Doomed to Fail? East Germany's Collapse Revisited
Business as Usual? Conceptions of German-American Economic Relations Under Hitler
German-Jewish Identities in America: From the Civil War to the Present
Exhibiting the Other: Museums of Mankind and the Politics of Cultural Representation
Green Protest: Activism to Protect the Environment Around the Globe
Workshop at the GHI, September 22-24, 2000. Conveners: Daniel Letwin (Pennsylvania State University), Christof Mauch (GHI), and Richard F. Wetzell (GHI). Participants: Thomas M. Adams (National Endowment for the Humanities), Keith Allen (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), Christopher Capozzola (Columbia University), Karl Christian Führer (Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg), Edward Larkey (University of Maryland at Baltimore County), Sascha Liebermann (University of Dortmund), Timothy Patrick McCarthy (Harvard University), Sonya Michel (University of Illinois at Chicago), Sam A. Mustafa (College of Charleston), Karen Riechert (University of Tübingen), Lutz Sauerteig (University of Freiburg), Georg Schild (University of Bonn), James C. Van Hook (Trinity University).
Ever since the American and French revolutions signaled the emergence of democracy, nationalism, and market capitalism, debate over the claim to social resources - from food to health care, employment to education, housing to suffrage - has animated political life on each side of the Atlantic. To what extent are such benefits the birthright of all, and to what extent are privileges to be restricted by gender, class, ethnicity, race, or other social distinctions? By what principles (liberty, equality, rights of citizenship, universal rights, etc.) should popular access to social resources be expanded or curtailed? How these questions have been contested and resolved across the transatlantic world provided the focus for this stimulating three-day workshop. The workshop was divided into four sessions, each devoted to a different period.
The two opening papers went back to the revolutionary epoch of the late-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century - an age when modern debate over the scope and meanings of democracy, equality, and citizenship began to take shape. Sam A. Mustafa examined the civic sensibilities of the mercantile bourgeoisies of the American port towns and German Hanseatic cities. As leading political actors in cities like New York and Hamburg, Baltimore and Bremen, and Philadelphia and Lübeck, such figures embraced an egalitarian republicanism, expressed through philanthropic enterprises. Here, Mustafa argued, was "capitalism with a strong social conscience, practiced remarkably similarly on both sides of the Atlantic." In his review of African-American crusades for emancipation and racial equality (both within and beyond the abolitionist movement) Timothy Patrick McCarthy discussed how a nascent print culture served to popularize debate over race and equality. Although neither dealt centrally with contested claims to social resources, each paper illuminated ideological tensions that would come to frame such contestation: in particular that between the egalitarian thrust of bourgeois liberalism and the material inequalities of emerging capitalism, and that between egalitarianism and inequalities of race, gender, and ethnicity.
The following session surveyed issues of rights and resources as they arose from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. The transformative epochs of war figured prominently here. Christopher Capozzola considered how World War I altered America's ideological landscape. If wartime mobilization reflected (and redoubled) a coercive "culture of obligation," it also inspired a current of opposition to conscription, political repression, and inequalities of race and sex. Although swiftly curtailed, such crusades foreshadowed a more socially inclusive, rights-oriented vision of citizenship. Notably, this budding culture of rights in America only began to address the distribution of social resources. The latter, however, was central to Karl Christian Führer's study of housing confiscation in Germany during the eras of the two world wars. The modern German state has long assumed a role in the allocation of this vital resource - but never more dramatically than during and following World Wars I and II, as state authorities took to quartering the homeless in private homes. Although justified by the exigencies of war, this practice triggered "charged debates on the rights of those citizens who had a roof over their head and those who sought or needed one."
Other contributions on this period explored the issue of social resources in comparative perspective. Looking at the distribution of "life's most precious social resource" - food - Keith Allen asked why Berlin (and London) lagged behind Paris in the public provision of midday meals to children outside the home (a remarkable fact, Allen observed, given Germany's oft-noted place on the leading edge of social entitlement programs). Detailing the emergence of this issue during a time (1890-1930) when growing numbers of women worked outside the home, Allen cited Germany's stubborn adherence to traditional ideas of family life, "complete with a male breadwinner, female homemaker, and parental authority over children's consumption." Karen Riechert reviewed the impact of the newly founded International Labor Organization - "the first truly international legislative organization" - on the domestic politics of interwar France and America. She found that although the adoption of international labor standards were greeted with apprehension by the French and American governments, they left their stamp on public discourse over labor policy in each country.
The workshop next turned to the second half of the twentieth century. In her study of the complex postwar policy debates over the provision of old-age pensions, Sonya Michel detailed the efforts of the American business sector (as represented by the National Association of Manufacturers, or NAM) to tip the balance of support for social entitlements from the state to private employers. Motivated by a blend of free-market doctrine and strategies of management and investment, and bolstered by support from organized labor, NAM's campaign for social security for the elderly hastened the coming of a largely privatized, individualized welfare structure - "an increasingly bifurcated, nonegalitarian, nonredistributive system that allowed the inequities of the market to pursue less privileged Americans even into their 'golden years.'" If Michel was concerned with the limited reach of social welfare (even at its height) in the United States, Lutz Sauerteig was interested in the corrosion of Germany's ambitious welfare state. Sauerteig highlighted shifts in debate over the German healthcare system, as its impressive postwar growth ran up against a range of obstacles - escalating costs, economic recession, and a rising pool of elderly patients, among others - starting in the 1970s. These pressures, he observed, sharpened the tension between imperatives of "solidarity" on the one hand and those of "self-responsibility" and "cost containment" on the other. The mounting influence of these latter principles was manifested in controversial trends toward higher premiums, direct patient contributions, and shrinking of health benefits. Along a similar vein, James C. Van Hook analyzed the introduction of the West German "social market economy" by the neoliberal Ludwig Erhard during the late 1940s and 1950s. Challenging the social-democratic insistence on redistributive state action as the chief means to overcome inequality and want, the social market economy preferred measures (such as anticartel legislation) to ensure equal access to the market. Interestingly, each side invoked its own explanation for the rise of Nazism on behalf of its position - social democrats stressing the inherent inequities of capitalism and neoliberals emphasizing Germany's progressive tradition of state intervention. Edward Larkey took the story of social resources onto unusual terrain with his study of regional government subsidization of popular music in postwar Germany, particularly during the culturally charged decades of the 1960s and 1970s.
The final set of papers addressed issues and models pertaining to the distribution of social resources in today's transatlantic world. Georg Schild asked why no counterpart to the German system of Kindergeld (state child support) has taken root in the United States, notwithstanding that country's outspoken devotion to "family values." Thus, Schild took on a familiar problem: the comparative weakness of social welfare provisions in the United States. In the case of state policy on children, he held, the American position reflected a tendency to tie social welfare to need or prior contribution, and to weigh to the material cost of public entitlements more highly than the social benefits. Antonia Kupfer outlined the comparative origins and trajectories of affirmative action. Focusing on the promotion of women and (in America) minorities in higher education, Kupfer highlighted many contrasts in the German and American variants of affirmative action - in its legal and ideological foundations, its implementation, its scope, its reception, and its impact. Sascha Liebermann challenged the broad linkage, on both sides of the Atlantic, between one's claim to social resources and his or her station as a wage-earner. As technological displacement renders human labor ever more marginal to the production of a nation's wealth, he contended, job status becomes increasingly untenable as a basis for its just distribution. Thomas M. Adams placed the recent incarnation of a European Union-vintage "European Social Model" (and the clash between neoliberal and social-democratic variants of that model) into deep historical perspective, going back even further than the papers that opened the workshop. Although recognizing novel aspects to the current model, Adams found much in present-day thinking that echoes traditions of social provision (including charity, public assistance, and market regulation) long predating the seminal state welfare initiatives of the late-nineteenth century.
Spanning a diversity of topics, settings, and periods, this workshop underscored just how varied and elastic has been the claim to social resources across the transatlantic world. Exchanges at the sessions were no less wide-ranging than the papers themselves. What have been the meanings of democracy, equality, and citizenship? What has been seen as the rightful scope of state intervention? In what respective measures has social entitlement been anchored in employment status or citizenship? What explains the relative weakness of material entitlements in America or the growing fragility of social welfare in Europe? How has the appearance of international standards shaped the resolution of such questions? These were among the salient points of inquiry throughout the proceedings. Without a doubt, the workshop did more to sharpen than to resolve these issues. Just as surely, it reconfirmed the power of historical and comparative perspectives to illuminate the issue of social resources, as it moves - alive as ever - into the new century.
Daniel Letwin
Workshop at the GHI, October 11, 2000. Convener: Wilfried Mausbach (GHI). Participants: Christoph Buchheim (University of Mannheim); G. Jonathan Greenwald (Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy to the GDR, 1987-1990); Regine Hildebrandt (GDR Minister for Labor and Social Policy, April-August 1990); R. Gerald Livingston (GHI); Christoph Mauch (GHI); Isolde Stark (University of Halle-Wittenberg).
This workshop was the second in a series of events that combine scholarly presentations with the recollections of contemporaries; the first was the workshop with Freya von Moltke in June 2000 (see the fall 2000 issue of the Bulletin). Christoph Buchheim began the proceedings with a paper that was primarily concerned with the reasons behind the sudden collapse of the East German economy after unification. He ruled out two common explanations going back to the early postwar period, namely, an unfavorable starting position relative to West Germany and large-scale reparations exacted by the Soviet Union. In fact, as Buchheim explained, Nazi investment policy had favored the central regions of prewar Germany due to strategic considerations. Thus, during World War II, real industrial production actually increased slightly more in the territory later occupied by the Soviets than it did in the western zones of occupation. At first, even reparations payments did not reverse this situation. The recurring waves of dismantling up to 1948 did not reduce capital stock in the Soviet Zone to a point where it would have inhibited the recovery of industrial production. At the same time, Soviet demand for current deliveries actually stimulated industrial production in eastern Germany. Whereas central planning was good at mobilizing underutilized resources, it was unable to provide necessary incentives later on. Here lay the reason for the relative decline of East German productivity vis-à-vis that of West Germany, the latter surging ahead after the currency reform had liberalized prices and markets. Buchheim then demonstrated how the East German regime tried to establish the necessary incentives in the 1960s. However, activities of firms would be directed toward the achievement of economic goals set by the party. Thus economic reforms fell considerably short of the establishment of a market economy, not least because this would have ended the party's economic control. The half-hearted reforms led to an economic crisis in 1970. As a consequence, the new leadership under Erich Honecker abrogated the reforms in favor of a new concept of "Unity of Economic and Social Policy." Under this banner the GDR started a race with its more prosperous neighbor to the west in constructing a comprehensive welfare state, which proved to be an enormous burden on the state budget. Ironically, imitating consumption patterns of the west did not mitigate criticism; rather, it led to ever rising popular expectations. In fact, the economic policy of the Honecker era may well have accelerated the downfall of the GDR. Buchheim concluded that the deeper reason for the GDR's economic collapse lay in the systemic inability of the party to withdraw from directing the economy. In that sense "the East German socialist economy was doomed to become a frustrated experiment from the very beginning."
In the second presentation Isolde Stark introduced the audience to the economic and social ideas of the East German civil rights movement in 1989-90. Although the first proclamations emphasized the necessity for reform within the framework of the GDR's constitution, they also contained demands for different forms of economic ownership that threatened the power of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) over what was termed "national property" but had in fact been expropriated by the party. The sudden demise of the regime forced the revolutionaries to rush into action, and yet they had not been able to develop any long-term economic plans. Stark stressed that the question of control and disposition of national property was the central economic issue for the civil rights movement during this period. The movement protested the decision of the Council of Ministers of the GDR in December 1989 to transfer the rights of ownership of national property to the chairmen of the large industrial combines, who also belonged to the highest levels of the SED nomenclatura. When the Council of Ministers reaffirmed its decision, these chairmen felt free to fill management positions with former party functionaries and officials of the infamous Ministry for State Security (Stasi). Realizing that unification was increasingly probable and that the concept of national property did not exist in the West German Basic Law, one of the new political parties, Demokratie Jetzt (Democracy Now), proposed a trust organization (later called the Treuhandanstalt) to be charged with the privatization of East German industry. Although the new government under Hans Modrow adopted this proposal, it was implemented in quite a different form than envisioned by the revolutionaries. Aspects of the plan were socially inequitable, and the door was opened for the party nomenklatura to infiltrate the trustee organization, thereby establishing links between the old and new chief executives. The civil rights movement was not only critical of actions taken by successive GDR governments but also of West German plans for a rapid currency union. In a letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the Neues Forum (New Forum) warned that a premature currency union would destroy whole branches of the GDR's economy, lead to tremendous unemployment, and would cause further migration from eastern to western Germany. This position, however, no longer was shared by the majority of East Germans who expected the Bonn government to resolve their economic problems. In that sense, the East German civil rights movement suffered a tragic fate. As Stark put it: "At the beginning, the danger existed that the repression machine of the SED would silence them. In the end . . . they had attained freedom of speech, but the people did not want to hear them."
In the second half of the workshop Regine Hildebrandt spoke about her experiences in the GDR, responding to questions posed by Gerald Livingston and Jonathan Greenwald as well as by the audience. Hildebrandt's recollections included a fascinating account of the building of the Berlin Wall right next to her home on the Bernauer Straße, lively depictions of what it was like to live in the GDR, and a vivid portrayal of the problems she faced as the GDR's last minister for labor and social policy under Minister President Lothar de Maizière. The following discussion touched on the law regulating access to files of the Stasi (Stasi-Unterlagengesetz), on the leeway the last GDR government had vis-à-vis its western negotiating partner, and on the importance of the Lutheran Church in the GDR as a shelter for oppositional groups, among other things. Hildebrandt's remark that she discovered positive aspects of the GDR only after its demise met with objections from the previous speakers and triggered a general discussion that reflected the different perspectives that still exist on the history of the GDR and the process of unification.
Wilfried Mausbach
Panel at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in Houston, Texas, October 5-7, 2000. Chair: Hans-Jürgen Schröder (University of Gießen). Presenters: Andreas W. Daum (GHI), Maria Mitchell (Franklin & Marshall College), and Wilfried Mausbach (GHI). Commentator: Thomas A. Schwartz (Vanderbilt University).
Since the 1950s it has become common to describe the political relationship between Western Europe, particularly Germany, and the United States as an "Atlantic community." This political, military, and security community - so the arrangement goes - is not only based on common values and a common understanding of democracy but also bound together by similar pragmatic national interests. The rhetoric of an Atlantic community continues to permeate the statements of the political elite in the United States and Western Europe. As a result of the growing self-assurance of democratic Europe, which increasingly defines its political agenda independent of that of the United States, this community faces important challenges. In fact, hidden by the popularization and ubiquitous use of the term community, the inner fabric of this supposed relationship has always been the focus of critical questions. Closer analysis reveals that its content has never been static; rather, the term has always been the result of complicated, sometimes even contradictory processes and complex international as well as national interactions in the post-World War II era.
The purpose of this panel was to explore the processes that have contributed to the formation of specific transatlantic identities and perceptions between 1950 and 1970. The panelists emphasized that the creation of an Atlantic identity, which has linked the United States and Western Europe, was a contested process. It never unfolded in a linear fashion and always involved a multiplicity of factors and influences, ranging from state and party interests, covert actions, and intellectual circles to mass media and popular consent. Moreover, all these factors and influences were framed by and imbued with specific Cold War assumptions. The panelists focused on those ideological and political efforts in the United States and Germany that contributed to the building of the Western Alliance, defining a Western democratic identity, and integrating Germany into an American-led community of economic and military powers. This approach concentrated on how Germany was drawn into the discourse of American culture after World War II and, vice versa, how U.S. policies were received and transformed in German debates. The panelists thereby not only addressed obvious successes resulting from these processes. They also discussed the difficulties within the German political discourse and the relevant political institutions in creating a Western identity; and they explored the problems inherent in efforts to promote an Atlantic community.
In her paper "Das Abendland, Anti-Materialism, and Ideological Community: The Federal Republic and the United States" Maria Mitchell focused on the ideology and rhetoric of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), West Germany's leading party from 1949 until 1969. Under the leadership of the CDU the Federal Republic established itself as a loyal American ally and the linchpin of the Western Alliance. Although the CDU stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States both militarily and politically, its founding ideology nonetheless posed significant rhetorical challenges to that alliance. In particular, the United States stood outside the CDU's professed community of defense, namely, the antimaterialist Abendland, or Occident. In combining political Christianity with the concept of antimaterialism CDU leaders in the late 1940s outlined both an important base of confessional commonality and an explicit political agenda. Whereas both confessions embraced materialism as their fundamental referent, Protestants and Catholics in the Catholic-dominated party nevertheless construed its connotations very differently. Although Protestants generally used materialism to convey simply secularism, materialism for CDU Catholics implied all that they believed German Catholics had historically rejected - secularism certainly, but also capitalism, liberalism, militarism, nationalism, Protestantism, Prussianism, and socialism.
Reliance on the notion of Abendland struck a dissonant chord not only in CDU interconfessional relations but also in international relations. For many, especially Protestant conservatives, the Abendland conveyed a clear sense of cultural superiority over all non-Western Europeans, including Americans. Alliance with the United States was regarded as a necessary sacrifice to protect Western Europe from communism, but abendländische culture was to be protected at all costs from the American way of life. Indeed, because the party's interpretation of the Abendland rendered all others as materialistic and antithetical to Christian democracy, the United States's place in early Christian Democratic ideology was necessarily ambiguous. Whereas this discomfort existed on the ideological and cultural - not policy - level, it nonetheless troubled some within the abendländische camp enough to prompt them to address the issue directly. Beginning in the late 1940s the Abendland underwent a wide-ranging conceptual reconfiguration, in part as an attempt to readjust its relationship to the United States.
Despite its unparalleled prominence in CDU discourse in the 1940s, the Abendland rhetoric faded throughout the 1950s in both the party and the national discourse. Increasingly, CDU politicians adopted a new rhetoric of antitotalitarianism, the West, and the Free World - language far less distinctly German Catholic. As the CDU began to distance itself from the concept of the Abendland, however, materialism returned in a new guise in the mid-1950s with the emergence of West Germany's consumer society. But from the Christian conservative point of view all materialist ideologies possessed the same fundamental flaw: They were anti-Christian. Materialism emerged as a significant theme, particularly for Konrad Adenauer, who repeatedly raised the issue in his discussions with other party leaders. What does not appear in this rhetoric is an explicit linkage of materialism to the United States. Although leading Christian Democrats certainly expressed reservations about American society, their criticisms tended to be oblique. Although the tensions between CDU ideology and the cultural identity of the United States were never resolved, they were effectively side-stepped. Ideology did not threaten strategic alliance, and in the competition between Cold War politics and organic Christian Democratic ideology, ideology ultimately gave way to pragmatism.
The question of how different national traditions and distinct cultural identities could both coexist and merge in the creation of a Cold War German-American community also stood in the center of Andreas Daum's presentation. He chose an anticommunist slogan from 1950 as the title of his paper: "'To Rally to the Defense': Berlin's Freedom Bell, the Crusade for Freedom, and the Formation of a Cold War Community, 1950-1963." The Freedom Bell was dedicated in West Berlin's city hall, the Schöneberger Rathaus, on October 24, 1950. This dedication was embedded in a festive celebration of German-American friendship, with hundreds of thousands of Berliners crowding the square in front of the city hall. The festivities were also attended by high-ranking officials from Germany and the United States, including Chancellor Adenauer, Mayor Ernst Reuter, High Commissioner John McCloy, and General Lucius D. Clay, the former military governor in Germany and chief planner of the Berlin Airlift of 1948-9. Until the early 1960s the Freedom Bell remained one of West Berlin's most important political symbols and was heavily referenced all over the world as an icon of anticommunist propaganda. A half-century after its inauguration and after the end of the Cold War the Freedom Bell was all but forgotten (although its toll could once more be heard on the night of German unification, October 3, 1990). For many in the post-Cold War era this symbol of German-American solidarity and of Berlin's struggle for freedom represents nothing more than a dusty relic of a vanished epoch. However, this dismissal neglects the fact that the Freedom Bell indeed embodies, in a unique way, the peculiar interaction of politics, culture, and ideology that marked the creation of the German-American community in the 1950s. Its story illustrates many of the challenges and opportunities but also the difficulties inherent in this process. In particular, the bell's history demonstrates that Cold War symbols were not static in themselves but rather underwent subtle changes in terms of their ideological message and several different political objectives at different times.
The idea for the Freedom Bell originated in the activities of the National Committee for a Free Europe, which was founded in New York City in May 1949. Supporters initiated a spectacular fundraising campaign in the United States that was to be carried out with the help of a symbol that could appeal to patriotic Americans and to those still struggling for freedom: a bell, following the model of the American Liberty Bell enshrined in Philadelphia. A "Freedom Bell" was now designed for West Berlin, the city that more than any other place in the world symbolized the Cold War interface between freedom and totalitarianism.
Analogous to the original Liberty Bell, the National Committee ordered the casting of this new Freedom Bell in England. From there it was transported not directly to Berlin but via the United States. From New York the Freedom Bell began a six-week tour across the continent, to the Pacific Coast and back, visiting twentysix cities. Public approval, undoubtedly spontaneous, was reinforced by a well-planned orchestration of the media and was guided by a strategic concept that covered all regions of the United States and involved the active work of numerous representatives of political parties, the private sector, and nonpolitical institutions. This concept was an almost natural part of the idea of "psychological warfare," which had gained particular importance in 1950 following the National Security Council's famous recommendation number sixty-eight (NSC 68).
During its tour through the United States the Freedom Bell appealed mainly to American traditions rather than highlighted the plight of Berlin. Using reminiscences of the American struggle for independence, allusions to the United States's national history, and - more than anything else - constant reminders of the war that American soldiers were fighting to secure the freedom of South Korea, the Freedom Bell was successfully Americanized. Although the American aura of the Freedom Bell would never vanish, the bell took on new symbolic meaning when it finally arrived in Berlin in October 1950. The speakers transformed the bell into a symbol of German-American solidarity and the heroism of the Berliners.
The changing history of Berlin's Freedom Bell demonstrates that political mobilization during the Cold War relied heavily on the use of symbols that could liberate emotions and allude to historical traditions while embodying a dichotomous vision of the world, on both the domestic and the international fronts. As such, Berlin's famous bell not only embodied a peculiar "Cold War Freedom" (Eric Foner); its initial resonance and later popularization are also indicative of the convergence of voluntary support with a well-orchestrated mobilization of the political, private, and public spheres that transformed material symbols into public icons. As such, the Freedom Bell is a mirror of the theatricalization of politics during the Cold War as well as a reflection of the role that the politics of memory can play in creating a sense of transnational community.
The interplay of politics, ideology, and propaganda also stood at the center of Wilfried Mausbach's paper, titled "'A Test Case for the Free World': America's Vietnam Informational Policies in West Germany." Mausbach delineated the various strands of cultural diplomacy and informational policies that have gained prominence in the U.S. government since the 1940s. Little attention, however, has been paid by historians to the role of informational policies as a "soft" means of political offensive during the mid-1960s, when the United States came under increasing pressure, both on the domestic scene and abroad, for its military and political stance in the Vietnam conflict. As early as 1961 the State Department Planning Staff called for an "educative diplomacy" aimed at bringing "the free world nations to the point where they will stand steadily with us on the basic issues." This strategy held particularly true for Western Europe, where America's allies early on began grumbling about the United States's involvement in Vietnam. Mausbach focused on Germany as a test case for the opportunities to influence public opinion in favor of American foreign policy.
Mausbach emphasized that the United States offered important ideological tools for a renewed political identity in postwar German society - such as the concept of the "free world" and the free "West" - but had to merge these offerings with existing German traditions. When the war in Vietnam intensified, the United States went to great lengths to turn Vietnam into a symbol of the will of the free world to resist totalitarianism, parallel to the case of Cold War Berlin. The United States Information Service (USIS) posts in Germany began to organize events and lectures dealing with Vietnam in the local American Information Centers (Amerikahäuser), a campaign that reached its zenith in 1966 with an average of one event on Vietnam per day being organized somewhere in West Germany.
Nineteen sixty-seven marked a decisive break in the West Germans' attitude toward the Vietnam War. Whereas the media had previously portrayed the American efforts in Asia as necessary to secure freedom, criticism now began to mount - obviously, the Berlin-Vietnam analogy no longer worked. But why did American informational policies lose their appeal and eventually fail? Undoubtedly, the dynamics of modern television technology, which transported the war into the living rooms of West Germans and shook the viewers' emotions, surpassed any official efforts to control the flow of images from Vietnam. The disintegration of German support was further accelerated by the massive attack launched by the so-called nonparliamentary opposition (außerparlamentarische Opposition) against American efforts to rally Europeans behind a dubious political regime in South Vietnam. From now on, Germany's own past and the horrors of the Nazi regime moved to the forefront of its ongoing effort to define a new postwar identity. Vietnam ceased being a test case for the defense of the free world. Rather, in the minds of many who protested U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the West German parliamentary system became a screen onto which the dangers of the past were vividly projected.
Comments by Thomas A. Schwartz and the discussion following the presentations underscored once more that questions of American patriotism and U.S. foreign policy after World War II cannot be separated from the development of West Germany's political life. Instead, both sides are intertwined in a way that make politics, culture, and ideology factors that mutually influence and inform each other.
Andreas W. Daum
Panel at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association, Houston, Texas, October 5-7, 2000. Chair: Christof Mauch (GHI). Presenters: Jeff R. Schutts (Georgetown University), Philipp Gassert (Universität Heidelberg), Regina U. Gramer (Temple University). Commentator: Mary Nolan (New York University).
Recent class-action lawsuits have made American business dealings with the Third Reich front-page news. Sensational "disclosures" emerged two years ago: American auto manufacturers in Germany collaborated in the use of slave labor to build the Nazi war machine, and American banks were among those plundering Hitler's Jewish victims. With legions of attorneys deployed to establish the cost of restitution, historians also began to re-examine how Nazi rule shaped German-American economic relations. Whereas earlier historiographical debates centered on whether "big business" financed Hitler's rise to power, many now question whether Nazi society nurtured transnational capitalism. Informed with the perspective of contemporary "globalization," might not the presence of multinational corporations in the Third Reich be deemed "business as usual"?
The GHI sponsored a panel considering such questions at the 24th Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association held in Houston. The papers presented three case studies that spotlighted different conceptions of "normal" German-American business relations during the 1930s and 1940s. The first explained how small German entrepreneurs helped make Coca-Cola, that "most American" of consumer products, a "genuine German product" within the Third Reich. The second paper revisited the infighting among the Nazi agencies that wanted to control American business interests caught in Germany during World War II. The third examined how American policy makers thought reformed economic relations could help secure peace once Nazi Germany was defeated. Each paper engaged with distinct historiographical debates, however as a group they illuminated the need for further study of the development of transnational capitalism within Nazi society. Commentary to all three papers was provided by Mary Nolan (read by Waltraud Schelkle).
In the first offering, "Coca-Colonization in the Third Reich? The Americanization of Germany and the Germanization of Coca-Cola," Jeff Schutts recounted how the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Company succeeded in establishing its soft drink as a Volksgetränk (people's beverage) palatable to the increasingly chauvinistic tastes of Nazi Germany. Rather than considering this as an example of one-dimensional Americanization, Schutts argued that Coca-Cola was itself "Germanized" within the Third Reich. His presentation highlighted how the company's system of franchised independent bottlers was adapted to the economic and cultural conditions of interwar Germany. As a consumer product produced and distributed by local German entrepreneurs, Coca-Cola was integrated into the indigenous beverage industry and German culture. Effectively transcending national and ideological borders, the Coca-Cola Company was thus positioned to "refresh" both German and American soldiers during World War II. Questions after the presentations encouraged Schutts to expand upon his case study, while Nolan cautioned that Coca-Cola Company records required a more critical reading.
Philipp Gassert's paper, "Keine rein geschäftliche Angelegenheit: Die amerikanischen Investitionen im Dritten Reich," also discussed American corporations in Nazi Germany. His focus, however, was not on the firms themselves, but on how Nazi authorities handled these potential "Trojan horses" within their economy. Whereas much of the current media controversy has emphasized the collaboration between American companies and Hitler's regime, Gassert's presentation highlighted the Third Reich's bureaucratic infighting to suggest that American subsidiaries led a precarious existence under Nazi rule. Threatened with outright seizure, American-owned firms were formally held in escrow as "enemy property" while their German managers accommodated production to fit Germany's wartime needs. Gassert acknowledged that this situation made the companies exceptionally profitable but argued that American firms were "prisoners of their large investments," unable to pull out of prewar Nazi Germany and then unable to exercise control over their affiliates once the United States had declared war. In her commentary Mary Nolan took issue with Gassert's framing of the issue, questioning whether his narrative overstated the "apolitical" and marginalized nature of American businessmen. She noted: "Both sides accommodated themselves to a less-than-optimal situation during the war on the assumption that this would position them more advantageously for the postwar economy; however, they envisioned that. . . [j]ockeying for advantageous position in the medium run is a form of business as usual, just as adjusting to the terms of authoritarian regimes was and is a key to business survival and success."
The final presentation shifted the panel's focus from Nazi to American policy makers. In her paper, "The Morgenthau Plan Reconsidered: On the Limitations of American Prescriptions for German Economic Disarmament," Regina Gramer recontextualized Henry Morgenthau's discredited 1944 proposal to deindustrialize postwar Germany. Complementing recent historiography that emphasizes the treasury secretary's success in establishing a formal link between economic controls and policies to curb the potential of future German militarism, Gramer argued that "Morgenthau's intervention was not intended so much to harm Germany as to rejuvenate a faltering New Deal debate on reforming Germany's industrial structure in specific, and on the role of economic disarmament in general." Highlighting links between New Deal antimonopoly initiatives and American postwar planning for Germany, Gramer's presentation reviewed how different U.S. government agencies embraced contradictory interpretations of the complicity of big business with Nazi aggression and the existence of "an increasingly supranational as well as global cartel threat." In her commentary Nolan noted that Gramer "adds a vital structural dimension to the question of business an usual" and urged her to investigate further how American policy makers were shaped by their own involvement with transnational capitalism.
Rather than offering a cohesive conception of "business as usual," these three studies illuminated the need to further contextualize German-American economic relations under Hitler. In Nolan's words,
If these papers are individually stimulating, they are collectively frustrating. Gassert's Nazi officials and American business leaders, Schutts' Coca-Cola executives on both sides of the Atlantic, and Gramer's American policy makers and politicians do not speak to the same sets of concerns.É Each paper suggests how difficult it was for contemporaries to determine what did or should constitute business as usual. Until that issue is posed and researched more directly... we can only hint at the competing conceptions circulating and the support they received.
Indeed, with each case study pulling at different historical threads, the panel was not able, or expected, to untangle all the controversies surrounding American business relations with the Third Reich. Instead, the panelists demonstrated that new and diverse perspectives must be developed further before a comprehensive appraisal of the Third Reich's transnational economic relations is possible. Until then the question remains open: What is the usual business of business as usual?
Jeff R. Schutts
Conference at the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, October 26-28, 2000. Co-Sponsored by the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies and the George L. Mosse & Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, as well as the Department of German and the Center for Humanities, both of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Conveners: Christof Mauch (GHI) and Joseph C. Salmons (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Participants: Tobias Brinkmann (University of Leipzig); Mary Devitt (Max Kade Institute); Henry L. Feingold (Graduate School, CUNY / Jewish Resource Center, Baruch College); Karla Goldman (Jewish Women's Archive); Gerhard Grytz (University of Nevada); Leah Hagedorn (Tulane University); Mitchell Hart (Florida International University); Karen Jankowsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Bobbie Malone (Wisconsin State Historical Society); Tony Michaels (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Cora Lee Nollendorfs (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Anke Ortlepp (University of Bonn); Derek Penslar (University of Toronto); Marc Silbermann (University of Wisconsin-Madison); David Sorkin (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Cornelia Wilhelm (University of Munich).
A century ago the major issue for those who wrote about the history of German Jews in America was the identification of ancestors, the tracing of family roots overseas, and focus on individual biographies. During the course of the twentieth century, when scholars discussed social issues of immigration, they refined and redefined the older concepts of the "melting pot" and "automatic assimilation." The original models were replaced by more sophisticated ones that concentrated on political, social, and cultural factors, especially on "ethnic identity" and "ethnicization." Since then, studies on regions, cities, and neighborhoods have provided historians with insights into the complex mechanisms that made it possible for immigrants to shape their fate, transform their social environment, retain some autonomy, and define and stabilize their identity. This conference on "German-Jewish Identities in America" profited from such trends in research. Participants focused on the creation, recreation, and negotiation of a complex set of interlocking linguistic, national, regional, religious, and ethnic identities. Although the conference had a historical focus it benefited from insights gained by immigrant, ethnic, and urban studies. Many papers focused on regions and time periods that have rarely been studied in the past.
Henry Feingold gave the keynote lecture on "German Jewry and the American-Jewish Synthesis." Feingold argued that American-Jewish history has been much misunderstood. Contrary to accepted belief, there was much more continuity and convergence between German Jews who had emigrated earlier and Eastern European Jews who followed later. Feingold pointed out that the commonalities and tensions between German and Eastern Jews show up in the humor sparked by meetings between the two. German Jews were the first to arrive and therefore the first to confront the challenges of the American milieu, which posed a threat to the Jewish ethos. The German Jews contributed to the permissiveness and liberal political culture of twentieth-century America. Eastern European Jews, who arrived at the turn of the century, adopted and redefined the German Jews' path, leading toward further secularization of Jewish culture. It was only after the Holocaust that the terms of the German-Jewish interaction with America came to be questioned. Feingold pondered the fact that the Holocaust left American Jewry with a demographic cultural gap that has not been filled. In the nineteenth century, Jews from central Europe contributed greatly to America's culture but "no one knows," as Feingold concluded, "where the next biological infusion is going to come from."
In her paper on Jews and Gentiles in the American South, Leah Hagedorn described the emergence of a complex type of anti-Semitism that had its roots in localism and in the Confederacy's traditional values (in some cases misconceptions) of duty and social order. During the course of the Civil War the term Jewish became increasingly associated with parasitic economic activity and with itinerancy (the Yankee peddler and the Wandering Jew). Newspapers emphasized the otherness of Jews and questioned their loyalty, and by the spring of 1863 Southern attitudes toward Jews took on an even more threatening character when Southern women raided Jewish stores in a Georgia town. Most Jews thought it best to remain silent. By the end of the war, however, the meaning of the word "Jew" had changed so much that Southern Jews avoided it as a self-reference for the remainder of the nineteenth century.
The focus of Anke Ortlepp's paper was Jewish charities in the Midwest. Ortlepp studied the mission and activities of societies such as widow's and orphan associations as well as relief societies, founded in the second half of the nineteenth century with the goal of providing financial and material help to Jewish newcomers in Milwaukee. She emphasized that, by the turn of the century, these societies grew from the small voluntary groups of the mid nineteenth century into larger agencies with professional fundraising methods and a college-educated staff of social workers. While retaining their unique religious identity these charities played a major role in the integration of a steady stream of Jewish immigrants from Germany and other European countries. Ortlepp's study was complemented by Karla Goldman's comparative paper on "Patterns of Philanthropy" wherein the activities of nineteenth-century women's societies in both Germany and the United States was discussed.
In his study on German-speaking Jews in the Arizona of the second half of the nineteenth century, Gerhard Grytz argued that German-Jewish merchants and German-Gentile artisans were not as divided as had been assumed. Together, they formed a group of Germans - though only a three percent minority - that enhanced the early socioeconomic development of the Arizona Territory with their skills and economic ability. Along with other ethnic groups the "Arizona Germans" played a substantial part in creating a unique regional form of "Creole Culture" in the American Southwest that was neither the product of a Turnerian confrontation between the individual and the frontier environment nor the result of assimilation to "dominant" Anglo-American values.
In his paper on German Jews in Chicago, Tobias Brinkmann traced the history of Jewish community building between 1847 and 1923 in America's fastest growing city. Brinkmann contended that after 1847 Jews in the United States organized their communities increasingly around ethnic rather than religious terms. Jewish immigrants lamented the loss of close-knit Jewish Gemeinschaft and praised, sometimes in the same breath, the unique possibilities in the United States to form new Jewish communities. Brinkmann's paper analyzed both the "centrifugal" and "centripetal" forces that influenced community-building in the city. Jewish immigrants had close relationships with other German-speaking immigrants and some of them helped organize the short-lived German "umbrella" community. But the Jewish community was never a part of the German one. Brinkmann questioned the bipolar model of interpreting modern Jewish history. He asserted that "assimilation" led not to the disintegration but rather to the transformation of Jewish "community" into what Arthur Ruppin characterized as a "new milieu."
Cornelia Wilhelm analyzed what constituted the first and largest national American-Jewish organization in the nineteenth century in her paper on the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith. This organization provided a platform for socializing and support as well as a network of communication for American Jews. Created in 1843 as a fraternal lodge, B'nai B'rith reached out to people from different backgrounds of race, class, and ethnicity, while at the same time preaching practical Judaism and a message of universalism. Wilhelm interpreted B'nai B'rith as a modern organization that helped replace old-fashioned ideas of community by establishing a new corporate framework and an identity that combined elements of Jewish with American symbolism and rhetoric. Thus, B'nai B'rith became the vehicle for a new self-awareness and civic Jewish identity and contributed to the establishment of a new brand of civil American-Jewish religion.
In a paper titled "Brahmin Philanthropists" Derek Penslar assessed the leadership style, operating methods, and goals of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), particularly in the interwar period. The JDC was the most powerful Jewish philanthropy in the United States and the second wealthiest in the world (a close second to the London-based Jewish Colonization Association). Penslar argued that, although the JDC's hierarchical managerial style caused friction with American Zionists, the goals of the JDC and American Zionism overlapped considerably. His examination of the JDC's activities in Palestine and Eastern Europe revealed that the JDC was viscerally linked to the Zionist project.
German scientific literature, and the theme of America as the place of Jewish regeneration - both physical and spiritual - was the topic of a paper by Mitchell Hart. Whereas American-Jewish social scientists largely accepted the standard contemporary image of the modern Jew as "degenerate," they sought to prove through science that the American environment would have a "civilizing" effect on the Jewish body and mind. Jews would literally thrive in New York and elsewhere, if allowed to enjoy the political and social freedoms associated with the New World. Hart focused on the reciprocity between scientific studies produced in Germany and the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, the role of German science in shaping a particular kind of American-Jewish social science, and the politics that drove it. Hart's paper was followed by Bobbie Malone's a presentation on the role of Russians and of the Reform movement within the framework of Southern Zionism in 1890s New Orleans.
The papers by Harley Erdman and Thomas Kovach focused on literary and cultural studies. Kovach analyzed a theater play, and Erdman discussed the disproportionately large contributions of Jews to the growth and development of modern American theater and show business. He demonstrated that the Jewish presence in American show business has developed a corollary narrative: its impact and influence was largely Eastern European in origin, tied to the massive wave of Jewish immigration to the United States between 1881 and 1917. Although this understanding might make sense at first glance - numerous charismatic performers came from Eastern Europe - Erdman argued that this interpretation overlooks the historical contributions of the German-Jewish community. He showed that from the mid-1890s, Germans Jews had already become a central force in theater-related enterprises, including songwriting and song publishing. Around the turn of the century a generation of German Jews transformed the American theatrical landscape into what we today call "Broadway" or "show business." Erdmann concluded that "Germans" were vital to the theatrical life of late nineteenth-century New York, with their ethnic theaters, variety halls, and cabaret-like beer gardens. They had a broader impact on the Jewish cultural life of twentieth-century America than has usually been acknowledged.
Thomas Kovach evaluated Alfred Uhry's Tony Award-winning play "The Last Night of Ballyhoo" in light of historical research on Jewish life in the South. The play mirrors the tensions between older German-Jewish families in the South and more recent arrivals. Kovach argued that the tensions between German Jews and Ostjuden replicated the tensions between eastern and western Jews within Germany and Austria during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In a paper that triggered a lively discussion Monika Schmid presented the findings of her study on language use and language loss of Jews who left Germany during the Nazi regime and afterward lived in England or the United States. Schmid's research was based on interviews with Düsseldorf-born emigrants who were between six and thirty years old when they left Germany. Her work showed that the breakdown of identity (whether Jewish or German) suffered by some immigrants was so deep that it led to the complete adoption of British or American English as their own language. Schmid linked the loss of the first language to life-threatening experiences, although the breakdown of a language system after sixty years of non-use or restricted use, was to a large degree determined by personal attitudes.
Among the highlights of the conference were two film screenings by independent filmmakers Ruth Goldman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Manfred Kirchheimer of New York. Goldman presented her documentary in progress "And These Were Jews," a portrait of the highly assimilated, upper-class German-American Jewish Community of Cincinnati in the interwar period. On the last night of the conference Kirchheimer showed his film "We Were So Beloved: The German-Jews of Washington Heights, New York," a much-acclaimed documentary that examines the experiences of German-Jewish refugees who fled their country in the 1930s and settled in the Washington Heights area of New York City. Having been assimilated in Germany, the refugees found themselves suddenly living exclusively among Jews for the first time and were called "more German than Jewish." The film clearly showed that these people who had lost so much became secure and patriotic Americans. In frank conversation they discussed the trauma of leaving their homeland, the difficulties of adapting to life in the United States, the relief and remorse of having escaped the Holocaust, and the moral and emotional implications of that survival.
In sum, the conference, which was attended by a large audience of students, scholars, and the interested public, shed new light on the confluence of Jewish, German, and American cultures, and added immeasurably to our understanding of how America's open and relentlessly secularizing society transformed both traditional Jewish existence and America's self-understanding - a process that is still very much underway.
Christof Mauch
Workshop at the GHI, October 31-November 1, 2000. Conveners: Johannes Dillinger (GHI/Georgetown University) and Sabine Doering-Manteuffel (University of Augsburg). Participants: Stephan Bachter (University of Augsburg), David Copeland (Emory College), Johanna Geyer-Kordesch (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Glasgow), Andreas Hartmann (University of Münster), Christof Mauch (GHI), Heinz Schott (University of Bonn), Erik R. Seeman (State University of New York at Buffalo), Carole Silver (Yeshiva University, New York).
The workshop, which took place on Halloween and All Saints' Day, addressed a topic that, until then, had never been on the GHI's agenda: the belief in magic. Cultural historians in the United States and Germany have focused primarily on early modern witch trials. By contrast, the workshop explored the much-neglected topic of magic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This effort represented the first interdisciplinary discussion among physicians, literary scholars, folklorists, and historians on the ways in which concepts of magic survived in the age of the Enlightenment.
In her keynote speech Johanna Geyer-Kordesch critically re-examined and questioned our concepts of nature, the "supernatural," science, and magic. Using the basic problems of illness and healing as examples, Geyer-Kordesch explored the development of the scientific definition of nature in the eighteenth century. Mechanomorphic concepts of nature and the dualism of body and mind that have come to dominate medicine were presented as just a small fraction of a broader, more complex discourse. Holistic concepts that emphasized the unity of body and soul and cyclical rather than linear developments competed with rationalistic notions. In this context magic was a way of speaking about nature through the use of symbols and rituals. It did not aim at mastering nature. Although resembling the older "natural magic" in some respects, these alternative concepts cannot be denounced as mere relics of an unenlightened past. Rather, they demonstrate the complexity and heterogeneity of the debate about nature, science, and magic that informed the eighteenth century.
In the first panel on "Contacts and Contrasts: Magic, Folklore, and the Sciences" some of the new discourses brought about by the intermingling of traditional and enlightened thinking were investigated. The older notion of a decline in magic's significance was shown to be misleading: Magical thinking did not vanish when rationalism and Cartesianism became the dominating discourses. Rather, it took new forms that enabled it not only to adapt to new ideas and new social environments but also to actively influence them. Magic was not just a renitent die-hardism; in a way, magic accompanied the Enlightenment and even commented on it. Heinz Schott addressed these "dialectics of enlightenment" (Horkheimer/Adorno) in his talk about magical elements in eighteenth-century medicine. In early modern times natural magic (magia naturalis) was essential to Paracelsian medicine, which was based on natural philosophy, alchemy, and astrology. But even after the Cartesian shift presented the human body as analogous to a machine, the tradition of magical medicine continued and was expressed in new concepts. The study of electricity and its medical applications is the most prominent example. With its fascinating imagery of lightning and sparks, electricity impressively symbolized the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment. Electricity seemed to reveal the miraculous powers hidden in nature. The most important magical byway of electrical research was Franz Anton Mesmer's (1734-1815) "animal magnetism," later called "mesmerism." Mesmer combined the medical application of electricity with that of steel magnets and created a so-called magnetic cure. Mesmer became a famous healer in Paris in the years leading up to the French Revolution. Although he deliberately drew on the older imagery of the wizard or the miracle worker Mesmer himself was an enlightened doctor who rejected the mysticism and spiritual beliefs of his time. Nevertheless, his ideas on animal magnetism inspired many doctors and scientists in the early nineteenth century who were influenced by the natural philosophy of romanticism and admired the psychic phenomena of mesmerism as a revelation of the divine in nature. Schott illustrated his point with Johann Friedrich von Schiller's much-neglected fragment Geisterseher (1787-8), wherein electrical tricks play an important role.
Erik Seeman presented the emergence of enlightened "civil religion" in eighteenth-century New England as a slow and often conflicted process. Lay piety not only sustained but also developed and adapted elements of ecclesiastical tradition that the Enlightenment had discredited in educated circles, especially among the learned clergy. A range of ideas - magic and early Reformation providentialism - persisted among New England's uneducated majority. Elite response to these two belief systems varied enormously: Magic continued to be the target of elite condemnation, whereas providentialism, only more recently unfashionable, was quietly ignored by ministers and educated laypeople. For the most part magical practice became confined to society's lower orders during the eighteenth century. This does not mean that the belief in magic lost its relevance for society. As a matter of fact, magic was the basis of a number of power struggles between the clergy and laypeople throughout the century. Ordinary people's attention to magic in the eighteenth century reveals not their powerlessness but rather their ability to shape religious culture.
Many New Englanders persisted in interpreting extraordinary meteorological and astrological events as signs of heavenly displeasure. This providential worldview had been an important part of Anglo-American learned culture in the seventeenth century. But by the eighteenth century the Enlightenment view of the universe as rationally ordered made searching for religious meaning in comets and earthquakes decidedly unfashionable among the educated. Seeman demonstrated that, on the popular level, providentialism even helped to define the significance of the new enlightened state formed in 1776. He analyzed the diary of an uneducated farm woman who interpreted the war against the British as the fight of David against the Philistines. The idea that God granted the revolutionaries' victory thus based American exceptionalism on traditional lay piety. Secularized millenarianism was integrated into American political thought.
Occult elements in climatology were the topic of Andreas Hartmann's talk. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the notion that ethnic groups shared common cognitive and emotional as well as common health dispositions was widely accepted. "National character" and "ethnopathology" were considered to be influenced by climate. Temperature and moisture were supposed to affect the humors of the human body, which allegedly informed the behavior and well-being of individuals and peoples alike. In the writings of pre-Enlightenment thinkers such as Athanasius Kircher (1601-80) this idea of climatology mirrored the clear-cut and static magical worldview of correlations and "sympathy." Climate theory was informed by the pattern of macrocosm and microcosm. While accepting the idea that the climate influenced peoples, Herder emphasized the nation itself, its life and experiences as an interpretive category for history and politics.
Carole Silver addressed what seems to be a significant lack of magical folklore in America. In colonial America and the United States, a belief in witches and ghosts, both figures regarded as sanctified by the Bible, was retained, as was some faith in the existence of vampires and, among Irish-Americans, of Banshees. However, according to many folklorists, the belief in fairies, the spirits of nature and rural households so prominent in the traditional popular culture of Germany, Britain, and most of Europe, never reached the United States. Silver disputed this notion: Vestiges of fairy beliefs can be found in America even though they are relatively sparse. There are several reasons for the paucity of fairy lore in the United States: the heterogeneity of the immigrants to this country, the Puritan theology that tended to identify all supernatural beings as demons, the later enlightened tendencies to render occult phenomena scientifically verifiable, and the rapid urbanization and industrialization of society. In addition, even on the popular level the American discourse seems to have had a tendency to rationalize, reduce, or reject supernatural beliefs not sanctioned by the Bible or by ancient learned "authority" - a tendency that was easily compatible with enlightenment ideas. The first significant vestige of fairy beliefs in America is the rather widespread collection of legends about mermaids, mermen, and water monsters. One of the reasons for this might be that for some time even enlightened science considered the existence of such creatures possible. The most important piece of fairy lore in the United States is the belief in changelings - the possibility that children might be transformed into or abducted by and exchanged for fairies. Although in abbreviated and attenuated form, the anxiety about children's magical transformation or substitution is encapsulated in a number of memorates and enshrined in a series of instructions on how to protect infants from fairy or other supernatural harm. Related traditions and stories can be found all over America. Silver emphasized that accounts of changelings constitute one of America's contributions to world fairy lore. Its other contribution lies in Spiritualism, which in its early years and more exotic subsects integrated elfin creatures into religious systems. In short, Spiritualism institutionalized and rationalized traditional beliefs in magical beings. Transformed into UFOs, fairies had a more powerful impact on twentieth-century America than they did on nineteenth-century America.
The second panel, "Communications and Comparisons: The Media of Magic in Comparative Perspective," dealt with the material and institutional basis of magic in America and Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Enlightenment took full advantage of and, in a way, was made possible by the revolution in information flows that had started in the seventeenth century. Relatively cheap, mass-market books and pamphlets, news sheets, and daily newspapers reshaped the culture of communication. These media have long been recognized as important vehicles for the new Enlightenment ideas. In her lecture Sabine Doering-Manteuffel pointed out that the new media spread not only the concepts of progress and rationalism; business-minded publishers also exploited the belief in miracles, magical skills, and fortune-telling. Doering-Manteuffel's arguments rendered older concepts concerning the positive role that the media played for the Enlightenment as naive: The more general literature that was printed, the more magic and occult literature that also was published. There was a mass production of literature on magic and the occult at the end of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century this literature attracted an occult underground scene in a number of European countries. The decline of church and state censorship and the modernization of mass communication created a market for printed materials that was far from being preoccupied with the spread of Enlightenment ideas.
Thus, a new, "modern" kind of superstition emerged in the eighteenth century that took its full form in the next century. It served the new book and newspaper market and was affordable. This new magical culture, Doering-Manteuffel emphasized, was different from old folk beliefs. It was transmitted not by oral tradition but by mass publication and was aimed at the urban rather than the rural population. The new magic spread from the cities to the suburbs, and then to the countryside.
The stereotypical reports on miraculous signs that appeared mainly in the sixteenth century played a central role in the transmission of superstitious concepts. They provided material that later became easily marketable. However, the new superstition of the age of Enlightenment found its most important form in numinous literature, which promised "practical" help to the advice seeker. It taught amateur fortune-telling and provided matter-of-fact instructions for the invocation of demons, love magic, or protective magic against harmful spells. This form of superstition no longer spelled a consistent worldview such as traditional folk belief and early modern popular religion had done. It was at most faintly reminiscent of the complex systems of conduct and rituals of erudite magic in the Middle Ages.
Stephan Bachter illustrated and underscored Doering-Manteuffel's points with a detailed history of various German magical books, some of which were brought to Pennsylvania by German settlers. These books were the product of a modern, highly commericalized market. The most influential was the Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses. Although this book, like most other magic manuals, claimed to present ancient traditions, it was probably written in the eighteenth century. The oldest surviving copy was bought by Goethe for the ducal library at Weimar. The demand for magical books seems to have been greater in Protestant areas than in Catholic ones. This was probably due to the fact that Protestantism denied the faithful rituals that enabled them to deal with personal crisis or provided them the illusion of being able to influence fate. By contrast, the traditional Catholic cult provided quasimagical coping mechanisms of its own.
David Copeland dealt with articles about witchcraft in colonial American newspapers. In contrast to the earliest American newspapers, eighteenth-century American "journalism" had very little to say about charges of witchcraft or supernatural occurrences in the British colonies. The development of newspapers as a means of mass communication not only coincided with the introduction of Enlightenment thought in America: Most printers actively embraced the rationalism of John Locke and Isaac Newton. As a result, newspapers almost always explained away any news stories about the supernatural. Printers followed what Benjamin Franklin did in 1730 when he created the story of a mock witch trial that poked fun at the pseudorational methods the unenlightened used to prove the suspected witch's guilt. When stories of the supernatural did appear, they usually occurred in places other than America, principally in Europe, as a way to demonstrate that America was a new and enlightened place different from the Old World. The other main purpose of these stories was simply to entertain the audience.
However, some elements of traditional folk belief can be traced in eighteenth-century newspapers: Natural disasters such as earthquakes were still presented as divine intervention aimed at admonishing or punishing humankind. Religious explanations of unusual events were accepted by journalists and readers alike. Although the newspapers criticized the belief in witchcraft, they still shared and spread one of its basic elements: misogyny, which informed many articles in colonial newspapers.
Finally, Johannes Dillinger compared the Fox sisters, the first professional mediums and "mothers" of American Spiritualism, with an early modern Württemberg sect that had worshipped ghosts. (See Johannes Dillinger, "American Spiritualism and German Sectarianism: A Comparative Study of the Societal Construction of Ghost Beliefs," on page 55 of this issue.)
The workshop showed that discourses developed on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that might be called magical cultures of the Enlightenment. The emerging bourgeois society, science, mass communication, and market economy were shaped by mechanistic and rationalistic ideas but developed their own modes of magical thought. When magic and enlightenment met, new beliefs and doctrines came into existence that were neither mere survivals of the past nor just the embryonic forms of the future but rather specific cultural patterns in their own right.
Johannes Dillinger
Conference at the Centre Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art (CAHA), November 2-5, 2000. Conveners: Thomas W. Gaehtgens (CAHA) and Cordula A. Grewe (GHI). Participants: David Carrier (Carnegie Mellon University), Michel Colardelle (Musée national des arts et traditions populaires), Raymond Corbey (Leiden University), Sarah F. Delaporte (University of Chicago), Ludger Derenthal (University of Bochum), Nélia S. Dias (University of Lisbon), Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Rostock), Eberhard Fischer (Museum Rietberg, Zurich), Uwe Fleckner (Free University of Berlin/CAHA), Wendy Grossman (Smithsonian Institution), Curtis M. Hinsley (Northern Arizona University), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (New York University), Ikem S. Okoye (University of Delaware), H. Glenn Penny (University of Missouri at Kansas City), Alice von Plato (University of Hannover), Reimar Schefold (Leiden University), Enid Schildkrout (American Museum of Natural History), James J. Sheehan (Stanford University), Elisabeth Tietmeyer (Museum Europäischer Kulturen), Germain Viatte (Musée du quai Branly), Andrew Zimmerman (George Washington University).
The last two decades have witnessed a boom in museum studies. Histories of the museum have broadly acknowledged the emergence of the "modern museum" in the nineteenth century as a dominant institution in Western culture. Generally speaking, scholars have devoted most of their attention to the legitimizing function of museums, long proclaimed by such figures as Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno. In this context they have closely analyzed the connections among politics, aesthetics, and museum policies within national projects and within the institutionalization of historical consciousness.
Less recognized is the differentiation of the modern museum into specialized, often competing subcategories - such as museums for anthropology, natural history, folklore, or archaeology - and their respective relationships to mass culture and the production of knowledge. To deepen our understanding of the historical and contemporaneous processes the GHI and the Centre Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art (CAHA) invited twenty-three scholars from six different countries to a multidisciplinary conference that examined the ways in which the emergence of new types of museums - devoted to the "human" as broadly conceived - responded to fundamental shifts within the overall composition of Western societies: the rise and fall of imperialism and colonialism, the appearance of mass society and consumerism, and economic dislocations brought about by the second industrial revolution. The most recent of these shifts is the breakdown of thinking along national lines, that is to say, globalization, and the necessity to reconceptualize these museums of "mankind."
Focusing on England, France, Germany, and the United States in the period between the midnineteenth century and World War II, the conference looked at the changing function of the museums of mankind in their twofold capacity as progenitors and manifestations of their own differentiation. Sixteen papers were presented that investigated a wide range of topics, from the relationship between the new museum forms mentioned to new academic disciplines such as anthropology and then on to (novel) practices of popular mass culture, such as new forms of voluntary scientific societies, popular ethnographic spectacles and freakshows, as well as world and colonial fairs, arcades, and the art market.
The first section, "Art or Artifacts? Ordering Things," examined the relationship of "art" to "artifact," especially the evaluation of non-Western objects in relation to Western culture. In his paper titled "Learning to See? Representations and Receptions in Germany's Ethnographic Museums, 1900-1914" H. Glenn Penny looked at the shift within museums from "creating reliable scientific institutions to fashioning popular displays." Penny traced the various shifts at the turn of the twentieth century: from a unitary notion of humanity to one of differentiation, from the pursuit of science to the satisfaction of social demands, from the simple display of objects to a narrative approach, from seeing museums as arenas for self-exploration to refashioning them into spaces for the promotion of an educational mission. Penny attributes these shifts to the popularization of museums as well as the professionalization of anthropology, and to the museum personnel themselves. Andrew Zimmerman, in his talk on "Art and Artifact in the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, 1870-1921," discussed the relation of anthropology to colonialism and how Western views of non-Western peoples changed within the context of the colonial project. Zimmerman looked at how "ideas" about non-Western places and peoples negotiated the encounter with the "reality" of the German colonial/imperial experience. He showed that the history of the classification of objects from outside the West paralleled the history of colonialism itself and served to sustain broader views about the nature of human difference.
In "Material or Culture: The Uses of Collections in American Museums of Anthropology" Sarah F. Delaporte critiqued the tendency in contemporary museums to represent "culture" instead of display "objects." She argued for a new approach, namely, returning to the "object-oriented context both in the archive and in the exhibition." The panel was rounded out by a paper on "Popular Ethnographic Spectacles Around 1900: Popularizing South Sea Cultures in Germany" by Gabriele Dürbeck. She emphasized that the popularization of non-Western cultures often meant simply "arranging stereotypes and traditional images of the other as a perfect illusion with multimedia." Dürbeck looked at how "education" and "entertainment" began an uneasy partnership at this juncture.
The second section was titled "Nature or Culture? Placing the 'Other' into the Western Context." In "The Burden of Science in the Presentation of Culture: A Brief History of Museums of Natural History in the United States" Enid Schildkrout addressed the culture war between the arts and the sciences, with ethnology as "the orphan in the middle." She emphasized that the institutional structures in the United States are quite different from those in Europe; for example, there are no American museums of mankind as such. She also sketched the current dilemma of ethnographic museums, which are burdened with the mandate to present the "truth" yet faced with a situation wherein truths about "culture" are increasingly contested. As a result, their authority is under threat, and curators are learning to become risk averse. Caught in the culture wars, such museums are trying to straddle the fence - satisfying few in the process. That the Other may also lie within was the focus of Alice von Plato's "World Fairs, Folklore, and the Display of the Other." Plato showed that the concept of "folklore" arrived in France rather late, in ca. 1910 when the nation was overcome by a wave of nostalgia for representations of past selves, seen most vividly in the provinces. She discussed the (re)discovery of French folk culture as the Other within the French nation; one main venue for the articulation of French folklore was exhibits at world fairs.
In "Documenting Non-European Masters" Eberhard Fischer criticized the traditional narrative of anonymous non-Western art and argued for the importance of connoisseurship, much like the treatment of Western art. In earlier centuries Westerners recognized "masters" in West African and Indian art; this knowledge, however, became lost over time, while Europeans increasingly focused on technical proficiency divorced from individuality. Moreover, many of these works of "primitive" art had a functional component - ceremonial masks or housing decoration - that rendered them less esteemed or eminently replaceable. Reimar Schefold augmented Fischer's theme in his paper "Stylistic Canon, Imitation, Distortion: The Case of Siberut (Western Indonesia)." Schefold discussed the lack of expertise on the part of Westerners, on whom distinctions among original artworks, objects produced for the tourist market, and fakes were often lost. He strongly urged more analysis of individual pieces to discourage trafficking in fake non-Western art - a situation partly resulting from insufficient connoisseurship.
The third session juxtaposed "Ethnology and Modern Art." In "Photography at the Crossroads: Strategies of Representation in Ethnographic Museums" Wendy Grossman explored the convergence of museological and photographic practices that marked epistemic shifts in the aestheticization of African material culture as art. Focusing on two key junctures in the modernist narrative - the anonymous photographic production surrounding Carl Einstein's 1915 book, titled Negerplastik, and Walker Evans's photographic portfolio of objects from the Museum of Modern Art's 1935 "African Negro Art" exhibition - she demonstrated that these photographs occupied an ambiguous and often contradictory place at the crossroads between document and art, fact and fiction, presentation and (re-)presentation. In doing so, she deconstructed prevailing notions of the allegedly unproblematic documentary character of such images as well as their underlying premise, namely, that a universal affinity between the "tribal" and the modern exists. Grossman convincingly argues that the modernist, formalist approach of the photographs in Negerplastik and in Evans's portfolio not only mediated Western perceptions of non-Western objects and contributed to the construction of a canon but also were "integrally linked to practices in the collection and marketing of African artifacts as reified and commodified forms at this pivotal juncture in an evolving modernist narrative." Whether implicated in colonial enterprises or employed as a powerful weapon of critique, photography has clearly played a key role in constructing ideas about non-Western art and, conversely, non-Western objects have participated in the legitimization of photography as a modernist art form.
Taking up Grossman's analysis of the modernist nature of Einstein's Negerplastik, Uwe Fleckner traced the development of Einstein's appreciation of non-Western art from a purely aesthetic comprehension to a more inclusive and interdisciplinary viewpoint, linking ethnological and art-historical methods in the 1920s. In his paper "The Death of the Work of Art: Carl Einstein and the Berlin Museum of Ethnology" Fleckner reflected on Einstein's insistence on a balance between the aestheticism of museum displays that emphasize the formal beauty of individual artworks and an ethnographic contextualization. In 1926 Einstein advocated the collaboration of museum ethnologists with research and teaching facilities "so that visitors can gain an adequate picture of the elements that make up the cultures and the population districts." Einstein asserted the need for such a "living educational whole" because the entry of an artwork into the museum meant to him its "natural death" and "the attainment of a shadowy, very limited, that is to say an aesthetic, immortality." Fleckner interpreted Einstein's two essays on the Berlin Museum of Ethnology - despite their rather journalistic nature - as a new museum concept and an ethnological program in nuclear form. Einstein's position was grounded in the belief that - through a direct confrontation with the art of his time - the works of extinct cultures could be brought back to life.
Ludger Derenthal continued this theme in his paper on "Max Ernst and the Indians." Tracing the appropriation of non-Western cultures in Surrealist art that emerged out of its need for a "New Myth" (André Breton), his discussion centered on Ernst's "Capricorn" (1947) and its use of Native American art as a source of inspiration. As Derenthal showed, Ernst embedded his sculpture, originally placed at the edge of his garden in Sedona, into the context of original Native American art, such as two crest poles from Northwest Coast tribes. His statue thereby achieved an encyclopedic character, being "neither realistic nor abstract but emblematic," as Patrick Waldberg has observed. Ernst's contextualization of his modern myth within ancient mythology also incarnated a line of identification between Surrealist and Indian art that Breton had first recognized. The latter connected the artist's private mythology with the survival of myths in communities resisting the oppression of modernity and rationalism. For Breton, the savage could preserve a psychic continuum by not splitting his life into a real and a surreal part. Accordingly, the art of the savage, as a concretization of desires and latent life, could serve as a model for Surrealist art. Because the savage myth assures the coherence of the community, it makes it possible to prevent the dessiccation of cultural identity.
The conference's final session dealt with "Ethnology, Art History, and the Contemporary Museum." In his presentation of the "Projet muséologique Musée du Quai Branly, its director, Germain Viatte, outlined the history of this project, begun in 1996 as a collective effort between the Musée de l'Homme and the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie, and delineated the current state of its development. Involving the construction of a new building, the opening date is scheduled for 2004. Viatte emphasized the double nature of the Musée du Quai Branly encompassing research and museography. This twofold approach strives to overcome the longstanding tendency to separate natural history, ethnographic, and art collections. While Maurice Godelier is responsible for the scientific (research) component of the project, Viatte himself is in charge of museography.
Like the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée du Quai Branly aims to create a network between the collections in their material form and the knowledge they contain and engender. As Viatte emphasized, this knowledge needs to be multidisciplinary and multigenerational, and should not be reserved only for school children. In his opinion, it is the museum's duty to recognize and to show the historical significance of its particular collections, and their equality to other types of collections. At the same time the collections must be considered an accessible resource, while addressing the question of responsibility to the heirs of those cultures, whose heritage became transferred to and de-contextualized by the museum. In Viatte's eyes, a key function of the Musée du Quai Branly is to create a space in which contestable knowledge can be shown, thereby stimulating a discussion of this knowledge.
In "The 'Other' and the 'Self': History, Profile, and Perspectives of the Berlin Museum of European Cultures" Elisabeth Tietmeyer asked the pertinent questions: What is the "Other"? What is the "self"? And how does one display difference? Tietmeyer developed a theoretical framework for the history of Berlin's "ethnographic" museums by linking their development to the distinction between Völkerkunde (ethnography) and Volkskunde (folklore) that marked German intellectual culture since the late nineteenth century. Arguing against this tradition, she described the new philosophical implications of the Museum Europäischer Kulturen (Museum of European Cultures), which aims to fuse these different scientific approaches. The use of the plural, that is, of "cultures" in the museum's name implies not only the diversity of each country's or nation's cultural expression but also the need to take into account their interweaving, interdependency, and cross-fertilization. As an example for the new approach taken by the Museum of European Cultures, Tietmeyer presented the concept of the museum's inaugural exhibition "Cultural Contacts in Europe: Fascination Picture," which, instead of focusing on individual artworks or employing traditional categories such as art versus artifact, highlighted the cultural function of images, for example, their adoption in daily life, use in religious practice, or magical connotations. She concluded with a call for more interaction among European and non-European collections, whose physical separation seems unjustifiable: "Last but not least, we must not lose sight of two facts: First, exhibiting other cultures always implies exhibiting one's own. Second, much of our own culture may appear strange to us. What, then, is the 'Other'? It remains a construct, like the 'Self,' and is hence subjective."
The discussion of constructing binaries, creating categories, and implementing classifications continued in the next paper. Asking "What's in a Name? Anthropology, Museums, and Values," Nélia Dias explored the connections between categorization and classification, the links of these two processes and museums' designations, as well as their underlying political and moral values. Delineating four different main phases she related the history of anthropology to the changing museum landscape in Paris from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. With regard to contemporary issues, namely, the planning of the Musée du Quai Branly, she argued that the newest ethnographic museum in Paris has to manage two key concerns, both of which are part of its historical heritage: (1) the boundaries between art history and ethnography, and (2) the delicate question of which geographic areas will be excluded. Moreover, the Branly museum also has a moral agenda because it, like its predecessors, is value laden. The museum organizers' accent on cultural equality - more precisely, on equality of creations - and on tolerance and respect demonstrates that the question of values is inherent to any museum containing non-European objects. Finally, Dias asked: Is the designation ethnographic museum obsolete and consequently the categories art object and ethnographic one? Do we need to forge new terms because the objects in their materiality have changed or because they have ceased to respond to the theoretical questions of the new disciplines and subdisciplines? And she concluded: "Either answer could be correct. It is surely not fortuitous that nowadays several ethnographic museums are being refurbished or radically transformed. Placing new museum foundations in a historical context that stresses how categories are multilayered can be an illuminating exercise, or a defamiliarizing one.
The theme of how to contextualize objects instead of treating them as isolated aesthetic items also formed the core of the next paper, "Verso: Architecture Enters the Interior at the British Museum," by Ikem Okoye. Okoye the planning and reception of the early 1980s exhibition, "Ashanti: Kingdom of Gold." He argued that the contradictory images conjured by British imperial ideology of the precolonial West African state of Asante (Ashanti) were not only active in the nineteenth century but still underlie twentieth-century perceptions. Okoye linked the specific form of representing historical Asante as well as the impressions, reactions, and responses created by it to a re-emergence of the politics of race in the Thatcherite era. This connection became clear not just in particular incidents of racialized responses in the manufacturing industry but also in the crystallization of a certain frustration (and claim to rights) that resulted in several riots in Britain - especially in urban areas with high black populations, such as in Brixton and Handsworth. This politics greatly affected how the architecture in the "Ashanti" exhibition was fabricated (in both senses of the word). Okoye demonstrated that certain kinds of knowledge, which, for the sake of historical truth and the useful debates they might engender, the museum should display, seemed unbearable in the cultural context of the "Ashanti" exhibition.
In his passionate account of the reorganization of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions, Michel Colardelle addressed the new political and economic agendas that he views as vital for contemporaneous "folklore" museums. In his paper "Que faire des musées de société dans la civilization du XXIe siècle?" Colardelle enumerated as examples of these agendas the struggle to "democratize" culture against exclusion across class lines, the academic rejection of material culture as a minor element of culture systems, and the advent of new technologies that displace objects. Colardelle pointed out that the presentation of objects always has a double context, that of fabrication and use as well as that of selecting objects for a museum collection. Thus, it is difficult to reconcile museographic requirements with the complexity of ethnographic themes. In order to make ethnographic museums work, Colardelle proposed (a) to base them on long-term educational goals, (b) to create a modern ethic based on the materiality of objects, and (c) to unite scientific study with material objects. Overall, he demanded that museums should be multidisciplinary and oriented toward the public. Their displays should take into effect the modern "zapping effect," which destroys a holistic approach to exhibitions. "Permanent" exhibits thus should be changeable because a museum is a whole whose parts are in constant dialog. In true French fashion, the museum should present a varied, balanced, and nourishing museological repast to its public. To accomplish this goal Colardelle proposed a mediation personalisée or live interpretation of exhibits, which could "unvirtualize" the museum and teach visitors to "read" objects themselves. Moreover, the necessary outreach to a broad audience has to take the museum beyond its own walls to a larger public. In sum, museums should combine entertainment and education.
In one of several final comments on the whole event, Raymond Corbey criticized the absence from the conference of dealers and private collectors, two groups central to the history, structure, and endurance of ethnographic museums. Corbey stressed that these groups need to be included because they are part of the social life of the ethnographic enterprise. In particular, he regretted that dealers were not present precisely at a time when they are deeply involved in the current cultural and political struggles over the future of the ethnographic collections in Paris. The participation of art dealers in the building of museum collections creates an ambivalence: Although museums depend on the art market and often also dealers' expertise, they resist acknowledging the commodity character of the items in their collection.
The conference concluded with visits to the Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaire, and the new exhibition of so-called Art Premier in the Louvre museum. Our guides for these three outings were Germain Viatte, Michel Colardelle, and Maurice Godelier, respectively. The tours allowed the conference participants to reflect on the theoretical issues previously discussed in conjunction with the practical environment of actual museum spaces. The museum visits were a thought-provoking and entertaining ending to a stimulating and rewarding four days at the Centre Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris.
Cordula A. Grewe and Daniel S. Mattern
Conference at the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum, Heidelberg, November 9-11, 2000. Convener: Detlef Junker (University of Heidelberg). Participants: Donna Alvah (University of California at Davis); Anni P. Baker (Wheaton College); Günter Bischof (University of New Orleans); Dewey A. Browder (Austin Peay State University); Howard J. De Nike (San Francisco State University); Jennifer V. Evans (SUNY at Binghamton); Gerhard Fürmetz (Bavarian State Archive, Munich); Hans Gebhardt (University of Heidelberg); Uta Gerhardt (University of Heidelberg); Petra Goedde (Princeton University); Robert P. Grathwohl (R & D Associates, Washington, D.C.); Hans-Joachim Harder, (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Potsdam); Maria Höhn (Vassar College); Werner Kremp (Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz); Wolfgang Krieger (University of Marburg); David Clay Large (State University of Montana at Bozeman); Thomas Leuerer (University of Würzburg); R. Gerald Livingston (GHI); Gen. Montgomery G. Meigs (U.S. Army); Donita M. Moorhus (R & D Associates); Klaus Naumann (Hamburg Institute for Social Research); Theodor Scharnholz (University of Heidelberg); Wolfgang Schmidt (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Potsdam); Susanne Schrafstetter (University of Glamorgan); Dennis E. Showalter (Colorado College); André Gingerich Stoner (Stone Road Mennonite Church, South Bend, Ind.); Bruno Thoß (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Potsdam); Reinhard Treu (Altenmünster); Christian Tuschhoff (Aspen Institute, Berlin); Hubert Zimmermann (University of Bochum).
From November 9 to 11, 2000, the University of Heidelberg's Department of History in conjunction with the GHI hosted a conference on the role of the American armed forces in Germany since 1945. Until now this topic has received relatively little scholarly attention, which is surprising given the wide range of issues in postwar German-American relations in which the American military played a role. Initially present as occupiers, within a few years the GIs, along with their British and French counterparts, had become allies of the new West German state and the protectors of West Berlin. Not only were these American troops on the front lines during the Cold War, but their very presence influenced the development of NATO strategy. They also had a considerable economic impact on the regions of the Federal Republic in which they were stationed, and the question of who was to pay for their costs proved to be a contentious point until the mid-1970s. Last but not least, the estimated sixteen million U.S. servicemen, military employees, and dependents stationed in Germany after 1945 were an important medium for intersocietal and intercultural contact. They took part in what might be described as one of the twentieth century's greatest cultural exchange programs. The interaction between the American military community and its German neighbors also reflected the overall state of relations between the two countries. The conference brought together historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, and several contemporary eyewitnesses from the United States, Great Britain, and Germany in an attempt to weigh the significance of the American military presence in its varied facets.
General Montgomery G. Meigs, commanding general of the United States Army, Europe (USAREUR) and of the Seventh U.S. Army, started off the symposium on the evening of November 9 with a well-attended public keynote lecture in the University of Heidelberg's Alte Aula. Meigs, who earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1982, attempted to periodize the history of the U.S. military in Germany, where he had spent much of his active-duty career. The lecture and the question-and-answer period that followed were notable for the general's frankness about the U.S. Army's problems as well as for his promise that he and his staff would do all they could to speed the declassification of materials from USAREUR's archives and library in Heidelberg. This task has been slow primarily due to insufficient staff.
The next day the conference reconvened at the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum with two panels devoted to the interaction between the GIs and the German population. The first dealt with the history of U.S. military communities. Donna Alvah spoke about military families in Germany and their evolving function as "unofficial ambassadors" between the late 1940s and mid-1960s. When servicemen's families initially arrived in Germany in the spring of 1946, military officials expected them to serve as models of American domestic life and its virtues. Moreover, they were to assist in the establishment of democracy and in making clear to the locals that the occupation forces were actually there to help. Led by officers' wives, the families tried to achieve these goals through a wide range of activities. By 1948 yet another major task began to emerge: In their public-relations work and occasional writings, servicemen and their families began to emphasize the common German-American struggle against communism, to downplay the Federal Republic's economic and military dependence on the United States, and in general to promote an image of West Germany's equality with its American ally. In doing so, they presented an idealized view of relations with the German community, which frequently had a negative impression of the condition of military housing, racism within the armed forces, the occasional boorish behavior of American military wives and children, and other issues.
Hans Gebhardt presented the results of a study co-authored with his colleague Petra Jung in which they surveyed approximately four hundred American military employees and their dependents living in Heidelberg about their present-day interaction with local Germans. Gebhardt and Jung concluded that although relations between both communities were characterized by a high degree of normal contact and routine, they lived more alongside than with one another.
Heidelberg also was the subject of a paper by Theodor Scharnholz, who analyzed relations between the army and the city and its inhabitants between 1948 and 1955. Two of his conclusions deserve special mention: First, whatever the administrative, social, and psychological burdens associated with the American occupation, the city profited rather handsomely not only from direct military expenditures but also from tourism and private spending by soldiers. Second, the initially controversial creation of "Little Americas," or separate military communities, in the 1950s not only was necessary to fulfill official U.S. Army housing guidelines (for example, those governing space requirements) given the prevailing state of accommodations in Germany but also best fulfilled the wishes of American personnel in this regard. Thomas Leuerer concluded the first panel by presenting a wide-ranging overview of the history of military communities in Germany. They entered their heyday during the Korean War due to a large-scale building program ordered by the Truman administration. The subsequent neglect of these facilities until the 1980s contributed heavily to the decline in morale in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Vietnam era. Leuerer also explained that the communities historically served a variety of purposes. For the U.S. military, the Little Americas stabilized the lives of servicemen and helped lessen disciplinary problems; for West Germans, they symbolized the United States' commitment to defend the Federal Republic; and for the Warsaw Pact, they served as a reassurance that NATO did not contemplate aggressive action.
Whereas contacts between the American military communities and their German neighbors generally remained friendly, they were by no means always harmonious; the second panel devoted itself to the darker side of this relationship through the mid-1970s. In a paper titled "Aggressive Protectors," Gerhard Fürmetz focused on the problem that lawlessness on the part of U.S. servicemen created for German (in this case, Bavarian) authorities in the early 1950s. During these years an apparent increase in GI delinquency received considerable attention in the local press. Until 1954-5 the German police had no right to apprehend or question military personnel who had violated local law and therefore remained heavily dependent on the cooperation of American authorities. Faced with these limits on their power to discipline GI wrongdoers, the police tended to focus instead on the Germans who associated with them.
Courts-martial involving U.S. servicemen and "ordinary" local women - women who were neither prostitutes nor prospective army brides - in Berlin during the immediate postwar years formed Jennifer V. Evans's subject. These cases of sexual abuse and assault by U.S. servicemen provide considerable evidence of "fraternization gone wrong" and also posed a threat to the American policy of promoting cooperation with the local population. Maria Höhn then focused on the problem of German and American racism in the 1950s as it related to black GIs. African-American servicemen faced little open hostility from the local population, a fact they often compared positively to prevailing conditions in the United States. However, Germans were considerably anxious about single black soldiers and especially the possibility that they might enter into intimate relationships with local women. Paradoxically, although Germans now by-and-large rejected Nazi racist concepts, they could safely refer to the American policy of segregation in support of their own opposition to interracial couples. Finally, Howard J. De Nike described the problems faced by the U.S. military in Germany between 1970 and 1975, the late stage of the Vietnam era. Growing dissent within the ranks due to the war and the draft, rising use of illegal drugs, and protests by minority soldiers against discrimination they faced both on and off base were just some of the major internal problems the military faced. This discontent was evidenced in the growing number of incidences of insubordination and violence involving servicemen. After initial hesitation, over the course of the next decade the military eventually addressed many of the complaints by issuing regulations guaranteeing freedom of expression for its sevicemen, by effectively clamping down on racial discrimination, and by upgrading military housing.
The conference's first two panels focused on the role of the U.S. military in Germany as an intermediary between mainstream societies and popular cultures. As a counterpoint, the third panel dealt with the interaction of American and German military elites. One of its major themes was the extent to which the West German military, especially its leaders, underwent a process of "Americanization." Wolfgang Schmidt delivered a paper on the Luftwaffe, the branch of the new West German armed forces most open to American influence. Due to the revolution in air warfare between 1945 and 1955 based on jet propulsion, the new air force remained heavily dependent on American materiel and principles of combat and training. Positively influenced by the Americans' collegial treatment and the experience of pilot training in the United States, the Luftwaffe quickly oriented itself along the lines of its counterparts in other Western democracies. By contrast, Klaus Naumann concluded that "Americanization" of the Bundeswehr remained limited, even though the West German army initially seemed highly Americanized in terms of its uniforms, equipment, and logistics. More important, the United States influenced the central German military concepts of innere Führung (leadership from within) and Staatsbürger in Uniform (citizens in uniform) only in the broadest sense. In fact, American officers, in no small measure influenced by their admiration of the Wehrmacht's performance in World War II, doubted that these concepts did much to promote military efficiency.
The day concluded with a screening of footage from "Crossing the Bridge," a one-hour documentary on the fifty-year history of the U.S. military in Germany being developed by Robert P. Grathwohl and Donita M. Moorhus. The conference participants used the opportunity to offer constructive criticism on how to improve the final version of the film.
Saturday began with a panel devoted to the strategic dimension of the American military presence in Germany during the Cold War. "Forward defense" became one of the central elements of the German-American security relationship because it strengthened West German confidence in the American commitment to defending the Federal Republic. Bruno Thoss analyzed the development of this strategy through 1968. In response to growing doubts about the credibility of the American nuclear umbrella, the Federal Republic succeeded in getting a NATO commitment to move its line of defense forward to the Iron Curtain in 1963. However, the interalliance crises of the mid-1960s, including the troop demands of the Vietnam War, ensured that forward defense would be implemented only at a reduced level.
Dennis Showalter discussed the dialectical relationship between American and West German perspectives on how best to defend NATO's central front between 1954 and 1990. From the very start, the Bundeswehr's clear preference was for a conventional defense using elastic tactics, such as those used on the eastern front during World War II, to counter an attack by the Warsaw Pact. Such tactics would perhaps make a general nuclear exchange a logical step in the escalation of hostilities but not the inevitable outcome foreseen by American military planners during most of the 1950s. West German generals did see the logic of the American emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons as a method of stabilizing the front. In part to keep German fingers off of the nuclear trigger, however, the Kennedy administration shifted to the strategy of "flexible response" in the early 1960s. German and American strategic concepts began to truly converge only with the development of the United States's AirLand Battle doctrine in the 1980s. Hans-Joachim Harder described the various functions served by the American military presence in Germany. It was at times an occupation force, a means of containing the U.S.S.R., the major American contribution to NATO, a political symbol for the Federal Republic, a playing card in disarmament negotiations, and simultaneously the guarantor of West German security and German unification.
Finally, in a provocative paper titled "Why They Did Not Go Home" Hubert Zimmermann argued that the United States kept large-scale forces stationed in Europe during the Cold War largely due to an historical accident. Many factors spoke against it, including the American tradition of "no entangling alliances," new technologies such as nuclear weapons and airlift capabilities, domestic opposition in the United States to paying for stationing, détente, and the initial expectation that the GIs would stay in Europe only for a limited period of time. Although a major reduction seemed quite likely in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Zimmermann argued that none occurred until the 1990s due to the West German government's insistence on continued stationing and the Nixon administration's unwillingness to allow the U.S. Congress to dictate its foreign policy.
The conference concluded with a panel on the American armed forces in Germany during the turbulent 1980s, an era in which their relationship with the local community became increasingly strained due to growing antinuclear and anti-NATO protests. This unrest also indicated that over the years the Federal Republic, not least in the eyes of its own citizens, had become much less dependent on the United States than it had been during the "Golden Era" of German-American relations in the 1950s.
Anni P. Baker spoke about the protests against the stationing of new American military aircraft at Wiesbaden Air Base. A local movement initially motivated by quality-of-life issues such as air and noise pollution and air traffic safety became increasingly critical of the Federal Republic's political dependence on the United States, especially because the Kohl government consistently prioritized good relations with NATO over all other considerations. Pastor André Gingerich Stoner related his experiences as a member of the Military Counseling Network aiding American servicemen who sought conscientious-objector status during the Gulf War.
Finally, Reinhard Treu, editor of the journal Graswurzelrevolution, provided an insider's perspective on the peace movement of the 1980s. He emphasized that it was inappropriate to talk about a "German" movement because these protests were an international phenomenon that actually began in the Netherlands. Treu also asserted that the nonviolent independent peace movement, unlike those parts of the movement associated with official organizations like the Social Democratic Party (SPD), remained relatively free of nationalist sentiment or rhetoric in its activities.
In conclusion, the conference demonstrated that the history of GIs in Germany is a rich field that can illuminate important aspects of German-American political, social, cultural, military, and economic relationship since 1945. It also indicated the need for additional work in several important areas about which we still know very little, for example, the economic impact of the American military in Germany and the comparative experiences of British, French, and other NATO forces stationed in the Federal Republic. Expert commentary on the panels by Dewey A. Browder, Petra Goedde, Wolfgang Krieger, David Clay Large, and Christian Tuschhoff, as well as summary remarks by Günther Bischof helped place the papers in the proper perspective. The organizers are currently planning to publish a collection of essays based on the conference.
Thomas W. Maulucci
Workshop at the GHI, November 17-19, 2000. Convener: Waltraud Schelkle (GHI/Technical University of Berlin). Participants: Iain Begg (South Bank University, London), Martin H. Geyer (University of Munich), Robert Kuttner (The American Prospect, Boston), Stephan Leibfried (University of Bremen), Christof Mauch (GHI), Ann Orloff (Northwestern University), Mark Rom (Georgetown University), Max Sawicky (Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.), Joseph Schwartz (Temple University), Robert Walker (University of Nottingham), Margaret Weir (University of California at Berkeley), Michael Wiseman (National Opinion Research Center, Washington, D.C.).
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the emergence of social welfare states was largely about "nationalizing social security in Europe and America."1 Local charity and poverty relief became negligible compared to the vast national programs of comprehensive social insurance. Since the late twentieth century, however, there has been a discernable trend toward the decentralization of responsibilities for social policy, removing it from the competence of national governments and ceding it either to subnational states or to private agencies. The U.S. Welfare Reform Act of 1996 has been, above all, a manifestation of the so-called New Federalism in intergovernmental relations, that is, the willful devolution of operational competencies for welfare provision to the states and municipalities. In Germany the national government's monopoly on providing social services, such as employment exchange and job placement, is being increasingly challenged by the regulatory competencies of the European Union (EU).
In his keynote lecture Robert Kuttner discussed this trend with respect to the long-term development of social welfare institutions in the United States. Even in the American case he observed centrifugal forces working not only toward the subnational (state) level but also toward the supranational (global) level. Both forces seem to limit the national government's ability to finance and operate redistribution programs. This limitation of national capacity stands in stark contrast to the continuous popularity of a nationally uniform system of social insurance, as the election campaign of 2000 demonstrated: Subsidizing social security and providing health insurance for all seemed to be vote-winning agendas.
The workshop began with an effort to identify common problems and to discuss how they are intertwined with changes in the division of responsibilities among different tiers of government. One of the common problems discussed at some length was the increasing number of women in the labor force. The German system of cash assistance is still based on the male-breadwinner model. It ensures the living standard of a family almost irrespective of local circumstances, thanks to heavy top-down fiscal redistribution - a practice that seems to have reached its limits after unification (Stephan Leibfried). In the United States welfare reform bid "farewell to maternalism" and replaced the social right to assistance for caregivers with an entitlement to assistance when the poor go to work (Ann Orloff). Interestingly, this shift to an employment-based strategy of poverty alleviation is intertwined with competence devolution, presumably because it meets the specific interests of low-wage regions that also happen to be the regions of the highest incidence of poverty.
Another common problem is the multiethnic character of society due to continual immigration and, in particular, "race" in the American case (Joseph Schwartz). Typically, minorities and immigrant communities are geographically concentrated, which leads to the divergence of regional interests in terms of the generosity and universal character of social policy. Although there was consensus at the workshop that multiethnicity has and will continue to put political pressure on the social-welfare state on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a difference of opinion about whether this will inevitably lead to the notorious "race to the bottom" in a federal system.
The federal setup itself may be a common problem: Evidence was presented for a gradual descent to the bottom with respect to certain welfare programs in the United States (Mark Rom). But this finding inevitably encounters all sorts of methodological problems: For example, how does one evaluate the performance of privatized welfare services (Max Sawicky)? If welfare expenditures decrease, is it necessarily evidence of a (moderate) race to the bottom? Or is it evidence for maintaining the state's role if private welfare providers require the same amount of welfare spending as public providers? What about the quality of social services or the effects on the representative household's well-being?
The established theories of devolution and federalism seem to be inadequate because there are distinctly different responses to common problems among and within federations, in addition to the fact that no clear-cut evidence exists for downward convergence in decentralized social welfare systems. They leave too little room for the impact of organized interest groups and how they are empowered in a more decentralized setting (Margaret Weir). Nor do these theories take into account that there may be no federalist consensus, that is, the central level still must establish its credibility to fulfill a useful role (Waltraud Schelkle). This may explain effective countertendencies to retrenchment and the variety of responses.
The inadequacy of existing theories was a recurrent if not dominant theme in other presentations. The "household demand model" of federalism, which treats states like households that respond to a given supply of federal grants, leaves out important aspects of bargaining and strategic behavior of the different tiers of government (Michael Wiseman). The "imperative of subsidiarity," which governs the legal framework of the EU (in line with conventional theory), severely limits intergovernmental policy coordination (Iain Begg). Conventional theory classifies policy coordination as a mode of representing the central (EU) level that might not be a meaningful way to describe its emergence in practice.
That the role of the central tier of government in federal systems is less understood was underscored by two case studies wherein the U.S. government either tried regulation from above or enabled regulation from below. Regulation from above, namely, the international sphere, was the goal of U.S. plans for postwar reconstruction during World War II (Michael Geyer). The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 and its spinoff, the Social Covenants, were meant to establish high standards of social welfare via binding international treaties that would serve as bulwarks against domestic opposition, especially from the states. Regulation from below is the pattern that has emerged from transport and banking legislation in U.S. metropolises since the 1970s (Margaret Weir). The federal role is predominantly one of providing levers for local activism. In both cases the federal government created new arenas of policymaking. And by giving up certain prerogatives or even sovereign rights the U.S. government tried to gain room for maneuvering around lower tiers of governments.
Finally, the various perspectives of the presentations contributed to a discussion of whether and how one can learn from diversity in federal systems. A case study of "workfare" in the United States and the United Kingdom showed that learning from diversity is already taking place (Robert Walker). Initially, the United Kingdom imported workfare elements from the United States (and the Netherlands), such as the work-first strategy and in-work benefits distributed via the tax system. At the same time, however, the British government safeguarded individual and aggregate security to a much higher degree than did U.S. welfare reform. Britain also tries to make sure that there is constant evaluation of experiences. In contrast, no reporting or federal collection of data about state practices is mandated in the United States. At the same time, there is now more than anecdotal evidence that state practice has become more diverse or polarized, for example, with respect to rules for access to assistance and benefit computation that states apply to working families (Michael Wiseman). But the opportunity to learn from this diversity is foregone. Thus, there arguably is a case for a "policy transfer loop" from the United Kingdom to the United States.
Missed opportunities and the learning that does not take place within federations but between nations may yield a disturbing prospect: On the one hand, federalization of a policy area may be a way to deal with uncertainty in a period of acute reform pressures because it allows spatially limited reforms (Waltraud Schelkle). This is one of the cases in favor of "soft" policy coordination among the states in the EU: It would provide a framework for systematic exchange to share experience and for exerting peer pressure to undertake reforms (Iain Begg). On the other hand, the interest of governments to evaluate and learn from each other's experiences is less than keen. For instance, the diversity in how various states operate their welfare systems is due to the different degrees to which they outsource the provision of social services to private firms (Max Sawicky). There is anecdotal evidence that those who have established the programs, including such contracts, also are the ones who evaluate their own performance. This raises the possibility that missed opportunities for learning from diversity are not necessarily accidental. Rather, it might be deliberate refusal on the part of the middle tier of administration to provide even a basis for learning in an attempt to preclude regulation both from above and from below.
Waltraud Schelkle
Note
1 Douglas E. Ashford and E. W. Kelly, eds., Nationalizing Social Security in Europe and America (Greenwich, Conn., 1986).
Workshop at Florida State University, December 1-2, 2000. Conveners: Christof Mauch (GHI) and Nathan Stolzfus (Florida State University). Participants: J. Christopher Brown (UCLA), Raymond Bye Jr. (Florida State University), Jane Carruthers (University of South Africa), Sandra L. Chaney (Erskine College), Peter Ho (Wageningen University), Dan Klooster (Florida State University), JoAnn McGregor (University of Reading), Mahesh Rangarajan (The Telegraph, Delhi, India), Bron Raymond Taylor (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh), Douglas R. Weiner (University of Arizona).
Throughout the twentieth century, environmentalists and their organizations have sought to transform society's interaction with nature - whatever their philosophical, ideological, or social orientation. Cosponsored by Florida State University, this workshop brought together a diverse group of environmental historians and social scientists to discuss the impact of scientific and political institutions as well as ecological belief systems on environmentalism around the globe. The conference focused on activism in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, as well as North and South America and the organizational forms it took to pursue its goals. Among the many issues debated were the impact of ideologies and political systems on environmental organizations; the different forms of regional, national, and international engagement; and the discussion of human ecological and cultural intervention. What set this workshop apart from other projects in the field was its focus on the historical perspective of environmental activism.
In the first session, Sandra Chaney and Nathan Stolzfus presented their views on environmental protection in postwar West and East Germany, respectively. Chaney discussed the case of a West German group of activists form the Black Forest who foiled the attempts of an electricity company to extract hydroelectric power from the Wutach River. Chaney pointed out that it was Heimatschutz and Heimatliebe - love for one's homeland and the desire to preserve local nature and culture - that motivated the Black Forest activists. Whereas the electric company represented itself as a progressive element, claiming that conservation and technology can solve future problems, the conservationists emphasized the need to preserve the "primeval" landscape of the Black Forest (in reality, of course, a cultural construct).
Chaney showed that citizens' initiatives prevailed because conservationists used every possible means available within a democratic system to express their political and environmental concerns: The activists formed a coalition supported by various political parties and nature clubs, and it lobbied newspapers as well as local and state officials and key parliamentarians. Moreover, conservationists benefited from a new level of material comfort reached in West Germany by the late 1950s. Once a certain level of wealth had been achieved, Germans' interest in recreation and the conservation of nature increased.
In East Germany the situation was very different. Stolzfus reminded the workshop participants of the narrow course GDR activists had to steer between auffälligem Verhalten (behavior that attracts attention), which would almost certainly lead to their arrest, and other, less provocative actions. He pointed out that East German environmentalists were often active in other political groups as well. Activists were as concerned with expanding the small public space in which they could operate as they were with furthering environmental policies. In this context Stolzfus stressed the role of the Protestant Church, which protected political activists. The church served as a safe space for environmental activism and not as an active agent. In the discussion it became clear that the environmental concerns and the political culture of environmentalism in the GDR had more in common with movements in other socialist countries than with West German activism.
By focusing on the Soviet Union and China, respectively, Doug Weiner and Peter Ho contributed to a deeper understanding of the nature of resistance in socialist countries. Whereas Stolzfus emphasized the importance of public space for GDR environmentalists, Doug Weiner discussed a more private phenomenon - "coded" or "hidden resistance" to the regime - as the key to understanding environmentalists' activities in the Soviet Union. Weiner found that scientific and civic activists of the nature protection movements (many of them organized in the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature or VOOP) were fighting both for the restoration of nature reserves and for their social autonomy. He argued that the activists (or scientists) who led the movement felt deeply about the protection of nature for ethical and aesthetic reasons, but that they made sure to frame their concerns in scientific terms in order to provide legitimacy for their cause. They went so far as to make them appear eccentric and thereby harmless, within the context of a heavily policed society. This strategy enabled the activists to challenge the prerogatives of the secret police when, for example, they ordered the logging of all cypress trees on the Crimean peninsula. But the movement lacked mass support since the activists were merely hoping to persuade bureaucrats to join their ranks. It is unclear whether the regime ever realized that the nature protection discourse was subversive. But it seems that the activists were tolerated because they were assisted by mid-level bureaucrats and because they showed no desire to overthrow the political system.
Peter Ho, an expert on environmentalism in the People's Republic of China, broadened the theme of resistance to an authoritarian regime by arguing that Chinese environmentalists, particularly those who are organized in voluntary organizations, have been successful in developing strategies that help them escape state control. Ho pointed out that Chinese environmentalists are generally organized into Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and often register under a name that hides their true nature. This tactic has allowed environmentalism to develop in a gradual way and has strengthened civil society in the People's Republic. The best-known example of environmental protest in recent years has been the opposition to the building of the Three Gorges Dam. The plans for this costly project (ca. $20 billion), which were first released in 1989, require the relocation of approximately 1.5 million people to a large area of land that had to be developed. Environmentalists have publicly expressed fears that the relocated population would far exceed the carrying capacity of the newly developed land and therefore bring about deforestation and soil erosion. Demonstrations by dissatisfied farmers in the proposed resettlement areas have since caused the central government to pay attention to the feared environmental consequences of the planned construction. As a result, a cautious academic debate on the effects of land reclamation has taken place. Recent historical developments seem to indicate that environmental organizations in China are increasingly courting government approval and influence in policy-making, rather than seeking the more dangerous confrontation with the central government.
In his survey of wildlife conservation in India, Mahesh Rangarajan emphasized the importance of colonial policies in the country's environmental history. By 1900 the vast preserves of the Forest Department covered no less than one-fifth of British India. Although the prime objective of the reserves was to generate forestry products, including timber, they also became a major refuge for large fauna. Although contemporary critics pointed out that a nature park like the Kruger National Park in South Africa was impossible, since the Indian taxpayer would never stand for it, and although the great conferences of imperial powers to protect African fauna in the 1930s showed that India was lagging behind Africa, conservation moved to center-stage during and after the 1960s. At that time the idea of "ecological patriotism" was gathering force and the movement to protect the tiger (which replaced the lion as the new "national animal") ushered in a new era of conservation. Protected areas of various categories were expanded and restrictions on extracting resources from the National Parks were tightened. Initially, grassroots activism in India often came from communities that questioned the concept of conservation rather than from environmentalists. At the root of such controversies lay the question of the extent to which nature should and could be protected from human intrusion. But environmental awareness has strengthened over time: Decisions are now more widely scrutinized and discussed in public, and some of the older institutions that are an outgrowth of imperialism (Reserved Forests, National Parks, etc.) are undergoing a slow process of democratization.
JoAnn McGregor, who discussed environmental protection in Zimbabwe, confirmed some of Rangarajan's theses. Much like in India, state conservation in Zimbabwe had its origins in the colonial era. Consequently, popular activism and demands have focused primarily on rights of access to land rather than the protection of the land. Although the idea of conservation has played a part in rural protest movements and although peoples' mounting hardship has been channeled into syncretistic, environmentally inspired belief systems, the underlying green concerns have not been central to the claims on land and its resources.
In the course of the workshop it became clear that "place" mattered as much as political and institutional factors. In her comparison of environmental activism in South Africa and Australia, Jane Carruthers pointed out that the need to develop structures for public participation in local communities had an impact on the character of individual sites. She argued that sites of environmental contest often promote the transformation of notions of "land" (as resource or commodity) into "place" (as constructions of cultural values). Her argument was based on the comparison of environmental activism in Magaliesberg (Transvaal, South Africa), and Cooper's Creek (Western Queensland, Australia). Although the two regions are quite different in topography and history, the dynamics of local and national environmentalism show many similarities. Both campaigns consisted of diverse, inchoate groups who began with a limited strategic goal. Eventually, however, they coalesced around the original objective and around larger concerns that change attitudes toward the environment, even on a national level. The success of environmental campaigns depends, as Carruthers argues, on the transformation of land into place. That is to say, on the predominance of cultural or environmental values as opposed to purely economic ones.
Carruthers's fundamental insight - that green initiative is taken at the local level - was also emphasized by J. Christopher Brown whose research focuses on the mindset and the activities of Amazonian colonist farmers, particularly in Rondonia, Brazil. At the same time, Brown highlighted the eminent role of global environmental networks (in particular World Bank policy) and their influence on local communities. According to Brown, local groups have been shown to resist the development practices of multilateral banks - in particular, against the political, economic, and ecological structures that caused conflict with indigenous peoples and a subsequent deforestation in Rondonia. Brown stressed that the goals of local protest movements surrounding social and environmental issues always changed when these groups communicated with groups that operated on an international level. In such cases, colonist farmer production and markets received primary attention, whereas direct action and protest evaporated.
In Brazil, but also in Mexico, as discussed by Dan Klooster, the primary goal of local environmental action has always concentrated on creating an environment able to support livelihood - family and village life - and not the conservation of nature per se. Klooster, whose research focuses on forest survival and forest policies, pointed out that activists in Mexico have traditionally resisted concessions, logging bans or repressive forest bureaucracies whenever the policies implied that the villages might loose control over their forest authority. Klooster added to our understanding of environmentalism in Mexico in that he defined environmental issues basically in terms of distribution. On both the national and village level Mexican villagers demanded justice in the distribution of benefits, such as logging revenues, and in the distribution of costs, such as watershed changes and woodcutting restrictions. In a broader sense, rural environmental actions in Mexico are, as Klooster emphasized, closely linked to issues of social justice.
Finally, Bron Tayler gave a public lecture that was also attended by students of Florida State University on various radical resistance movements, their origins, ideas, and activities in the United States. He distinguished between radical environmentalists who promote direct action, and so-called deep ecology groups that hope to return the earth to a sacred place by means of (re-)inventing a "green religion." Those latter groups have rejected Western, anthropocentric, and monotheistic belief-systems in order to reestablish harmony with nonhuman nature.
The diversity of the topics introduced at this workshop demonstrates that environmentalism around the globe is not - nor has it ever been - a universal or unified movement. It springs from different motives, histories, and traditions, and it is shaped - strengthened, weakened, or suppressed - by different local, national, and international concerns, politics, and social realities.
Christof Mauch
Workshop in cooperation with the Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz and the Rhineland Palatinate State Institute for Teachers' Education, held at the Pfalzakademie, Lambrecht, Germany, December 6-8, 2000. Conveners: Philipp Gassert (University of Heidelberg), Werner Kremp (Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz), Christof Mauch (GHI). Participants: Sabine Freitag (GHI London), Marc Frey (University of Cologne), Ute Mehnert (Agence France-Presse, Berlin), Eckard Presler (Hamburg),Dieter Zimmer (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, Mainz).
Hillary Rodham Clinton's election to the U.S. Senate has opened a new chapter in the history of a venerable two-hundred-year-old American institution: That of the office of first lady of the United States. Whereas many of Clinton's predecessors were happy to leave the glaring light of the media behind after the end of their husbands' tenure in the White House, Clinton embarked on a second political career. Her candidacy for the United States Senate continued the unprecedented political partnership between husband and wife that has become the hallmark of the Clinton presidency. In addition, the rise, fall, and resurgence of Clinton's political fortunes since 1992 has attracted remarkable international attention. With the arrival of a new generation of political spouses in European capitals, political observers now ask whether the "Hillary Syndrome" has reached the Old World. What has been less well-perceived by the general public, however, is the historic dimension of the first ladyship and its long-term impact on the political life of the United States.
The workshop brought together scholars, journalists, and secondary-school teachers who share an interest in the history of first ladyships in the United States and Europe. Based on three recent books published by the participants1 and building on a rapidly expanding literature on the history of American first ladies (including a growing interest of gender historians in the role of women and the state), the workshop served to analyze the institutional, social, and cultural background that turned presidential spouses into important players in American politics. Christof Mauch opened the workshop with an overview of American first ladies from the founding of the republic to World War I. Whereas earlier studies often highlighted individual accomplishments of particular first ladies, recent scholarship underscores how the transformation of the first ladyship reflected change in society at large. Martha Washington's highly publicized support for the revolutionary army was modeled on the ideal of "republican motherhood" (Linda Kerber). Abigail Adams's candid admonition to "remember the ladies" probably had a limited impact on her husband, yet it served as a point of departure for the early women's movement. During most of the nineteenth century first ladies were virtually absent from the public eye, opting to live outside Washington because of poor health or unwillingness to shoulder the burdens of White House entertaining. Reacting to contemporary ideals of beauty and sociability presidents often preferred as official hostess young daughters or nieces to their middle-aged wives. Except for Sarah Polk, Mary Lincoln, and some first ladies coming to Washington in the last third of the nineteenth century presidential spouses were virtually unknown to the American people. Frequently descending from the higher echelons of society than the presidents, first ladies often provided much of the financial and social support that helped initiate their husbands' political careers.
In the second presentation Philipp Gassert analyzed the dramatic change that the relationship between president and first lady has undergone during the twentieth century. Because it combines the offices of head of state and chief of government, a rather unique feature in Western democracies, the American presidency requires a first lady. With the growth of the presidency to a national institution the private relationship between a presidential husband and wife has developed into a public (and highly publicized) partnership. In the modern media environment a successful presidency requires the presidential couple to engage in what Jan Jarboe Russell calls a "theatrical, courtly ritual" - witness the annual state of the union messages. The consecutive media revolutions, beginning with the arrival of a mass press in the 1890s, then of radio in 1920s, television in the 1950s, and finally the Internet in the 1990s, have driven the institutionalization of the first ladyship. Starting with Edith Roosevelt, whose carefully released family photographs complemented the energetic image her husband projected, the first family has played an expanding role in the making of the American presidency. The first lady acquired her own staff, with Congress approving more and more press secretaries and aides. The institutionalization of the first ladyship reached a high point during the "imperial presidency" in the decades after World War II and culminated during the late Cold War with Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan. Following a general trend in Washington bureaucracies, the office of the first lady was scaled back during the Bush and Clinton presidencies. Hillary Clinton made up for the loss of personnel in the first lady's office by working with members of other government agencies and different sections of the White House. Furthermore, since Lady Bird Johnson all first ladies have played a more prominent role in their husbands' election campaigns. Finally, the public has begun to expect first ladies not to limit themselves to being a "mere" supporter of their husbands, even though the limits of first-lady activism remain highly contested. Since the 1970s, however, the general assumption has been that a first lady should use her office to further a substantive social (and sometimes political) cause.
The next two presentations centered on individual first ladies. Sabine Freitag presented a paper on "The Consciousness of a Nation: Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1962," and Marc Frey addressed the topic "Between Camelot and Crisis: American First Ladies During the Turbulent Sixties." Freitag argued that Roosevelt, despite her aristocratic birth, very much fits the description of a "self-made woman." Unlike her future husband Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor experienced a traumatic childhood. It is noteworthy that she only became the role model she nowadays is after the Roosevelts rearranged their marriage in the early 1920s following her discovery of Franklin's extramarital affair. During the New Deal and World War II Roosevelt emerged as the "social consciousness" of her husband's administration, speaking out against racial and social discrimination, issues that the president did not dare to address himself. As some historians have argued Roosevelt secured the support of blacks for the administration despite their disappointment over its timid approach toward race relations. It took almost two decades for a similarly active first lady - Lady Bird Johnson - to enter the White House. Johnson was preceded by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy for whose husband Roosevelt had vigorously campaigned. As Frey argued in his contribution Kennedy was an immeasurable asset to her husband's presidency. She "hated politics," wanted first to be wife and mother and only second to be first lady, yet Kennedy's taste and cultural sophistication created the glamorous White House that American (and international) audiences loved during the early 1960s. Whereas Kennedy underscored the enormous public-relations value of the first ladyship, Lady Bird Johnson became a formidable political activist more in the tradition of Eleanor Roosevelt. She markedly increased the institutional power of her office by hiring a professional team of advisers and playing a crucial role during the election campaign of 1964. Johnson also set a problematic precedent by having her husband support legislative efforts on behalf of the environment. Her mixed success with the Highway Beautification Act foreshadowed the catastrophic failure of the Clinton health care plan in the 1990s.
Because Clinton's tenure as first lady has generated enormous interest outside the United States, two contributions explored the role of first ladies in a comparative transatlantic perspective. Dieter Zimmer, a television journalist, presented an overview of the wives of German federal presidents and chancellors. Taking his cues from his personal knowledge of Hannelore Kohl's life and career Zimmer underscored how the high visibility of their husbands and the building of personal contacts made possible and successful the social engagement of German first ladies. Often ridiculed by the general public these activities require energy and political clout, and they represent significant accomplishments. Eckard Presler then asked how the Hillary Syndrome has translated into European politics by comparing the latest crop of European first ladies - including Cherie Blair of Great Britain, Sylviane Jospin of France, Dagmar Havlová of the Czech Republic, Jolanta Kwasniewska of Poland, Ana Botella-Aznar of Spain, and Doris Schröder-Köpf of Germany. This new generation of European first ladies is routinely measured against its famous American counterpart. Yet they differ markedly from activist American first ladies, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, and from their old-school European predecessors because they tend to continue their professional careers even after their husbands' election to high office. At the same time, however, they seem to follow the American model of partnership presidency in the "two-for-one" mold the Clintons originally presented to the voters. The discussion centered on divergent and convergent developments on both sides of the Atlantic. With the ceremonial aspect less prevalent in Europe than in the "royal" American case, European first couples more closely resemble modern working families than does the highly institutionalized first ladyship that has become one of the most peculiar hallmarks of American democracy.
The workshop concluded with Ute Mehnert's presentation "Between Politics and Popular Culture: Hillary Clinton." The paradoxical success story of the first couple from Arkansas has not ended with their tenure in the White House. For the first time in recent American history an - albeit indirect - continuation of a presidency beyond the two-term constitutional limit seems to be emerging. Clinton's recent electoral success and George W. Bush's victory in the 2000 presidential election have added to the frenzy of such political speculation. As Mehnert argued, by analyzing recent reports on the Clinton campaign in New York State, the bid for a Senate seat, like the Oval Office, was the common project of a political partnership. In many ways Hillary Clinton's latest career move is the result of a growing personalization of politics. The many firsts and superlatives with which she is associated are the fodder feeding the media. So is the ambivalence that has been built into her image. The "biographical approach to politics" proved successful because of Clinton's contradictory life experience - "between emancipation and adaptation." It provides different possibilities with which the American electorate (and women in particular) can identify. She is portrayed as a strong political leader - and as "the most humiliated woman in the world." She has attracted uncritical adulation as well as unmitigated hatred. As a modern Lady Macbeth she stood in the center of political scandal while she suffered as an "ordinary housewife and mother." The combination of contradictions, the calculated ambivalence of presidential politics, the merging of pop and politics, of soap opera and statecraft, has proven successful in the postindustrial late-twentieth-century media democracy. Ute Mehnert concluded her talk with an appropriate phrase: "Fortsetzung folgt."
Philipp Gassert
Note
1 Philipp Gassert and Christof Mauch, eds., Mrs. President: Von Martha Washington bis Hillary Clinton (Stuttgart, 2000); Eckard Presler, Europas First Ladies auf eigenen Füßen (Leipzig, 1999); Dieter Zimmer, ed., Deutschlands First Ladies: Die Frauen der Präsidenten und Bundeskanzler von 1949 bis heute (Stuttgart, 1998).