identity during an era of
national reconstruction in the US.
Because the letters between the
two lovers were lost (or destroyed)
after Assings suicide, Hackett
will spend her semester in Berlin
engaged in her own reconstruc-
tion historical rather than per-
sonal to unearth the private sub-
text beneath the very public texts
LIFE & LETTERS at the Hans Arnhold Center
The Spring 2006 Fellows
Profiles in Scholarship
The Berlin Journal 33
of these two prominent gures.
Hacketts rst book, Disturbance
of the Inner Ear, a novel about
inherited trauma and healing,
was a National Book Critics
Notable Book in 2002.
Legend has it that in 1321, a
Thringen nobleman named
Friedrich der Freidige was so
moved while watching an enact-
ment of the biblical parable of the
Wise and Foolish Virgins that,
wild with grief and frustration at
the plight of the women, he suf-
fered a stroke and promptly died.
This semester, art historian and
Coca-Cola Fellow Jacqueline
Jung examines the dramatic
force of this parable through
the ten sandstone gures of the
Wise and Foolish Virgins that
adorn the magnicent cathedral
at Magdeburg. Carved between
1240 and 1250, the Magdeburg
Virgins represent a daring break
with the formal traditions of
medieval sculpture. Not only are
they unusual simply for focus-
ing on solely female subjects, but
the smiling and weeping gures
also form the rst large medieval
sculptural ensemble to depict a
narrative through bodily expres-
sions. The assistant professor of
art history at the University of
California, Berkeley explores how
the gures use these devices of
drama from empathetic faces to
easily legible gestures to create
the same powerful audience reac-
tion produced by theater.
In 1951 Hannah Arendt posed the
famous question who has the
right to have rights? This spring,
Haniel Fellow Cl audia Koonz
examines a variety of contem-
porary European responses to
that question, taking the Muslim
headscarf, or hijab, as the spark
for a broader debate about gender,
immigration, and ethnic assimi-
lation. Koonz compares German,
Austrian, French, and British
reactions to the controversial
garment. Is the hijab a token of
religious freedom or a provocative
emblem of anti-Western values?
Does its suppression simul-
taneously liberate the women
who wear it? In these countries
where immigration is economi-
cally essential but immigrants are
culturally marginalized does
the headscarf create cultural
diversity or prevent assimilation?
A historian of and prolic writer
on gender in the Nazi era, Koonzs
current research ties in to her
previous studies on the expulsion
of ethnic minorities. Her 1987
book Mothers in the Fatherland,
on the women who collaborated
with Nazi racial projects, was
a National Book Award nalist.
A professor of history at Duke
University, Koonz now applies
her rich background to the sub-
ject of how ethnic pluralism, and
its concomitant threat of ethnic
panic, is shaping the formation of
European identity.
Paradox, Alain Locke once
claimed, followed him through
all his days. Dubbed a godfather
of the Harlem Renaissance for
his perceptive cultural criticism,
philosopher and public intellec-
tual Locke nonetheless criticized
the movement as exhibitionist.
Politically an unfailing egalitar-
ian and one of the earliest propo-
nents of multiculturalism Locke
nonetheless possessed an elite
aesthetic sensibility shaped by
years of education at Harvard,
Oxford, and in Berlin. Though a
dandy in dress and affectation, he
fastidiously concealed his homo-
sexuality. DaimlerChrysler Fellow
Charles Molesworth,
professor of English at the City
University of New York, will
spend his semester in Berlin
probing the paradoxes of Lockes
personality in a biography co-
authored with Leonard Harris.
Molesworths previous works
include a biography of poet
Marianne Moore, two books
of his own poetry, The Heath
Anthology of American Literature
(as editor), and a wide variety
of reviews and articles for the
journal Salmagundi, among oth-
ers. Ably composing everything
from columns on contemporary
art to encyclopedia entries on
postmodernism, Molesworth
in fact embodies the very traits
that Locke once praised in the
American mind: its superb
eclecticism, its voraciousness,
its collectors instinct for facts
and details.
In December 1980, historian
Paul Rahe, then a junior fellow
at Harvards Center for Hellenic
Studies, set out to write a brief
essay comparing the Spartan
Constitution with that of the
United States. Twelve years later,
the essay spanning more than
twelve hundred pages was pub-
lished as Republics Ancient and
Modern: Classical Republicanism
and the American Revolution.
A professor at the University
of Tulsa and the author most
recently of Machiavellis Liberal
Republican Legacy, Rahe takes on
an equally fruitful topic during
his two-month DaimlerChrysler
Fellowship in Berlin. Drawing
on the works of Montesquieu,
Rousseau, and Tocqueville, Rahe
reects on the virtues and defects
of the modern commercial repub-
lic. Though his research may have
a historical bent, his conclusions
are immediately relevant. The
most important question facing
the worlds liberal democracies
writes Rahe, is the one obliquely
posed by Montesquieu and made
more explicit by Rousseau and
Tocqueville: to whit, whether lib-
eral democracies are not by their
nature inclined to drift in the
direction of soft despotism.
In 2002, when artist Kerry
Tribe began approaching
strangers at l ax airport asking
them to draw maps of LA from
memory, she received an odd
range of results. Locals drew
places that had been signicant to
them, charting the progressions
of their lives along with the mazes
of routes. Tourists drew ideas:
the beaches of Baywatch, strewn
with palm trees and sun-dazed
surfers. The combined result
a city simultaneously real and
imagined epitomizes the work
of this years Guna S. Mundheim
Fellow, now in her second semes-
ter of Berlin residence. Tribes
work creates sedimented layers
of the factual and ctional. In
2003, she converted a roadside
bus bench into a sign pointing not
to the nearest freeway entrance
or information center, but rather
to Historical Amnesia. In her
2000 project Hothouse, she recon-
structed the seductively articial
environment of LA in a green-
house populated by real plants
carrying fantastic names like
Sensation cosmos, Imagination
verbena, Celebrity tomato, and
34 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
Showing watermelon. Tribes
gently humorous ironies create
works that are contemplative and
clever, works that disrupt the pat-
terns of everyday public life and,
as reected in the title of her 2002
video projection, exist simultane-
ously Here & Elsewhere.
The United Nations will elect a
new Secretary General in 2007.
In preparation for the upcom-
ing turnover, George H.W. Bush
Fellow Ruth Wedgwood will
spend a month at the Academy
laying out a hypothetical agenda
for the incoming secretary.
Seeing the change in power as
a chance to reform an organi-
zation troubled by ineffective
peacekeeping, shaky legitimacy,
and internal corruptions, the
legal scholar will ask what path
the UN can take to reafrm the
efcacy of international action.
Wedgwood, Edward B. Burling
Professor of International Law
and Diplomacy at Johns Hopkins
Universitys Nitze School, antici-
pates Darwinian conclusions.
The maintenance of some organi-
zations may require that they face
competition from the outside, in
order to encourage adaptive deci-
sions, she writes. Wedgwood
comes to the Academy well-
equipped to dispense such advice:
a commentator for the bbc, npr,
and msnbc as well as a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and a US member of the
Human Rights Committee, her
highly regarded work in interna-
tional law spans both the academ-
ic and popular spheres.
Poetry is, nally, a family matter,
writes poet Rosanna Warren,
involving the strains of birth, love,
power, death, and inheritance.
Indeed, Warrens four volumes
of poetry combine these funda-
mental themes with a plethora of
more nuanced motifs: the allu-
sions in her 2003 collection,
Departure, for example, span from
Virgil to German painter Max
Beckmann, from Cicero to the
twentieth-century composer Leos
Janacek. Anthony Hecht notes
that her probingly inquisitive
poems possess a sense of biloca-
tion, inhabiting the ramshackle
world of everyday loss simulta-
neously with a realm of classi-
cal purity. Warrens project at
the Academy this spring as Ellen
Maria Gorrissen Fellow spans
this same range of the classical
and colloquial. The chancellor of
the American Academy of Poets
and professor of the humanities at
Boston University plans to spend
her semester composing both a
series of poems based around the
four classical elements earth,
wind, re, and water and a set
of more personal poetic memoirs.
A recipient of the Pushcart Prize
and a former Guggenheim fellow,
Warren is also a painter, critic,
editor, biographer, and adept
translator whether of French
romantics into English interpre-
tations or, as in her own poetry,
lyric traditions into personal
experience.
Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn
To say that Jerry Muller is
interested in many things is a
gross understatement. Muller
is passionately eager to know
about things, practically all
things, but especially those he is
working on. His curiosity is for-
midable, so intense that it bor-
ders on brusqueness. When you
tell him a story about his cur-
rent subject, or if you give him
information on an object of his
desire, he will hardly comment
on it or show you his appre-
ciation. He will absorb it for a
moment and you can actu-
ally watch this process of diges-
tion and then immediately ask
for more, sometimes switching
over quite abruptly to another
topic. The knowledge inherent
in his questions is vast.
An intellectual historian and
professor of history at Catholic
University in Washington DC,
Muller studied at Brandeis and
Columbia, where he worked with
Fritz Stern, for whom he co-edited
an appreciation on his mentors
seventieth birthday, ten years
ago. His latest book is The Mind
and the Market: Capitalism in
Modern European Thought. Other
books include Conservatism: An
Anthology of Social and Political
Thought From David Hume to the
Present (1997) and a study of Adam
Smith (1995). In 1987, with The
Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer
and the Deradicalization of German
Conservatism, Muller explored a
German subject in some depth.
Freyer is now almost forgotten in
Germany, but before Hitlers rise
to power and in the rst years of
the Third Reich he was prominent
as a proponent of the so-called
conservative revolution. Muller
approached his subject in the
mode of representative biogra-
phy; Freyer interested him more
for what he stood for in German
society than in what he actually
created. Incredibly, Freyer still
exerted despite his involvement
with the Nazis considerable
inuence in the 1950s. But the
1950s were a very strange decade
in modern German history.
The 1950s were what Germans
call spieig stuffy, repressed, nar-
row-minded, pusillanimous and
most important, far from acknowl-
edging what Hitler and National
Socialism had done in Germanys
name. This reckoning came very
late, only in the second half of the
1960s, and the violent reaction of
the 68ers against the collective
denial of the German society of
that time may be their only claim
to fame. But a claim it certainly
is. The subject of Mullers cur-
rent project, Jacob Taubes, was in
the thick of it, less for his writing
than for his powerful personality.
A man of enormous vitality and
appetite for life, Taubes seemed to
know everybody and loved to con-
nect people. He taught theology
and Jewish studies in Jerusalem
and Berlin at that time, and he
was married to Margherita von
Brentano, with whom I studied
philosophy. So I met Taubes now
and then. She was a revered teach-
er cool, reserved, good looking
and everybody wondered what she
saw in this wild man. Why in the
world did she marry him? I am
sure Muller will solve this enigma
like so many other questions sur-
rounding Jacob Taubes.
As in the case of his Hans Freyer
project, Jerry Muller has found
a rather obscure but enormously
interesting representative of his
time, or better, a kind of fulcrum.
There can be no doubt that this will
be a most interesting book.
Arnulf Conradi
Jerry Z.
Muller
An Intellectual Biographer
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Alumni
Books
New Releases
Daniel Benjamin
The Next Attack: the Failure of the
War on Terror and a Strategy for
Getting it Right, with Steve Simon
Times Books (October 2005)
Judith Butler
Giving an Account of Oneself
Fordham University Press
(October 2005)
T.J. Clark
Sight of Death
Yale University Press (May)
Sue De Beer
Downtown Arts Projects
(October 2005)
Aris Fioretos
The Truth About Sascha Knisch
Jonathan Cape (March)
Jenny Holzer
Xenon for Duisburg: the Power
of Words
Hatje Cantz Publishers (January)
Thomas Geoghegan
The Law in Shambles
Prickly Paradigm Press
(October 2005)
Alex Katz
Collages
Colby College Museum of Art
(February)
Jytte Klausen
The Islamic Challenge: Politics and
Religion in Western Europe
Oxford University Press
(December 2005)
John Koethe
Sallys Hair: Poems
HarperCollins (March)
Also by John Koethe
Scepticism, Knowledge, and
Forms of Reasoning
Cornell University Press
(January)
Walter Laqueur
The Changing Face of Anti-
Semitism
Oxford University Press (May)
Wendy Lesser
The Pagoda in the Garden
Other Press (October 2005)
Michael Meltsner
The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer
University of Virginia Press (April)
Sigrid Nunez
The Last of Her Kind
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(January)
Saskia Sassen
Territory, Authority, Rights: From
Medieval to Global Assemblages
Princeton University Press (April)
Richard Sennett
The Culture of the New Capitalism
Yale University Press (January)
David Warsh
Knowledge and the Wealth of
Nations: A Story of Economic
Discovery
W.W. Norton (May)
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Realisierungswettbewerb Topographie des Terrors 10. Mrz 17. April 2006
Ausstellung der Wettbewerbsarbeiten Veranstalter: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors Berlin und Bundesamt fr Bauwesen und Raumordnung
Robert Polidori Fotografien 17. Mrz 26. Juni 2006 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele in Zusammenarbeit mit Camerawork
Barock im Vatikan Kunst und Kultur im Rom der Ppste
12. April 10. Juli 2006 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele und Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn
Ermglicht in Berlin durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds
gyptens versunkene Schtze 13. Mai 4. September 2006
Veranstalter: Franck Goddio mit Untersttzung der Hilti Arts & Culture in Kooperation mit den Berliner Festspielen
Martin Munkacsi Fotografien Die groe Retrospektive 5. August 6. November 2006
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The Berlin Journal 37
The historian is often just a
messenger, albeit one who selects
and delivers his messages with
great care. Fritz Stern waited ten
years before publishing an aston-
ishing comment that Raymond
Aron once made to him in con-
versation: It could have become
Germanys century. This remark-
able use of the subjunctive, often
cited since, reects a retrospective
optimism about the beginning of
a century that was instead marked
by battleelds and horror.
Aron, the great French philoso-
pher and political scientist, knew
that only a liberal historian who
had not allowed himself to be
demoralized by totalitarianisms
triumphs would have appreci-
ated his point. There had been
opportunities for liberal politics
in Germany at decisive crossroads
during the century. They were
lost. But the country marked by
an expanding economy, spiritual
A Celebration of Scholarship
Trustee Fritz Stern Turns Eighty
exibility, and intellectual achieve-
ment at the end of the nineteenth
century had met many, if not all,
of the prerequisites for developing
in a liberal direction. This is why
Fritz Stern speaks eagerly of the
Federal Republic as Germanys
second chance.
Historians are cautious about
using the subjunctive, at least
in the optimistic mode. How, to
quote the title of a 1998 German
collection of Sterns essays, can
contemplating Verspielte Gre
(greatness gambled away) soothe
our sense of wasted opportuni-
ties? Born in Breslau, Stern was
forced to leave Germany with his
parents in 1938. He was twelve.
Naturalized in the US, he studied
at Columbia University, where he
earned his Ph.D. and taught for
most of his career right up until
becoming professor emeritus.
His rst work was The Politics of
Cultural Despair (1961), which the
TLS named one of the hundred
most inuential books published
since 1945. In his portraits of three
powerful gures of anti-liberal cul-
tural criticism Paul de Lagarde,
Julius Langbehn, and Moeller van
den Bruck Stern explored the
incubation of German national
and totalitarian ideologies. The
books title refers to the process by
which the eras liberal accomplish-
ments were endangered by the
panic and rebellion unleashed by
modern commercial society. The
men he proled were outsiders to
liberal culture, men inclined to
prophetic pronouncements who
dared to leap into a new aestheti-
cized form of politics one forged
in the Nietzschean atmosphere
that also characterized Stefan
Georges circle.
In his distinctive style of his-
torical portraiture, Stern went on
to write Gold and Iron (1977), his
monumental double biography of
Bismarck and Gerson Bleichrder,
Bismarcks Jewish banker. Golo
Mann praised the books depth of
perspective and coherence, call-
ing it a triumph of impartial, real
history. The gure of Bleichrder,
who, despite his incredible inu-
ence over the empire, could never
free himself from the shadow of
his Jewish background, embodies
the German-Jewish relationship
prior to World War I.
Sterns many essays and lec-
tures, published in several col-
lections, also use biography as a
window through which to view the
twentieth century. These works
include portraits of Germans and
German Jews, politicians and
scientists, from Walter Rathenau
and Ernst Reuter to Max Planck,
Albert Einstein (whom Stern met
as a young man), and Fritz Haber,
his godfather. The Nobel Prize-
winning chemist Habers many
accomplishments were overshad-
owed by his development of poison
gas during World War I, the imple-
mentation of which he personally
oversaw at Ypern. The man who
had gone to such lengths to ensure
Germanys survival and victory in
World War I was friends with the
pacist Einstein. Ultimately, both
experienced a brutal end to their
lives as Germans and were forced
to emigrate. Biography brings to
light tragedy too often absent in
the documentation of history.
It is characteristic of Sterns
relationship to German history
that he referred to the cultural pes-
simists of his rst book as his peo-
ple, which is by no means the case.
And yet, the cultural pessimists
were trusted partners in a dialogue
about the subliminal causes of the
hatred of liberal culture, a problem
not unique to Germany. Soon after
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38 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
The road back to Nuremberg
begins with a detour via the
German Federal Ministry of
Justice on Mohrenstrae in down-
town Berlin and the American
Academy on the Wannsee. The
ministry was a tting site for a
day-long conference, organized by
Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries
and the American Academys
director Gary Smith, commemo-
rating the sixtieth anniversary of
the beginning of the Nuremberg
Trials. Lawyers, judges, and politi-
cians discussed lessons for the
future that could be drawn from
Nurembergs judicial discourse
on crimes against humanity.
Numerous international tribunal
lawyers and political gures were
present, including Judge Hans-
Peter Kaul from the International
Criminal Court, Hildegard Uertz-
Retzlaff and Albin Eser from the
International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia, and for-
mer US Ambassador to Germany
John C. Kornblum.
That evening, at the American
Academy on the Wannsee, Presi-
dent of the International Criminal
Court Philippe Kirsch provided
a concise sketch of the icc and
described its task as part of a
larger whole. One need not estab-
lish further ad hoc tribunals, he
said, but the many other alterna-
tive mechanisms of international
criminal justice from truth-and-
reconciliation commissions to
internationalized special courts
require further evaluation. In
the discussion that followed,
Academy fellow Ralf Michaels
asked whether international
criminal laws agenda of judicial
peace-building embodied in the
ad hoc tribunals for the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as
in the iccs institutional design
is perhaps a few sizes too large for
the law. How can a selective inter-
national prosecution that often
considers the historical investiga-
tion of the crimes context more
than the atonement for individual
wrong achieve the fundamentally
political goal of long-term recon-
ciliation and pacication? Kirsch
made clear that the icc is not a
political organ. The imperative of
fairness is deeply engraved in the
Courts statute. Kirsch, referring
to the principle of complementar-
ity embodied in the Rome Statute,
emphasized that prosecution lies
rst and foremost in the hands of
the domestic systems. In an ideal
world the icc would not have
any work to do. It is only there if
national systems do not do their
jobs.
Hans Corell, the former Under-
Secretary-General for Legal
Affairs and Legal Counsel of the
United Nations, added a calm but
sure footnote to Kirschs keynote
speech, reminding the audience
of the transience of hegemony
and recommending that all self-
aware advocates of superpower
politics pay a visit to Berlins
Pergamon Museum, where they
might meditate on the remains of
Babylons once-grand Ishtar gate.
Corell probed further, asking
where international criminal jus-
tice will be in twenty years, when
the world might be dominated by
the now awakening global power
of China. China has yet to sign
and ratify the Rome Statute, but
Beijing has reiterated, in prin-
ciple, its support for the establish-
Sterns rst book appeared in the
early 1960s, a new form of despair
became apparent in the youth
movements of the day. In recent
years, Stern has become a relent-
less critic of changes in American
politics, reproaching the country
for betraying its liberal tradition.
He has often shown a clairvoyance
that cannot simply be dismissed
as the heightened sensitivity of
a historian of twentieth-century
Germany. Sterns reections on
German history are bold and
unique, and, among other dis-
tinctions, were recognized by the
award of the German Peace Prize
from the German Publisher and
Booksellers Trade Organization
in 1999.
Stern describes hearing a
speech by Theodor Heuss on
June 20, 1954, the tenth anniver-
sary of the attempt to assassinate
Hitler, as a turning point in his
relationship with Germany. Since
then he has followed the Federal
Republics history as a participat-
ing observer. He sees reunication,
which he anticipated in a 1987
speech in front of the Bundestag,
not only as a reinforcement of
Germanys second chance but
as a second recognition. One is
tempted to say that there has never
been so much Germany in a single
life as in the life of this prolic his-
torian, who entitled his autobiogra-
phy Five Germanys I Have Known.
By Henning Ritter
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
February 2, 2006
Translated by Andrea F. Bohlman
ment of the icc, most recently in
last summers position paper on
United Nations reform.
Throughout the evening on
the Wannsee, one could hear the
moderate murmuring of the law
behind the loud rumblings of
imperial realpolitik. International
law must be committed to preven-
tion and prosecution as well as to
permanent conict resolution and
detailed reconstruction of histori-
cal events. The reality has yet to
match the aspirations.
From a report by Alexandra
Kemmerer
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
November 24, 2005
Translated by Andrea F. Bohlman
After Nuremberg
The Future of International Criminal Justice
Call for Applications
The American Academy will accept
applications this summer and fall
from scholars, writers, and profes-
sionals who wish to engage in inde-
pendent study in Berlin during the
20072008 academic year. Most
Berlin Prizes are for a single aca-
demic semester and include a month-
ly stipend, round-trip airfare, partial
board, and a furnished apartment at
the Hans Arnhold Center. Application
forms and information will be avail-
able on the Academys website
(www.americanacademy.de) start-
ing June 5. Only US citizens or per-
manent residents are eligible to apply.
Applications are due in Berlin on
Monday October 16, 2006 and will be
reviewed by an independent selection
committee following a rigorous peer
review process. The Berlin Prizes will
be announced in the spring of 2007.
Judge Patricia Wald, Ambassador John Kornblum, and ICC President Philippe Kirsch
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Off the Record,
on the Wannsee
Karen Hughes Visits the Academy
Karen Hughes is the Bush
administrations secret weapon.
Until 2002 she was one of George
W. Bushs closest advisors and
played an instrumental role in
packaging his messages. After
some time off in Texas, she
returned to Washington last year
to become the State Departments
top PR person. Shortly after, Dick
Cheney offered her his condolenc-
es for having taken on the adminis-
trations toughest job. It is an anec-
dote Hughes likes to recount.
Hughes is said to sometimes
sound like a drill sergeant, but in
her new role as undersecretary of
state for public diplomacy she has
learned to listen. Certainly, those
who attended Tuesdays off-the-
record roundtable at the American
Academy on the sticking points in
the transatlantic relationship were
convinced. Because the event was
deep background, I can only say
that Guantnamo was a hot-button
topic that afternoon.
Those present representa-
tives from Germanys media, busi-
ness, political, and think tank
worlds described in vivid terms
the difculty of defending the US
these days. Although the way in
which international law intersects
with international terrorism may
be far more complex than the
German public typically acknowl-
edges, most of the participants
agreed that Guantnamo has come
to symbolize both the arrogance
of American unilateralism and the
countrys human rights double
standard. As one attendee aptly
phrased it, Face it, you have lost
this one.
In Germany, we often hear
from our American friends that
German-American ties have been
preserved at the think tank level
and in the lower tiers of govern-
ment unlike in France, where
nobody even tries to impact
American public opinion. As the
Munich Conference on Security
Policy showed, policy makers on
both sides realize that the West
cannot afford to be divided in fac-
ing todays global challenges. But
there is a hitch, especially on the
German side: what foreign policy
expert is brave enough to aggres-
sively promote this position in
the public realm? As most parlia-
mentarians and members of the
administration know, in the cur-
rent climate any demonstration of
accord with the US is a tough sell
to the voting public and the largely
anti-American media.
Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib
are weighty reasons for this cli-
mate of difdence toward the US.
We are a far remove from the cold-
war sentimentality that marked
the last generation of foreign
policy experts. Now we must pro-
mote our tangible world interests.
An outstanding class of schol-
ars and artists will reside at
the Hans Arnhold Center next
fall. It includes the Washington
Post writer and editor Anne
Applebaum, composer
Stephen Hartke, Stanford
Law professor Lawrence
Lessig, novelist Susanna
Moore, archaeologist
Charles Brian Rose of
the University of Pennsylvania,
Sheil a Weiss of Clarksons
Sneak Preview
The Fall 2006 Fellows
history department, and
classics professor Dimitrios
Yatromanol akis of Johns
Hopkins University.
Bosch Prizes in Public Policy
were awarded to anthropologist
Esra Ozyurek of the University
of California, San Diego;
Phillip Phan of the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute; and
Jonathan Tucker, a senior
research fellow at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies.
The Guna S. Mundheim
Fellow in the Visual Arts will be
announced shortly.
The 20062007 Berlin Prizes
were awarded by an independent
selection committee chaired
by University of Pennsylvania
legal scholar Stephen
Burbank. Committee mem-
bers were Princeton musicolo-
gist Carolyn Abbate; poetry
scholar and retired Guggenheim
Foundation president Joel
Conarroe; University of
Chicago historian and former
Academy fellow Michael
Geyer; Princeton historian
Anthony Grafton; histo-
rian Dagmar Herzog of the
CUNY Graduate Center; James
Hoge of the Council on Foreign
Relations; Princeton German
literature professor Michael
Jennings; art historian Molly
Nesbit of Vassar College; jour-
nalist and Academy alumna
Amit y Shl aes; and former
Academy fellow Ronald Steel
of the University of Southern
Californias department of politi-
cal science. Alex Ross and Joel
Lester selected the composer in
residence.
The art jury was comprised
of curators Chrissie Iles,
Larissa Harris, and Ann
Temkin and painters John
Moore and Alex Katz.
And these would, I am convinced,
be far better served by working
with the US than with some other
world power, be it China or Russia.
Guantnamo is a moral problem,
but it is also a problem of realpo-
litik, one that prevents the West
from putting forward its common
values and interests in a robust
way. My impression was that Karen
Hughes grasped this message.
Whether she can convince the
White House is another question.
by Clemens Wergin
Der Tagesspiegel Online
February 23, 2006
Karen Hughes, Gary Smith, Jrg Lau, and Colleen Graffy
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41 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
The Inverted Constitution
Presidential Hegemony and the Eclipse of Privacy
by Laurence H. Tribe
national character after the Bush adminis-
tration twisted it beyond recognition at Abu
Ghraib and in Katrina, repeatedly incant-
ing the phony case for making war on Iraq
and obscenely exploiting the tragedy of
September 11 to excuse governing by fear
in the name of a potentially endless war on
global terrorism would be challenging
enough even if the judicial branch were in
the hands of jurists so wise as not always to
be certain they are right, so perceptive as to
discern the principles a living Constitution
does not always etch in stone, and so coura-
geous that they would not hesitate to defend
principle when the political branches bend
too shamelessly to expediency.
Would that the US Supreme Court as cur-
rently composed could be counted on to play
that role: to resist, even and perhaps espe-
cially during what the president insists is a
time of war, the tyrannical concentration of
power in any institution representing at
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The Berlin Journal 53
all three. Forgetting was not simply conve-
nient in postwar France; it was a legal obli-
gation. The amnesty laws of 1951 and 1953
stipulated that no further legal actions could
be brought against French citizens for their
behavior during the occupation. But forget-
ting worked less well in post-Ptain France
than in post-Franco Spain, where there had
been no foreign occupier and no participa-
tion in the Holocaust. After the social tur-
moil of 1968, young people wanted to know
what their parents had done during the war,
and Jewish victims wanted their say. The
attendant shift from forgetting to almost
obsessive preoccupation with Vichy has
been masterfully analyzed by Henry Rousso
in The Vichy Syndrome (1991).
Liberated France also administered
retributive justice. It is often forgotten how
broadly and how severely collaborators and
proteers were punished in France after
the liberation. The major cases were tried
before special courts, and purge commit-
tees weeded less prominent perpetrators
out of the professions and the civil service.
From 1945 to 1951 about 1,500 people were
executed, almost forty thousand were sen-
tenced to prison, and one hundred thousand
others were deprived of position, rank, or
civil rights not counting about nine thou-
sand suspected collaborators summarily
executed during the chaos of the liberation.
The French executed proportionally more
collaborators than other Western occupied
countries, but imprisoned fewer. The purge
process was ended, as already indicated, by
amnesty laws in 1951 and 1953. It had sat-
ised no one, however. While it had been
extensive enough to arouse protests, even
among former resisters, it had been uneven.
Whereas businessmen, for example, gener-
ally escaped, journalists and intellectuals,
whose words had been public, were severely
punished. Moreover, the fate of the Jews,
while not ignored in the postwar purge, had
far less salience than it would later gain.
F
rench opinion underwent a tectonic
shift at the end of the 1960s. The
celebrated May 1968 occupations of
campuses and workplaces served to
intensify and focus deeper social and cul-
tural changes already underway. A new gen-
eration learned to reject their elders views
on practically everything, including World
War II. Jewish victims, many of whom had
wanted normalcy more than retribution in
1945, now wanted to tell their children and
their neighbors what they had suffered. Led
by the efforts of the attorney Serge Klarsfeld
to bring to center stage the Vichy French
contribution to the Holocaust, the French
judiciary, supported by an important part
of public opinion, embarked (uniquely in
Europe) on a second round of prosecutions
of French citizens for wartime behavior.
This time the charge was crimes against
humanity (not subject in Europe to time
limitations) and the issue was complicity
in the Nazi murder of the Jews. A former
supplementary policeman, Paul Touvier,
was condemned to life imprisonment in
1994 and a prominent civil servant, Maurice
Papon, to ten years of prison in 1997.
The same shift of opinion affected the
teaching and writing of history. After the
Liberation, most French people had accept-
ed a constructed past that lled a number of
emotional and political needs. It portrayed
France as primarily the passive victim of
the Nazi occupation, not as its willing col-
laborator. A spurious image of Vichy as the
shield and de Gaulle as the sword, employed
by Marshal Ptain in his own postwar
defense, gained wide acceptance.
France was seen as largely united
against the occupation, while
only a few ideological fanatics
collaborated. This perspective
was most clearly embodied in
Robert Arons history of Vichy
(1954), a book found in prac-
tically every literate French
household that still shapes popu-
lar thinking about the Ptain
regime today. Arons version
not only provided a ground for
national reconciliation; it was
even plausible, since German
domination and widespread
French resistance did indeed
mark the nal days of the occu-
pation. Vichys early years, how-
ever, had been vastly different,
and Vichy is incomprehensible
without a rm grasp of how the
situation evolved over time.
A new historical interpreta-
tion of Vichy appeared after
1968. It challenged the two basic
assumptions of the Aronian
synthesis: total German domination, and
Vichy passivity. German diktat drove Robert
Arons interpretation, but, curiously, he
knew little about Nazi policy toward France
and showed little curiosity about it. Firm
knowledge of what the Nazi occupiers
wanted was the foundation stone of the new
interpretation. My own work was grounded
in the captured German archives, but I was
far from alone. Eberhard Jckels Frankreich
in Hitlers Europa (1966) was fundamental,
though its French translation (1968) arrived
before the French public was ready for it.
I
n June 1940, Hitler wanted his occu-
pation of France to consume as few
German resources as possible, com-
mitted as he was to invading Britain.
We know his thinking very well, for he
explained it on June 17, 1940 to Mussolini,
who itched to seize the spoils of France at
once. Hitler understood that harsh demands
would provoke the French to continue the
war from overseas; better to leave them a
semblance of sovereignty and let them rule
France themselves; the spoils could wait. At
rst, therefore, Vichy France had consider-
able leeway, and Hitler showed little interest
in how it governed itself as long as nothing
impeded his war effort against Britain.
The Vichy leaders resolved to seize their
opportunity and uproot the discredited
French Republic, even in the presence of
occupation forces. Vichy
thus had its own autono-
mous program, in two parts:
a domestic national revolu-
tion, which replaced the
Republic with a hierarchi-
cal, clerical, militarist state
under the authoritarian rule
of Marshal Ptain; and a for-
eign policy in which a neu-
tral France would seek its
place in Hitlers New Europe,
using its token armed force
to keep the Allies from drag-
ging any French territory
back into the war. Vichys
projects originated more in
interwar French conicts
than in German commands,
at least at rst.
Vichys anti-Jewish mea-
sures are an excellent exam-
ple. Swept by scapegoating
and xenophobia, Vichy
began to legislate against
Jews in August 1940, before
the German occupation
authorities were fully settled. This was not,
as most believed, something the conquerors
forced on France. Far from wanting France
judenrein, Germany wanted in fall 1940 to
use despised France as a dumping ground
for German Jews. Several trainloads of
Rhineland Jews were dispatched into Vichy
France in October 1940, over Ptains stren-
uous protests. In time, it is true, the Nazi
As the British
journalist
Timothy
Garton Ash
once observed,
there are three
ways to deal
with troubling
memories: by
forgetting, by
retributive
justice, and
by the writing
and teaching
of history. The
French have
tried all three.
54 Number Twelve | Spring 2006
occupiers pushed
Vichy toward harsher
anti-Jewish measures, and in spring 1942
they asked for Vichys help as their thin
occupation obliged them to do in carry-
ing out the new Nazi policy of deportation
and extermination. Vichys own autono-
mous anti-Jewish policy had been intended
to reduce Jewish inuence and encourage
Jewish emigration, but the machinery it set
up such as the famous card les of names
and addresses and Vichys determination
to have the French police act as master of
its own house meant that Vichy supplied
indispensable help to the Nazi deportations
of Jews. The most remarkable instance was
the French delivery to the Nazis in August
1942 of ten thousand foreign Jews (many
of them remnants of those unfortunates
expelled from the Rhineland in fall 1940)
from camps in the unoccupied zone, a rare
case (equaled only in Eastern Europe) of
the deportation of Jews from an area not
under direct German occupation. In all,
over 76,000 Jews (a third of them French
citizens) were deported to almost
certain death proportion-
ally fewer than in most Western
European occupied countries,
but far more than the Germans
could have taken alone.
Perceiving Vichy in this
historically more accurate way
exposed the mechanisms where-
by the French administration
became implicated in Nazi atroc-
ities. Article 3 of the Armistice
of June 1940 empowered the
French government to admin-
ister the whole country, includ-
ing the occupied northern half,
subject only to the needs of the
German military. By the onset of
total war after 1941, the German
occupiers steadily increased their
demands, but Vichy struggled
to preserve the ction of its own
sovereignty. Thus, at the very
moment when the deportations of Jews
began, in May 1942, the French police chief,
Ren Bousquet, was negotiating with the SS
commander in France, General Oberg, for
the continued independence of the French
police in return for its active assistance
against Germanys enemies.
According to the new historiography, the
collaborators were no longer limited to a
few ideological zealots. Vichys voluntary
assistance to Nazi projects was a pragmatic
maneuver designed to maximize French
independence in Hitlers Europe. It was
opportunistic, and it involved the cream of
the French administrative and economic
elite, not just fanatical intellectuals. Indeed,
these real French fascists remained mostly
in Paris, on the Nazi payroll, where they
were more noisy than powerful. This oppor-
tunistic state collaboration, visible only
in the new historiography, was the most
numerous and inuential kind of French
collaboration. The two Vichy prime min-
isters, Pierre Laval and Admiral Franois
Darlan, along with Ptain himself, had not
been overtly fascist before the war. They
considered themselves realists who
were willing to do what was necessary to
adapt France to what they regarded as the
inevitable.
A
t times, Vichys participation in the
Holocaust has threatened to over-
whelm every other aspect of its his-
tory. Moreover, the extraordinary
durability of the French obsession with
Vichy, now extended beyond the year 2000
into the third generation, is
surely linked to the issue of
French anti-Semitism. Few
issues are in more urgent
need of calm historical
perspective than French
anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus
Affair (18941906) marked
France indelibly with the
stain of an undeniable tradi-
tion of anti-Semitism. Even
the Dreyfus Affair, however,
considered to the fullest,
displayed the dual nature
of French attitudes toward
Jews. On the one hand,
Captain Dreyfus was one of
a number of Jewish military
ofcers, a state of affairs
reecting Frances pioneer-
ing role as the rst European
country to grant Jews full
citizenship and acceptance
provided that they assimilated themselves
fully into French culture. On the other hand,
an undeniable prejudice widespread in
France (even on the left) and abetted by the
Catholic Church held that Jews were unas-
similable and a danger to the community. In
1906, tolerant France defeated prejudiced
France and Captain Dreyfus was exonerated
of his spurious espionage accusation.
Tolerant France and prejudiced France
contended throughout the twentieth cen-
tury. After a lull following the national
harmony of World War I, anti-Semitism
resurged in 1936 when Jewish refugees
ooded into a hospitable France and Lon
Blum became the rst socialist and the rst
Jewish prime minister. All serious studies
of French public opinion show that anti-
Jewish prejudice has diminished in France
since 1945, if only to be replaced by distrust
of Muslims and Africans. Anyone who has
studied the French 1930s closely will recog-
nize that todays anti-Semitic and negation-
ist literature is nothing compared to the
commonplace and open anti-Jewish lan-
guage of that eras literary and social elite.
Nevertheless, two current develop-
ments have sharpened the issue. After the
Six-Day War of 1967, France, heretofore
one of Israels closest allies, drew closer
to Muslim countries. Later, during the
Intifada, the Palestinians plight aroused
broad sympathy. A great many French peo-
ple doubt that the Arab-Israeli conict can
be settled by force, and consequently dis-
approve of Prime Minister Ariel Sharons
policies. To consider this view anti-Semitic
is to dilute anti-Semitism to the point of
triviality. More gravely, racist acts, ranging
from grafti to the desecration of Jewish
tombs to the appalling kidnapping, torture,
and murder of Ilan Halimi in February
2006, have become notorious. Nearly all
these acts have been committed by root-
less, unemployed youths from immigrant
families, abetted by a few skinheads. Their
number is stable rather than rising, and
they are passionately disavowed by most
French people. They do not contradict the
ndings of most scholars that traditional
anti-Semitism has declined in French pub-
lic opinion, the immigrant communities
excluded, since 1945. These acts reect
the extension onto French soil, where
Europes largest Muslim minority rubs
shoulders with Europes largest Jewish
minority, of the Israeli-Palestinian conict.
Nevertheless, the reprehensible participa-
tion of Vichy France in the deportation of
Jews in 19421944 is the ghost at the ban-
quet. Therefore, even now, sixty years later,
the French obsession with Vichy has not
abated.
und Breitband-Internet-
Verbindung immer auf dem Laufenden. Oder machen Sie es sich
einfach bequem im lngsten Bett seiner Klasse. Danke, dass
Sie Lufthansa Ihr Vertrauen schenken.
www.lufthansa.com
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