Unter den Linden

When all else fails and you need a little density

there is always the webcam in the cold distant city

http://www.dhm.de/webcams/VID2.html

Tough Old Tree

Gingo Biloba

Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten

Meinem Garten anvertraut,

Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,

Wie's den Wissenden erbaut.

Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen,

Das sich in sich selbst getrennt?

Sind es zwei, die sich erlesen,

Dass man sie als eines kennt.

Solche Frage zu erwidern,

Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn.

Fühlst du nicht in meinen Liedern,

Dass ich Eins und doppelt bin.

from "Buch Suleika" in Goethe's "West-östlicher Divan"

Yes, the Gingko is a well established motif among Goetheverehrer and Bildungsbürger generally. It also has come to represent the paradoxes of Orientalism and European contact with China and Japan.

The first Westerner to note the Ginkgo Biloba tree was the botanist, Engelbert Kaempfer, who served with the Dutch East India Company and was shown the tree in a garden in Nagasaki. Seeds he brought back were planted in Utrecht, where the trees still stand.

The Ginkgo trees are very hardy and have been known to live for well over 1000 years. Six trees survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. They continue to grow there today. You can find pictures of how architecture has been designed around these surviving trees in the rebuilding of Nagasaki, here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~kwanten/hiroshima.htm

Outside my office there is a thick gnarly Gingko. For about a week in Spring, it drops small greenish translucent bulbs, which are often gathered up by Chinese graduate students. Whenever I walk past a cluster of students stashing these bulbs into plastic grocery bags, I want to ask them what they plan to do with them, can they be cooked up into food, or a tea or medicine. But I don't want to seem like the nosy professor, I don't want to sound intimidating, like the native speaker questioning the foreigner, so I usually just keep walking past the tree and the gleaners to the student center food court where I usually get a quick sushi or orange chicken for lunch.

Clearing up an old question

While being interviewed on the campus of a venerable East coast college, I was asked by a renown old French professor what courses I might be able to teach undergraduates. Like any other nervous candidate, I was prepared for this question. So I took a deep breath and slowly recited the list of class I had already taught, ending with the German Enlightenment. After a slight pause, the French professor, asked me with a skeptical smile, "Oh, I didn't think there was a German Enlightenment?"

Apparently this question still worries some. T.J. Reed's newest book Mehr Licht in Deutschland: Eine kleine Geschichte der Aufklärung is marketed by C. H. Beck, another venerable old institution, as an answer to this old concern.

"Die deutsche Variante der Aufklärung wird im Ausland gern unterschätzt, falls sie überhaupt als kohärente Bewegung zur Kenntnis genommen wird. Im Lande selbst hatte sie lange eine schlechte Presse, denn es gab eine Tradition, bei der man dem Grundsatz klaren Selbstdenkens und individueller Freiheit "tiefere", "deutschere" Werte vorgezogen hat, mit schlimmen, auch politischen Folgen.

T.J. Reed, intimer Kenner der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, zeichnet in einem großen historischen Essay die Geschichte der deutschen Aufklärung im europäischen Zusammenhang nach."

http://www.chbeck.de/productview.aspx?product=28329&PTBUCH=LESEPROBE

After all the many critiques of the Enlightenment, after all the answers written against and for Kantian ethics, epistemology and aesthetics, after all the horrors ascribed to the German Enlightenment, it is amazing that one could still wonder whether there ever was such a movement? It almost seems like a sophistic trick to claim so, "Well, you see there never was a German Enlightenment. It is strictly a French or English problem, like colonialism…"

Transit-on line journal

Check out the fascinating online journal published by the German department at Berkeley

http://german.berkeley.edu/transit/index.html

The current issue has a number of pieces by and about Yoko Tawada and Zafer Senocak.

Back issues are also fun

Cosmopolitan Cipher

Found a new collection of poems by Donna Stonecipher—an excellent name for a poet. Standing in front of the book shelf, I wondered if the name was an elaborate ruse. Should I buy this book? Is it a trick?

Why would one worry about being deceived by a book?

Stonecipher's The Cosmopolitan is a collection of prose poems arranged around the names of authors and architects, from Elaine Scarry to Franz Kafka to Zaha Hadid and not to forget Elfriede Jelinek by way of Lenin. A cluster of names Germanists read regularly.

Suspicion ebbs and inside you find wonderful ruminations of space. The Cosmopolitan is very thoughtful about the material arrangements of city life. The analogies we draw between the closets that pile up over our heads and the way in which we organize our day

"She sat down to build her day like a townhouse: room stacked atop room filled with pretexts for activity to save herself from falling headlong into undifferentiated time."

Her pieces are inlayed with quotations that reinforce the special order of her thoughts: "Voltaire said: 'a practically infallible way of preserving yourself against self-destruction is always to have something to do."

The lesson of the Enlightenment: reification can serve as a means of staying sane with style and wit. It does not have to be only a negative term. To design yourself as a house, a formal garden or a city is one means of becoming cosmopolitan—Voltaire should know after all.

There is so much more to read. These poems mix nuggets of academic prose with the casual theory gossip we all used in grad school. That way, she can flirt with the reader as she recounts how the "girl with the DDR bag met the boy with the CCCP t-shirt." Hipster chatter accumulates in her prose pieces so that before you know it you are deep in contemplation. It is surprising how Stonecipher turns light talk turn into clever introspection.

http://www.coffeehousepress.org/thecosmopolitan.asp

Haiti for Germanists

The world has once again discovered Haiti in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake. In addition to sending money, Germanists can read up on the long history of forgetting and remembering Haiti by taking another look at Susan Buck-Morss's essay "Hegel and Haiti," first published in Critical Inquiry ten years ago, and now reprinted with an introduction and accompanying essay by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=35923

Buck-Morss argues that news of the Haitian Revolution must have motivated Hegel as he elaborated the "Master-Slave dialectic" portion of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The Master-Slave dialectic is perhaps Hegel's most famous argument, one that has been read for almost two centuries as a precursor to Marxism.

In college I was taught that Hegel was thinking about Stoicism and the fate of Christians in the Roman Empire when he wrote that section of the Phenomenology, but Buck-Morss argues that the immediate condition of African slaves in the New World and the first successful revolution against white masters in Haiti must also have had a profound impact on the young Hegel, one which scholars have since forgotten.

Her argument is by no means confined to one German Idealist. She traces the long history of how European intellectuals looked past the immediate oppression of Africans when they theorized on freedom and slavery. The Mediterranean ancient past was always assumed to be the philosophical context for Enlightenment arguments against slavery, a perversion given the aggressive involvement of all European maritime powers in the Atlantic slave trade.

How much Buck-Morss's argument will shift our understanding of Hegel remains to be seen, but her essay, and this new book, is a compelling place to rediscover Haiti's crucial stand against oppression and the two hundred years of punishment that the United States and Europe of meted out ever since sugar cane slaves rose up against their masters.

The White Ribbon

It remains to be seen whether "Das weisse Band" becomes the kind of movie that everyone shows in German class the way "Good bye, Lenin" "Männer" and "Das Leben der anderen" were taught in almost every upper-level language course until every student had seen it thrice.

Nevertheless, Michael Haneke has a made a film that every German professor will compulsively watch again and again (not a big market admittedly). Buy the DVD and stare at the last shot to figure out who is standing next to whom.

The film is stunning, clever, confounding, in many ways like his earlier mystery "Cache." As with "Cache" the last shot seems to suggest an answer to the story's mystery, but we will have to look at it slowly to find any possible clues. It took me eight viewings to catch the final revelation in "Cache," but already on the first viewing the final shot in "Das weisse Band" suggests strange positions. Why is the Pfarrer seated with the congregation of the church in the last shot? At whom are the villagers looking? What person is in the position of the camera?

Das Weisse Band makes so many allusions that we will be writing about it for years. At first glance, it evokes Fassbinder's "Effi Briest" and Edgar Reitz's "Heimat," perhaps Schlöndorff's Törless, too. But there is more than a little Stephen King in the flick as well. The innocent children stand there all blond and blank-faced denying any knowledge of the nasty tricks plaguing the village. The story is a Max und Moritz tale without the humor to distract from the brutality, instead we get a great deal of sanctimonious covering up of crimes that foreshadow the Nazi genocide. But those historical references are made lightly and late in the film. On the face, the film could just be a belated indictment of Wilhelminian Prussia.

Haneke sets shots up like paintings. He creates the look of Adolf Menzel or Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller, but without the sentimentalism. There is a long shot of a man emerging from a tree-lined road that harkens Caspar David Friedrich. He directly quotes Menzel's famous painting of Friedrich der Grosse playing a flute concert in Sanssouci. Like Fassbinder, he chooses to shoot the historical drama in black and white.

Unlike other psychological treatments of proto-Fascism, Haneke does not exclude women from participating in violence. Patriarchy comes across with snarling insults and boots in the gut, but women, the Pfarrer's Tochter, in particular, is among the scariest organizers of secret punishments. In the end, the film shows a society run by fear and beatings.

Yiddish poet

di groyskayt fun kleynkayt

The last great Yiddish poet of the twentieth century has died at age 96. Abraham Sutzkever died January 19, 2010. Born 1913 in Czarist Russia and raised up in Vilna, Sutzkever experienced the golden period of Yiddish culture in Vilna followed by its destruction and all of Yiddish culture by the Nazis. A prolific writer, he began publishing lyric poetry in the 1930s. He is remembered for his reports from the Vilna ghetto. He was a witness at the Nuremberg trials, after which he emigrated to Israel, where he continued to write in Yiddish, a struggle in a country that eschewed the language of Eastern European Jewry.

David Hirsch wrote in 1986 "Abraham Sutzkever's a major twentieth-century poet who may never be accorded the recognition he deserves, because he writes in a language whose natural readership has been decimated by the Nazi genocide in Europe. By those who read him in Yiddish, Sutzkever is widely considered the greatest Yiddish poet of the twentieth century."

There are several collections of his poems in English on line and you can find his Yiddish works through the Open Library

A few marvelous essays published on his 90 birthday can be read here:

http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/vilna/vilna_pages/vilna_stories_sutzkever.html

and an obituary in Haaretz:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1144431.html

one in the NZZ:

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/literatur/der_lyriker_als_zeitzeuge_1.4570021.html

David H. Hirsch, Abraham Sutzkever's Vilna Poems "Modern Language Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 37-50 Available through JSTOR

New Snow Theory Agenda

So after a year of wandering about the blogger universe, trying out various topics, I realize that a decent blog needs to have a focus. So from now on Snow Theory will be dedicated to "German Studies in America." I will endeavor to post regularly on topics relevant to the profession of Germanistik in the US. Send me any suggestions.

Herta Mueller

Here is the longest and most eloquent interview with Nobel laureate, Herta Mueller:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuKdNmVPyuQ

You can really get the sense that she is speaking fluently, has lots to say, and then, alas, they run out of time.

What's wrong with television is that more people don't stop watching it. It is somehow inconceivable that one does not turn it on. And thus, the programming works with the clear understanding that television will be watched, even with the internet as a rival. Early television had to draw people to buy the devices, turn them on. These questions no longer matter, and yet the shows are so much like early television, ironically because they are cheap and easy. People will watch so much drama always, as if they were staring at the logs on the fire. Where is the sense of competition?

Where is the rural left?

The left in the US has historically ignored the rural population. If small town workers were industrialized then they were swept up in essentially urban political movements that would apply to factory workers in Ohio as well, but for the most part the left has sought to ignore the middle of the country, a bias that I share with most academics as well. The historical legacy of the coastal scorn for the middle of the country has meant that a mutual resentment has grown since the time of Andrew Jackson between the port cities and the country laborers. The Jeffersonian fear of the urban masses has become a stable of the poorest country voter.

This problem faces the left in Europe as well, it has been a factor in nineteenth-century politics, the 1848 revolution turned against the Viennese bourgeoisie and in favor of the Habsburg monarchy when the peasants received their concessions from the Emperor and went back to their farms, leaving the revolution in the hands of the poor. This brilliant move was repeated by Bismarck who sought to bind the rural classes to the Prussian monarchy in alliance against the socialist urban working class. Today as in the nineteenth century, the invocation of Christianity operates to binds the rural population to the ruling elite. This is a problem that Marx saw as just manipulation by Louis Napoleon. The mistake is to rely too strongly on the belief that left-wing politics needs to connected with the social conditions created by industrial and technological change, or progress as it used to be called. So many political decisions are made independent of economic transformations. Globalization, for all its importance, is simultaneously the ideology of corporations justifying their shifts from one industrial region to another, and it is the justification used by governments to explain why they cannot replenish lost industrial jobs. Yet, no matter how well contemporary crises can be defined as global, the constitutions of the United States and most other nations reflect an agricultural, nineteenth-century society. Technological advances were not written into the US constitution as a factor that could alter the election system. Thus we are faced with an outmoded distribution of voting power that does not reflect the last hundred years of economic growth inside and outside US borders. The trouble for the left is that it concentrates on the economic distribution of power without incorporating the very population that has been made irrelevant by these transformations, but which nevertheless holds considerable voting strength. The weaker this group has become economically, the more it has allowed itself to become organized into a conservative religious class. The left analysis has been to focus on the economic relations that disenfranchised industrial workers rather than thinking about the constitutional structures that continue to split the rural population from the economic elite on the coasts.

German word for work

"Praxis" a very theoretical German word used to describe "hands-on" work. Whereas the corporate English speech resorts to any number of idioms to describe the physical immediacy of work (lots of references to hands and the rolling up of sleeves), the German spoken by corporate managers to describe the non-abstract, immediate, sensual, bodily knowledge of how to perform labor is distinctly abstract, non-specific, and universal, so that working always appears as a general term within a larger economy.

A further little irony: the word "Praxis" is used both by old Marxists as well as new global fancy corporate managers. Both prefer the term as a single category that encompasses all the multitude of actions, thoughts, patterns and hierarchies inherent in work.