Humanities Mole

Over dinner with a speaker from England, he mentioned that King’s College, London was going through gut-wrenching budget cuts and that all sorts of humanities faculty were threatened with elimination. This sounded much worse than what is going on in University of Nevada, Reno, awful as those cuts are. I mentioned that I knew some German faculty at King’s College. He said they were probably at risk.

Imagine my surprise when upon googling the news, joining the Facebook page in protest to the cuts, reading through The Guardian on the matter, and finding a string of blogs that it turns out that the guy I knew from back in Berlin a few years ago was himself the professor/administrator held responsible for the cuts. According to an ocean of commentary, it seems that this German scholar has reached the height of professor, entered into an administrative appointment and is now administering the new budget plan upon the humanities.

One way to save German at universities—be the professor who works with the administration to reduce the humanities. I had never really thought of this strategy—rather than trying to save German language and culture instruction, one should ascend to the level where one administers the cuts to other departments as well as one’s own. This sounds almost like a brilliant John Le Carré plot. The administrator eliminating the humanities is actually working for the humanities. He’s a double agent.

Clearly more investigation is required, but the brutal truth remains, clever ironies or not—London is chopping down philosophy and the humanities in general. You, too, should look into the matter.

Air War

Aerial attack always seems justified to those in the sky. The subtle distinctions that decide actions on the street are unintelligible from above.

It will take a long time for the perspective from the ground to give the other side of the story. Slaughterhouse Five was published 24 years after the firebombing of Dresden.

The newly leaked footage of two Apache helicopters shooting a cluster of Iraqis on the ground is not likely to elicit the domestic moral and emotional groundswell that critics of the American occupation might expect.

http://wikileaks.org/

Europeans might be horrified, but Americans have for too long now seen cop shows in which the audience automatically identifies with the camera in the police car or up in the helicopter. Whomever is being depicted in the grainy film must be guilty, otherwise they would not be in the crosshairs to begin with. If you are “caught” on an official video, you are doing something wrong—this presumption will lead audiences to side with the US military.

The contrast between the familiar American voices of the pilots versus the vague humanoids running on the ground will further pull viewers’ allegiances toward the US military. Yes, the gunners are callous and cocky in their gleeful annihilation of the Iraqis on the street, but again only audience members who have not played a violent video game before, nor watched a teenager play one, will really be surprised at the pilots’ jocular tone.

The audience is immune from the violence, with the camera circling in the air, our screens on our laps, at our desks. The war has been dragging on, no one is surprised that terrible things happen.

The difference that the vantage point makes is brought out vividly at the end of the video, when US troops arrive in vehicles, soon they run around much like the Iraqis killed minutes before, except this time they are uniformed men racing with wounded children in their arms.

Surely there is no real sociological difference between the Americans in the helicopter and those in the humvees, yet one bunch is cracking jokes about not bringing kids to a battle (how about not bringing a battle to kids?) and another bunch seems to be moving very quickly to save them. The Americans on the ground are racing to pick up the bodies of the people who had just a few minutes earlier been trying to pick up the bodies of the first victims. The only difference is that the Americans are in uniform and they are running in a deliberate direction because they do not think the helicopter will shoot at them. The Iraqis at the beginning of the video were milling around on the street, also not believing that they will be shot at from the helicopters.

These videos are immediate, even the leak did not take long—two years, but the slow moral process, the back and forth debate over what was justified or not, will drag on.

I remember in 1993 leading a group of retired UCLA graduates on a trip up the Mosel and down the Rhine. For the most part, these were very conservative people, from Orange County. The kind who tell you that Mexicans are ruining the California school system and that Germany is a nice place because it is so white.

There were two quiet guys who kept away from the others, modest and not particularly wealthy, if you asked them had they ever been in Germany before, they would say no, but they had been over it. They had both served in bombers during World War Two, felt they had done the right thing in the war, but now they wanted to come back fifty years later to see the place they had bombed.

They were shy, kept to themselves, didn’t eat and drink like the other travelers. One of them had gone to Stanford on the GI bill and studied German after the war. They were uncomplicated, not particularly arrogant or defensive, they just wanted to see the country, maybe talk to some of the people there.

The Poet's Name

I have learned recently not speculate on the letters that make up a person’s name, that literary musings do not amuse when they are about your proper name. If I imagine some one speculating about my name, it instantly brings back vicious childhood teasing, and why would that be different for anyone else?

Still what a boon for the imagination when in the midst of a noisy Dionysian party a quiet friend slipped me a copy of John Koethe. What’s a German professor to do, but become intrigued? Is there some secret connection that the letters of the poet’s name spell out? An affinity affirmed, a lineage that requires the adjustment of just one letter?

Well, it’s not that simple. John Koethe is his own very serious poet, not someone swiftly tucked into a familiar envelope of literary history. If anything, reading Koethe reminds me of first encountering John Ashbury in the New Yorker, and wondering how to decipher the lines.

Goethe was not often turned around to contemplate memory. In that sense he was Classical –always facing the horizon ahead, anticipating more knowledge, yet unfamiliar treasures on the next island. His moodiness came in youth, so that when he yearned, it was for what he could not now have, as opposed to what was lost in recollection. The opening to Faust 2 was the one connection I could find between Goethe and Koethe.

Really there is more K in Koethe than Goethe.

He writes as an American who has read so much philosophy that his intimate feelings speak as theory. No romantic language of simplicity, no turning the speech of the ordinary farmer into self-revery. His introspection sounds not just like someone who has read Proust, but who has also absorbed the last forty years of Proust criticism. Koethe’s poem seem to have internalized the grammar of literary criticism, so that they speak the voice of a professor recollecting his life.

Falling Water, the poem I was assigned, and the one that produces the most Google hits, has the private voice of an academic. It recounts taking a trip, getting divorced, raising children with self-conscious turns. He moves directly from a personal thought to a general statement, as if abstracting quickly away from himself, a move that a therapist once pointed out to me.

So Koethe is not a poet who speaks from another time and place, he belongs very much to our own. He is the intensely learned middle American university professor, and not the alienated cliché who's grumbling that he should be teaching back East. Koethe seems too Buddhist for such resentment. His poems describe intellectual thought in place, where he now lives, so that the distances he contemplates are temporal, his own life, but not the lures of an island off on a distant shore.

Manifesto again

I often grouse around with colleagues that students have no knowledge of the Cold War, and that we need to teach courses specifically on the period 1945-1989. They have no sense of the polarization of everything and what it was like to think that the entire world could really be completely destroyed anytime, as in now or tomorrow, --not by climactic change, but by an instantaneous white flash of overwhelming heat that melted your body along with everyone else you knew.

Of course there’s a fascinating turn to forgetfulness, --after ten years of students professing no interest in Marx and Engels, I had the first lively discussion in class of the Communist Manifesto. All the comments were about contemporary economics, lots of references to globalization, a few students were clearly completely conversant in the lingo. This was quite a shift from the sullen refusal to consider the existence of class conflict that predominated a few years ago. Now the Manifesto seems to speak on its own about globalization’s inequalities.

I teach the pamphlet in the context of nineteenth-century industrialization and the 1848 revolution, all very historical, all very ancient. So it is quite the delight when the dead rise from the text –yet another day for the Gespenst.

Guido Colbert

What great satirical potential--If only it mattered. Stephen Colbert could do a hamishly convincing imitation of Guido Westerwelle. Not that the German foreign minister really needs a comedian to bring out the humor in his speech and mannerism. He does so all by himself. Still the resemblance suggests a missed potential.

Language Extinction

We are at the point where if a language is eliminated from a given university, we cannot expect to see it return in our lifetime. If Classics is eliminated, then there is hardly any foreseeable future in which it will return. So much of the Liberal Arts entails the preservation of a heritage.

While we are all obliged to be modern, there is a vast range of experience that will simply be lost, if no one teaches it. This applies to Inuit languages as much well as ancient European ones.

Once it is no longer taught, it will be forgotten, at least in the here and now—at this university, for these students in this state of the union.

I have sat on fellowship committees where we read applications from remarkable American students at Berkeley or Harvard working on Hittite or Sumerian, asking to attend a German university because the last professor in North America who taught the language had retired, and now there was just this one in Heidelberg or Tübingen who still taught seminars in the subject. Such applications get everyone’s attention, for no matter whether we taught post-war film, the Holocaust or Romanticism, we all recognized the claim these students of ancient languages had on us.

And when kids in Nevada can study only Spanish as the one other foreign language, their perception of the world and its history will have shrunk down to nothing more than their immediate surroundings.

Saving German instruction

The valiant Horst Lange is gathering support for the German, French and Italian at University of Nevada, Reno which is threatened with closure. To anyone who has read his research or heard him give a lecture, knows how excellent Horst’s work is. All three of these European language are scheduled for elimination at the University of Nevada, Reno. Take a look at the link below to sign a petition in support of preserving the language department. The administrators in charge are allowing a period for appeal, so it would really help if you signed up.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/rescue-the-german-department