Berlin Journal 15

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
THE BERLIN JOURNAL

In this issue:
Stephen Biddle
Anne Carson
Philippe de Montebello
Wolf Lepenies
Amory Lovins
Thomas Powers
Richard Reeves
C. Brian Rose
Helmut Schmidt
Lawrence Wright
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Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | 1he Berlin Journal |
CONTENTS
The Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
German-American Vistas
6 richard reeves looks for Americas
better angels on the eve of the Berlin
Airlifts ftieth anniversary. As a boy
during the cold war he imagined riding to
Germanys rescue on US planes.
13 wolf lepenies takes stock of the
transatlantic relationship in an intellectual
mood of cheerful irony. Is it time to
introduce a little more distance? Self-
criticism on both sides is essential.
21 helmut schmidt recalls his long
friendship with Henry Kissinger and looks
back on fty years of successful American-
German cooperation. Such longstanding
bonds should serve us well during the
current crisis of condence.
Al-Qaeda, Iraq, and the
Middle East
24 lawrence wright answers some
questions about al-Qaeda, Iran, and the
prospects for civil society in the Middle
East. How will things look in ten years?
28 stephen biddle believes powerful US
leverage is the only way to bring Iraqs
warring factions to the negotiating table.
But a system of threats and incentives will
be a tough sell, both in Baghdad and in
Washington.
N1 On the Waterfront
The Academys newsletter in a special
section, with the latest on fellows and
friends as well as reports from the
Hans Arnhold Center.
Preserving the Past
33 philippe de montebello describes
acquiring antiquities in the age of heritage
laws and puts the debate over cultural
ownership into historical perspective.
38 c. brian rose gives basic archaeological
training to US troops before they ship
out to the Fertile Crescent. How, in a time
of war, can traces of the worlds oldest
civilizations be preserved and kept off
the black market?
Energy Efficiency
42 amory lovins sees a protable solution
to the problems of oil shortage, climate
change, and nuclear proliferation. There
is exactly enough time to save the planet
starting now.
Sioux Resistance
47 thomas powers explains the hostility
of Sioux Indian chief Sitting Bull and his
tribesmen to US government overtures
in the 1870s. Cultural differences on the
Great Plains cut both ways.
Prometheus Bound
52 anne carson shares the opening lines of
her new translation of Aeschyluss tragedy.
The poet takes inspiration from hip-hop
and injects it into the realm of the Greek
Chorus.
53 Donations to the Academy

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FAZAL SHEIKH, PORTRAIT OF GHOLAM SADIQ, 1998
a 1he Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
DIRECTORS NOTE
Berlin Unbound
R
eaders may wonder what the Danish-Icelandic
artist Olafur Eliasson is doing on the cover of the
American Academys magazine. There is an easy
answer in addition, of course, to the luminous beauty of
Eliassons work: Berlin is an emphatically international city,
and nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the arts.
Serious galleries now line the citys back streets, provid-
ing fertile hunting grounds for collectors betting on present
and future artistic trends. Edgy performance spaces like
Radialsystem V have proliferated, thanks to city subsidies and
audiences open to experimentation. At the Staatsoper and the
Berlin Philharmonic, Daniel Barenboim and Sir Simon Rattle
two decidedly international maestros are expanding the
musical scope of audiences and performers in unaccustomed
ways. Both understand that the new Berlin is very different
from the Berlin of Furtwngler and von Karajan. The city still
bears traces of what Fritz Stern calls the ve Germanys but is
above all characterized by an openness to the unnished, the
experimental and, most of all, to the rest of the world.
Ever since the heady days and nights of winter 1989, many
have wondered if the worlds fascination with Berlin would sus-
tain itself. No one would contest that the inux of young artists
has been helped by an abundance of inexpensive housing. But
they are also lured by Berlins role in the history of the avant-
garde. Chagall, Lissitzky, and others had their rst major exhi-
bitions here before World War I at Herwarth Waldens legend-
ary gallery Der Sturm. That was before almost seven decades
of totalitarianism and isolation made the city into a provincial
backwater. Today, Berlin has again become a centripetal
force for cultural migration. For the fellows of the American
Academy, part of what makes the city so inspiring is its palpable
yearning for cosmopolitanism a yearning to return to the cre-
ative tradition of Lissitzky, Mendelsohn, Benjamin, and Grosz.
One of the Academys very rst guests, the playwright
Arthur Miller, was amused to be asked time and again to com-
pare Berlin to New York an expression of cosmopolitan desire
if there ever was one. The artists, writers, scholars, and policy
analysts who come to the Hans Arnhold Centers lakeside
retreat encounter the citys intense interest in their work, ideas,
and ways of thinking. Berlins openness to the world will long
sustain its attractiveness. It is a consequence both of the citys
discontinuities and its determination to build upon the best of
its history. Gary Smith
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
A Magazine from the Hans Arnhold
Center published twice a year by the
American Academy in Berlin
Number Fifteen Fall 2007
PUBLISHER Gary Smith
EDITOR Miranda Robbins
MANAGING EDITOR Rachel Marks
EDITORIAL INTERNS
Samantha Ferrell and Rachel Nolan
ADVERTISING Coralie Wrner
DESIGN Susanna Dulkinys and
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Verwendungszweck: Berlin Journal
Copyright 2007 The American
Academy in Berlin
ISSN 1610-6490
Cover: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather
Project, 2003 (The Unilever Series,
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London).
Courtesy of the artist; Tanya
Bonakdar, New York; and
neugerriemschneider, Berlin;
photograph by Andrew Dunkley and
Marcus Leith.
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6 1he Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
ONE C-54
EVERY NINETY SECONDS
How the Berlin Airlift broke the Soviet blocade
by Richard Reeves
Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | 1he Berlin Journal | y
I
spent the bet ter part of the last
twenty years researching and writing
a trilogy on the American presidency,
doing books on John F. Kennedy, Richard
Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. I knew I had
said what I had to say on all that. I had to
nd some new subjects. At the same time,
I continued writing a syndicated column
for newspapers around the country, an
exercise that kept me up on the politics and
people of the day and of the twenty-rst
century. I was not happy many of those
days. My country was becoming, or being
seen as, arrogant, self-righteous, and bru-
tal a monster using its very substantial
power to try to enforce a new order, a kind
of neo-imperialism. Of course, we meant
well; Americans usually do. After all, didnt
these people want to be like us?
It seemed they didnt. I have traveled
enough and lived enough places to feel the
resentment, even hatred, of people who had
been told America was the height of disin-
terested good as long as things went our
way. I was taken by a line in a not-very-good
2003 movie called Head of State, in which
the comedian Chris Rock played a black
Washington city councilman running for
president against a self-satised senator
who ended each speech by saying, God
bless America. And no one else!
Was that the America I grew up in? The
question bothered me, and so did the fact
that I had no idea for a new book. That was
my state of mind when I picked up Tony
Judts excellent book Postwar, subtitled
A History of Europe Since 1945, published in
2005. On page 146, I read this:
As the Soviet troops tightened their con-
trol over surface connections into the city,
the American and British governments
decided upon an airlift to provision their
own zones and on June 26, the rst trans-
port plane landed at Tempelhof aireld in
West Berlin. The Berlin Airlift lasted until
May 29, 1949. Over those eleven months,
the Western Allies shipped some 2.3 mil-
lion tons of food on 277,500 ights at the
cost of the lives of 73 Allied airmen.
Stalins purpose in blockading Berlin
was to force the West to choose between
quitting the city or else abandoning its
plans for a separate West German state.
In the end he secured neither objective.
That was about it. I was surprised. I
thought there would be much more. I was
11 years old when the Airlift began, as
thrilled by the action as only a small boy
could be. I thought I was on those planes
far away, riding to the rescue of innocent
people. Of course Berliners were not that
innocent, but that just made the effort
more heroic to an American kid.
I next checked David McCulloughs
1,100-page biography, Truman. There was
not much more, though he did record
President Trumans dramatic words after
he was briefed on what seemed to be the
impossible position of the Allies under
virtual siege, surrounded by more than
300,000 Soviet combat troops: We stay in
Berlin, period.
And so we (and the British) did.
McCullough asserted that the Airlift was
never very far from Trumans mind, but
there were only a few more passing refer-
ences before he concluded that it was one
of Trumans proudest decisions, strongly
affecting the morale of Western, non-com-
munist Europe, and the whole course of
the Cold War.
I asked a few friends what they remem-
bered about the Airlift. People my age
generally responded by asking when it
happened. (The 1960s, wasnt it?) People
forget. Many thought the Soviet blockade
of 1948 was the same as the building of the
Wall in 1961. I generally responded by bab-
bling on about the young men (and some
women) pulled away from their lives, their
wives, their schools, their work for the sec-
ond time in ve or six years this time to
feed the people they had been trying to kill,
and who had been trying to kill them, only
three years earlier.
Edwin Gere, a B-24 pilot who bombed
Japanese cities during the war, had just
enrolled for graduate studies in history
at the University of Connecticut. He was
woken by the telephone one of those sum-
mer mornings in 1948. Lieutenant Gere?
asked a pleasant female voice. You have a
telegram from the Air Force. Ill read it and
send it right on to you. By direction of the
President, you are ordered to active duty
for the Berlin Airlift, reporting to Camp
Kilmer, New Jersey
The calls were being answered all across
the country by veterans demobilized in
1946 or 1947, many of them pilots who
had bombed Berlin and other German
targets. Noah Thompson, a Vermont
farmer and a proud new father, was called
on July 30. He kissed his wife Betty and
baby Glenn and left the next day. Five days
later, as Lt. Thompson again, he was ying
over Germany, past cities he had bombed
Leipzig, Merseburg, Zeitz, Halle think-
ing of friends who never made it home. The
pilot who had bunked next to him in 1945,
Lt. Don Dennis, was beaten to death by
civilians after he parachuted to the ground
below. That was the great fear of Allied air-
men at the end of the war: to be set upon
by civilians, enraged by constant bombing,
with clubs, pitchforks, and dogs.
Many of those men hated Germans,
which was not hard for Americans. Even
at the age of eight or nine thats what I had
been taught. Now, as civilians and reserv-
ists, they were getting telegrams to report
immediately to Air Force bases. After a cou-
ple of months those with no four-engine
experience went to Great Falls, Montana,
to learn how to y C-54 passenger planes
and practice instrument take-offs and land-
ings at a quickly built plywood replica of
Tempelhof. The weather was usually lousy
in both Great Falls and Berlin, and the
approach was an air alley over a cemetery
between seven-story apartment buildings.
Two or three weeks of training and they
were off to the American base at Rhein-
Main outside Frankfurt. tdy, they were
told Temporary Duty, ninety days at the
most. Jobs were lost, marriages broke up,
mortgages went unpaid. One of the prob-
lems: the civilians called up were away for
a year or more. Some could not remember
where they had parked their cars when they
nally got back home.
It was not only pilots. Calls were made to
mechanics, truck drivers, cooks, and mete-
orologists. There were 570 weathermen
ordered to Germany. Roger Moser, a DC-3
pilot during the war the rst planes in
the Airlift were 1930s-design C-47s called
Gooney Birds had become certied as
an air trafc controller at Washingtons
National Airport. About 19 of us volun-
teered on August 31 in Washington, New
York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati,
Detroit,

Chicago, Jacksonville, and Miami
and were immediately ordered to active
duty for ninety days. My group arrived in
Germany on Saturday, September 4.

TDY, THEY WERE TOLD TEMPORARY DUTY
NINETY DAYS AT THE MOST. BUT THEY WERE GONE A YEAR. JOBS WERE
LOST. MARRIAGES BROKE UP. MORTGAGES WENT UNPAID.

B
P
K
He landed his rst planes that next Monday,
at the beginning of a 12-hour shift hunched
over radar scopes in a rolling control ofce
at the end of a runway.
I
decided I wanted to write a book
about all this and was lucky enough
to have an editor, Alice Mayhew of
Simon & Schuster, who thought that was
a good idea. I hoped, rather romantically,
that the Airlift was what I thought it was
as a boy and that the better angels of the
American nature and character hovered over
the men and women who made it happen.
I still hope so. The book is very much
a work in progress, but as I read more and
sought out veterans of what the Air Force
called Operation Vittles, I quickly real-
ized that Americans were hardly alone in
this great effort. The British, who called it,
with double meaning, Plane Fare, carried
almost one-third of the lifesaving freight
and lost more airmen than the Americans.
Many of the mechanics who kept the planes
ying were Germans. The people who load-
ed and unloaded planes were from all over
Europe, and so were the men and women
who did the heavy lifting on endless run-
way maintenance and construction.
I write narrative history, so I needed
characters and there were plenty, begin-
ning with Truman and Stalin. At the time,
Allied ofcials could only guess the Soviet
leaders role and tactics in the blockade.
Now we know that on March 19, 1948, East
German communist leaders had told him
not only that the Western candidates would
win the citywide election scheduled for
October, but that Allied plans to introduce
a new, separate currency in West Germany
would destroy what was left of the East
German economy. The Soviets printed
stacks of Occupation Reichmarks, which
had already lost most of their face value
and led to black markets where the usual
currency was American cigarettes. Stalins
response was: Lets make a joint effort.
Perhaps we can kick them out.
In fact, the distribution of new Western
Deutschmarks was announced on June 20,
1948, and four days later the Soviets block-
aded all land and water routes into Berlins
western sectors, leaving West Berlin an
island in a Red sea accessible from the
West only by air.
On the scene, then, were actors report-
ing to Truman, Stalin, and British Prime
Minister Clement Attlee. General Lucius
Clay, the courtly descendant of Henry
Clay, was the top American ofcial in
Berlin, and General Vassily Skolovsky was
the Soviet commander. Then there were:
Colonel Frank Howley, the hot-head, com-
munist-hating US troop commander of
Berlin; General Curtis LeMay, the architect
of the Allied bombing of Germany, now
the European commander of the brand
new United States Air Force. (Before 1947,
planes and the men who ew and main-
tained them were part of the US Army.)
The dominant British character, at least at
the creation, was the steadfast foreign min-
ister, Ernest Bevin, one of the many who
could be credited with coming up with the
idea of supplying Berlin by air. And then,
most importantly, there were the Berliners
themselves on both sides of the city, rst
among them the ex-communist mayor,
a protg of Lenin himself, Ernst Reuter.
Great characters. Men of history. They
are easy to nd, in diaries and memoirs,
lms, military records, transcripts, letters,
interviews. It is harder, but more rewarding,
to collect the stories of the uncelebrated
airmen, mechanics, weathermen, ground
controllers, and uncommon laborers who
were among the 60,000 men and women
who kept the Airlift going for 322 days until
the Soviets backed down in May of 1949.
Reading through records and hanging
around at meetings of the Berlin Airlift
Veterans Association in the US and the
British Berlin Airlift Association produced
some of those stories, but there are more
out there. What was it like to be one of the
17,000 German women and men, wear-
ing whatever clothes they had, using the
rubble of the bombed city to build a new
aireld at Tegel in just 92 days? It was an
unforgettable sight, said Colonel Theodore
Milton, who had been a B-17 pilot bomb-
ing Berlin. Women in high heels pushing
heavy wheelbarrows; men who looked like
doctors or professors and probably were,
wielding shovels. What was it like to be
one of the Luftwaffe mechanics recruited
and retrained by the Allies to keep Douglas
C-54s ying loads of coal and fuel from

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CRASH OF AN AMERICAN RAISIN BOMBER IN BERLIN, JULY 1948
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eight bases in West Germany to Tempelhof,
Tegel, and Gatow airports?
Building new airstrips to handle the
C-54s taking off or landing every ninety
seconds was one of the Airlifts great chal-
lenges. Tempelhof and Tegel were lovely
grass strips before and after World War II.
They couldnt last a week under the pound-
ing of hundreds of transports carrying ten
tons each of coal or food, medicines, or the
rolls of newsprint needed to publish news-
papers in the city threatened with starving
and freezing. The Americans began with
perforated metal mats laid over the grass or
dirt, with crews of Germans and Displaced
Persons (mostly Eastern Europeans) lling
in holes between takeoffs and landings.
Noah Thompson wrote home that pilots
were terried that the workers would leave
their wheelbarrows on the runway.
Three weeks after the Airlift began on
June 24, a National Security Council mem-
orandum to President Truman said: The
airdrome situation is critical. Tempelhof is
breaking up under its present load. LeMay
himself reported: Its so bad we have to
keep a gang of laborers on the runway with
asphalt, mats, shovels, wheelbarrows and
all. Down one of the transport planes
comes slamming loose material, scatter-
ing wildly. Out the workmen came: they
pored, pounded the mats down into place
then they went scrambling back to get out
of the way of the next C-54.
A week later, on July 17, Assistant
Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett had
more bad news for Truman: Its obvious
that the Soviets know that ying weather
will be too bad for this operation to con-
tinue beyond October. We should clearly
recognize that the airlift is a temporary
expedient.
That was exactly what the Soviets
thought. General Winter, as they called
him, would defeat the Airlift as surely as
he had defeated Napoleon and Hitler when
they invaded Russia. The Soviets also
knew very well that there was almost no
construction equipment in Berlin when
the Americans and British came in June of
1945. The Soviets, who got there rst, had
stripped the city of anything useful. Russia,
after all, was as badly damaged as Germany,
and the Red Army considered whatever
they could get their hands on to be repara-
tions for the suffering of their own people
when Hitler invaded.
It is difcult, to say the least, to build
airstrips with bulldozers, front-end

load-
ers, and the rest, but those machines are
too big and too heavy to be own in by
C-54s. That was General William Tunners
problem. Tunner, who had run the aerial
supply line from Burma into China during
the war over the Hump, meaning the
Himalayas was the commander of a joint
American-British Airlift Task Force. As

WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO BE ONE OF THE 17,000 GERMAN
WOMEN AND MEN USING THE RUBBLE OF THE BOMBED CITY
TO BUILD A NEW AIRFIELD AT TEGEL IN JUST 92 DAYS?

o 1he Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
his airstrips were pounded and drenched
by rain, he remembered hearing about a
guy in Brazil, an American civilian, who
was a genius at cutting up heavy equipment
with oxyacetylene torches so that parts
could t into planes and then welding them
back together after they were off-loaded.
H.P. Lacomb was the name. Or so they
tell me. They also tell me the fbi was to
nd him and did, at a small aireld in the
Midwestern US. Soon enough, Lacomb was
in Germany doing his thing and teaching
others how to do the same. I have spent
more than a year trying to nd his family
to get his story. (I am assuming he is dead.)
No luck so far; the military does not keep
records of civilian employees. If you know
anything about him, give me a call. Collect.
General Tunner took over Vittles on
July 29 when the Americans were land-
ing less than 2,000 tons a day, less than
half the estimated 4,500 tons necessary
to keep the lights on in West Berlin and
to keep Berliners fed and warm that is,
supplied with 1,834 to 2,609 calories per
day depending on their age and occupa-
tion. His nickname (behind his back) was
Willie the Whip. He drove himself and
anyone within his reach to exhaustion. He
was a man of numbers and details, deter-
mined to end the cowboy lift, the rst
hectic weeks when exhausted pilots and
half-empty planes with smoking engines
circled Tempelhof waiting for a break in the
clouds to roar down between the apartment
houses around the airport. He wanted to
turn the Airlift into a ying conveyor belt,
and he did just that, saying:
The actual operation of an airlift is about
as glamorous as drops of water on a stone.
Theres no frenzy, no ap. You dont see
planes parked all over the place; theyre
either in the air, on loading or unload-
ing ramps, or being worked on. You dont
see personnel milling around. The real
excitement from running a successful air-
lift comes from seeing a dozen lines climb-
ing on a dozen charts tonnage delivered,
utilization of aircraft, and so on. Theres a
basic rule that applies to military air opera-
tions just as it does to commercial opera-
tion. An airplane has to be doing one thing
to be earning its salt. It has to be in the air
with a load.
About the rst thing Tunner did was
to lock up his staff most of whom had
served with him in Burma in a room
with model airplanes attached to old coat
hangers hooked onto a maze of string
and small pulleys. The strings simulated
the three twenty-mile-wide air corridors
leading into the western sectors of divided
Berlin, ying lanes agreed upon by an air
safety treaty signed by the Allies and the
Soviets soon after the European ghting of
World War II ended in May of 1945. (There
were no agreements on rail, highway, and
canal access, which was the reason Soviet
troops could blockade the city, closing
the land and water routes for necessary
repairs.)
Tunners men came out with a plan:
American and British planes almost all
French military aircraft were otherwise
engaged in Indo-China would y into the
city in the outer corridors and y back in
the center corridor; planes missing their
Berlin landings would not circle the eld
in stacks as they had in the beginning but
would y straight out, still loaded, in the
center corridor; all ights would be instru-
ment ights, even in the clearest weather.
Tunner was not big on individualism in
his pilots; he wanted them controlled and
monitored from the ground at all times.
Old Soviet yak ghters and new jet
migs sporadically harassed the 250 C-54s
THE SOVIETS THOUGHT GENERAL
WINTER WOULD DEFEAT THE
AIRLIFT AS SURELY AS HE HAD
DEFEATED NAPOLEON AND HITLER.

and the various British planes in the cor-
ridors, buzzing by within ten or twenty feet
of the big transports. The Soviets periodi-
cally red anti-aircraft guns in the vicinity
of the planes and aimed strong spotlights
from the ground to try to blind pilots.
Signicantly, there were never attempts to
jam the radio signals essential for instru-
ment ying their planes had no instru-
ment capability so they could only go up in
good weather because the Soviets were
not prepared to go to war and believed the
Allies might retaliate militarily if jamming
caused a series of crashes.
There were bad days, particularly in the
foggy days of November when there was
literally no visibility at all as clouds settled
down to earth. But the lines on Tunners
charts kept going up. A mlange of aircraft
C-47s, C-54s, converted British Lancaster
bombers and seaplanes were delivering
just over 2,500 tons a day when he took
over at the end of July. On August 7, the
Americans and the British ew in a record
3,800 tons. On August 12, 4,742 tons
were delivered in 707 ights. That was the
rst time planes delivered more than the
4,500 tons considered the minimum in coal
and dried foodstuffs to keep West Berlin
going on low-calorie diets and provide two
hours a day of electricity and gas for cooking.
A
lively and profitable black
market provided just about the
only fresh food in the Allied zones.
Berlin had traditionally been fed by farms
to the east, now controlled by the Soviets,
and the night was alive with sound, the
around-the-clock air trafc that helped
cover the noise of the trucks, carts, and
wheelbarrows of farmers and black-marke-
teers bringing, for a price, food and other
essentials from the Eastern zone.
Competition was Tunners method. He
goaded on his squadrons and each base
by bombarding them with statistics and
praise for other units to the point that the
German loading crews took up the game.
Task Force Times, the Airlifts daily four-
page news sheet, reported on September 18,
Two 16-man German loading teams made
Vittles history today by tossing more than
19 tons of coal into two C-54s in slightly
more than 7 minutes. The winners tossed
176 sacks, the losers were 29 seconds
behind. There was also a record unload-
ing: 5 min 45 seconds at Tempelhof.
That was on Air Force Day, the rst
anniversary of the founding of the US
Air Force. American and British planes

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brought in 7,058 tons and were taking
out sick children as well as light bulbs and
other products labeled Made in Blockaded
Berlin. On October 15 the Allies formed
a Combined Task Force, commanded
by Tunner with a British deputy, Air
Commodore W.F. Merer. They were ready
for General Winter. Fortunately Berlins
weather was milder than usual that winter:
more fog but higher temperatures and
less snow and ice. The Task Force Times
reported on December 5: The Army and
Air Force are pre-cooking meals for Berlin
housewives to save coal in Berlin. There is
coal enough for heating one room for two
hours a day, and about twenty minutes of
that is cooking time with heat sufcient
to boil uids. Beans, for instance, are pre-
cooked for two hours by mess personnel,
dehydrated and shipped in bags to families.
In January 1949 the Task Force deliv-
ered a record 171,960 tons. It was obvious
by then that the Airlift was succeeding.
On the last day of that month, January 31,
1949, Stalin conceded. In an unusual inter-
view in Moscow with Kingsbury Smith of
International News Service, the Soviet lead-
er did not mention currency issues when
asked about the blockade. The US State
Department noticed, and Philip Jessup,
a deputy American ambassador to the
United Nations, was delegated to approach
the Russian ambassador to ask if the omis-
sion was intentional. On February 15, the
answer came back, Yes.
That led to rounds of secret negotiations
the Soviets wanted to delay any establish-
ment of a West German state separate from
the Eastern zone that ended with a Soviet
announcement on May 4 that the blockade
would be lifted on May 12, and that the
Foreign Ministers of the four occupying
powers would meet on May 23 to discuss
Germanys future.
Airlift planes continued to y until
the end of July 1949, but that was only to
build up stockpiles, as fresh food and coal
poured into the Allied sectors on trucks
and railroad cars. One of the last issues of
Task Force Times reported that West Berlin
was a healthier place in 1948 than in 1947:
Death rates fell below those of 1939 in the
American sector. Weight increases were
recorded in all age groups. Polio cases were
recorded at 1.6 per 10,000 people com-
pared with 6.6 in 1947.
It was over, part of history. The
Americans went home again, looking for
their cars.
Writer and columnist Richard Reeves,

senior lecturer at the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of
Southern California, was the Holtzbrinck
Distinguished Visitor in September 2007.
He is the author, most recently, of President
Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination.
AROUND-THE-CLOCK AIR TRAFFIC COVERED THE NOISE OF THE
TRUCKS, CARTS, AND WHEELBARROWS OF FARMERS AND BLACK-
MARKETEERS COMING FROM THE EASTERN ZONE.

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SXF_Freiheitselse_210x145_BlnJourn_28L 1 22.03.2007 16:01:45 Uhr
Most things rapidly jade.
The rest are a lifelong fascination.
The new 911Turbo Cabriolet.
For more information, visit www.porsche.com.
Fuel consumption l/100 km: urban 19.2 (14.7 mpg) extra urban 9.5 (29.7 mpg) combined 12.9 (21.9 mpg) CO
2
emissions: 309 g/km
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berlin_jour_210x280_leben_gb.qxd 13.08.2007 11:26 Uhr Seite 1
Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | 1he Berlin Journal | 3
T
he overl apping of American
and European identities is histori-
cal and deep-seated. Today, however,
this political and spiritual togetherness is
more in jeopardy than ever before. Perhaps
it will soon no longer be possible to speak
of the West as a transatlantic community
of convictions rather than a mere compass
direction. I shall argue that we can preserve
it if indeed we want to not so much by
nostalgically invoking a transatlantic unity
as by accepting our differences in a mood
of cheerful irony.
The question of whether the West still
exists at all or should exist did not arise
until the European-American disputes over
the Iraq war. Even as the Soviet Union was
breaking apart and communism was dis-
appearing from Europe like a ghost in the
morning, the Pentagon began playing out
scenarios aimed at ensuring US hegemony
in the world for the foreseeable future, as
the relevant documents put it. On June 8,
2001 Charles Krauthammer wrote in the
Washington Post that the time had come for
a new US foreign policy that was oriented
solely toward American interests: The
new unilateralism seeks to strengthen
American power and unashamedly deploy
it on behalf of self-dened global ends.
After a decade of Prometheus playing
pygmy, the rst task of the new adminis-
tration is precisely to reassert American
freedom of action. Such a scenario for the
future demanded a huge military budget
and the willingness to engage in preventive
war; in the long term, it aimed for control
of Eurasia and for the most part ignored
international institutions like the UN.
After September 11, 2001 the plan, as it
was nicknamed in Washington, became
a blueprint for reality.
Prometheus would no longer play
the pygmy. Was the commentator aware
of the mythological Prometheuss ill fate
when he formulated Americas future
self-image this way? At any rate the
epithet Prometheus did not catch on.
But pygmies did.
In the debates over the necessity and
justication of the war against Iraq, pyg-
mies entered the political vocabulary. For
this was the name given to those who were
too cowardly to join in the war on terror
or too hesitant to use military violence
to make their own interests prevail: Old
Europeans in particular. The govern-
ment in Washington called countries that
refused to join the coalition of the willing
political pygmies. France and Germany
were considered moral pygmies. The
epithet was contagious: Lord Robertson,
Secretary-General of nato, dutifully
promised a dramatic increase in European
defense spending so that nobody would
call the Europeans military pygmies
anymore.
Robert Kagan drew the Europeans
attention, though inadvertently perhaps,
to an early use of the term pygmies in
political-philosophical discourse: in Kant.
His much-quoted book Of Paradise and
Power was useful in a sense Kagan had not
anticipated. Kagans polemic split between
the American Hobbesian world a world
of eternal war and conict, where treaties
mean nothing and power is everything
and the European Kantian dream world
of perpetual peace called for a rereading of
both philosophers.
As it turns out, Hobbes was not simply a
cynic of power. And Kant was no unworldly
dreamer. The American critic had unearthed
a European master of political irony. Kants
tract on perpetual peace was anything but a
blue-eyed vision of paradise. It was almost
the contrary an early and powerful plea
for Realpolitik and its limits. There was
much more skepticism in Kant than Kagan
had ever dreamed of. In his writings on the
philosophy of history and on politics, Kant
was a realist and an ironist at the same time.
Irony accompanies his attempt to combine
anthropological skepticism with human
hope. Humanity is a crooked timber, out of
which no straight thing can ever be made.
Man is an animal that requires a master;
antagonism and struggle characterize homo
sapiens and are indispensable preconditions
for human progress. Kant sounds like
Hobbes. Setting up a great league of nations
is anthropologically improbable and pre-
cisely for that reason, we have to use it as a
regulative idea, even if real, empirical his-
tory is far removed from it.
Irony rings out in Kant when he calls his
own essays novels and admits that they
are full of dreams. Perpetual Peace was a
deeply ironic title, taken from the satirical
inscription on a Dutch innkeepers sign
upon which a burial ground was painted.
Perpetual peace was a regulative idea, not
an idealist misconception of harsh reality.
Much earlier than Kagan, Kant knew that
perpetual peace was for the dead, not for
the living. But the living can and should
already strive for it.
EUROPEAN-AMERICAN
VISTAS
Reconsidering the West with a touch of irony
by Wolf Lepenies
1he Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
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Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | 1he Berlin Journal | g
A
common European foreign and
security policy let us assume for
a moment that, in the European
Union, this utopia might one day become
reality could clearly invoke the ironist
Kant. This policy would be anything but
dream-like. It would orient itself toward
the ideal of an effective great league of
nations while being aware that the United
Nations of today is far removed from such
effectiveness. It would strive for a uni-
versal civic society which administers law
among men, and those responsible for it
would know that without an ability and a
willingness to ght, not even a preliminary
much less a perpetual peace can be secured.
A few years after Kant had published his
essay Idea for a Universal History from
a Cosmopolitan Point of View, war broke
out again in Europe. Kants publisher, Carl
Spener, asked him to update the essay, a
request the philosopher atly refused.
When the world powers were in rage, Kant
wrote to his publisher, it was much better
for the pygmies to keep quiet and not try
to meddle in the business of the mightiest
powers in the world.
Today this attitude does not mean
withdrawing to a policy of appeasement. It
merely means maintaining ones distance
from policies that take on the character
of frenzy and whose representatives are
hardly accessible anymore to consider-
ations of sober wisdom. But it also means
coupling criticism of the US with European
self-criticism. For on our continent, there is
still not enough realization that an effective
European policy cannot grow from a paci-
st dream. This dream is affordable only for
those who leave to others the costly defense
of peace. The arrogance of the Europeans
toward the Americans is often displayed in
their irresponsible and risk-averse eager-
ness to shrink themselves to pygmies and
simultaneously to pretend that pygmies
on the shoulders of giants see farther than
the giants themselves. A Europe that
boasts of being the farseeing dwarf on the
shoulders of the American giant, however,
is in truth nothing but a little fellow trav-
eler; it does not display an attitude of irony
but of cynicism.
Against a pessimistic worldview that
laments the end of the West, I am bank-
ing on irony as a political stance that

will determine the future of European-
American relations. My title alludes to
Walt Whitmans Democratic Vistas of
1871. This is the great poets hymn to the
United States, a self-condent distancing
of America from its European past and
at the same time an impressive document
of American self-criticism. Criticism
of the US from the European viewpoint
can be justied only if it is carried out in
consciousness and acknowledgement of
American self-criticism.
T
his capacit y for self-criticism is
admirably displayed in a book that
observers of American foreign policy
have called the best commentary on the
war on terror. Written more than fty
years ago, its author was a Protestant theo-
logian, Reinhold Niebuhr (18921971).
Niebuhrs 1952 essay The Irony of
American History reads like a prophecy of
current events. It was the predicament of
American history and, consequentially,
also of American politics, he wrote, to
be torn between too-easy escape from
responsibility and too-great condence
in its own virtue. To avoid the danger of
overestimating the purity of ones own
wisdom one had to understand the ironic
tendency of virtues to turn into vices
when too complacently relied upon. Half
a century ago, the issue was the threat to
the US from a fundamentalist movement:
communism. Today Niebuhrs warning
to democracy not to use fundamentalist
means in the struggle against fundamen-
talism has once again become press-
ingly relevant.
For Niebuhr, history consists of pathos,
tragedy, and irony. Natural disasters are
pathetic because it makes no sense to
ask Nature: why? Historical situations in
which evil means are consciously used
for good ends are tragic; the use of atomic
weapons to force a peace was a daunt-
ing example of this. But Niebuhr saw
the most important aspect of history as
the ironic part of it: over-weaning virtue
becomes vice, strength that overestimates
itself becomes weakness, and too much
concern for security intensies a general
feeling of insecurity.
Inuenced by Augustine, Niebuhrs
theology was shaped by positing the
unavoidable sinfulness of human action.
The challenge to politics is, while trusting
in God, to attempt to do what is good and
just while taking the risk of breaking the
law and promoting evil. The dignity of the
individual depends on this. American his-
tory provides the example.
Having escaped Europes religious wars,
the pilgrims who landed on the coast of
North America founded a New Jerusalem.
They considered themselves one of Gods
chosen peoples. After the founding of the
United States, its citizens proudly pro-
claimed it to be an innocent nation. The
dangerous irony of American history is
that this innocent nation has become the
mightiest empire on Gods green earth.
There exists a widespread belief that the
US became a superpower almost against
its will, and at any rate mostly without a
plan and always with the noblest inten-
tions. Empire by invitation is the techni-
cal term historians use for this, in a kind
of taxi theory of imperialism; supposedly,
America rushed to the crisis points of world
events only when it was called. Reinhold
Niebuhr challenged this view.
The cold-war decades, in which the
superpowers held each other in check with
the fear of atomic strikes, were merely an
interruption of the imperial policy of the
US. Ironic ambiguity, wrote Niebuhr,
determined Americas relationship to
communism. The US met its opponents
self-righteousness with a hardening of its
own arrogance. There is a hidden kinship,
Niebuhr wrote, between the vices of even
the most vicious and the virtues of even the
most upright.
He warned that the US must not
respond to the threat of a fundamental-
ist movement with an ideological policy.
Everything, he said, depended on pursuing
a policy of interests, decisively but without a
sense of mission. This by the way is not the
only point on which Niebuhr and George
Kennan agreed. Democratic nations, too,
have a legitimate right to protect their
interests, if necessary with power but they
must do so while being conscious of their
fallibility. In a democracy, every exercise of
power should be accompanied by a slightly
guilty conscience. This was Niebuhrs plea
for an ironic approach to politics.
When Niebuhr compares the corrup-
tions of freedom on our side with the
strange attractive power [of a certain
movement] in a chaotic and impoverished
world, he is speaking of communism.
Then and remember, we are speaking of
the year 1952! he shifts from communism
to Islam: The rise of communism in our
world is comparable to the rise of Islam
and its challenge to Christian civilization
in the high Middle Ages. Some of the mea-
sures we take against it are informed by the
same lack of realism that characterized the
crusades.
In recent decades, the mobilizing power
of Islam has regenerated to a previously
unimaginable degree. It codetermines the
course of world politics. We should avoid
drawing too-close parallels between com-
munism and Islam, but Niebuhrs warning
to the West not to succumb to a funda-
mentalist ideology in the struggle against
fundamentalism is still valid. Niebuhr was
not simply pointing to the ironic element in
history. He was also pleading for a policy in
which American self-condence and wise
self-doubt would be combined: an ironic
policy.
I
n this regard Reinhold Niebuhr
may have been inuenced by Thomas
Mann. He had reviewed Manns politi-
cal essays when they were translated into
English and admired his ability to produce
a perfect piece of irony almost extempore.
Thomas Mann may have been the rst to
speak of political irony or ironic politics.
The concluding chapter of his Reections
of a Nonpolitical Man takes the reader by
surprise. In it, Kant is characterized as the
representative of political irony: It is pos-
sible, Mann admits,
that I see [irony] where other people do
not see it; but it just seems to me that one
cannot grasp this concept comprehensively
enough, that it should never be taken too
ethically and too politically. When Kant,
after a terrible and only too successful epis-
temological campaign, reintroduced every-
thing again under the name of Postulates
of Practical Reason, and made possible
again what he had just critically crushed
then I see political irony in this.
Empathetically, almost touched, the
nonpolitical Thomas Mann professes a
stance that he characterizes as internal
in contrast to external politics. All
THOMAS MANN PROPHESIED THAT THE OLD CONTINENT
WOULD ONCE AGAIN BE AFFLICTED BY A CHRONIC ILLNESS:
THAT OF WRACKING ITS BRAINS.
Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | 1he Berlin Journal | y
Media Diversity
Guarantees
Freedom of Expression
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politics in the bourgeois sense, as well as
in that of the intellectual perpetrator, of
the activist, is external politics. Irony as
modesty, as a retrospective skepticism, is a
form of morals, a personal ethics, an inter-
nal politics.
In his talk Goethe and Democracy,
given on May 2, 1949 at the Library of
Congress, Mann described what this
internal politics could mean for European-
American relations. This speech has lost
none of its relevance today; it summarizes
the problem in a memorable formula that is
still part of the political vocabulary on both
sides of the Atlantic and that still describes
a current problem. It was a speech on
how Europe and America represented
two different political temperaments. The
American citizen Thomas Mann, who
had been born a German and remained a
European, prophesied that after the end of
World War II the old continent would once
again be aficted by a chronic illness: that
of wracking its brains.
He predicted that Europeans would
again brood too much about themselves,
Europes boundaries, and the continents
identity thereby crucially inhibiting their
political activities. They would become a
lame actor on the worlds stage. At the time
of World War I, Paul Valry had already
spoken of Europe as Hamlets continent.
Thomas Mann went even further: The
future belongs to the man of the day, whose
mind and common sense are directed
toward the nearest, most useful matters; it
belongs to him whose energy is not tainted
by the pallor of thought. Not only Germany,
all of Europe, is Hamlet, and Fortinbras is
America.
Hamlet the Danish prince is the doubter
and brooder who fails to act when it is nec-
essary and therefore is later forced to com-
mit deeds that make bad things even worse.
Fortinbras, the young son of the Norwegian
king, untainted by the pallor of thought,
acts forcefully and swiftly, convinced that
perhaps not always the law, but certainly
the law of the strongest, will be on his
side. Emerson expressed a truly American
view when he maintained that spleen the
organ where melancholy has its seat could
not be found in his countrymen: it was part
only of the European anatomy.
At the end of Shakespeares Hamlet,
Fortinbras declares, I have some rights
of memory in this kingdom/Which now
to claim my vantage does invite me.
Interestingly enough, the word mem-
ory is lacking in Schlegels and Tiecks
German translation of this scene: Ich
habe alte Recht an dieses Reich/Die anzus-
prechen mich mein Vorteil heisst. It is not
possible, however, to understand America
without seeing how much her politics are
a politics of memory. Americans have not
forgotten and are eager to remind their
friends and allies how often they have
had to play Fortinbras in order to put an
end to European family feuds. America
assumed the role of Fortinbras not least
because Europe would not stop playing
Hamlet.
I AM BANKING ON IRONY AS A
POLITICAL STANCE THAT WILL
DETERMINE THE FUTURE OF
EUROPEAN-AMERICAN RELATIONS.
If during recent debates Europe and
America in particular France and the
US had recalled their own histories, they
could have discovered surprising cross-
over constellations in their conict after
the invasion of Iraq. The missionary faith
of Americans in the superiority of their
civilization is old. Faced, however, with
the question of whether their own values
should be imposed on others by force or
implanted in them by persuasion, the
early American settlers opted for what they
called a new diplomacy that would dis-
tinguish itself from the bellicose policies
of the European monarchs. John Quincy
Adams spoke on the Fourth of July, 1821.
The true America, he said,
goes not abroad in search of monsters
to destroy. She well knows that by once
enlisting under other banners than her
own, were they even the banners of foreign
independence, she would involve herself,
beyond the powers of extrication, in all the
wars of interest and intrigue, of individual
avarice, envy, and ambition which assume
the colors and usurp the standard of free-
dom. She might [then] become the dicta-
tress of the world; she would no longer be
the ruler of her own spirit.
That civic persuasion had to reign over
military force was an early American creed.
A contemporary of Niebuhrs, Louis
Hartz, writing on the liberal tradition in
America in 1955, emphasized that the
Americans did not share the crusading
spirit of the French and the Russians.
Hartz was an excellent historian but a bad
prophet when he wrote: The fact that the
Americans remained sober in 1776 was
a fairly good sign that they were going to
remain that way during the modern age
which followed. the central course of our
political thought has betrayed an uncon-
querable pragmatism.
Of course it was not the Americans but
the French who rst came to the conclu-
sion that progress, liberty, and civilization
must, if necessary, be implemented with
force at home and abroad. After 1792 a
missionary fury took hold of the French
revolutionaries, who were willing to ght
beyond their borders not just to defend
themselves but also to spread civilization
and republican ideals. The idea that the
world will be secure and stable in the long
run only when democracy and human
rights have been exported everywhere, if
necessary by force, is a genuine French
idea and one that did not fail to inuence
American politics.
One of the great ironies of recent years
was the curious crossover that could be
observed in the meetings of the Security
Council at the United Nations in February
2003 during the debates over a possible
invasion of Iraq. The Americans fumed
over the French unwillingness to give up
diplomacy early, while the French repudi-
ated the American attempt to spread lib-
erty and civilization by force. When France
and the US rebuked each other, they were
striking at their own pasts. Europeans
and Americans alike had forgotten or had
wanted to forget that, constrained by histo-
ry, they always saw themselves in the other,
as if in a mirror: European-American
vistas.
On what is my appreciation of irony
based? I do not see any element of an
American or European national charac-
ter in it; I merely suggest that we view
European-American relations ironically.
T.S. Eliot an admirable advocate of
irony and an American who became a
European described irony in a subdued
sense as a generous skepticism an
admission that there are times when we
cannot be sure, not so much because we
dont know enough as because uncertain-
ty is intrinsic. Irony involves, probably,
a recognition, implicit in the expression of
every experience, of other kinds of experi-
ence which are possible (D.J. Enright).
It is the adoption, without committing
ones self, of anothers point of view
(Randolph Bourne). Political irony is an
expression of modesty; it preserves some
mystery, an area of uncertainty, while
encouraging the effort to increase the
area of understanding (Richard Reinitz).
Irony understood in this sense is not
only a cognitive method but a way of life:
Irony makes it possible to endure contra-
dictions critically and patiently without
losing oneself to them (again, Bourne).
Such an attitude would not express the
weakness but the strength of European-
American relations.
T
he United States of America
was founded in 1776. Eighty-ve
years later a bloody civil war began;
and even afterward the Americans were not
yet truly unied. This year the European
Union celebrates its ftieth birthday. The
Americans, united in one language, grew
together into a nation without the burden
of competing memories. The European
nations were entangled with each other in
bloody wars for long centuries. In World
War I alone, France lost three times as
many soldiers as the US has lost in all the
wars it has ever fought combined. The
multilingual Europeans had to liberate
themselves from the weight of uncounted
murderous histories of national conict. In
contrast to the US, Europe never became
an empire with a single language and the
same customs everywhere, as Tocqueville
wrote.
A pluralistic West need not be a disad-
vantage. Polyphony does not necessarily
lead to cacophony. The West may not be
a belle alliance anymore, but neither is it
Waterloo. More equanimity in the debates
on European-American relations would
do us good and so would a cautious opti-
mism fed not by exaggerated hopes for the
future but by the indisputable successes of
the past. Anti-Americanism must not and
cannot be a driving force for Europe. On
the contrary, anti-Americanism would not
foster European unity but would surely
weaken it.
Europe and America will not trade
roles on the world political stage. But in
the future, Hamlet must certainly brood
less and act more rapidly and decisively.
And Fortinbras should perhaps reect a
bit longer before he strikes out. Hamlet
and Fortinbras act in the same play on the
world stage. If their play in contrast to
Shakespeares drama is to have a happy
ending, the Europeans must become more
like Americans and the Americans become
more like Europeans again.
And therein lies, today, the irony of
European-American vistas.
Wolf Lepenies is a permanent fellow at the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a professor of
sociology at the Freie Universitt Berlin, and
the author, most recently, of The Seduction
of Culture in German History. He presented
this text as part of his Fritz Stern Lecture at
the Academy on May 8, 2007. The author
would like to thank Mitch Cohen not only
for having polished his English but also
for helpful criticism and corrections.
A PLURALISTIC WEST NEED NOT BE A DISADVANTAGE.
POLYPHONY DOES NOT NECESSARILY LEAD TO CACOPHONY.
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Fall 2007 | Number Fifteen | The Berlin Journal | 21
H
enry Kissinger and I met
for the rst time about half a
century ago it must have been
at Harvard University, or somewhere else
in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1957 or
1958. And we have mutually maintained
contact ever since. The year 1957 must
have been my fth or sixth visit to the
United States. (In the meantime the
number of my trips may well have sur-
passed one hundred.) My rst visit was in
1950, when I represented the port of my
home city of Hamburg at an international
trade fair at the navy pier in Chicago. It
happened to be a very poor show as far
as Hamburg was concerned because the
port had been 100 percent destroyed and
was full of wrecked ships; all I could offer
were plans and papers for a reconstruc-
tion that in fact had not started. But I was
full of optimism because the US had
already started its European Recovery
Program (known as the Marshall Plan)
and, to the great relief of us Germans, the
US already had graciously included our
defeated country in that great recovery
effort. At the same time Lenny Bernstein
was giving his rst concerts in Germany.
I was amazed by this generosity because
during the war I had expected an even
greater destruction of my country. I had
foreseen us Germans living in holes in the
earth; never had I hoped for much help
from the victorious Americans. But now,
in the summer of 1950, after eight years
of service as a drafted soldier and after
three years of rather supercial studies at a
destroyed university already 31 years old
but still only in my rst year in an ordinary,
paid job I came to see America and expe-
rience its vitality. I was overwhelmed.
One weekend after the trade fair I visited
my distant relatives in Duluth, Minnesota
in order to thank them for the care pack-
ages they had sent to their cousins in
Hamburg. I did not know any of them, but
one of my uncles showed me his little fac-
tory. He produced simple cast-iron items
with 15 employees. Outside, almost 15 cars
were parked. What great wealth! And this
uncle offered me a job; he offered me an
empty house that he owned; I should just
stay and bring my wife and daughter over
immediately, he said; he would lend me the
money for the airfare. Although we did not
accept and did not emigrate, his offer was
again a fundamental example of American
generosity for me.
My third experience of Americas open-
ness came in the late 1950s when I was a
young member of the Bundestag prepar-
ing to write a book on German interests in
the context of natos defense strategies.
I did not believe in the effectiveness of
threatening the Soviet Union with atomic
retaliation in case of any Soviet encroach-
ment. Thanks to Henry Kissinger, Robert
Bowie, and Paul Doty, I was introduced
to outstanding American authorities and
specialists like Bernard Brodie, Klaus
Knorr, General Maxwell Taylor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, George Kennan, Paul Nitze,

THE VALUE OF AMERICAN
LEADERSHIP
Stepping back from the crisis of condence
by Helmut Schmidt
B
O
N
N
,

1
9
7
5
.

U
L
L
S
T
E
I
N

B
I
L
D
AMERICA HAS MANY TRUE
FRIENDS. I AM JUST ONE
PERSONAL EXAMPLE.
22 | The Berlin Journal | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
and many others. All of them were willing
to share their knowledge and wisdom with
me. When in the end of the 1960s I became
Germanys defense secretary I was able to
meet my colleagues in nato with the same
level of knowledge and judgment thanks
to the education I had received earlier from
those Americans (and as well from a few
British and French specialists).
Of course sometimes we did not see
problems eye to eye. The latter was the
case in the early 1970s when Melvin Laird
then US defense secretary and I very qui-
etly buried natos plans to put more than a
hundred atomic demolition means (adms)
into German soil. The purpose of these
adms had been to function as an automatic
nuclear tripwire. In case of a Soviet con-
ventional attack, that tripwire would have
automatically transformed the conict into
a nuclear war. And it would have automati-
cally destroyed Germany in the process
along with Germanys will to defend itself.
Henry Kissinger was President Nixons
security advisor at that time and must have
known what Mel Laird and I clandestinely
did. He went along with it, and I am still
grateful to him.
In the early 1970s when after
Americas nancial bloodletting the
US felt it was unavoidable to abandon
the Bretton Woods Agreement of xed
exchange rates of currencies, it was George
Shultz, then secretary of nance, who
understood the necessity of cooperating
with the UK, France, Germany, and Japan.
He founded the unofcial Library Group
of ve nance secretaries, who met in the
library of the White House just a few steps
away from Henry Kissingers ofce. The
location enabled me to slip away from time
to time to visit Henry. This group was able
to avoid dangerous tensions and thereby
prevented a global crisis between the then
major currencies.
One year later Henrys own effort to
convene an international energy confer-
ence ended without great progress because
of staunch French resistance. But in 1974
Valry Giscard dEstaing became presi-
dent of France, making it possible for the
Americans and West Europeans to agree to
the successful 1975 Helsinki Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The Soviet Union received acknowledge-
ment of the existing borders in Europe, but
the West succeeded in getting all the com-
munist leaders in Eastern Europe to afx
their personal signatures to the famous
Basket III of the Helsinki Accords. Shortly
thereafter we saw Solidarnosc in Poland
under Lech Walesa as well as Charta 77
in Czechoslovakia under Vaclav Havel.
Helsinki also made possible a private
meeting between President Gerald Ford
plus Henry Kissinger, Prime Minister
Harold Wilson plus Jim Callaghan, Valry
Giscard dEstaing plus his foreign sec-
retary, and myself plus Hans-Dietrich
Genscher. We agreed to a second meeting
later that year in order to jointly prevent
the chain reaction of global ination,
recession, and depression, all of which
appeared highly probable after the rst
oil shock. It was obviously sensible to
include Japan. Giscard dEstaing, as the
host of that meeting at Rambouillet, felt
inclined to invite neighboring Italy as well,
so we were six leaders meeting in a small
living room of a little chateau outside of
Paris; one year later Ford invited Canada,
making seven participants. In the mean-
time our meeting was named the World
Economic Summit by the media.
These annual economic summits were
reasonably successful until right into the
1980s, despite the two oil shocks, which
convulsed the fabric of the global economy
but could not destroy it. A global depression
was avoided because the leading economic
powers of that time coordinated their s-
cal and monetary policies not due to an
enormous new institution or anybodys dic-
tate but because of private discussion and
understanding among leaders.
I could go on to remember many more
examples of successful cooperation from
the 1980s and the 1990s. The peak obvi-
ously was reached in 1990! But in order to
cut a long story short: the lesson is twofold.
The rst lesson is that, in order to avoid
a global economic breakdown, cooperation
between the states that manage the largest
economies and currencies is urgently advis-
able, regardless of different sets of values,
ideologies, or religions.
The second lesson is that such global
cooperation cannot be achieved without
North America and Europe working togeth-
er. The latter, by the way, is relatively easier
because of the many ties that bind our cul-
tures together.
The world of today differs tremendously
from the world of two and three decades
ago. Today economic and nancial strength
alone can make a major power into a world
power. China presently is the outstanding
example of this; it will rather soon replace
Germany as the worlds export champion.
India will follow. And Russia remains a
world power if anything for its economic
leverage in exporting huge quantities of
petrol and gas.
All of us ought to accept these enormous
changes as facts of life. It is also a fact of
life that a eet of aircraft carriers or of sub-
marines, of nuclear-equipped rockets plus
some troops, will not sufce to economi-
cally and politically stabilize the globe.
The United States will always nd quite
a number of countries joining its policies
out of opportunistic calculation. But more
important is that the American nation has
many true friends out of inclination and
affection. I am just one personal example of
that thankful affection.
After the colossal terrorist crime against
the twin towers in Manhattan six years ago
the wave of sympathy and solidarity with
America all over the globe was almost over-
whelming. It is a pity that today some of
that sympathy has vanished; some friends
and allies today are puzzled and anxious.
This deplorable change was triggered by
strategic and foreign political decisions
made by the present administration in
Washington. The second Iraq war has
created additional tensions and enemies.
The men who started that war had, by the
way, never personally fought themselves,
conrming the wisdom of Erasmus of
Rotterdam: War is sweet to those who have
no experience of it.
Erasmuss philosophical insight applies
to quite a few contemporary governments.
The present generation of political leaders
has had, for the most part, no personal
experience of any dreadful war, nor of the
Soviet Gulag system, nor of the Holocaust
or Shoa, nor of any genocide with uncount-
ed victims. These leaders nd it relatively
easy to interfere by military force in the
internal affairs of a foreign sovereign
state even under the banner of humani-
tarian intervention to mask their national
interests.
National egoism and national egotism
are a fact all over the globe. In this respect
America has many companions. The sec-
ond war against Iraq was a war of choice,
not of necessity. But here again America
was not alone; many joined that war. The
I HAD FORESEEN THAT GERMANS
WOULD BE LIVING IN HOLES IN
THE EARTH; NEVER HAD I HOPED
FOR MUCH HELP FROM THE
VICTORIOUS AMERICANS.
main reason was that they have been used
to accepting American leadership for
decades.
The United States will overcome its
present internal crisis of condence as
well as the international crisis of con-
dence. It may take time. But governments
have made mistakes since history began
to be written and read; none of us would
deny the ancient Greeks or the Romans,
the ancient Egyptians or the Chinese,
our admiration and respect because of
such errors. Nor will we Germans blame
the US for the mistakes of its present
administration. On the contrary, we will
thankfully remember the help and assis-
tance that we received from 1945 onward,
and again when the decay of Soviet
supremacy over the eastern half of Europe
opened up the chance for Germanys
reunication. And we will teach German
students of the next generation that the
US and its Declaration of Independence,
Constitution, and Bill of Rights have laid
the spiritual foundations for the political
breakthrough of the era of enlightenment
throughout the Western world, a break-
through that has reached my country only
with a delay of nearly two centuries with
help from America.
The US has promoted the rule of law
since World War I. At the end of World War
II it played the decisive role in creating the
United Nations, as well as the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund, and the
World Trade Organization all rule-making
institutions. The US knew that rules are
critical, because no decision-maker has a
monopoly on wisdom and because debate
and contention are a sounder way to truth
than dictate. The genius of the American
Constitution is its provision for countervail-
ing institutions that check and balance each
other. The necessity for balance is even more
important internationally, when the stakes
are often life and death themselves. Leaders
must have a clear picture of their own
national interest, but they also need willing-
THE SECOND WAR AGAINST
IRAQ WAS A WAR OF CHOICE,
NOT OF NECESSITY.
ness to cooperate, compromise, and take the
national interest of others into account.
I am still convinced of the generosity,
vitality, and inner political compass of
the American people. In the early 1950s I
experienced inside the US the nationwide
psychosis that Senator Joseph McCarthy
created, but I was also a witness to the
strength of the democratic instincts, of the
reason and the vitality by which the nation
overcame that psychosis. That experience
is now half a century old. Today I am con-
vinced that the American nations inner
democratic instincts will serve it equally
well in the future.
Lassen Sie uns alle dazu beitragen, dass
auch in Zukunft die transatlantischen
Beziehungen zwischen uns Europern, uns
Deutschen und den Amerikanern gepegt
werden! Let us all contribute to cultivating
our transatlantic relationship.
Helmut Schmidt was chancellor of the Federal

Republic of Germany from 1974 to 1982 and is
publisher of Die Zeit. The above speech was deliv-
ered upon Chancellor Schmidts acceptance of
the rst Henry A. Kissinger Award, June 7, 2007.
Verantwortung ist ein groes Wort.
Wir verstehen unter Verantwortung einen
Prozess, den wir tglich leben.
Das beginnt in der Forschung: Allein 4200
Wissenschaftler arbeiten weltweit fr MSD
an Themen wie HIV, Asthma, Migrne,
Arthrose, Osteoporose oder Koronare Herz-
erkrankungen, um nur einige Schwerpunkte
zu nennen.
Aber auch auerhalb unserer Indikationsge-
biete ist Verantwortung unser Thema. Etwa,
wenn wir Lnder der Dritten Welt bei der
Bekmpfung der Flublindheit untersttzen.
Oder wenn wir mit dem National Institut of
Biodiversity of Costa Rica ein gemeinsames
Such- und Testprogramm fr neue Arznei-
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MSD_91000_210x145.indd 1 21.08.2007 14:20:47 Uhr
Lawrence Wright a journalist, New Yorker
staff writer, and screenwriter was in
Berlin on August 30 to discuss his recent
book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and
the Road to 9/11, with an audience at the
Academy. This text derives from a tran-
script of the animated discussion that fol-
lowed his presentation, which was moder-
ated by Georg Mascolo of Der Spiegel.
MATTHIAS SONN (German International
Cooperation on Counterterrorism): What
are some of the political ways in which the
problems of al-Qaeda and Islamic terror-
ism can be approached?
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Solving the larger
political problem is mostly up to the Arab
world, but there are some things that we
in the US and Europe can do. The Israeli-
Palestinian conict is a tremendous source
of inammation in the Muslim world. And
it can be solved! On paper, the problem
of apartheid in South Africa was a much
more difcult political problem, and it was
solved. Bin Laden doesnt really care about
Israel, but he would be in tears if we helped
the Israelis and Palestinians work out a
solution. Despair over Palestine is a huge
source of recruitment for him and would
vanish if the world could make a concerted
and unied effort to resolve the conict.
We should bring the same kind of energy
to the Kashmir question another solvable
political problem. These two issues are not
directly related to al-Qaeda, but they are the
wellsprings for so many recruits. So if you
dry those up, you begin to reduce the num-
ber of people who are drawn to al-Qaeda out
of pure frustration.
In more concrete terms we need to do a
much better job policing al-Qaeda. I dont
know the details in Europe, but it seems the
intelligence problems are similar to those
we have in the US. Language skills, cul-
tural sophistication, and a deep historical
grasp of the region are sorely lacking. The
rank and le of people policing al-Qaeda
dont speak Arabic. They cant even pro-
nounce the names of the people theyre
trying to ght. Gary Ball, the former head
of the fbis counterterrorism division, tes-
tied under oath that he did not know the
difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.
He even stated that he thought it was an
irrelevant question. If you dont know the
rst thing about your enemy, then you will
always fail to connect the dots.
Ali Soufan, one of the heroes in The
Looming Tower, was one of eight Arabic-
speaking agents in the fbi on September 11,
2001. Now there are six! The fbi has nally
realized that it needs to hire rst- and
second-generation Muslim-Americans. It
needs native speakers of Arabic, Pashto,
Dari, Urdu, and all the other languages spo-
ken by the groups the fbi wants to police
and control. But the intelligence commu-
nitys security apparatus is a tremendous
obstacle; theres great reluctance to let such
people in. This is ironic because if you go
up to the seventh oor of fbi headquarters
and, remember, this is an organization
LOOMING DISASTER?
Questions for Lawrence Wright
FAZAL SHEIKH, KABUL, ONE MONTH BEFORE TALIBAN CONQUEST, 1996
that made its reputation ghting the Maa
and, to some extent, the Irish Republican
Army who do you see up there? Irish and
Italian guys! The fbi wouldnt be what it is
without them. Theyre the absolute spine of
the organization, and its no surprise that
the fbi was successful in ghting the Maa
and the ira with the talents and cultural
skills of people who knew their communi-
ties from the inside out. The fbi will not
be successful in ghting al-Qaeda until it
brings people inside the organization who
understand the people outside it, the people
whose plans they need to disrupt. Nor will
the cia, nsa, or any of our other intelli-
gence agencies.
GEORG MASCOLO (Der Spiegel): I sense
a growing feeling in Washington that the
real problem is Muslims in Europe. Do you
share this view that Europe is still sleep-
ing? That it doesnt understand the threat?
That it is unable to deal with its Muslim
communities?
WRIGHT: I wouldnt say that Europeans
are unconscious of the problem; its pos-
sible that Americans dont realize how
many Europeans are in fact acutely aware
of the conicts inside Europe. But its
also true that Americans have a different
take on the immigrant experience of its
Muslim populations and so far havent
encountered home-grown terrorists like
the British and Spanish nationals who
wrought havoc in London and Madrid in
recent years. I dont think Americans really
understand Europes problem integrating
its Muslims. America has had a far easier
experience since the average Muslim in
America earns about the same wage as
the average American, is about as likely to
go to college, and is far less likely to be in
prison. Compare that to the situation in
France, where Muslims comprise about ten
percent of the population but fty percent
of the prisoners. What a stark measure of
the degree of alienation of Muslims in that
society!
Yet it is becoming clearer to both
Europeans and Americans that Europe
is the frontline. Its not New York; its not
even Cairo or Riyadh: its London, Paris,
Madrid, and Berlin. It is within Europe that
the questions of Islam and its future in the
West will have to be resolved for good or
for ill. And I feel strongly that assimilating
Muslim minorities and addressing their
feelings of being ostracized is key. We
cannot afford to marginalize them.
For instance I think the French are mak-
ing a terrible mistake in picking a ght over
the hijab, or headscarf. Pronouncements
like that force people to make a declara-
tion about their identity. Im not saying
the French do everything wrong. I appre-
ciate their rhetorical insistence on the
Frenchness of all their citizens even
their Muslim minorities. This may alien-
ate some people, but polls show that
French Muslims have a higher opinion
of Christians and Jews than do Muslims
anywhere else in the world. Im sure that
this is because they feel French as well as
Muslim. The national insistence on at least
the principles of libert, egalit, fraternit
has succeeded in making them think in
those terms. Compare this to the situation
right across the Channel, where British
Muslims have a completely different and
largely negative attitude toward Christians
and Jews.
There is no doubt that Europe is the
crucible for the future of Islam in the West.
Muslims are freer here than they are in
their native countries to address the ques-
tions of their religion, but they are also freer
to be more radical. Freedom cuts both ways.
Muslims in Europe experience many ambi-
guities of identity, but they also experience
an unprecedented degree of civil society.
JOHN KORNBLUM (former US
Ambassador to Germany, Chairman Lazard
and Co. GmbH, and Academy Trustee): As
you point out in your book, the terrorism
question has another dimension, namely
the fact that leadership especially leader-
ship in Arab countries has done very little
to foster civil society. President Bush has
spoken of a crusade for democracy in

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the region, which I dont think will be very
successful. Isnt this project something of
a dead end, considering our dependence
on the oil resources of these countries?
We have tolerated these governments for a
long time. We have called the Saudis our
great friends. We have had dealings with all
sorts of governments that have, in fact, cre-
ated the very conditions or at least some
of them that have spawned a phalanx of
despairing young radicals. For my part,
I dont see a way out of this, but Id be very
interested to hear what you think.
WRIGHT: Imagine how we would treat
these regimes if we didnt need their oil. It
tells you all you need to know, really. That
said, I do believe in democracy. If you
spend any time in countries like Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt you see how sup-
pressed the lives of the citizens are. You see
how unfullled, how despairing they are.
These countries are deprived of virtually
every aspect of what we call civil society.
I dont mean to apply this as a blanket to
the entire Muslim world; there are plenty
of happy, fullled people from Indonesia to
Morocco. But overall the level of hopeless-
ness, frustration, and anger is much, much
higher in the Muslim world than in any
other place Ive traveled.
This has a lot to do with the fact that
citizens of these countries have so little
control over their own societies. This is
true even of rich people like Osama bin
Laden. There was nothing he could do
to affect his countrys future because he
was not a member of the Saudi royal fam-
ily. Democracy is ultimately the best way
to defuse the regions radicalism, but it
is not an immediate or realistic solution.
There are some things like forging civil
society that cannot be done from the
outside; the Muslims have to do them
themselves. There are questions that they
have to answer for themselves. Our role
is to constantly demand that they address
these questions.
My sense is that democracy will come
more quickly and easily in some countries
than in others. Egypt is ready for democ-
racy and has been ready for a long time;
it has an almost eternal sense of itself
as a nation (unlike Iraq, which Winston
Churchill drew up on a napkin at lunch).
Indeed Egypt thinks of itself as the origi-
nal country, the original nation. Its people
are coherent and would not splinter into
ethnic groups, as in Iraq. And Egypt
has an appetite for politics; it has a civil
society.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is not
ready for democracy; it hasnt been trained.
Recently the Saudi King has inaugurated
a series of dialogues, open discussions
about the role of women and so on. This
is encouraging. And the Saudis have
begun voting. I remember very distinctly
on my last trip to Saudi Arabia how some
of my friends had just received their vot-
ing cards. They asked to see mine, and I
showed them this rather sad piece of card
stock. Its not very impressive. Theirs is a
beautiful document! It has their picture
on it; it has the royal seal. And it permits
them to vote for precisely 48 percent of
the members of the city council. The king
gets the other 52 percent. I can vote for the
president of the United States with this
pathetic little piece of paper! Theres a start
in Saudi Arabia, but one could argue that
it is a false start. It may even be a dead end,
but at least some sort of notional nod is
being made toward democracy.
The situation in Pakistan is rather
different. Pakistan is essentially a failed
state, though it might at this point be edg-
ing into democracy. Madrasas (religious
schools) dot the country because there is
no public education system to speak of.
Pakistan has abandoned its responsibil-
ity and has a lot to answer for. But it is
also a nuclear state, a fact that paralyzes
American policy makers who mortally
fear the consequences of going in after bin
Laden and inadvertently destabilizing the
Pakistani government. I think we worry
too much about that. My experience in
Pakistan is not very profound, but I know
FAZAL SHEIKH, KABUL, 1997
it is one country where the Army owns
nearly everything: the biggest banks, the
insurance companies, the hotels, real
estate. The army isnt going to let Pakistan
descend into chaos.
HELGA HAFTENDORN (Freie Universitt):
What is the attitude of Iran and other
Muslim states toward al-Qaeda? Could
the country be brought into some kind of
alliance network or political framework for
trying to contain resurgent al-Qaeda and
Taliban in Afghanistan? Early on Iran very
much opposed the Taliban, and I wonder
what its stance is now.
WRIGHT: Iran is one of the most puz-
zling players in the whole region. Bear in
mind that al-Qaeda is a Sunni organiza-
tion. It holds that the Shiites are heretics.
Iran is of course a largely Shiite country,
so one would think it would be the natural
enemy of al-Qaeda. And yet historically
Iran and al-Qaeda have worked together
to ght the US. When bin Laden was
in Sudan in the early 1990s, his ght-
ers trained with members of Hezbollah,
which is as we know sponsored by Iran.
Imad Mugniyah, the head of Hezbollahs
military wing, met with some of al-
Qaedas leaders, while al-Qaedas ght-
ers went over to Lebanon to train with
Hezbollah. To this day, one of bin Ladens
sons, Saad, and his military chief, Saif
al-Adl, live in Tehran in a sort of protective
custody. Many other al-Qaeda gures have
lived in Iran, too. Even al-Zarqawi, who
precipitated the civil war in Iraq against
the Shiites, took refuge in Iran after the
Americans went into Afghanistan. (Does
that make sense? It doesnt make sense!
But in the Middle East, sometimes sense
doesnt make sense!)
There is a possibility that Iran could be
made into an ally in this war, but it has a
stake in creating disorder between America
and its allies, and al-Qaeda is an element
of that. It is one thing to talk about Irans
nuclear program. But how easy would it
be to get Iran to turn over members of al-
Qaeda to the international community for
trial? They refuse to do that, and I nd this
to be an extraordinary statement of where
the Iranians stand in the world.
GARY SMITH (The American Academy
in Berlin): Could you say a bit more about
al-Qaedas leadership? What if Osama bin
Laden were captured? You recently argued
that various parts of al-Qaeda would some-
how lose their energy and direction. On
the other hand, havent new leaders been
forged in the battles of terrorism since
September 11?
WRIGHT: Bin Laden is an irreduc-
ible asset for al-Qaeda. There is no one
else in the movement who rivals him.
For instance Ayman al-Zawahiri the
Egyptian doctor who has been the brains
of al-Qaeda from the beginning has
zero charisma. People are not going to
go off and die for Zawahiri. No one but
bin Laden projects that sense of moral
authority. He can still give direction. He
has been telling young Jihadis to go to
Kashmir, to go to Dafur. No one else has
the authority to direct trafc that way. And
he is able to give the illusion that al-Qaeda
has moral standing in the world when in
fact al-Qaeda is devolving into criminal
gangs. They are nancing their opera-
tions by kidnapping, smuggling opium in
Afghanistan, stealing oil in Iraq, poaching
big game in Africa. They are mobs essen-
tially a bunch of maas, loosely linked
together beneath the isolated gure of
bin Laden. Without him to hold things
together, al-Qaedas growing sectarianism
will sound its death knell. In some ways
al-Qaeda is becoming a sort of black pirate
ag to run up before robbing, kidnapping,
looting, and smuggling. But there really is
an al-Qaeda, and it really is headed by bin
Laden. Without him, however, I think it
would be much weaker.
Bin Laden is not a political gure.
I think of Al-Qaeda as a sort of snakebite,
a reaction, an angry strike at the West. But
it has no political program whatsoever.
What would al-Qaeda do if it took power?
What if it actually succeeded in establishing
its longed-for caliphate? Radical Islamists
have been in power before. The Taliban are
a great example of what bin Laden would do
if he had power. Taliban leaders were not
interested in government at all; they were
interested in purifying the Muslims. And
when purication is on the docket, terror is
very close at hand.
MASCOLO: Do you think al-Qaeda will
still exist in 2017?
WRIGHT: I dont think so. Al-Qaeda would
be nearly thirty years old in 2017. Very few
terror organizations have had that kind of
longevity. I can only think of the ira, and it
lived on because it had political goals, some
of which were achievable. Some of them
have been achieved. Thats why Sinn Fein is
now a political organization instead of the
arm of a terror organization. We can trace
a similar development with Palestinian
terror organizations, some of which have
become important political players. Bin
Laden and al-Qaeda, in contrast, have
become increasingly nihilistic. Their goals
are apocalyptic. Theyre unachievable.
Either al-Qaeda will become more political
along the lines of Hezbollah for instance
(which is possible, though unlikely) or it
will burn out.
We will continue to have radical Islam,
as we will have many different forms of
radicalism. I think that the movements,
the conditions that gave rise to al-Qaeda,
could give rise to many other different
forms of radicalism as well. As long as
there are young people who are disaffected,
despairing, and unable to participate in
the modern world as long as they have
no outlets for dealing with their confusion
about their identities and long to make an
impression on history they will be drawn
to extremes. It doesnt have to be al-Qaeda.
It might be animal rights, or radical envi-
ronmentalism, or some other form of
intense religious expression. These things
happen again and again.
I do see radicalism in our future, but I
think that with al-Qaeda itself, the ame is
burning too brightly for it to endure.

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f there is any way for the US to
resolve the conict in Iraq it will only
be through a negotiated political solu-
tion rather than a US military victory on
the battleeld. On this much all parties
agree. Notwithstanding frequent charges
that the Bush administration sees only
military solutions, it has in fact been try-
ing to negotiate a settlement among Iraqs
warring factions since at least 2005. The
problem is not a xation on warfare; it
is a lack of the leverage needed to make
negotiations work and broker a deal. Iraqs
factions reject reconciliation and will
continue to reject it until outside pressure
forces them to compromise. Real progress
therefore requires some new and more
powerful lever.
Many critics of the war now hope that a
threat of US withdrawal will provide this
A
TOUGH
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Rethinking US strategy in Iraq
by Stephen Biddle
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ADAM HELMS, UNTITLED PORTRAITS, 2007
lever. Senator Carl Levin, for example, has
long argued that the US military pres-
ence serves as a crutch that enables Iraqis
to avoid painful compromise and hard
bargaining, and that only a timetable for
removing this crutch can compel them to
face facts and swallow a settlement.
The administration, by contrast, sees its
troop surge as the means to reconciliation.
In its view, chaos in Baghdad has pushed
politics aside in favor of sectarian self-
defense and the vengeance of militias. By
deploying enough troops to bring security
to the capital, the administration hopes to
create breathing room and a political space
within which to strike a deal.
Neither view is sound. Instead, if there
is any hope of a peaceful solution to Iraqs
civil war, it will require a new strategy in
which military force is tied much more
actively to ongoing political negotiations.
Rather than merely creating space for diplo-
mats to talk, our military must provide the
leverage they need to drive unwilling fac-
tions toward compromise.
The surge gives the United States
160,000 heavily armed troops in Iraq
through perhaps the winter and spring
of 2008. This is not enough to secure the
whole country, but it is enough to provide
some powerful incentives and threats.
Used selectively to threaten factions that
do not compromise and assist those that do,
American military power can be an impor-
tant tool for negotiators. Such a strategy
may require militarily protecting or assist-
ing factions that have fought the Iraqi gov-
ernment and killed Americans if these
factions agree to change sides or observe
a ceasere. It may require withholding
military assistance or defense for commu-
nities whose leaders fail to bargain in good
faith and using force to disarm the militias
of factions that refuse to negotiate, while
tolerating or even assisting others that do
cooperate politically.
Even if we do this, the odds are still
against us. Reasonable people could cer-
tainly conclude that the chances of success
in Iraq are now too low, and that the US
should simply withdraw. But a long-shot
gamble can make sense if the cost of
failure is high enough, and the president
has clearly decided to continue rolling the
dice until he leaves ofce or until politi-
cal realignment in Washington produces
a veto-proof majority for withdrawal in
Congress.
In the meantime, the US is committed
to ght on in Iraq. If this long shot is to
have any chance of success, it is essential
that US combat operations be tied much
more closely to Washingtons political
strategy and create the kind of incentives,
now lacking, that can move Iraqs factions
toward a negotiated ceasere across all of
Iraq.
I
t is difficult to see how any such
deal can emerge from the strategies that
have been most popular in Washington
over the last year.
A timetable for withdrawal is too blunt
an instrument. A withdrawal of US forces
is a threat to some Iraqis but a promise to
others. Muqtada al Sadr and some Sunni
factions want the US to leave so they can
try to seize control in its wake. A threat of
withdrawal will hardly encourage them
to accept an unpalatable compromise; on
the contrary, it gives them every incentive
to dig in their heels and destroy any com-
promise in order to hasten the departure
of troops. Policies that encourage only one
side to compromise while inviting the other
to stonewall may actually reduce the odds
of a deal.
Nor will creating breathing room in
Baghdad be enough. If Iraqis wanted com-
promise and only violence in the capital
stood in the way, then reducing the violence
might enable an accord. But the problem
is deeper than this. Real compromise is far
too risky for Iraqs major factions to accept
if left to their own devices. Each fears
with some reason that its rivals intend
mass violence against it if those rivals gain
control of the coercive instruments of a
modern state. This makes compromise
very dangerous for Iraqis and is a recipe for
stalemate.
If the US military could somehow
defend all Iraqis from their rivals, then this
dilemma would recede, and perhaps Iraqis
could reach their own accommodation
under a blanket of comprehensive US pro-
tection. But we will never deploy enough
US soldiers to accomplish that. Even at
full strength and used entirely for popula-
tion security, the surge can at best secure
Baghdad and Anbar province; but what
about Diyala, Saladin, Najaf, Basra, and the
rest of the country? Militants have already
responded to increased US troop strength
in Baghdad and Anbar by owing outward
into vulnerable communities elsewhere.
We have seen this time and again.
We cannot solve the problem by making
compromise risk free for Iraqis through
comprehensive population security;

SOME 160,000 HEAVILY ARMED US
TROOPS IN IRAQ IS NOT ENOUGH
TO SECURE THE WHOLE COUNTRY,
BUT IT IS ENOUGH TO PROVIDE
SOME POWERFUL INCENTIVES
AND THREATS.
we can only do it by persuading them to
accept the risks by creating new costs for
stubbornness and new benets for coopera-
tion in short, by nding more powerful
forms of bargaining leverage.
Some see this leverage in offers of
economic aid, whether in the form of debt
forgiveness or direct US or international
aid. US reconstruction aid however is
falling, not rising, and it is far from clear
that other countries will ll the void.
More important, though, are the incom-
mensurate stakes for Iraqis. Factions
that fear mass violence are unlikely to be
persuaded to risk it in exchange for a few
more hours of electricity or rebuilt clin-
ics or restructured loans. Economic aid
can help seal a deal, but it will never be
enough by itself.
Perhaps this new leverage can come
from Iraqs neighbors via a regional diplo-
matic strategy. Many now hope that Iran
and Syria, in particular, may be persuaded
to use their inuence on Iraqs Shiite and
Sunni factions to pressure them into an
arrangement or, at a minimum, that Iran
might be induced to stop making things
worse by arming Iraqi militias. There are
ample grounds for skepticism, however.
No one wants chaos in Iraq, but the pre-
ferred Iraqi endstate is very different for
Syria, Iran, and the US. To persuade Syria
and Iran to accept our preference rather
than theirs when Iraq is an immediate
neighbor of theirs and a matter of vital
national security interest to them could
prove expensive for us. Iran could demand
US acquiescence to its nuclear ambitions.
Syria will want the US to accept reestab-
lishment of its inuence in Lebanon.
And even if the US pays the price, it is
far from clear that Iraqs neighbors have
enough inuence to compel a ceasere.
The stakes in Iraq are literally existential
for Iraqis, and there are more than enough
arms, ghters, and money inside the coun-
try today to fuel civil warfare for a long time,
even if Iran and Syria were to withdraw
their support altogether.
Given the stakes for the US if it fails in
Iraq, diplomacy with Iran and Syria may
still be worth trying, even if the cost is high
and the benet unclear. But such diplo-
macy will probably not sufce.
A
rguably the most powerful
potential source of leverage is mili-
tary force. Selective use of US mili-
tary power to reward compromise and pun-
ish intransigence should in principle be a
powerful tool in an ongoing war. To exer-
cise such leverage, however, would require
a very different military strategy from what
we followed from 2003 to 2006. It would
require a military campaign designed not
as a means of pacifying Iraq directly or as
a means of handing the ght off to an Iraqi
surrogate. Rather, the military campaign
should be a tool of a political negotiating
strategy aimed at producing a ceasere.
Anbar province shows both the prom-
ise and the challenges of this approach.
A group of Sunni tribal sheiks there agreed
to turn against al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia
(aqm), whose brutality and interference
with traditional tribal smuggling routes
has alienated the tribes. To facilitate this
turnabout and in return for a ceasere
agreement between the tribes, the US, and
the government of Iraq, the US has assist-
ed the sheiks in converting tribal militias
that had once fought Americans into better
organized, better equipped, ofcially sanc-
tioned police forces for use in protecting
the tribes against aqm.
This realignment and its associated
ceasere is a potential model for negoti-
ated truces elsewhere. Only by concluding
a series of such local bilateral agreements
with particular factions can the violence
in Iraq as a whole be brought under
control.
The deal in Anbar, however, poses real
risks both for the tribes and the govern-
ment. aqm has turned on the sheiks in full
force. Indeed the bloody assassination this
september of Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu
Risha after his high-prole meeting with
President Bush makes this all too clear.
Sunni tribesmen worry that by siding with
Malikis government they risk oppression
under what they see as a Shiite regime. And
the government worries that it could be
arming the enemy in the midst of a Sunni-
Shiite civil war.
To convert this opportunity into a sus-
tainable ceasere will require tangible
rewards for continued cooperation as well
as a credible threat that backsliding will
yield a worse fate. Economic aid can help,
but given the survival stakes at risk here,
only military tools are likely to offer enough
leverage to make a real difference. The US
must be prepared to follow through with
selective training, equipment, and arms
for Sunni tribal police who have agreed to
cooperate. The US must also be willing to
protect cooperative tribes with US troops if
requested by Sunnis worried about Shiite
violence. They must also be willing to
threaten offensive action if necessary to
disarm any tribal forces that break their
ceasere agreement or take action against
the government.
The particulars will vary with Iraqs var-
ied communal geography, but the military
logic here holds everywhere. To groups con-
sidering a ceasere, we must be willing to
offer military aid or protection by US troops
against their rivals and this promise of
assistance must be coupled with a threat
of attack or the withdrawal of protection if
they do not come around.
Some kind of selectivity is unavoidable
in Iraq. We have always made decisions
about whom to protect and whom to punish,
if only because we cannot protect everyone
or punish all malign actors at once. But if
we are to succeed in Iraq, these decisions
cannot be based chiey on who most needs
A LONG-SHOT GAMBLE CAN MAKE
SENSE IF THE COST OF FAILURE
IS HIGH ENOUGH, AND THE
PRESIDENT HAS CLEARLY DECIDED
TO CONTINUE ROLLING THE DICE
UNTIL HE LEAVES OFFICE OR
UNTIL POLITICAL REALIGNMENT
PRODUCES A VETO-PROOF
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the protection or which communities are
easiest to defend. Our use of force must
instead be guided by our search for lever-
age; we must send troops where their pres-
ence is most likely to persuade factions to
accept ceaseres.
Of course the strategy I am describing
is a very tall order and likelier to fail than to
succeed. The application of military force
is notoriously inexact, and large, far-ung
military organizations are hard to control
with the precision needed to distinguish
between factions and subfactions. Unless
implemented with deft diplomacy, such a
plan could easily yield uniform enmity from
Iraqis on all sides. Military aid or protection
for Sunni factions could be diverted later
into use in civil warfare against a Shiite gov-
ernment if a system of ceaseres policed by
American troops does not avert this rst.
Such a strategy could also be a tough
sell politically it replaces a clear, simple
narrative of evil insurgents against a
democratically elected government with a
complicated story of intersectarian intrigue,
shifting loyalties, and coercive leverage.
The military itself prefers a clear role of
defending the innocent and destroying the
evil to a complex mission of manipulating
rewards and punishments for bargain-
ing leverage. And the expertise needed to
understand Iraqi political dynamics clearly
enough to move all parties simultaneously
toward compromise may prove beyond us.
And yet we have reached a point at
which all policies for Iraq are likelier to
fail than to succeed. To peacefully ter-
minate an ongoing communal conict
such as Iraqs is inherently a long-shot
gamble. There are examples of success;
the ceaseres in Kosovo and Bosnia were
obtained by interventions not unlike what
I describe. These ceaseres are never
easy, however, and Iraq is an especially
hard case. Unless the US makes the most
of every possible source of leverage, its
chances of success could quickly go from
slim to none.
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense

policy at the Council on Foreign Relations,
was a C.V. Starr Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy last May. An earlier version of this
text was published in the Boston Globe in June.
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Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
ON THE WATERFRONT
NEWS FROM THE HANS ARNHOLD CENTER
N2 Academy Notebook: When
Helmut Schmidt received
the rst Kissinger Prize this
spring, many friends were
there to celebrate with him.
N4 Academy Notebook: Three
trustees are appointed; a
website is reborn; North Korea
takes the spotlight; new senior
counselors come aboard.
N6 Sketches & Dispatches: Reports
on visits by Christopher Cox,
James Wolfensohn, and Cass
Sunstein; Richard Cohen on
the Wannsees troubled past.
N9 Life & Letters: Academy fellows
and their projects, plus a
preview of next springs class,
recent alumni publications,
and the fall calendar.
J
ohn Kornblum set
the earnest tone. June 12,
1987 was the rst day of
reunication, said the former
US Ambassador at the American
Academy in Berlin in his intro-
ductory remarks. Helmut Kohl,
the chancellor of unity himself,
did not demur and winked at his
friend George P. Shultz, with
whom he shared the podium that
evening.
In the 1980s Shultz was secre-
tary of state under the late Ronald
Reagan, who twenty years before
had pronounced legendary words
from in front of the Brandenburg
Gate: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down
this Wall!
Invited by the American
Academy to commemorate the
speech, Kohl and Shultz were
joined at the villa on the Wannsee
by former German President
Richard von Weizscker, Berlins
former mayor Eberhard Diepgen,
and a distinguished company of
transatlantic guests.
Kohl praised Reagans speech
as one of the most important
in Berlins history. President
Reagan, though rarely considered
the embodiment of intellectual-
ism, had the vision to anticipate
the utopia of a reunied Berlin,
he said.

CONTINUED ON N6
Berlin on 57
th
Street
A Carnegie Hall venue for Academy talks
T
he Academy has orga-
nized a series of Berlin
Talks on lm, literature,
the visual arts, and politics as
part of Carnegie Halls Berlin
in Lights Festival to take place
this November in New York. With
the Berlin Philharmonics long-
anticipated Carnegie residency at
its center, the festival celebrates
Berlins cultural wealth, past
and present. The Berlin in
Lights Festival, including the
Berlin Philharmonics return to
New York City, is made possible
by a leadership gift from the
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen
Foundation. The Academys
Berlin Talks are generously
underwritten by Lufthansa AG.
The lm panel on November 3
will feature the Oscar-winning
German directors Volker
Schlndorff and Florian Henckel
von Donnersmarck, New Yorker
lm critic David Denby, and
Michael Barker of Sony Pictures
Classics. The next day, Academy
alumni Jeffrey Eugenides and
Nicole Krauss will serve on the
literature panel, joining the
German-language writers Daniel
Kehlmann and Peter Schneider
and publisher Michael Naumann.
Also on November 4, New
York Times art critic Michael
Kimmelman, newly based in
Berlin, will lead a discussion with
MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach,
Berlin-based artists Tacita Dean
and Thomas Demand, and the
Academy alumna painter Julie
Mehretu.
Finally on November 11 the
Academys Chairman Richard
C. Holbrooke will reect on the
current political situation in
Germany with Academy trustees
Josef Joffe, Henry Kissinger, and
John Kornblum as well as with
German parliamentarian Karl-
Theodor zu Guttenberg. A gala
fundraiser for the Academy will
take place on November 12. r.n.
Tear Down
This Wall
T
he American Academy
in Berlin is honored to
announce the Hans
Arnhold Center as German
Chancellor Angela Merkels cho-
sen site for a major speech mark-
ing the sixtieth anniversary of the
Marshall Plan. Chancellor Merkel,
who has made transatlantic mar-
ket integration a top priority since
she announced her proposal at the
EU-US Summit earlier this year,
will address the importance of
harmonizing market conditions,
among other issues.
We are deeply honored that
Chancellor Merkel will speak at
the American Academy in Berlin
in November, said Academy
Chairman Richard C. Holbrooke.
She is continuing a tradition
of chancellor speeches at the
Academy that is now almost
a decade old. Her appearance
underlines our core purpose: to
strengthen US-German dialogue
and understanding in the mod-
ern era.
In conjunction with the speech,
German, British, and American
business leaders will convene the
following day for a conference
co-organized by the Academy and
kpmg. Topics will include nan-
cial regulation, industrial product
standards, and medicine with
the goal of raising awareness on
the advantages of a barrier-free
transatlantic market. s.f.
Merkels Atlantic Agenda
Chancellor to give major speech at the Academy
Xa | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
Academy Notebook
T
wo old friends, Helmut
Schmidt and Henry
Kissinger, meet privately
once a year to exchange strate-
gies and discuss the worlds
political situation. This June the
former German chancellor, 88,
and the former US secretary of
state, 84, made an exception. At
the invitation of the American
Academy in Berlin, they had
their annual tte--tte in pub-
lic, joined by 350 guests in the
splendid Emperors Hall of the
Munich Residence. The inaugural
Henry A. Kissinger prize, named
after the Academys Honorary
Chairman, was awarded to
Schmidt in recognition of his
outstanding transatlantic achieve-
ments. Josef Joffe, Schmidts col-
league at Die Zeit, played a key role
in bringing the guests of honor
together.
There is no other statesman I
have trusted more, and few whom
I have trusted as much as Helmut,
remarked Kissinger before he
and Academy Chairman Richard
C. Holbrooke presented the prize.
Schmidt, he said, is considerably
more than a national gure; he is a
pillar of Western values. Over the
years Schmidt has been increas-
ingly critical of certain tendencies
in American politics, Kissinger
said, but only a supercial
observer would confuse this with
anti-Americanism. His friends
know better.
In his own speech Schmidt
looked back on more than fty
years of warm personal experienc-
es with the United States, describ-
ing his profound admiration for
the nations system of checks and
balances. Germany, he said, has
much to thank Americans for, not
least its crucial help in building
German democracy from the
ruins of World War II and Nazi
dictatorship. Convinced that the
US will overcome its current inter-
nal and international crises of con-
dence, Schmidt cautioned rmly
against stereotypes. The German
people will not blame the
American nation for the mistakes
of its present administration.
By Tobias Matern
Sddeutsche Zeitung
June 9, 2007 | Translated
by Samantha Ferrell
Fifty Years
of Friendship
Helmut Schmidt receives the inaugural Kissinger Prize
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | X3
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A
t its spring meeting
in Berlin, the Academy
welcomed to its board
three outstanding new members:
Manfred Bischoff, Michael Klein,
and Dieter Spri.
Daimlers commitment to
the Academy has been immense
since the Hans Arnhold Center
opened its doors in 1998. It con-
tinues with Manfred Bischoffs
appointment to the board.
Bischoff joined Daimler-Benz
AG over thirty years ago and
remained with the company
until 2003. He is now a mem-
ber of Daimlers supervisory
board as well as chairman of its
presidential and mediation com-
mittees. He is chairman of the
European Aeronautic Defense
and Space Company (eads), a
position he has held since the
companys formation in 2000.
Bischoff sits on the boards of sev-
eral other companies, including
Nortel Networks Ltd., Unicredit
S.p.a; and Voith AG. He is a
perfect addition, said Trustee
John Kornblum, who stressed
Bischoffs long involvement in
international business and his
dedication to promoting cultural
exchange between Germany and
the US.
Investment banker Michael
Klein, an American with a
German background, is chair-
man and co-chief executive
ofcer of Citi Markets & Banking.
He has played a major role in
developing both nancial ser-
vices over his twenty years with
Citigroup. Given responsibility
for expanding the companys
European investment banking
business in 1999, Klein met the
challenge within a year, leading
to the creation of what is now
Citigroups European Corporate
and Investment Bank. Named
one of Fortunes 25 Global
Leaders to Watch by the time
he was 37, Kleins other advisory
activities include membership
on the board of the Mount Sinai
Medical Center, the London
Investment Bankers Association,
and the advisory board of the
National Football League. Klein
is also active in promoting equal
opportunities for young people.
A frequent visitor to Berlin and
member of the Transatlantic
Business Dialogue, he is a key
gure in marshalling President
Bush and Chancellor Merkels
transatlantic market initiative.
The distinguished political
career of Dieter Spri, a former
member of both the German
Bundestag and Bundesrat,
included several positions in
the state of Baden-Wrttemberg
(as chairman of the spd party,
economics minister, and deputy
minister president), where he
played a discreet but important
role in political and economic
issues at the national and state
level. Now operating from Berlin
as corporate representative of
federal affairs for Daimler, Spri
has been at the center of con-
necting Berlins corporate and
political worlds through his
legendary lunches at Potsdamer
Platzs Haus Huth, an important
Berlin tradition. Spri is gener-
ously including the Academy in
these private discussions. He is
also president of the Network
European Movement of Germany,
working with this consortium of
civil society organizations to pro-
mote communication between
the EU and Germany on a range
of issues, from democracy to
human rights. s.f.
Trustees on Board
Manfred Bischoff, Michael Klein, and Dieter Spri
O
n July 4 the Academy
launched its newly
refurbished website,
www.americanacademy.de. The
new site is replete with interac-
tive features and comprehensive
information about the Academy,
its programs, community, and
its mission: bringing the best of
America to Berlin and the best
of Berlin to America. Designed
and built by the Berlin web
design rm Exozet Interact after
an extensive competition, the
sites clear and user-friendly
navigation, elegant design, and
extensive links will open the
Academys doors well beyond
the historic villa in which it is
housed.
A new Flash home page
highlights recent programs at
the Hans Arnhold Center and
enables users to click to connect-
ed summaries and media les.
Upcoming events are organized
per month on the calendar tab.
The Academys complete alumni
database is now searchable
online, enabling users to nd
each of the fellows and distin-
guished visitors who have been
in residence since it opened its
doors in 1998. A video and audio
archive offers lms and mp3s of
past events, and every issue of
the Berlin Journal is download-
able as a pdf le.
New features, which are
regularly updated, include On
the Waterfront, a blog summariz-
ing lectures; Berlin Chronicle,
offering a variety of personal
impressions by Academy friends;
and Academy Unbound with
extensive links to work by mem-
bers of the greater Academy
community. A press review page
links to recent articles about the
Academy in the press.
The American Academys
new website serves to acquaint
an international audience with
the activities and events, the peo-
ple and projects that continue to
make the Hans Arnhold Center
a thriving intellectual and cul-
tural center. r.j. magill jr.
A Web of Ideas
The Academy launches its new website
MANFRED BISCHOFF
MICHAEL KLEIN
DIETER SPRI
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | Xg
Academy Expands its Circle of Counselors
Karen Roth, Yoram Roth, and Victoria Scheibler
Talking to North Korea
Christopher Hill leads diplomatic effort in Berlin
T
he Academy is pleased
to announce three new
Senior Counselors, Karen
Roth, Yoram Roth, and Victoria
Scheibler, who will advise the
Academy as volunteers.
Karen Roth, a new American
arrival in Berlin, has worked in
nance and technology manage-
ment since 1988, becoming cfo-
in-residence of the investment
rm Greylock Partners in 2000.
As a counselor she will bring
crucial management skills and
nance savvy to organizing a con-
ference of transatlantic business
leaders that the Academy will co-
host this November. In addition
to drawing young entrepreneurs
to the Academy, Ms. Roth plans to
collaborate with the other Senior
Counselors in creating long-term
fundraising strategies.
Her husband, Yoram Roth,
has been a fan of the Academy
since day one. The native
Berliner, back in Germany after
a decade in Los Angeles, is a
passionate photographer and
the founder of Berlins early
electronica music label DVision
Records. Mr. Roth is always look-
ing for cutting-edge companies
in which to invest, focusing
especially on the intersection of
technology with entertainment
and education. In LA he founded
Rotor Communications, a creator
of broadcast software for stream-
ing content. This experience
will be put to good use as Mr.
Roth helps usher the turn-of-the-
century Wannsee villa into the
digital era, introducing a host of
fresh ideas including Academy
podcasts.
Victoria Scheibler will
strengthen the Academys
link to the arts. Recently trans-
planted to Berlin from Cologne
with her gallerist husband,
Aurel Scheibler, she will help
introduce the fellows to Berlin.
A scholar of Goethes contem-
porary, Benedikte Naubert, Dr.
Scheibler has also served on
art juries and museum boards.
She joins the tradition of sup-
porting the Academy launched
by her parents, the prominent
American art patron Jeane von
Oppenheim and the late Alfred
von Oppenheim, and continued
by her brother Christopher von
Oppenheim, who sits on the
Academys board. Her extensive
time in both Germany and the
US has created an invaluable
cultural network spanning two
continents. s.f.
A
mbassador Christopher
Hill, the assistant sec-
retary of state for East
Asian and Pacic affairs, in a
Berlin speech organized by the
Academy on January 17, stated
that progress was being made
in secret meetings with North
Korean diplomats in Berlin. His
announcement made headlines
around the world. Ambassador
Hill has headed the US delega-
tion to the Six-Party Talks on
the North Korean nuclear issue
since 2005.
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Sketches & Dispatches
Kohl remembered being especial-
ly pleased when he heard Reagan
had said that things clicked
between them.
Shultz, who was not in Berlin
at the time of the Berlin Wall
speech, stressed that, though
Reagan always placed an empha-
sis on appearing strong, he was
also willing to negotiate with the
Soviets. He made some people
nervous with his views and rheto-
ric, but the idea that change is
possible turned out to be an ener-
gizing and motivating stimulant.
Reagan, he said, called on Mr.
Gorbachev to tear down the Wall,
but in the end it was the German
people who did so.
Shultz, who advised George
W. Bush during his campaigns
and has lobbied for nuclear dis-
armament, used the speech to
make a number of points about
the post-Soviet era. In addition
to describing the challenge
of containing fundamental-
ist Islamic movements, he
addressed global warming. He
criticized the European stance
on climate protection as imprac-
tical. The Kyoto Protocol could
not work because the concept
behind it had no chance of
global acceptance. The 1987
Montreal Protocol, on the other
hand in which all countries
agreed to phase out the produc-
tion of materials that dam-
age the ozone layer worked
because every state was part of
the problem and took part in the
solution.
By Philipp Lichterbeck
Der Tagesspiegel
June 7, 2007 | Translated
by Samantha Ferrell
Tear Down This Wall
George Shultz commemorates Reagans Berlin speech
T
he Academy welcomed
sec Chairman Christopher
Cox to the Hans Arnhold
Center this April. His visit con-
tinued the Academys program
of bringing senior gures from
the US Securities and Exchange
Commission to Berlin for
informal meetings with mem-
bers of the German business
community.
Chairman Cox, who is lead-
ing the international effort to
nd sensible ways of integrat-
ing US and overseas regulation,
spoke of the need to smooth
regulatory friction between
different national systems.
Regulators, he said, need to
strike a balance between under-
regulation, which carries with
it the risk of fraud, abuse, and a
loss of investor condence, and
over-regulation, which saps the
economic vitality of otherwise
vibrant markets.
That morning he and Jochen
Sanio signed a comprehensive
arrangement between the
sec and the German Federal
Financial Supervisory Authority
(BaFin) to facilitate their super-
vision of internationally active
rms and their oversight of
markets.
Frustration in Europe with
the extraterritorial effects of
the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
has become a regular theme in
German corporate circles, and
Chairman Cox outlined possible
paths toward regulatory conver-
gence in his speech, while at the
same time cautioning against
a one-size-ts-all approach to
securities oversight.
His talk, which was co-orga-
nized by the American Chamber
of Commerce in Germany, was
preceded by a private dinner with
German business leaders and
politicians. m. r.
Promoting Convergence
while Respecting Differences
SEC Chairman speaks at the Academy
CONTINUED FROM N1
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G
reat importance was
once assigned to the role
of debate in democracy.
That was back when legislatures
had something to say and did not
just help governments into the
saddle. It was thought that the
exchange of arguments helped
to bring out the truth of a matter,
thus shaping consensus. Cass
Sunstein, star of the University
of Chicagos law school, sees it
differently. He has conducted
experiments in which liberals
and conservatives were asked
their opinions on such matters
as climate change and homo-
sexual marriage. After the like-
minded camps discussed among
themselves, the participants
were once again asked what they
thought. Their positions were
further apart than before.
The observation that preach-
ing to the choir does not tend
to promote skepticism may in
itself be trivial, but this May at a
lecture at the Academy, Sunstein
expanded it into a diagnosis
for our times. According to the
most pessimistic version of the
diagnosis, the Internet makes
it possible for more and more
people to restrict their discus-
sions to like-minded contempo-
raries, leading to a solidication
of attitudes. Sunstein referred
to studies of US courts. If three
judges have all been nominated
by Republicans or Democrats,
respectively, they will judge
more stereotypically than
when there is a dissenting view
among them. In other words,
dissent has it easier when it is
institutionalized.
One could at this point raise
an objection: that parliaments
and discussions are, in fact,
supposed to institutionalize dis-
sent. The opposition is expected
to consider the opposite of what
the government puts forward.
But the term opposition did
not come up in Sunsteins
theory of democracy. For him
democracy is a machine for the
aggregation of information,
and, because he sees it this way,
he can compare it to the market-
place. Democracy does not fare
well in this comparison because,
whereas in a democracy only
a few take part in the actual
discussions, many more partici-
pate in the market.
Sunstein refers (and this leads
to the optimistic version of his
diagnosis) to the many Internet
stock exchanges, where one
can bet on the success of every-
thing from Hollywood movies
(www.hsx.com) to the next presi-
dent (www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem).

CONTINUED ON N8
The Wisdom of Crowds
Cass Sunstein discusses utopias of information
G
ermanys President
Horst Khler has a great
many friends in the
big, wide world. Some of them
were invited to Bellevue palace
on a Tuesday in April to hear a
speech by James Wolfensohn.
The man of the evening,
the former president of the
World Bank, inaugurated the
American Academys Richard
von Weizscker Honorary
Fellowship. Sitting in the rst
row were former UN General
Secretary Ko Annan; Michael
Camdessus, a former manag-
ing director of the International
Monetary Fund; his erstwhile
successor at the imf, Horst
Khler; and of course, Ex-
President von Weizscker.
I must say that at this
moment I feel especially at ease,
said Khler in his introductory
remarks with a glance at his
old friends Wolfensohn and
Annan. Having them there, he
continued, was reminiscent of
the years when the three headed
three inuential world organi-
zations, working together politi-
cally and emboldening each
other to reform their respective
institutions. Die drei Weltpros
is what von Weizscker called
them in his warm, heartfelt
greeting the three world pro-
fessionals. Von Weizscker was
full of praise for his presidential
successor, Khler.
Khler fondly remembered
his years as head of the IMF in
Washington where Wolfensohn,
whose ofce was across the
street at the World Bank, helped
him settle in. He was more
than a colleague.
And today, in light of the
recent developments at the
bank, everyone can see what a
great president he was. There
was no need to even mention
Wolfensohns scandal-ridden
successor Paul Wolfowitz on the
eve of the latters resignation.
In his intellectually demand-
ing and fact-lled speech,
Wolfensohn described the
four-speed world of 2050. By
that year at the latest, countries
such as China, India, and Brazil
will be hard on the heels of rich
industrial nations with high
per-person incomes, placing an
even greater distance between
themselves and the large
number of slowly developing
nations and leaving a fourth
group of countries in Africa and
Asia out of the game completely.
The future will require think-
ing in terms of these new power
dynamics. One need only con-
sider how outmoded structures
like the G7 and G8 have become.
By Holger Schmale
Berliner Zeitung
April 26, 2007
Translated by Samantha
Ferrell
Reunion in Bellevue Palace
Wolfensohn, Khler, and friends honor von Weizscker
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X8 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
T
he sun has risen over the
Wannsee, the lake here in
this leafy neighborhood of
the German capital. The day will
be hot and the sky a deep blue
until afternoon, when the expect-
ed thunderstorms arrive. I am
writing in the gatehouse of the
old Hans Arnhold estate, which
is now the American Academy in
Berlin. The Arnholds left behind
the lakeside vista, the boat basin,
the bucolic setting, the imposing
house, and a prosperous banking
business. They ran for their lives.
This is one of my many visits
to Berlin, and I still nd the his-
tory of the city the reality of
the place almost impossible to
comprehend. Oh, sure, you know
of the Holocaust and the murder
of six million. It happened. Its a
fact. And we live with it as we do
the inuenza pandemic of 1918,
something that also killed mil-
lions now, please, can we go on
with our lives?
The Arnholds and their neigh-
bors had huge houses, gated like
castles in some cases. They were
prosperous citizens in a land
where Jews were Germans and
Germans were Jews so inter-
married and so much a part of
the creative, nancial, and intel-
lectual leadership of the country
that it took the best brains the
Nazis had to pry them apart and
decide who should live and who
should die. The great painter Max
Liebermann lived nearby in the
house that his widow, Martha,
was forced to sell Martha, who
committed suicide shortly before
the police came to arrest her. The
house is now open to the public.
So, too, is the much more
famous mansion at Wannsee
where, in 1942, top Nazis met to
devise the nal solution the
murder of Europes remaining
Jews. The villa is across the lake
from the one where I write. It, too,
is open to the public and is now a
center for the study of genocide
and such matters. The other day
a conference was held there on
original testimony, the rsthand
accounts of the murder of Jews.
That house was once owned by
Jews.
Because of its historical
signicance, there is no more
important lake in the entire
world than the Wannsee. For the
same reason, there is no more
important neighborhood than
this one. There is no more chill-
ing story than that of Europes
Jews and what happened to
them. There is no more crashing
silence than the gleeful sounds
no longer made by children, by
shooing nannies, by parents gone
and businesses expropriated
and houses stolen, and people
marched here or there, allowed at
rst to ee, then not, and nally
killed.
This is something that hap-
pened, and you can, if it comforts
you, assign it to a category called
Germans or Jews and relate
it to nothing else. Or you can
dwell on it, wonder about it, and
conclude that madness can strike
anyone anywhere that one days
permanence is the evanescence of
the next: here today, gone tomor-
row. You can relate it to today, to
the threats coming from Iran or
North Korea, to the menace of
radical Islam, to the miniaturiza-
tion of terror, the digitization of
warfare the combination of ide-
ology with technology. The world
our world of Paris Hilton silli-
ness can change in an instant.
The war in Iraq will take its
toll. We rightly question authority
and expertise. We increasingly
subscribe to what could be called
the privatization of life the
worthy notion, once unheard
of, that the government has no
unquestioned call on the lives
of young men. In Iraq about
3,500 American deaths appall
us. But before coming to Berlin,
I went to Normandy, where Allied
forces invaded during World War
II and where, by the end of that
battle, the US alone had lost about
30,000 lives. Could we make the
same sacrice today? I wonder.
I dont wonder, though, about the
possible need to do so.
The sun climbs. Birds dart in
and out of the trees. The Arnholds
and others must have had a
wonderful life here. They had a
culture, an identity that was sunk
with roots as deep as those of the
trees on their estates. It was rich
with achievement. I see them and
others the bankers and writers,
the playwrights and composers
and the ordinary workers swim-
ming in the lake, sunning on the
beach, picnicking, or maybe just
napping. This is Berlins unparal-
leled tourist site.
Come here to see what no lon-
ger can be seen.
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post
June 12, 2007
Lake of the Unimaginable
The Wisdom of Crowds
Such electronic markets,
Sunstein points out, have shown
astonishing success in predicting
the future because they are open
to all, blind to social status, and
do not gaze at their own navels.
Furthermore, instead of reward-
ing conformism, they offer
incentives for dissent and specic
information.
So should parliaments be
replaced with betting booths?
Would an Internet site have
predicted more accurately than
the Pentagon that there were no
weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq? And, one wonders, who
resigns when the internet site is
caught lying?
It was not until the end of the
discussion after Sunsteins Berlin
lecture that he conceded that
democracy may have functions
other than aggregating as much
information as possible and
using what James Surowiecki has
called the wisdom of crowds.
After all, democracy at times is
also dictated by the stupidity
of crowds, and it still remains
democracy.
By Jrgen Kaube
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung
May 23, 2007 | Translated
by Miranda Robbins
CONTI NUED FROM N7
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MAX LIEBERMANN, BADENDE JUNGEN, 1898
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | X
Life & Letters
OMER BARTOV
Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish
Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine
Princeton University Press
(October 2007)
DEREK CHOLLET
Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide
Routledge
(December 2007)
SIMONE DI PIERO
Chinese Apples: New and
Selected Poems
Knopf
(February 2007)
RICHARD B. FREEMAN
America Works: The Exceptional
US Labor Market
Russell Sage Foundation
Publications
(April 2007)
ATINA GROSSMAN
Jews, Germans and Allies: Close
Encounters in Occupied Germany
Princeton University Press
(September 2007)
JAMES HANKINS
(editor)
The Cambridge Companion to
Renaissance Philosophy
Cambridge University Press
(October 2007)
BEN KATCHOR
The Dairy Restaurant
Schocken
(December 2007)
WALTER LAQUEUR
The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph
for an Old Continent
St. Martins Press
(May 2007)
ANTHONY LEWIS
Freedom for the Thought that We
Hate: Tales of the First Amendment
Basic Books
(January 2008)
JULIE MEHRETU
The Drawings
Text by Catherine deZegher
Rizzoli
(November 2007)
WALLIS MILLER
O.M. Ungers: Cosmos of
Architecture
Co-authors Martin Kieren,
Wilfred Kuhn, Stephanie Tasch
Hatje Cantz
(February 2007)
ESRA ZYREK
The Politics of Memory in Turkey
Syracuse University Press
(March 2007)
ADAM POSEN
Stabilizing the Economy: Why
and How
Blackwell Pub
(September 2007)
DAVID RIEFF
Swimming in a Sea of Death:
A Sons Memoir
Simon & Schuster
(January 2007)
ALEX ROSS
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the
Twentieth Century
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(October 2007)
JAMES SHEEHAN
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone:
The Transformation of Europe
Houghton Mifin
(January 2008)
HENRY E. SMITH
Property: Principles and Policies
Co-author Thomas W. Merrill
Foundation Press
(March 2007)
HELEN VENDLER
Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and
Lyric Form
Harvard University Press
(October 2007)
Alumni Books
Recent and forthcoming releases
T
he Academy looks
forward to welcoming
an outstanding class of
scholars and artists to the Hans
Arnhold Center next spring.
The class includes journalist
Anne Applebaum as the
George Herbert Walker Bush /
Axel Springer Fellow, returning
for the second half of a two-
semester fellowship. She will
be joined by Siemens Fellow
Cl aire Finkelstein of the
University of Pennsylvania
Law School; Deutsche Bank
Fellow for Music Composition
Sean Shepherd; art histo-
rian Elizabeth Sears of
the University of Michigan,
holding an Anna-Maria Kellen
Fellowship; and Vanderbilt
philosophy professor Gregg
Horowitz as the Berthold
Leibinger Fellow. The two Ellen
Maria Gorrissen Fellows are
New York University historian
David Levering Lewis
and Kenneth Gross of
the University of Rochesters
English department. Boston
University political scientist
David Mayers has been
named the Haniel Fellow.
The Bosch Prizes in Public
Policy are held by Nichol as
Eberstadt of the American
Enterprise Institute and
Steven Simon, a senior fel-
low for Middle Eastern stud-
ies at the Council on Foreign
Relations. Two photographers,
Mitch Epstein and Collier
Schorr, will take up residen-
cies as Guna S. Mundheim
Fellows in the Visual Arts.
Sneak
Preview
The spring 2008 fellows
Xo | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
MARK BUTLER
It is after midnight in an old
dancehall in the Berlin neigh-
borhood of Kreuzberg. A hun-
dred or so enthusiasts of elec-
tronic music have their eyes and
ears trained on a table loaded
with laptops and turntables,
listening to a musician named
Pole performing extended
improvisations on tracks from
his latest album. The audience is
behaving much like the people
who attended the Philharmonic
across town: listening attentively,
admiring the musicianship,
appreciating the span of musical
references made. Berliners take
their techno seriously. So does
music theorist Mark Butler, who
is fascinated by the combination
of product and activity that
such performances embody.
Morsels of prerecorded sounds
and rhythms and the highly
varied technology used to medi-
ate them are combined in a dis-
tinctly performative way. Butler
is an assistant professor of music
theory and popular music at the
University of Pennsylvania and
this semesters Daimler fellow.
He has developed a way to tran-
scribe the unique performances
of particular performers and DJs
and to carefully analyze how they
work. Berlin, with its vibrant
electronic music scene, has prov-
en a rich venue for eldwork.
ANNE CARSON
Seldom has Ezra Pounds
injunction Make It New been
so spectacularly obeyed, wrote
classicist Bernard Knox of Anne
Carsons Autobiography of Red,
her retelling of the ancient
Greek myth of Geryon. Carson,
a professor of comparative lit-
erature, English, and classics at
the University of Michigan, is a
protean writer. Her work com-
bines a philologists erudition,
a poets subjectivity, a satirists
wit, and a translators sensitivity
with the audacity of a perfor-
mance artist. As Anna-Maria
Kellen fellow she is translating
the tragedy Prometheus Bound,
seeking a new way to infuse
Aeschyluss ancient mentality
with the music and movement
of current styles of performance
like hip-hop. This genre may
at rst seem a far cry from the
mighty sufferings of the immor-
tal Prometheus chained to his
rock. But Carson nds its rhym-
ing structure well suited to the
sheer volume of information
plus sensual content packed into
each of Aeschyluss lines. And
like the heroes of many hip-hop
tales, the titan is doing time:
a ten-thousand-year sentence
for stealing re from the gods.
Nowhere, she writes, is lan-
guage so energized nowadays
as in the ash and discipline of
hip-hop artists. In fact, they have
reinvented the dynamics of a
Greek Chorus.
ELIZABETH GOODSTEIN
In his best-known work, The
Philosophy of Money (1900), the
philosopher and sociologist
Georg Simmel wrote of the
possibility of nding in each
of lifes details the totality of
its meaning. Intellectual his-
torian Elizabeth Goodstein of
Emory Universitys Graduate
Institute of Liberal Arts sees
in this a summary of Simmels
philosophical ambition and a
key to his strong grounding in
the German philosophical tra-
dition. His inquiry seemingly
fragmented aspects of modern
life money, urban space and
architecture, travel, fashion,
sociability, feminism has
brought him many fans and
foes in the Anglo-American
intellectual world. His admirers
herald him as a prophet of post-
modernism, while his detractors
see a fox darting unmethodically
from sociological description to
imprecise philosophical general-
izations. Both camps are wrong,
Goodstein argues. She regards
Simmel as anything but unsys-
tematic or subjective, a modern-
ist philosopher rather than a
mere sociologist of modernity.
The German Transatlantic
Program fellows forthcom-
ing monograph, a companion
to her well received rst book
Experience Without Qualities:
Boredom and Modernity of 2005,
will try to untangle this rather
garbled reception and to place
Simmel in the modernist canon
alongside Adorno, Benjamin,
and Musil.
JEFFREY HERF
Historian Jeffery Herf has
already made careful studies of
European anti-Semitism, par-
ticularly Nazi propaganda. Now,
as the George Herbert Walker
Bush / Axel Springer fellow, he
will apply his ndings to a non-
Western chapter in the history
of anti-Semitism: that of radical
Islam. It is often forgotten that
the Nazis eagerly cultivated Arab
sympathy during the war. In
1942 Third Reich propagandists
were instructed to draw this
great cultural power closer to
us. The German press wrote
favorably of Arab freedom
struggles in the British colonies
and courted Muslim leaders like
the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
who worked with Himmler to
set up an SS unit of Bosnian
Muslims. These historical con-
nections form just one chapter of
Herfs ambitious examination of
the lineages, comparisons, and
differences between European
fascism and radical Islam. His
book will trace Islamic fun-
damentalism from prewar
Egypt and Pakistan to modern
iterations in organizations like
al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. The
University of Maryland profes-
sor, who regularly contributes
commentary and book reviews
to the New Republic, is quick to
stress that his project is as much
about differences as it is about
similarities.
JASON JOHNSTON
In the spring of 2006 fast food
giant McDonalds sent an encour-
aging message to environmen-
talists, agreeing to an Amazon
protection effort that would help
curb deforestation due to soy
planting. Stories like this now ll
the literature surrounding corpo-
rate social responsibility. Models
have been created to explain
when prot maximization will
itself create incentive for corpo-
rate compliance with environ-
mental regulations. Consumers
and investors have been praised
for encouraging companies to
be more socially responsible.
But something has been largely
left out of the literature: how
the laws themselves inuence
market incentives. Bosch Fellow
in Public Policy Jason Johnston
intends to address this gap. The
founding director of University
of Pennsylvanias Program on
Law, the Environment, and the
Economy studies corporate social
and environmental responsibility
and serves on the board of regents
at the Multistate Working Group
on Environmental Management
Systems Policy Academy. In addi-
tion to preparing his book Law,
Markets and the Environmentally
Responsible Corporation: An
Economic Analysis in Berlin,
Johnston also plans to begin
comparative research on the roles
played by ngos in the environ-
mental regulatory process in the
US and Europe.
DIANE McWHORTER
Birmingham, Alabama site
of the jail cell in which Martin
Luther King wrote his famous
treatise against segregation in
1963 as well as of the deadly
bombing of the 16
th
Street Baptist
Church that same year epito-
mized the segregated American
South and the civil rights strug-
Proles in
Scholarship
The fall 2007 class of fellows
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | X
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gle as a whole. Diane McWhorter,
then a young native of the town
America called Bombingham,
later wrote a Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning memoir of that turbulent
period. Carry Me Home redened
the historical framework of
Americas civil rights struggle
and challenged what McWhorter
uninchingly calls American
amnesia. Fascinated by how
Germans have dealt with their
own tormented past, the regular
New York Times contributor is
now researching the intersection
of Nazi Germany and the segre-
gated South in 1950s Huntsville,
Alabama. In this cold-war hub
dubbed Rocket City a team
of ex Nazi scientists lead by
Wernher von Braun perfected
the missile technology that put
the rst man on the moon. As a
Holtzbrinck fellow, McWhorter
will examine the connection
between persistent racial politics
and historical amnesia.
SYLVESTER O. OGBECHIE
Berlins ethnological museum
in Dahlem is famed for its collec-
tion of African art, serving both
as a testament to a painful colo-
nial legacy and as an invaluable
resource for scholars. Art histori-
an Sylvester O. Ogbechie says the
museums recent overhaul of its
permanent exhibition reects a
seismic shift in African studies.
The shift, he says, is long over-
due. With its revised strategies
of display and new emphasis on
contemporary art and practices,
the Berlin museum has nally
turned its back on the primitiv-
ist paradigms that weighted
down Western reception of
African art in the twentieth cen-
tury (paradigms shaped in part
by German thinkers such as Leo
Frobenius and Carl Einstein in
the early 1900s). The myth that
African art exists outside of time,
unadulterated by contact with the
outside world, failed to recognize
that it, too, followed a series of
developments. The museums
substantial new acquisitions of
contemporary work reect what
Ogbechie hails as an eruption
in African art. The Nigerian-
born associate professor at the
University of California, Santa
Barbara is also a curator, consul-
tant, publisher, and champion
of African lm. He has written
extensively on African, African-
American, and African diaspora
artists. Ogbechies scrutiny of the
Dahlem collection is part of his
book exploring the role and func-
tion of ethnographic museums
in contemporary global culture
and, more broadly, of the role
and location of Africa in global
modernity.
GARY SHTEYNGART
This is the prose of heroic dis-
appointment, tted to the task
of shoveling up mountains of
cultural debris, wrote the New
York Times in a 2006 review of
Gary Shteyngarts bestselling
Absurdistan. The St. Petersburg-
born authors success has bur-
geoned since his rst book The
Russian Debutantes Handbook
was published in 2002. His next
novel, which he is completing
from Berlin as the Academys
Citibank fellow, is called The
Love Song of Eunice Park. Set
in a dystopian New York of the
future, the novel depicts a city
hovering on the brink of extinc-
tion. In a place where written
and spoken communication
fails its residents and MySpace
has become the only venue of
exchange, one might expect lit-
tle hope for romance. But despite
the Russian-Americans patent
sarcasm, black humor, and unre-
lenting cynicism, Shteyngart
conrms that this new project
is indeed a love story. While put-
ting the nishing touches on
Eunice Park, it is only appropriate
that the next ofcial stop on his
global itinerary is his hometown
of Manhattan, where Shteyngart
has recently been appointed to
the writing faculty of Columbia
University.
SIDRA STICH
In 1994 nine years before US
Attorney General John Ashcroft
purchased expensive drapes to
conceal a bare-breasted statue
in the Justice Department the
newly unied German govern-
ment embarked on an ambitious
public art program for its new
quarters in Berlin. It commis-
sioned some of the most aestheti-
cally provocative and politically
critical art ever to grace the walls
of government. Art historian and
curator Sidra Stich is in Berlin
this fall to study the individual
artworks that resulted: over
140 pieces by German artists
like Gerhard Richter, Hans
Haacke, and Hanne Darboven
and international gures like
Jenny Holzer, Sophie Calle, and
Christian Boltanski, among
others. As a Coca-Cola fellow,
Stich will trace the considerable
debates that took place in and
outside of the Bundestag and
examine the complex and often
critical way the project engages
the German past, present, and
future. The former director of
the Berkeley Art Museum and
publisher of a successful series
of contemporary art guides to
European capitals will use this
important case study in Berlin
to inquire into the meaning of
public art in general.
Xa | Calendar | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

Calendar
GUEST APPEARANCES
From recitals to readings, forums to
lm premieres, the Academys fall
semester offers a myriad of new per-
spectives on American intellectual
and cultural life. A listing of events
in and around the Hans Arnhold
Center.
AUGUST
8/30 The Looming Tower: Al-
Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, mod-
erated by Georg Mascolo, Der Spiegel
SEPTEMBER
9/2 Foreign Policy Forum
A Conversation wi th Jane
and Sidney Harman
Jane Harman, Member of the House
of Representatives, 36th District of
California, and Sidney Harman,
Executive Chairman, Harman
International Industries
9/4 Charles Ives and
Walt Whi tman:
Transcendentalist
Continui ties
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music
Director, San Francisco Symphony,
and Artistic Director, New World
Symphony
9/5 Foreign Policy Forum
Afghanistan: Ensuring a
Comprehensi ve Approach
Richard A. Boucher, Assistant
Secretary of South and Central
Asian Affairs, US Department
of State; moderated by John C.
Kornblum, Chairman, Lazard & Co.
and Trustee of the Academy
9/9 American Academy
Screening
A Mighty Heart, directed by
Michael Winterbottom
(USA, 2007)
9/11 The Middle East Regional
Conflict
Nir Rosen, Fellow, New America
Foundation, and C.V. Starr
Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy
9/17 The Making of the
President, 2008
Richard Reeves, Journalist and
Senior Lecturer, Annenberg School
for Communication, University
of Southern California, and
Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor at
the Academy
9/18 National Trauma and Soci al
Amnesi a: Remembering (and
Forget ting) Apartheid in
the American South
Diane McWhorter, Journalist, New
York City, and Holtzbrinck Fellow at
the Academy
9/25 Absurdistan: A Reading
Gary Shteyngart, Writer, New York
City, and Citigroup Fellow at the
Academy
Location: Radialsystem V, Berlin
9/30 A Conversation wi th Mike
Kelley
Mike Kelley, Artist, Los Angeles
OCTOBER
10/5 Cassandra Float Can
Anne Carson, Professor of Classics,
University of Michigan, and Anna-
Maria Kellen Fellow at the Academy
Location: Radialsystem V, Berlin
10/11 The Jewish Enemy: Nazi
Propaganda in Germany
and the Middle East dur-
ing World War II and the
Holocaust
Jeffrey Herf, Professor of History,
University of Maryland, College
Park, and George H.W. Bush / Axel
Springer Fellow at the Academy
10/15 Fnf Deutschl and und ein
Leben. Erinnerungen
Fritz Stern, University Professor
Emeritus, Columbia University;
introduction by Richard von
Weizscker, Former President of the
Federal Republic of Germany, and
Honorary Chairman of the Academy
10/19 The Lay of the Land
Richard Ford, Writer, Maine;
Christian Brckner reads from the
German edition
Location: Admiralspalast, Studio,
Berlin
10/23 Georg Simmels Essayism:
Theory as Genre
Elizabeth Goodstein, Associate
Professor, Graduate Institute of the
Liberal Arts, Emory University, and
German Transatlantic Program
Fellow at the Academy
10/25 Remixing Ones Self:
Electronic- Music
Performance and
the Ontology of the
Provisional Work
Mark Butler, Assistant Professor
of Musicology, University of
Pennsylvania, and Daimler Fellow at
the Academy
10/28 Ethics for a Global Age
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance
S. Rockefeller University Professor of
Philosophy, Princeton University
10/30 Consti tutional
Proceduralism: Its Allure
and Impossibili t y
Frank Michelman, Robert
Walmsley University Professor,
Harvard Law School; moderated
by Dieter Grimm, Rector Emeritus,
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
NOVEMBER
11/6 Interrogating African
Moderni t y: Art, Cultural
Poli tics, and Global
Identi ties
Sylvester Ogbechie, Associate
Professor of Art History, University
of California, Santa Barbara, and
Daimler Fellow at the Academy
11/19 Speech Celebrating the six-
tieth Anni versary of the
Marshall Pl an
Address by German Chancellor
Angela Merkel; introduction by
Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke,
Chairman of the Academy
11/27 The Burden of Choice:
Ci tizen Health Decisions
in a Democracy
Jessie Gruman, President, Center
for the Advancement of Health, and
Stephen Kellen Distinguished Visitor
at the Academy
11/29 Climate Change Policy for
Realists
Jason Scott Johnston, Director,
Program on Law and the
Environment, University of
Pennsylvania Law School, and
Bosch Fellow in Public Policy at the
Academy
DECEMBER
12/5 Global Financi al Stabili t y
Roger Ferguson, Chairman, Swiss
Re America Holding Corporation,
and Member, Executive Board,
Swiss Re
12/6 Moon of Al abama: Wernher
von Brauns Journey
into Space, vi a Third-
Reich Germany and the
Segregated American
South
Diane McWhorter, Journalist, New
York City, and Holtzbrinck Fellow at
the Academy
Location: Deutsches Hygiene-
Museum Dresden
Public Art at the Helm of
Urban Transformation: The
Case of Turin, Italy
Sidra Stich, Director, art-SITES
Press, Independent Scholar, San
Francisco, and Coca-Cola Fellow at
the Academy
POSTPONED UNTIL
FURTHER NOTICE
Ruthlessness and
Compassion: The Poli tical
Genius of Lyndon Johnson
Robert Caro, Biographer, New York
City, and Holtzbrinck Distinguished
Visitor at the Academy
Supplementing its core programs
at the Hans Arnhold Center and
in downtown Berlin is a series of
nine additional talks by Academy
Fellows in Baden-Wrttemberg,
co-organized with partner insti-
tutions in that German state.
More information on the Baden-
Wrttemberg Seminar is available
on www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de
T
he question Who owns culture?
has become a highly controversial
issue, surrounded by a considerable
degree of exaggeration, misunderstanding,
and political correctness. Two key areas
of controversy are objects archaeological
context and the acquisitions policies of
major institutions. Both disagreements are,
I would contend, more a matter of degree
than of fundamental dispute.
Nobody would contest the fact that cul-
tural heritage laws must be obeyed. Nor
would anyone disagree with the fundamen-
tal principle that all archaeological sites
and potential archaeological sites must
be preserved. The protection of cultural
property, however, involves a tangled set
of codes and regulations and players with
various agendas. There are source coun-
tries rich in antiquities and countries with
long traditions of collecting them. Each
has its own national cultural heritage laws,
emphasizing different points and dating to
different years. There are also international
conventions, including the 1970 unesco
Convention on Cultural Property and the
1995 unidroit Convention on Stolen or
Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.
The corollary to the question Who owns
culture? is of course Can anyone own cul-
ture? Naturally, a nation state has the right
to pass laws claiming ownership of objects
found in its ground. It can derive national
identity from such treasures. But does deriv-
ing national identity from such objects rule
out other claims? The boundaries of ancient
empires are often anything but concurrent
with those of contemporary nation states,
many of which were established articially
with a ruler on a map.
The debate over cultural ownership
is very much a product of our times.
Archaeology, a child of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, has evolved
considerably since the Napoleonic era

WHOSE CULTURE IS IT?
Museums and the collection of antiquities
by Philippe de Montebello
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LOUISE LAWLER, STORAGE, 1984
and when Bernardino Drovetti simply
dynamited Egyptian sites and lled the
Turin Museum. Ours is an era of proper
archaeological digs and scrupulous acquisi-
tions policies. But it is worth recalling that
people have collected, admired, and drawn
inspiration from antiquities for a very long
time and that many museums participated
in archaeological digs.
For example, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art has about a dozen archaeologists
on its staff and participates in digs in four
countries: Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Turkey.
(We hope soon to expand our operations to
Italy.) It has the highest respect for the eld
of archaeology. At the same time, however,
I question whether the discipline should
be the sole authority over the objects it
unearths. I am concerned that excessive
claims are made for the importance of
archaeological context.
It is often said today that an object with-
out the knowledge of its archaeological con-
text is meaningless, that we need a thorough
knowledge of its nd spot precise details
about where and when and under what cir-
cumstances it came out of the ground in
order to understand it. Such context is of
course of paramount importance. Once it
is lost, it is irretrievable. But can one really
say that an object has no intrinsic qualities?
Cannot experts, through comparison with
a critical mass of similar objects objects
long out of the ground shed a great deal
of light on it? We can prove that an object is
Sumerian rather than Greek, for example,
that it was intended for a sacred or symbolic
function rather than everyday use, that it
dates to a certain period, and so forth.
We should remember that, although
many works of art end up in the ground, not
all of them were created for burial. The nd
spot represents the last station in the life
of a work of art, but it is not necessarily the
context for which that work was intended.
Objects traveled in antiquity along trade
routes like the Silk Road, establishing fas-
cinating interconnections over time. The
Greek Kouros the pathbreaking genre of
the standing male nude can be directly
linked to Egyptian statuary. Indeed Egyptian
sculpture has been found in archaeological
digs in Greece. Or consider an ivory found
in one of the Pompeii villas. It is from
Gandhara on the Indian subcontinent, but
we know that it has been in Pompeii since
before Vesuvius erupted. If this Gandharan
ivory were to come on the market in our
times, everybody would assume it was
found recently in Afghanistan or northern
Pakistan. Astonishing as it may be, the ivory
traveled in antiquity from northern India to
the Roman city of Pompeii. There were times
when artworks could cross borders, possibly
more freely than they do today.
Objects without known nd sites can
still serve as rich sources of information.
Though the Rosetta Stone itself has no
known archaeological context, Im sure we
LOUISE LAWLER, THREE, 1984
can agree that paramount information was
derived from it. The cuneiform inscrip-
tions on a pair of bronzes two small lions,
one in the Louvre and one in the Met from
the second millennium bce, led to the
discovery of the legendary city of Urkesh in
northeastern Syria, which archaeologists
and historians had long sought and were
beginning to suspect never actually existed.
The objects were bought on the market
without a nd spot, but the catalogue cards
in both museums had a notation from the
dealer indicating that they were found
near Tell Mozan in Syria. Piecing together
the inscription with this detail, archaeolo-
gists rushed to Tell Mozan, dug, and found
the city of Urkesh. (Ironically, it is precisely
this sort of detail that vanishes in todays
criminal atmosphere. If an illegitimate
object comes on the market today, no dealer
will tell you where it came from he doesnt
want to be prosecuted. Important archaeo-
logical knowledge is thus lost.)
T
he vast bulk of what we know
about the history of ancient art
comes to us from tens of thousands
of works scattered throughout the worlds
museums, very few of which have a known
nd spot or clear archaeological prov-
enance. By todays standards, all of the
works in the Vatican are stolen. How did
these works enter the worlds collections?
It was certainly not according to a careful
codex of laws and regulations. Indeed,
for many hundreds of years plunder was
the main method of collecting. Entire
armies were paid with permission to take
what they could after a siege. Art moved
through the ancient world via barter, trade,
and tribute, but also perhaps above all
as trophies of conquest. Trajans Column
is piled high with the shields of conquered
Dacians and booty brought from the east.
The Arch of Titus depicts the emperors
Roman soldiers shouldering spoils taken
from the Temple at Jerusalem.
Entire collections have been based on
chance nds. As the artist Donatello wrote,
fresh antiquities were discovered in fteenth-
century Florence every time a foundation
was laid. The same was true for Rome. The
discoveries of the Renaissance soon led to
a better knowledge of antiquities and to the
creation of the rst museums, among them
the Capitoline, soon followed by the publica-
tions of studies of monuments and inscrip-
tions. The eighteenth century brought with
it the grand tour and enthusiastic English
milordi exploring southern climes. At the
same time the discipline of archaeology as
we know it today was born, inspired by the
discoveries of the cities of Herculaneum
and Pompeii. Knowledge continued to swell
with the writings of Goethe, Lessing, Keats,
and especially the antiquarian and theorist
J.J. Winkelmann. The nineteenth century
was launched with Vivant Denon accom-
panying Napoleon to Egypt. His Travels in
Upper and Lower Egypt of 1802 is still one of
the fundamental works on Egyptian art. The
remarkable discoveries made mid century
in Mesopotamia by August Henry Layard
and Paul-mile Botta were prompted by the
search for the roots of the Bible.

AMERICAN COURTS HAVE RULED THAT VIOLATING A CULTURAL
PROPERTY LAW ABROAD IS A CRIMINAL VIOLATION IN THE US AS WELL.
This was a time when the spoils went
to the digger. Works were sent back to
the national museums in Berlin, Paris,
London, and later New York, each actively
promoting archaeology as part of the
search for empirical knowledge. Before one
condemns as colonialist rapine the trans-
fer of so many Greek, Egyptian, and Near
Eastern works to these collecting museums
one must remember that they were seen
as the three-dimensional embodiment of
Diderots Encyclopedia, a way of advanc-
ing universal knowledge. It is also worth
remembering that in the days in which
Layard, Botta, and their contemporaries
were digging there was an almost universal
indifference in those countries to archaeo-
logical heritage. Many of the stones were
either reused for new buildings sites were
literally being quarried for the local post
ofce and train station or they were des-
tined for the lime kilns.
As interest and awareness grew within
the source countries, the system of partage
was established by which archaeologi-
cal ndings would be shared by contract
between the institutions doing the digging
and the countries in which they were exca-
vated. Many of the treasures now in Berlin,
Paris, New York, London, and Boston are
the result of such sharing arrangements.
Although partage now belongs among
the relics of the past, we might ask whether
a certain diversication (to use a nancial
term) of the worlds cultural heritage is
necessarily an evil. The Baghdad museum
is home to a portion of the famed Nimrud
Ivories, discovered during a dig in the
1930s and 1940s conducted by three insti-
tutions the Iraq Museum, the British
Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum.
As a result, the extraordinary ivories were
split among the three institutions. Water
damage caused to the Baghdad ivories, in
the rst Gulf War in 1991 as well during
the shameful sacking of the museum fol-
lowing the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has
turned them black as pitch; once an ancient
ivory has turned black it is lost. To a certain
degree, then, one can say that diversica-
tion has preserved at least some of the
treasure.
Partage ceased as nationalism became
more pointed in the twentieth century
and was replaced by national cultural
property laws. Today there are still inter-
nationally managed archaeological digs,
but everything that is found during those
digs remains in the countries of origin.
Museums in collector countries began to
pass codes of ethics, especially in the 1950s
and 1960s, culminating in the ratica-
tion in varying years of the unesco treaty.
Since then, their acquisitions policies
have been continually revised and rened,
pushed by internal as well as external
initiatives.
I
n the first years of the new mil-
lennium two almost simultaneous
events had a tremendous impact on the
world of antiquities collecting. The rst
was a set of high-prole court cases in the
United States, especially the case against
antiquities dealer Frederick Shultz, which
determined that the US recognizes inter-
national cultural property laws. The Shultz
decision made clear that, under the US
National Stolen Property Act, anything that
violates a cultural property law abroad is a
criminal violation in the US as well. This
is one of the reasons why countries like
Greece, Turkey, and especially Italy are now
making claims against US institutions.
It would be much more difcult to extri-
cate material from European museums,
despite European laws signed in the 1990s.
European museums bought just as much
from now discredited dealers like Robin
Symes and Robert Hecht as American
museums did but for the moment seem to
be inviolate.
The second event was the spectacular
and highly publicized success of the Italian
police in exposing Giacomo Medici and
others a ring of tomb raiders, middlemen,
and dealers who brought a great deal of
looted material onto the market in violation
of both international and national cultural
property laws. Mr. Medici should have been
an archivist. His records, discovered dur-
ing a raid on his Swiss warehouse in 1995,
were immaculate: photographs, lists of all
the people to whom he and his associates
sold, details about where the material came
from, photographs of the vases and sculp-
tures at the time of excavation, restoration,
and sale. As a result, Italy was able to put
together a case and present it to a number
of American museums the Met, the J.
Paul Getty Museum, the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts, among others showing
clear evidence that objects had been stolen
in modern times. The Met returned the
Euphronios Krater a magnicent Attic
vase purchased in 1972 as well as a num-
ber of pieces of Hellenistic silver.
I think it is important to distinguish
between specic claims for restitution
and more general, rhetorical ones. In addi-
tion to the successful claims made against
American museums for the return of par-
ticular works of art, there have been rhetori-
cal calls for removing masterpieces like the
Bust of Nefretete from Berlin and return-
ing it to Egypt; for sending the Pergamon
Altar back to Turkey; and returning the
Elgin Marbles to Athens, for example. Such
politically motivated demands may repre-
sent mere posturing, but they are certainly
very popular in the countries in which
these masterpieces originated.
These larger rhetorical claims raise
interesting questions. How far back can
one go, for example, before restitution
becomes an impossible rewriting of his-
tory? Many who call for the return of the
Elgin Marbles base their argument on the
fact it was the Ottoman Turks then occu-
pying Greece who permitted Lord Elgin
to bring the panels from the Parthenon
in Athens to Britain. If one determines
that this was an illegitimate act, because
it was initiated by an occupying power,
then it is logical to inquire about the
famous Alexander Sarcophagus now in the
Istanbul Museum, which was taken by the
Ottomans from Sidon in Lebanon. If the
one does not belong in London, perhaps the
other does not belong in Istanbul.
Or consider the Horses of San Marco,
which Napoleon transferred from Venice
to the top of the Arc du Carrousel in Paris.
The famous bronzes were returned, of
course, as part of the Treaty of Vienna. If
the Horses of San Marco had not gone back
to Italy in 1815, however, we might still
be asking the question of whether or not
they should go to Istanbul. After all, Doge
Enrico Dandolo brought them to Venice
from Constantinople in 1204. Where do
they belong? Does a work of art necessar-
ily belong to one place and one place only?
These are difcult questions. I raise them
without taking sides, only to indicate the
complexity of the matter of restitution.
The sins of the past are legion, and I do
not believe in retrospective self-agella-
tion for them. We cannot dictate that Italy
send back the thousands of Greek works
EUROPEAN MUSEUMS BOUGHT JUST AS MUCH FROM NOW
DISCREDITED DEALERS BUT FOR THE MOMENT SEEM TO BE INVIOLATE.
that the Romans carried off in the rst
century. We should recognize that a great
deal of knowledge, cross-fertilization, and
exchange can come from objects moving
across borders. All we can do is monitor our
own practices and be sure they are as ethi-
cal as possible.
T
he Mets experience surround-
ing the return of the Euphronios
Krater, though arduous, has been
very constructive and heralds, I believe,
a new era in the way ancient works are
preserved and presented. Our current
agreement with the Italian government
calls for reciprocity: for every work that the
Met returns to Italy, the Italian Ministry
of Culture promises to lend on long-term
loan a work of equivalent importance
and beauty. In addition, this agreement
has created a new program for the Met to
participate on digs in Italy. In exchange
for restoration work, some of the nds
would come to New York for conservation
and long-term loans. After a period these
would be returned to Italy.
There is no question that we are seeing
a shift from the notion of museum owner-
ship to a more uid practice of loans and
sharing. Ideally, such loans would last
considerably longer than four or ve years.
Source countries now enjoy an embarrass-
ment of riches and have more material than
they can display, let alone conserve. The
more they liberalize and regularize their
loan and export permit practices, the less
incentive there will be for actors in certain
borrower countries to contribute in any
way to the illicit digs. A certain exibility
on the part of both parties is necessary.
Museums have important obligations
to the objects themselves, regardless of
whether they were recently unearthed
or have long been part of known collec-
tions. Museums are uniquely able to show
an objects multiple contexts, to show its
whole life. As Neil MacGregor, the director
of the British Museum, has often said very
persuasively, the Greekness of Greek art
at the museum is doubly clear because the
art of Egypt and Sumer are available just
ten steps away for comparison.
As the philosopher Kwame Anthony
Appiah has argued, the treasures in the
worlds major museums belong to an
international, cosmopolitan society. Our
museums are a kind of cultural family tree
on whose branches all of us can nd our-
selves. It would be an odd world indeed if
we had to travel to the remotest corners of
the earth in order to see its art.
Philippe de Montebello has been director of

the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1977.
This article is based on his Stephen Kellen
Lecture, which he delivered at the Academy
in June 2007.
THE MORE SOURCE COUNTRIES LIBERALIZE AND REGULARIZE
THEIR LOAN AND EXPORT PERMIT PRACTICES, THE LESS INCENTIVE
THERE WILL BE FOR BORROWER COUNTRIES TO CONTRIBUTE
TO ILLICIT DIGS.
A
rchaeologists and museum
curators deal with the antiquities
market in one way or another every
day of their lives, especially with the ethics
of acquisitions, questions of provenance,
and the shifting character of international
law. The focus is generally on antiquities
whose site of plunder cannot be identied,
either because such objects were continual-
ly traded in antiquity or because their style
does not point toward a particular country
of origin.
Many in the museum community
would favor the purchase of an undocu-
mented artifact on the art market to
prevent it from disappearing from the
public eye forever; just as many archaeolo-
gists would argue that the purchase of
such artifacts fuels the market and spurs
the plunder of even more sites. The two
groups will probably not agree on a com-
mon course of action at any point in the
immediate future, but both deplore the
destruction of archaeological sites and
the consequent loss of context. We may
therefore be able to reach consensus in
programs aimed at preventing the initial
plundering of artifacts and removal from
their countries of origin.
The Archaeological Institute of America
(aia) recently launched a Troops Lecture
program focused on Iraq and Afghanistan
with precisely that goal. The programs
development was hardly straightforward,
nor has its reach been as extensive as we
initially imagined; but it represents the
beginning of an outreach strategy that we
hope will broaden in the future. What fol-
lows is an account of my own involvement
with the program over the last four years
and some of the problems and rewards that
arose in the course of the planning.
When the Iraq Museum was looted in
the wake of the coalition intervention in
Iraq in the spring of 2003, the aia realized
that it needed do something. Determining
which programs would be most potentially
productive was not easy, however, since
none of our members had worked in Iraq
or Afghanistan in the years immediately
prior to the wars. Our rst course of action
was to bring archaeologists from Iraq and
Afghanistan to a special colloquium in
January 2004. Abdul Wassey Feroozi, the
director general of the National Institute
of Archaeology in Afghanistan, was
among the participants. In the course of
the conference, Dr. Feroozi described the
campaign of iconoclasm promoted by the
Taliban, including the destruction of the
colossal Buddhas in the cliffs of Bamiyan
Valley. He spoke of the rampant looting
of museums and archaeological sites
throughout his country and described the
sale of many undocumented Afghan and
Iraqi antiquities on eBay. In particular he
lamented the fact that the soldiers deployed
in Afghanistan had little or no sense of the
cultural heritage of the region.
Those comments put the conict in Iraq
and Afghanistan in a new perspective, and
I suggested that the situation could be ame-
liorated if archaeologists were to go to US
military bases and provide briengs on the
ancient history of the Middle East to the sol-
diers who were scheduled for deployment
there. Since the soldiers had become the
primary security agents at both archaeo-
logical sites and museums, such briengs
seemed essential in order to promote a
greater comprehension of and respect for
BASIC TRAINING
Deploying archaeological awareness in Iraq and Afghanistan
by C. Brian Rose
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the cultural heritage of the areas in conict.
I hoped that this, in turn, would play a role
in decreasing the number of antiquities
smuggled out of the country and into the
art market. Dr. Feroozi agreed that such a
program had enormous potential.
Launching it was easier said than
done, however. I initially had no idea of
how to secure the militarys approval.
Archaeologists had periodically interfaced
with the US Armed Forces especially
during World War II, when they helped
to pinpoint and safeguard archaeological
sites, identify and repatriate looted works
of art, and assist with cryptography but
there had been very little interaction
between the aia and the military since
that time. There was no existing coopera-
tive framework to tap.
Progress would not have been possible
without the active intervention of Marine
Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, who had
led the team in charge of recovering the
antiquities stolen from the Iraq Museum
(and has chronicled his work in recover-
ing and securing the Iraq Museum in
Thieves of Baghdad). Col. Bogdanos and I
had been graduate students together in
Mediterranean history and archaeology at
Columbia in the early 1980s, and, although
we did not know each other then, he was
the only member of the Armed Forces I
could identify whose life spans both of the
worlds embraced by the program I hoped
to develop. His immediate and encourag-
ing response to my project outline was
indispensable for identifying the proper
channels for routing our request.
Col. Bogdanos advised me to send the
proposal to General John Abizaid, head
of the US Central Command (centcom)
and to emphasize the programs politically
neutral character. This kind of proposal
was obviously very different from what I
was accustomed to writing, and after sev-
eral attempts, all of which were critiqued
by Col. Bogdanos, I nally put forward
an educational program of lectures to be
delivered by aia lecturers at the US bases
from which troops will be deployed to the
Middle East:
The troops nd themselves in a culture
that many of them have never studied,
and they may be called upon to patrol
archaeological sites and museums associ-
ated with that culture. The briengs in the
program we propose would deal with the
civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and
Afghanistan and provide general overviews
of the sites and archaeological discoveries
in these regions. Such a program would
allow the troops to acquire a stronger sense
of the ancient cultures with which they
might be required to deal. The emphasis
would be on history and culture; the lec-
tures would be completely apolitical, and
the goal would be educational outreach.
Such lectures, if approved, would take
place at different locations and different
times during pre-deployment training. We
are prepared to give such lectures whenever
and wherever it is convenient for the US
Central Command. The aia would like to
launch a program that is pro-active but not
political, and we hope that this series would
generate positive publicity for everyone
involved.
With the continued support of Col.
Bogdanos, the proposal was nally
approved in December of 2004. Now I
had to determine how it could actually be
executed. centcoms approval did not
guarantee that the doors of US military
bases would automatically be opened; the
commanding ofcers at each of the bases
where the lectures would be given had to
be contacted and their approval secured. To
use an academic metaphor, one can view
centcom as the university president, the
Marine Corps and Army as individual
colleges within that university, the base
commanders as department heads, and the
unit commanders as professors. Securing
approval from a university president does
not guarantee that the college deans and
the department heads will sanction the
task in question, and the same is true of the
military.
The Marine Corps base at Camp
Lejeune, North Carolina was the site at
which we hoped to inaugurate the program,
since so many Marines on their way to Iraq
receive their pre-deployment briengs
there. I delivered the rst lecture there
in April 2005. We subsequently added
the Army base at Fort Bliss, Texas, where
my colleague Robert Carr coordinated the
briengs.
From the beginning of the program,
I was amazed at the hospitality we were
shown, especially in light of the large
number of pre-deployment briengs that
the Marines received. One of the com-
manding ofcers at Camp Lejeune was
concerned that the brieng room in which
I was scheduled to speak was not in suf-
ciently good condition for the lecture, and
he arranged to have it painted and carpeted
overnight. At the conclusion of my rst lec-
ture, I was given a book, Pictorial History
of Baghdad, signed by all of the ofcers at
the base, along with several other tokens
of appreciation. At this time and in subse-
quent lectures, I was continually impressed
by the quality of the questions that followed
the briengs, such as Who was the father
of Assurnasirpal II?, What structures had
been built on the inner side of the Ishtar
Gate at Babylon?, and Were Egyptian
hieroglyphics earlier than cuneiform writ-
ing in Sumeria?
O
nce the logistical challenges
were surmounted, our program
still faced pedagogical ones. I had
to determine what precisely we wanted to
communicate; how to make the points most
interesting and accessible; how to incorpo-
rate them into a lightning-fast 3045 min-
ute format. The version of the lecture that
I now use evolved over the course of two
years as I assessed which approaches did
and did not work. In the case of soldiers
to be deployed in Iraq, I eventually real-
ized that in order to make them regard the
ground and its antiquities with the same
kind of reverence held by archaeologists,
I had to provide a framework that enabled
them to nd that sanctity within their own
experience.
This was not as difcult as one might
think. Most of the soldiers had acquired
some familiarity with this part of the

IN EVERY BRIEFING I HAVE GIVEN,
THE ENLISTED SOLDIERS AND
OFFICERS HAVE BEEN RIVETED.
world through the Bible, and it quickly
became clear that linking particular sites
in Iraq to different accounts in Genesis
brought the material home to my audience.
I therefore included such topics as archaeo-
logical evidence for the ood account,
Abrahams birth at Ur, and Daniel and the
Tower of Babel in Babylon, among oth-
ers. I also emphasized our shared cultural
heritage, i.e. the origins in Mesopotamia
of political and social institutions that con-
tinue to form an integral part of our lives,
such as the earliest evidence for written law
codes, mathematics, astronomy, calendars,
libraries, and schools.
In terms of chronology, I generally
begin my lectures with the new excavations
at Gbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey
(ca. 9,000 bce) since the site has been
linked to the account in Genesis of the
Garden of Eden, about which the soldiers
continually questioned me. I then move to
the sixth millennium bce, reviewing the
suggested theories that the ood accounts
in the Near East derive from geological
changes that transformed the Black Sea
from fresh to salt water. This leads to an
overview of Mesopotamian geography, geo-
graphic and cultural differences between
northern and southern Iraq, and the role of
the ziggurat in Sumerian society. I focus
on the ziggurat of Ur in particular since
this is the area in which many are stationed.
A subsequent examination of the royal
tombs of Ur allows me to demonstrate
the importance of objects in context and
to communicate the techniques that
archaeologists regularly use in the course
of historical reconstruction (paleobotany,
faunal analysis, physical anthropology, etc.).
My goal is to summarize for the soldiers
the extent of the historical loss if a site
is plundered and to highlight the funda-
mental interrelationship of the artifacts in
archaeological analysis. I nd that most
of the soldiers already have at least a slight
familiarity with the Kingdom of Babylon,
both Old and New, since Babylon is the site
of one of the principal US military bases
in southern Iraq, and the Mesopotamian
King Hammurabis portrait now adorns the
25,000 dinar note in the new Iraq currency.
I usually treat Afghanistan in less
detail than Iraq, since far fewer soldiers
are deployed there. Here I begin with the
campaigns of Alexander emphasizing the
cities that bore his name as founder, such
as Kandahar and stressing the Hellenic
inuences on the regions language, art,
and religion. The lecture moves back and
forth between Iraq and Afghanistan dur-
ing this section, since some of Alexanders
campaigns in these areas resonate with the
soldiers own experiences and knowledge:
the crude petroleum set on re by the
inhabitants near ancient Kirkuk is not so
different from the actions of the Iraqi sol-
diers during the rst Gulf War, while some
of the difculties experienced by Alexander
in the Hindu Kush mountains of northern
Afghanistan have been witnessed again
in the maneuvers of the coalition forces.
I end the section on Afghanistan with the
introduction of Buddhism, the carving of
the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the Talibans
iconoclasm. In the conclusion, I stress that
the soldiers vigilance in safeguarding sites
and museums determines whether the
historical foundations that I have just pre-
sented will survive in the future.
W
hen we began the program,
our hope was that we would
eventually expand it to every base
from which soldiers were being deployed
to the Middle East. Since few aia members
are experts in the archaeology of Iraq and
Afghanistan, I prepared a master script with
accompanying PowerPoint presentation to
guide others. The process of lecturing on
a military base is obviously very different
from the typical aia lecture tour: train-
ing schedules can change suddenly in the
Armed Forces, and one has to react rapidly
and diplomatically to alterations in the tim-
ing of the briengs. Over time I have found
that archaeologists with prior military expe-
rience had an easier time adapting to such
shifting requirements, and a number of the
lecturers have been Vietnam veterans.
The question always arises as to whether
the soldiers actually absorb the informa-
tion we present and whether one can
gauge the effect it has on them. In every
brieng I have given, the enlisted soldiers
and ofcers have been riveted, and the
other archaeologists who have given the
briengs have received e-mails and letters
from soldiers stationed in Iraq asking
additional questions about the presentation,
describing their attempts to safeguard mud-
brick structures inadvertently uncovered
during construction, and chronicling their
attempts to hinder looting.
When I mention site plundering in
my normal aia lectures, I often need to
remind the audience that looters are not
debonair rogues analogous to Cary Grant
in To Catch a Thief. But this kind of analy-
sis is not necessary for the soldiers, who
routinely discover caches of stolen antiqui-
ties mixed with drugs and weapons. As
Col. Bogdanos has pointed out, the sale of
drugs and looted antiquities is one of the
funding sources for terrorism, and antiqui-
ties smuggling is only one component of an
QUESTIONS FOLLOW THE BRIEFINGS: WHO WAS THE FATHER OF
ASSURNASIRPAL II? WHAT STRUCTURES HAD BEEN BUILT ON THE
INNER SIDE OF THE ISHTAR GATE AT BABYLON?
international crime network that enriches
itself in any way it can.
So far the Troops Lectures Program has
been adopted by Bulgaria, which sends
troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and
by Germany, whose troops are deployed in
northern Afghanistan. The aia is attempt-
ing to become involved in the training
programs of the other countries deploying
in the Middle East as well, but progress has
not been as rapid as we had hoped.
The aias Troop Lecture Program is
only one of several that have been launched
since the beginning of armed conict
in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American
Institute for Conservation and the US
Committee of the Blue Shield (the cul-
tural equivalent of the Red Cross) have
complementary initiatives to provide cul-
tural heritage expertise to commanders in
combat zones. Similar lectures have also
been delivered as part of a graduate-level
program based at the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey, California.
Another very positive development is the
Cultural Heritage Training Project created
in 2006 by Dr. Laurie Rush at Fort Drum,
New York. The projects purpose is to dem-
onstrate that careful treatment of heritage
sites overseas is integral to the success of
the military mission. Military personnel of
all levels are provided with user friendly
training materials, which include decks
of archaeology awareness playing cards.
Each card contains photos of cultural heri-
tage sites in Iraq and Afghanistan accompa-
nied by didactic captions such as Ancient
sites matter to the local community.
Showing respect wins hearts and minds;
Purchasing ancient souvenirs helps fund
insurgents. Do not buy them!; and A loot-
ed archaeological site means that details of
our common past are lost forever.
All of this leads back to the continued
challenge of nding strategies to prevent
the plunder of sites and the sale of stolen,
undocumented antiquities. The program
outlined above is only a small part of the
solution to the current spoliation of history.
As a museum curator and an archaeologist,
I remain convinced that both groups can
nd common ground, and that we should
search for that ground more energetically
than we have in the past. Our passion for
the art and material culture of antiquity
stems from an equally passionate interest
in the societies that produced them, and
this is surely enough of a foundation for
collegial interaction.
As tragic as it is to contemplate, wars
will continue to be fought, and the material
culture of the ancient world will continue to
be placed in jeopardy. A unied response by
those of us who have chosen to devote our
lives to the study of antiquity is required if any
real progress is to be made in the future. This
means dismantling the barriers to communi-
cation that have continually been constructed
while simultaneously reaching out more force-
fully to the international community.
C. Brian Rose, who held a Berlin Prize at the

American Academy in Berlin last fall, is James
B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology at the
University of Pennsylvania and president of the
Archaeological Institute of America. This essay
is forthcoming in The Acquisition and Exhibition
of Classical Antiquities: Professional, Legal, and
Ethical Perspectives, edited by Robin Rhodes, and
appears courtesy of the University of Notre Dame
Press. 2007 by the University of Notre Dame.
2007 Bank of America Corporation.
Common ground is an
extraordinary discovery.
BANK OF AMERICA:
An der Welle 5 60322 Frankfurt
Friedrichstrae 166 10117 Berlin
Oststrae 10 40211 Dsseldorf
Bank of America is proud to support the American Academy
in Berlin and its efforts to unite diverse thinkers in pursuit
of greater knowledge and understanding.
AD-09-07-0118.11060406.indd 1 9/13/07 4:29:43 PM
EXACTLY
ENOUGH TIME
An efcient approach to the climate problem
by Amory B. Lovins
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Fall .cc Rumler Filteen 1he Berlin Journal 3
R
aymond Williams wrote,
To be truly radical is to make hope
possible, not despair convincing.
Problems like climate change, oil depen-
dence, and nuclear proliferation seem
so huge and daunting that energy policy
sometimes seems like a stupid multiple-
choice test: Would you prefer to die of (a)
climate change, (b) oil wars, or (c) nuclear
holocaust? Yet if we take economics and
technologies seriously, the right answer is
the one usually omitted (d) none of the
above because all of the conventionally
dreadful answers are both unnecessary and
uneconomic. To see how, lets start with
climate.
OLAFUR ELIASSON
THE WEATHER PROJECT (TURBINE HALL,
TATE MODERN, LONDON, 2003)
Climate protection, like the Hubble
Space Telescopes mirror, got spoiled by
a sign error: in fact, climate solutions are
not costly but protable because saving fuel
costs less than buying fuel. Many leading
companies are making billions of dollars
in prot by cutting their carbon intensity
or emissions at rates of 5 to 8 percent per
year. When politicians who lament climate
protections supposed costs, burdens, and
sacrices join the parallel universe of
practitioners who routinely achieve prots,
jobs, and competitive advantage by wast-
ing less fuel, the political obstacles will
dissolve faster than any glacier.
Stabilizing carbon emissions requires
only increasing energy productivity (how
much primary energy is consumed to
make a unit of real economic activity) by
2 percent per year rather than the canoni-
cally assumed 1 percent per year; stabiliz-
ing climate needs only about 3 percent
per year. The US has long achieved about
3 percent per year (It achieved 4 percent
per year in 2006, slightly faster than the
gross domestic product (gdp) grew, so its
total use of energy, oil, and coal actually
declined.); California, a point faster; China,
at 6 percent, a point faster still for more
than twenty years (until 1997, then nearly
8 percent per year to 2001, then a tem-
porary reversal that should end in 2007).
Raising global adoption to about 3 percent
per year will be protable and not so dif-
cult if we pay careful attention to bar-
rier-busting turning the sixty to eighty
known market failures in buying energy
efciency into business opportunities.
Energy efciency is not the only but
certainly the main tool for protable cli-
mate protection, and indeed it could sufce
if pursued to its full modern potential, typi-
cally with expanding rather than diminish-
ing returns. (Radical savings are possible
at lower capital cost. This has by now been
demonstrated in some two dozen sectors
but awaits a revolution in design pedagogy
and practice.) Detailed assessments show
how to save half of US oil and gas at respec-
tive average costs of $12 per barrel and $0.9
per gigajoule ($2,000), and three-fourths
of US electricity at about $0.01 kilowatt
per hour all below short-run marginal
cost. For example, tripled-efciency but
safer and uncompromised cars, trucks, and
planes using current technology would
respectively repay their extra capital cost in
two, one, and four to ve years respectively
at current US fuel prices, or about twice
that fast at EU fuel prices.
Now add alternative supplies. About two-
fths of global fossil-fuel carbon emissions
come from burning oil and two-fths come
from making electricity (the remaining gas
and coal are analogous). Redoubled US oil
efciency at $12 per barrel will save half
the oil. The rest can be displaced by saved
natural gas and advanced biofuels, together
averaging $18 per barrel. Together these
innovations can eliminate US oil use by the
2040s at an average cost around $15 per bar-
rel a fth the recent price. This transition
will be led by business for prot. Innovative
public policies can support, not distort, the
business logic without needing new fuel
taxes, subsidies, mandates, or national laws.
The Rocky Mountain Institute nds
early implementation encouraging. Some
examples of institutional acupuncture
inserting needles wherever the business
logic is congested and not owing prop-
erly follow:
1. Wal- Mart required its suppliers
to provide doubled-efciency heavy trucks
in 2005. Its demand pull, motivated by
billions of dollars in expected savings, will
soon get those trucks on the road where
everyone can buy them, saving 6 percent of
US oil, and more abroad.
2. The Pentagon is emerging as
the Federal government leader in getting
the US off oil so nobody need ght over
it, ultimately yielding negamissions in
the Persian Gulf Mission Unnecessary.
Military science and technology investment
in light-and-strong materials, advanced
propulsion, and the like will help to trans-
form the civilian vehicle sectors just as
military research and development led to
the creation of the Internet, the chip and
jet industries, and the Global Positioning
System.
3. Boeings competitive strat-
egy based on its 787 Dreamliner, which
is radically simplied, half-carbon ber,
20 percent more efcient but no costlier
THE COMPETITION NOW UNDERWAY WILL CHANGE THE MANAGERS
OR THEIR MINDS, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST; WE ARE NOW
SEEING UNPRECEDENTED OPENNESS TO NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND
BUSINESS STRATEGIES.
has yielded the fastest order takeoff of any
airplane in history. It is sold out into 2014.
The Dreamliners innovations will enter
every other Boeing product before Airbus
can steer itself out of the ditch, and no
doubt Boeing will use its new cashow and
momentum to pursue even more dramatic
fuel savings.
4. When we suggested in our book
Winning the Oil Endgame that this strategy
could also work for US automakers, Ford
recruited the head of Boeing Commercial
Airplanes as its own ceo. This is part
of a broader trend that is bringing new
leadership and vision to Detroit before US
automakers are swept away by a tsunami of
what Joseph Schumpeter called creative
destruction. The competition now under-
way will change the managers or their
minds, whichever comes rst; it has already
displaced the heads of two of the three US
automakers with executives from outside
that industry. Rocky Mountain Institutes
transformational auto projects are provid-
ing very encouraging evidence of unprec-
edented openness to new technologies and
business strategies.
In summary, of the six sectors that must
shift their behavior to eliminate US oil use,
at least three transport, military, and avia-
tion seem lately to have passed their tip-
ping points, and all six are moving briskly
in the right direction.
As for electricity, micropower low-
carbon combined-heat-and-power plus
carbon-free decentralized renewables like
wind, solar, geothermal, and small hydro
provided one-sixth of the worlds electricity
and one-third of its new electricity in 2005,
meeting from one-sixth to over one half of
all electrical needs in 13 industrial coun-
tries. Micropower thus added four times
the electricity and 11 times the capacity that
nuclear power added globally in 2005, now
exceeds it in both respects, and is nanced
by private risk capital (unlike new nuclear
projects, which are bought only by central
planners). Another and probably as impor-
tant source of electrical services is nega-
watts saving electricity through smarter
technology that wrings more work from
it or uses it at more advantageous times.
Together, micropower and negawatts now
provide upward of half the worlds new elec-
trical services, and their 207 distributed
benets, when counted, will widen their
already decisive economic advantage by
approximately another tenfold.
These dramatic market shifts in technol-
ogy and scale go largely unnoticed but are
well underway. For example, around $71
billion of global investment went to clean
energy in 2006; $56 billion of that was for
distributed renewable sources of electricity
(vs. zero for new nuclear projects). The new
technologies for both supply and efciency,
being cheaper and faster than traditional
competitors (hence twice as low in nancial
risk), will continue to wallop them in the
marketplace and to buy more climate
solution per dollar and per year. Conversely,
when central planners continue to buy
costlier and slower options, they reduce
and retard climate protection. For example,
buying new nuclear power instead of turn-
ing to micropower and efciency displaces
two to ten times less coal per euro and does
so more slowly.
In short, the climate problem is neither
necessary nor economic. It is an artifact of
not using energy in a way that saves money.
Climate change can be prevented by tak-
ing markets seriously letting all ways to
save or supply energy compete fairly, at
honest prices, no matter which kind they
are, what technology they use, where they
are, how big they are, or who owns them.
Internalizing carbon and other environ-
mental costs will be correct and helpful but
not essential. Indeed, a technically very
conservative 2006 McKinsey study found
that 46 percent of projected 2030 global
emissions of greenhouses gases could be
abated protably, i.e., yielding at least a 10
percent internal rate of return. That whole
abatement would cost, on average, only 2
per tonne of CO
2
-equivalent. This implies
that an efcient carbon market will clear at
very low (or, with newer technologies and
design integration, negative) prices, send-
ing a relatively weak price signal to emit
less carbon. That would make it even more
important to use comprehensive barrier-
busting to enable people to respond to
price than it would be to get the price right.
Fair competition can simultaneously
solve many other problems. For example,
saving electricity needs about one thou-
sand times less capital, and repays it about
ten times faster, than supplying more elec-
tricity. This roughly ten-thousandfold

THE CLIMATE PROBLEM IS
NEITHER NECESSARY NOR
ECONOMIC. IT IS AN ARTIFACT OF
NOT USING ENERGY IN A WAY THAT
SAVES MONEY.
capital leverage can turn the power sector
(now gobbling about one fourth of global
development capital) into a net funder
of other development needs. Protably
eliminating oil use would certainly make
the world better and safer. A more ef-
cient, diverse, dispersed, renewable energy
system can make major supply failures,
whether caused by accident or malice,
impossible by design rather than (as now)
inevitable by design.
Nuclear power has already been strick-
en by a fatal attack of market forces. Its
inevitable demise if acknowledged can
belatedly stem nuclear proliferation, too,
by removing from ordinary commerce a
vast ow of ingredients of do-it-yourself
bomb kits and their civilian disguises.
That would make those ingredients harder
to get, more conspicuous to try to get, and
politically far costlier to be caught trying to
get because, for the rst time, the motive
for wanting them would be unmasked as
unambiguously military. Focusing intel-
ligence resources on needles instead of
haystacks would also improve the odds of
timely warning. All this would not make
proliferation impossible, but it would cer-
tainly make it far more difcult for both
recipients and suppliers.
Had my analyses of these opportunities
been adopted when they were rst pub-
lished starting in the mid 1970s, we would
not now be worrying about climate change,
oil dependence, or the nuclear threats
posed by Iran and North Korea. But its not
quite too late. As the late systems analyst
Donella Meadows said, when asked if we
had enough time to solve the worlds big
scary problems, We have exactly enough
time starting now. And now is the time
for countries rich in money, technology,
and fuels, like the United States and the
Federal Republic of Germany, to exercise
the full energy leadership that the world
needs and expects of them.
So what are we waiting for? We are the
people we have been waiting for. And if
any of the solutions suggested here seem
too good to be true (and you do not have
the time to check the references provided
in the electronic version of this article),
just remember Marshall McLuhans
remark: Only puny secrets need protec-
tion. Big discoveries are protected by public
incredulity.
Physicist Amory Lovins was a C.V. Starr

Distinguished Visitor at the Academy in April.
He is cofounder, chairman, and chief scientist
of the Rocky Mountain Institute and cofounder
and chairman emeritus of Fiberforge, Inc. He
advises governments and major rms worldwide
on advanced energy and resource efciency. This
article is available with full citations on rmis
website: http://www.rmi.org/libraryClimate
(C07-08). A condensed version, also avail-
able, was previously published in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (C07-07).
THIS CALLS FOR INSTITUTIONAL ACUPUNCTURE INSERTING
NEEDLES WHEREVER THE BUSINESS LOGIC IS CONGESTED AND
NOT FLOWING PROPERLY.
BERLIN IN LIGHTS
Over 17 days, Carnegie Hall and partner venues throughout
New York City create a thrilling snapshot of contemporary Berlin.
For more information: carnegiehall.org/berlininlights
The Berlin in Lights festival is made possible by a leadership gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.
Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, with additional support from Martha and Bob Lipp, Fundacin Mercantil (Venezuela),
and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding provided by Axel Springer, GWFF USA Inc., and the Jerome Robbins Foundation.
Fall '07 Berlin Journal.indd 1 9/4/07 11:54:24 AM
I
n the summer of 1875 US govern-
ment ofcials, hoping to negotiate the
purchase of the gold-rich Black Hills
region in present-day South Dakota, for-
mally invited the northern Sioux under
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to attend a
grand council at the agencies in northwest
Nebraska. The invitation was delivered
by about a hundred leading Indians from
the agencies, as the reservations were
commonly known at the time. Most of the
northern Indians refused to come, some
angrily, some diplomatically. But who could
nd a whisper of hope for a deal in the
lordly, dismissive words of Uncpapa Sioux
Chief Sitting Bull?
Are you the great god that made me, or
was it the Great God that made me who
sent you? If he asked me to come see him,
I will go, but the big chief of the white men
must come see me. I will not go to the
reservation. I have no land to sell. There is
plenty of game here for us. We have enough
ammunition. We dont want any white men
here.
Keeping their distance from whites was
the bedrock of the policy of the northern
Sioux. They had fought to keep whites
out of the Powder River country in the
Bozeman war (18661868). They never
signed the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie,
never lived on an agency, never took gov-
ernment rations or annuities. Their dislike
of whites was visceral and in many ways
mirrored white dislike of Indians. A lead-
ing man among the northern Indians,
chief High Bear of the Sans Arc subtribe,
born about 1840, much later attempted
to explain the origin and nature of this
hostility:
When the tribe rst mingled with the
whites, the braves [that is, the akicita or
camp police] would not sanction it because
they did not wish to eat the white mans
food, and the white man would eat all

THE SMELL OF
COFFEE AND BACON
Cultural differences on the Great Plains
by Thomas Powers
EDWARD S. CURTIS, OGLALA MOTHER AND CHILD
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their buffalo. If the braves discovered any-
one going among the white people they
would intercept him and kill him and his
horse. They were afraid that the smell of
coffee and bacon (foreign smells) would
scare the buffalo and make them stay away.
However, they would allow the white trad-
ers to come in and bring merchandise but
would not buy foods that created a peculiar
smell. They did not want the wakpamni [the
government issue] and did not want the
white people coming in.
White women especially were offended
and even frightened by Indians. They are
so dreadfully dirty, Caroline Frey Winne
wrote home from Sidney, Nebraska in
March 1875. Winne was stationed with
her husband Charles, an Army surgeon,
at Sidney Barracks on the Union Pacic
Railroad line. Indians hunting south of the
Platte frequently camped for a time near
Sidney in the hope of trade. Winne recoiled
when she encountered them in the streets.
Indians lled her with terror not fear of
rape or murder, exactly, but of them their
painted faces, the animal skins in which
they wrapped themselves, what they ate,
their grunt-like words, their nasty little
papooses, their relentless begging, their
desire to touch, their frank curiosity
about her:
It was not pleasant to say the least to
look up and nd your windows darkened
by Lo and his brethren and wives and
children, their dirty painted faces pressed
close to the glass. They are poor miserable
creatures. It would be a great mercy to them
if they would all freeze to death, as many of
them have this winter.
This aside is breathtakingly cold-hearted.
It is also surprising. Caroline Winne was
educated, devoted to her family back home,
tried to keep current with the civilized
world, complaining that reading matter
is scarce here. She detested the town of
Sidney nothing but whiskey and vice
and wickedness and keenly missed the
gentle Sundays of her early life. I havent
been inside a church or heard a sermon
since I left home, she wrote her brother.
And yet she allowed herself to wish on
paper that the Indians would all die, a sign
almost of panic. They are the most horri-
ble looking creatures I ever saw, she wrote.
To call them creatures was to deny they
were human. One afternoon, she reported,
Charlie and I saw six of them coming out
of Captain Hawleys quarters. I stood my
ground in mortal fear that they would
all want to shake hands, but they passed by.
One was a chief, Red Fly. He nodded and
said, How be you, Doctor? They are dread-
ful beggars
The Oglala Sioux chief Red Fly had
shaken hands with President Grant in
Washington during Red Clouds rst trip
there in 1870. A few days after the chance
encounter with Red Fly, Charles Winne
met Two Lance, an Oglala man noted for
his strength; in 1872, as a member of a
group of Brule Sioux hunting in Kansas
with the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, Two
Lance had driven an arrow entirely through
a buffalo, and the Grand Duke kept the
arrow as a souvenir. Caroline Winne had
met no presidents or grand dukes, and
she did not know these things about the
chiefs she encountered in Sidney. To her,
the chiefs look no better than the oth-
ers, and the others were nasty, dirty, and
foul-smelling.
Indeed it was smell that seemed to
bother whites most. Nothing strange is
sensed more quickly than smell; it is one
of the rst things people note about each
other. Many found the smell of Indians
strong, sharp, clinging, rank. They
THE DAUGHTER OF BAD HORSE
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THE ANCIENT ARAPAHOE
blamed it on ignorance of soap or on the
Indians practice of greasing themselves
with animal oils. Early travelers reported
that Indians used polecats, meaning
skunks, for this purpose, or the entrails
of raccoons. Lydia Waters, who crossed
the plains in 1855, said Indians took the
greatest comfort lying in the sun rubbing
themselves with these greasy insides. It
was true; Indians did use animal oils to
make their hair glisten, to heal scratches
and rashes, to repel insects. White women
did not know these things, or care; for the
Army wife Francis Roe, Indians were sim-
ply painted, dirty and nauseous-smell-
ing savages, not noble red men. It was
commonly believed that horses, dogs, and
old frontiersmen could smell the approach
of Indians.
Some associated the smoke with tipi
res, so dense it was used to cure leather
by hanging hides up near the smoke hole.
Others thought the smoky odor of Indians
came from kinnikinick the mixture
of red willow bark, fragrant herbs and
roots, and the strong twist tobacco used in
Indian pipes. The smoke made a sweet
and pleasant odor, wrote Captain J. Lee
Humfreville, who attended many meetings
with Indians at Fort Laramie in 1868. The
Indians person and all his belongings
were completely saturated with it, and it
lasted a long time. Horses, and particularly
mules, whose sense of smell is very acute,
would scent an Indian by this odor at a long
distance.
The point here is not sweet smells or
sour, but difference the unfamiliar that
separated white and Indian. Difference
worked both ways. As High Bear pointed
out, some Sioux on rst encounter did not
like the smell of bacon or coffee. Hardest
to tolerate for the ten-year-old Brule Sioux
Ota Kte (Plenty Kill), son of Standing Bear,
was the smell of cattle, rst encountered
at the Spotted Tail reservation in Western
Nebraska.
One day we boys heard some of the men
talking about going to the agency. They
said the government had sent some spotted
buffalo for the Indians. This was the name
the Indians gave to the cows, there being
no word in the Sioux tongue for the white
mens cattle. So we got on our ponies
and rode over to the agency with some of
the men. What a terrible odor met us! It
was awful! We had to hold our noses. Then
I asked my father what was the matter
around there, as the stench was more than
I could stand. He told me it was the odor of
the spotted buffalo. Then I asked him if we
were going to be obliged to eat those ter-
rible animals. The white people eat them,
was his reply.
Now we had several white people around
us, but they were all bald-headed. I began
to wonder if they got that way from eating
those vile-smelling cattle. I then recalled
that buzzards were bald-headed, and they
lived on carrion, and I began to feel sorry
for the white people who had to live on such
stuff.
F
or the northern Indians, who
wanted nothing to do with whites,
such visceral differences were only
the beginning. Perhaps equally important
was resentment of white treatment of
Indian women. They were not referring to
the white trappers and hunters in the early
years who often married Indian women,
remained in the Indian country to raise
their families, learned to speak the local
language, and were counted as friends and
relatives by the families of their wives. In
negotiating treaties with white ofcials
the chiefs always insisted that white men
with Indian wives along with their chil-
dren be treated as full-blood Sioux. But
many whites beat or abused Indian women,
exploited them sexually after capture in
battle, bought them for cheap trinkets and
liquor, and then cast them aside. Trouble
often followed. In June 1867 the freighter
and sometime-storekeeper John Bratt woke
one night to hear a drunken ranch hand
beating an Indian girl he had just pur-
chased for two ponies. When I went to get
my horse the next morning I came across
the poor girl, Bratt wrote. Her face was
swollen and covered with blood, and one
eye was swollen shut from his heavy blows.
Later that day relatives of the girl returned,
burned one of the ranch buildings and
carried off the woman-beater, who was not
seen again.
White writers of the period were curi-
ously transparent about the attractions of
Indian women, dismissing older women
as hags and harridans but remarking the
younger ones who were comely, or not
bad looking, or pretty in their way. They
rated the tribes by looks and accessibil-
ity. Cheyenne women were commonly
believed to be unapproachable, Sioux
women a bit easier, although the Chicago
Times correspondent John F. Finerty
reported in 1876 that the girls of that race
seldom yield to the seducer. But with the
Crow and Arapahoe tribes, by common
report, it was liberty hall. The Arapahoes
do not hesitate to make merchandise of
their women, wrote a correspondent for
the Chicago Tribune in 1875, and that,
too, for almost anything, from a pup to a
blanket. In fact, such arrangements were
transactions, with willing buyers and will-
ing sellers on either side.
It was different in wartime, when
whites simply took women as a spoil of
war. After the battle of Blue Water Creek in
1855 General Harney otherwise remem-
bered favorably in American and Indian
histories as a proponent of peace drove
a large number of captured Brule Sioux
from central Nebraska to Fort Laramie in
Wyoming. Among them, according to the
mixed-blood writer Josephine Waggoner,
were seventy women who were shared
out among the soldiers. The best-look-
ing women were taken by the ofcers and
there were many war orphans or fatherless
half-breed children born among the cap-
tive women, Waggoner wrote. Among
the women was an aunt of Standing Bear,
taken by General Harney himself, who
fathered a girl. A grandson of Iron Shell,
a Brule chief who took part in the battle,
said later, Some of the Indian women got
caught. After awhile they were released
from the white people and they all came
back pregnant. Some of the squaw women
disappeared.
No man was safe on the plains, and no
Indian woman was safe in her village. In
November 1868 the Seventh Cavalry under
General Custer his rank was lieutenant
colonel, but everyone, and especially his
wife Libbie, called him General led an
expedition west of the Indian Territory
(now Oklahoma) looking for Cheyenne
Indians. His orders from General Phil
Sheridan were simple and unambiguous:
to destroy their villages and ponies; to kill
or hang all warriors, and bring back all
women and children.
Custer did well enough in a dawn attack
on a large village camped on the Washita
River in present day Oklahoma, a tradi-
tional wintering ground for Indians

THE NORTHERN SIOUXS DISLIKE OF WHITES WAS VISCERAL AND
MIRRORED WHITE DISLIKE OF INDIANS.
on the southern plains. In the battle that
followed, lasting a couple of hours after
a wild ten minutes for the initial charge,
Custers men killed 103 Cheyenne warriors,
including their chiefs Black Kettle and
Little Rock; captured 53 women and chil-
dren; and killed more than eight hundred
Cheyenne ponies. The ponies throats were
cut to save ammunition; some of the men
who witnessed the slaughter remembered
the blood and shrieks of the horses for the
rest of their lives.
Among the captured women some
refused treatment for their wounds, fear-
ing they would later be killed. Later, after
reaching Custers base at Camp Supply
on the Canadian River in Oklahoma, the
Indian women learned that Custer and
his men had something different in mind.
The youngest and prettiest of the captive
women were brought at night to visit the
tents of the ofcers. Cheyennes in later
years reported that one of these women
was the daughter of a chief killed on the
Washita; Mo-nah-se-tah caught the eye of
General Custer, they said, and eventually
gave birth to his daughter. Quite possibly
this is true. It is certainly true that Custer
told Sheridan he planned to take Mo-nah-
se-tah and two other captive women when
he went after the rest of the Cheyennes
the following spring, and she was with
the main body of troops when Custer and
a few men, out in front, caught up with
the Indians on Sweetwater Creek in mid-
March. There, according to Custers own
account, he told the chiefs it was surrender
or else.
The southern Cheyennes remembered
this encounter in a somewhat different
light: as the solemn moment in which
Custer the white soldier they had begun
to call Hi-es-tzie, Long Hair told the
chiefs Medicine Arrow and Little Robe
that agreement (in reality Custers demand
of surrender) meant he would ght the
Cheyennes no more. I will never harm the
Cheyennes again. I will never point my gun
at a Cheyenne again. This pledge or prom-
ise, as the Cheyennes remembered it, was
delivered in council after a formal ritual
of smoking together. All were seated on
the ground in Medicine Arrows lodge. On
Custers left was Medicine Arrow, on his
right the medicine man preparing the pipe.
Custer was wearing the high, brilliantly
polished boots he favored. He placed his
white hat on the ground beside him. His
long hair, a ne, silky gold, fell back over
his shoulders. It is unlikely Custer knew
that Medicine Arrow was called so after
the Sacred Arrows given to the Cheyenne
people by the gods on Bear Butte many
years earlier, or that the arrows had been
in Medicine Arrows keeping since the kill-
ing of the arrows previous keeper, Gray
Thunder, about 1838. Nor did the general
know that Medicine Arrow had invited him
to sit directly beneath the sacred arrows,
which were suspended high in the lodge
from a forked stick. On these arrows the
Cheyennes believed their power and well-
being depended; smoking in the proper
way in the presence of these arrows guaran-
teed the words spoken.
According to George Bent, a mixed-
blood who lived his entire life with the
Cheyenne, it was Medicine Arrow who
actually held the pipe while Custer smoked,
saying to him in Cheyenne, If you are act-
ing treachery toward us, sometime you and
your whole command will be killed. But
Mo-nah-se-tah and Custers interpreter,
Raphael Romero, were both absent, and the
general had no idea what was being said.
The ritual and prayers were all mumbo-
jumbo to him, and he worried mainly, as he
drew puff after puff, that smoking would
make him sick.
In the end many of the
Cheyenne Indians fol-
lowed Custer back to Camp
Supply on the north fork
of the Canadian River in
the Oklahoma panhandle.
By midsummer Custers
Seventh Cavalry returned to
its permanent post at Fort
Hays in Kansas, where the
women and children cap-
tured on the Washita were
imprisoned in a stockade.
With Custer came Mo-nah-
se-tah, close to term with a
baby girl born that summer.
Of that child Custer was pos-
sibly the father. Custers wife
Libbie expressed no suspi-
cions, but both of them speak
openly of the Cheyenne girl
in memoirs, stressing her
youth and beauty. It is hard
not to feel that Custer was
hiding Mo-nah-se-tah in
plain sight and that Libbie
sensed this. She conceded the girl had the
beauty of youth, whose dimples and curves
and rounded outlines are always charming.
But she disliked the looks of Indian women
high cheekbones and square jaw being
the prevailing type and she was never
quite free of the fear that Mo-nah-se-tah
carried a knife concealed in the folds of her
dress and might kill her or the general in a
moment of anger.
Maybe Custer shared his nights with
Mo-nah-se-tah. Maybe not. But there is
no doubt about the sexual convenience
supplied by the other Cheyenne women
captured on the Washita. From Fort Hays
in May, while Libbie Custer was trying to
decide just how she felt about Indian girls,
Captain Myles Keogh, a company com-
mander in the Seventh Regiment, wrote
to his brother back in Ireland: We have
knocked the Indians up a cocked hat, yet
they are still on the warpath. We have here
about ninety squaws from our last ght
some of them are very pretty. I have one
that is quite intelligent. It is usual for of-
cers to have two or three lounging around.
What is missing from the record is how
Cheyenne men felt about it. Very prob-
ably their feelings mirrored those of the
THE WHITE PEOPLE WERE ALL BALD-HEADED. I BEGAN TO WONDER IF
THEY GOT THAT WAY FROM EATING THOSE VILE-SMELLING CATTLE.
L
C
-
U
S
Z
6
2
-
1
3
1
4
6
1
CHEYENNE YOUNG WOMAN
Sioux, who considered sexual jealousy
a weakness and insisted that chiefs rise
above it. But the northern Sioux also felt
contempt for the loafers who idled around
Fort Laramie. They were accused of trad-
ing their daughters to the white men for
loaves of light bread, reported Josephine
Waggoner. The hostiles who did not want
to mix their blood with the whites made the
accusation. The agency Sioux on the White
River shared the feeling, and 17 of them
signed a letter to President Grant in March
1876, protesting plans for replacing civilian
agents with military ofcers, something
the Army had long been seeking to do. The
Indians had plenty of experience by that
time living next door to white men. Spotted
Tail and other leading men of the Brule
Sioux told the interpreter Louis Bordeaux
and the Reverend William J. Cleveland
what to write to the president:
Soldiers generally are obnoxious to our
young men and their dislike for us is so
evident as always to provoke ill-feeling.
They corrupt our women and introduce
the vice of drinking, gambling, etc. They
have through their trader introduced whis-
key among the people here which has
already resulted in one murder and much
other domestic trouble
T
he whites called the northern
Indians hostile, but proud or stand-
ofsh would have been more accurate
terms. The Powder and Tongue Rivers
were their country. Sitting Bulls attitude
toward whites had a long history and came
from the gut. He explained himself once to
General Nelson Miles in council: Sitting
Bull said that Almighty God had made him
an Indian and not an [agency] Indian and
he did not intend to be one. He said there
never was a white man who did not hate the
Indians and there never was an Indian who
did not hate the white race. In 1867 at Fort
Union on the upper Missouri Sitting Bull
told the trader Charles Larpenteur he had
no respect for the agency Indians. I dont
want to have anything to do with people
who make one carry water on the shoulders
and haul manure. Better, he said, to have
my skin pierced with bullet holes than
starve like the Indians on the agencies,
getting as poor as snakes. He urged them
to leave the agencies, move out into the
buffalo country and live on meat, and when
they needed a horse to steal one from the
whites at some fort. Look at me, he told
the Indians who lived on free government
food, see if I am poor, or my people either.
The whites may get me at last, as you say,
but I will have good times till then. You are
fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of
fat bacon, some hardtack, and a little sugar
and coffee.
Thomas Powers held an Ellen Maria Gorrissen

fellowship at the Academy last spring. He
is the author, most recently, of Intelligence
Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to
Al-Qaeda, a collection of essays from the New
York Review of Books. This text is from his
work in progress, The Killing of Crazy Horse.
SOME OF THE INDIAN WOMEN
GOT CAUGHT. AFTER AWHILE THEY
WERE RELEASED FROM THE WHITE
PEOPLE AND THEY ALL CAME
BACK PREGNANT.
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First Stop
Prometheus:
What is that sound?
What is that smell?
God or human? Come to spectate my pain? Why?
You are looking at an enemy of Zeus. Despised by every god who walks into his kitchen.
Because my love of human beings was excessive but
what is that sound
a sort of whirring, a sort of whistling through the air?
Is some bird near?
Everything that comes at me is full of fear.
Enter The Ocean Dance Co. Alleged to be the 50 daughters of Ocean. They are water itself.
Who knows how this was staged in antiquity.
Chorus:
Dont fear friends are here.
We came at a clip.
Gave father the slip,
Racing the breeze to this new altitude of your knees.
That sound fetched us round
peal after peal
of steel on steel.
No time to lose
we even forgot
to put on shoes!
Prometheus:
AIAIAIAIAI [groan]
Go ahead, scan me,
you daughters of Ocean,
you children of the sleepless stream that winds its way around the world!
Look at me festooned on this cliff!
You see the watch I keep!
Chorus:
Tears ll my eyes you win the prize
for adamantine pain.
But whose is the gain?
I hear theres a new boss
on Mount Olympos
now Zeus makes the rules
and the big old boys
all look like fools!
Prometheus:
O how I wish hed sunk me underground
in the corpsesucking endlessness of Tartaros
or whatever deathgreasy furniture they have down there
not splayed out here
as a joke in midair.
Chorus:
Old ironst Zeus!
Unbending abuse
secures his domination
of the current generation
until such time
as a new kind of rhyme
knocks him
mocks him
out!
Anne Carson is an Anna-Maria Kellen fellow at
the Academy. She is the author most recently
of Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera and of the
translation Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes.

P
R
O
M
E
T
H
E
U
S

B
O
U
N
D
b
y

A
e
s
c
h
y
l
u
s
Excerpt from the opening scene of
Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound: Prometheus
has just been nailed to a rock in the
Kaukasos Mountains where he will stay
for 10,000 years as punishment for out-
ing Zeus. He hears an odd sound it is the
Chorus. Note he does not see the Chorus,
he hears and smells them; he has been fas-
tened to the rock in such a way that he can-
not turn his head. The Chorus always enter
from the side of the stage.
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A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
In this issue:
Stephen Biddle
Anne Carson
Philippe de Montebello
Wolf Lepenies
Amory Lovins
Thomas Powers
Richard Reeves
C. Brian Rose
Helmut Schmidt
Lawrence Wright
T
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A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Fifteen | Fall 2007

THE BERLIN JOURNAL

Writer and columnist Richard Reeves,

Helmut Schmidt was chancellor of the Federal

Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense

Philippe de Montebello has been director of

C. Brian Rose, who held a Berlin Prize at the

Physicist Amory Lovins was a C.V. Starr

Thomas Powers held an Ellen Maria Gorrissen

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