Stanford University

Josef Joffe: The Wall and the end of history

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"November 9, 1989, deserves a towering monument in every European capital - a marker of something completely new under the European sun," writes FSI Senior Fellow Josef Joffe in Newsweek. "Unlike in 1789, the promise of peace and liberty was truly delivered. Unlike in 1919 ... 1989 brought an end to the worst part of European history."

Twenty years ago, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted "not just the end of the Cold War … but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

He was wrong, of course, as were all the "end of" prophets of the past. Liberal democracy is hardly what inspires current forces like Iranian Khomeinism, global jihadism, the caudillismo of Latin America, or the neo-tsarism of Russia. But what about Europe?

The collapse of the 3.7-meter-tall monster in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1989, did bring about—or, more accurately, complete—a momentous transformation of the Old Continent. For the past 2,000 years, Europe had been the source of the best and the worst in human history. It invented practically everything that matters: from Greek philosophy to Roman law, from the Renaissance to the fax machine, from Brunelleschi to Bauhaus. But this was also where the world's deadliest wars erupted, killing tens of millions. It was in Europe that the most murderous ideologies were invented: communism, fascism, and Nazism, complete with the Gulag, the Gestapo, and Auschwitz.

That history truly ended with the Berlin Wall. Gone are the million soldiers who once manned a line running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and so are thousands of nuclear weapons. The French and Germans no longer fight over Alsace-Lorraine, and it's impossible to imagine another partition of Poland, or mass murder in the name of the Lord, or a flood of refugees like the tens of millions who crisscrossed Europe in the 20th century. Yes, we recently saw ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, but that was a cottage industry compared with what Hitler and Stalin wrought, and it was quickly bankrupted by the U.S. Air Force.

Post-wall Europe, meanwhile, has come to mean peace, social democracy, and the EU Commission, which has made Karl Marx's prediction come true at last: after the final class struggle, "power over men" would yield to the "administration of things." So it has: regulation has replaced revolution, and the welfare state has trumped the warfare state. Marx got only the timing wrong; it would take 140 years from the Communist Manifesto to the fall of the wall.

But the wait was worth it. The wall fell without bloodshed; the Soviet Union was the first empire that died in bed, so to speak, with barely a shot being fired. The Velvet Revolutions that made Europe whole again truly ended European history as we knew it. Traditional revolutions beget counterrevolutions and new rounds of repression and revolt. That cycle was broken in 1989, a miraculous first that bodes so well for the future. Yes, conflict continues in Europe, but not the kind that sets fire to history. Today the clashes are over taxes and spending, zoning and shop-closing hours, the sway of Brussels and the reserve rights of national capitals, abortion and same-sex marriage. Politics hasn't been abolished, but the really touchy items have been safely outsourced to the courts—far from the streets and even from parliaments.

The fall of the wall did not create this brave new world; it sped it up and ratified it. But as a revolution without victims (except for the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot, and a few other leaders who served short prison terms), Nov. 9, 1989, deserves a towering monument in every European capital—a marker of something completely new under the European sun. Unlike in 1789, the promise of peace and liberty was truly delivered. Unlike in 1919, when the continent erupted in revolutions that spawned totalitarian counterrevolutions, 1989 brought an end to the worst part of European history. That's not bad when you consider the origins: a flustered East German functionary looking into the TV cameras and announcing, well, yes, as far as he knew, East Berliners could freely cross into the West—right now.

Elsewhere in the world, history continues in its bloody fashion. But if you want to know how to end it nice and smoothly, check out what Europe managed 20 years ago.

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How Happy Are the Germans Twenty Years After the Fall of the Wall?

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Born in 1940 and raised in southern Germany, Peter Schneider has greatly contributed to the literary and cultural life of Germany over the last four decades. After finishing his studies in German, History, and Philosophy in 1964, Schneider became a central figure in the 1968 Student Protest Movements in Berlin and Turin, Italy. After completing his Staatsexamen in higher education, Schneider began his career as a writer with his novel Lenz. After the success of Lenz in Germany, over twenty other novels, screenplays, and volumes of journalistic essays followed, including the English translated works Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1984), Extreme Mittelage (The German Comedy, 1990), Paarungen (Couplings, 1996), and Eduards Heimkehr (Edward's Homecoming, 2000). Schneider's screenplays were filmed by Reinhard Hauff - Messer im Kopf (Knife in the Head) and Margarethe von Trotta - Das Versprechen (The Promise). His essays can be found in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Le Monde.

Since 1985, Peter Schneider has served as a guest professor at Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouth, Harvard, Washington University St. Louis, and Georgetown University. During the 1996-97 academic year, Schneider was awarded a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Peter Schneider returned to Georgetown as the Parker Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the fall of 2000 and took up his role as Roth Distinguished-Writer-in-Residence with the spring semester 2001. During the spring of 2002 he taught at the Emory College's Halle Institute as a Distinguished Fellow.

This event is jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Center for European Studies, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, Department of History, and Stanford Humanities Cener.

 

Audio Synopsis:

Peter Schneider recounts his experience and impression of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the changes he has observed over the past twenty years. Schneider was in Dartmouth, NH when the wall fell, having recently written that more than a wall divided Germans, and that it could only come down if the idea of reunification were abandoned. He felt disbelief when the wall fell, an event he describes as a "miracle that did not appear in any political calculus." Schneider credits the fall of the wall to pressure from the East German people, and cooperation between German and American politicians. Britain and France, in contrast, resisted the idea of a unified Germany, as did intellectuals and many Germans.

Schneider is struck by the city's transformation over twenty years, including new Western style housing and beautified storefronts. He relates how he observed a new generation of young Germans "taking charge" of the national flag as a symbol of joy rather than sorrow during Germany's hosting of the 2006 World Cup. However, he warns that it would be wrong to assume this progress signifies a new, shared culture. Germany illustrates the adage that a happy marriage is the product of long-term hard work, and much work remains to be done. Schneider describes that "a wall in the heads" of Germans persists, along with a clear generational gap. There is also significant economic disparity between East and West, including in unemployment rates and wages. He predicts that East Germany may rely on financial transfers from the West for another two decades or more.

Schneider observes that reunification has changed both sides and predicts an "Easternization of West Germany". He cites multiple surprising political developments of recent years including the election of the first female chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the rise of the PDS leftist party in the West.

In conclusion, Schneider provides a ready answer to the question of how happy Germans are twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: "as far as Germans can be happy, and warm up to the pursuit of happiness, we are almost happy." A discussion session follows Schneider’s presentation.

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Levinthal Hall
Stanford Humanities Center

Peter Schneider Author, "The Wall Jumper" and "The German Comedy" Speaker
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The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years later

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November 9, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For most, the historic event has come to symbolize the end of the Cold War, but for the Germans living there then and now, 1989 represents a turning point in an era that continues to shape their culture. Modern European historian and Stanford history professor James J. Sheehan and Amir Eshel, a Stanford professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, reflect on the consequences of this important anniversary through their distinct research perspectives. Professor Eshel is Director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research focuses include German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. Professor Sheehan has written widely on the history of Germany, including the relationship between aesthetic ideas, cultural institutions, and museum architecture in nineteenth century Germany. His most recent book, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, considers problems in European international history.

Which facets of Cold War history do you find most compelling?

JS: A great deal of work has been done on the origins of the Cold War, but I am more interested in two other questions: Why did it last so long? and Why did it end when (and how) it did? The Cold War could have ended (along with a great deal else) if there had been a military conflict between the superpowers. And while there were some close calls, this did not happen. Instead, there were a number of proxy wars that created a great deal of damage in their immediate environments, but did not lead to a U.S.-Soviet war. Why not? In large measure, I think, because both sides created and sustained a stable order in Europe, the one part of the world where their land armies faced one another.

The Cold War ended, and ended peacefully, when Gorbachev decided to allow this European order to collapse. He based this decision on an extraordinary miscalculation: that the Soviet regime could survive in a new Europe, taking advantage of Western Europe's economic resources and dynamism without abandoning the Communist Party's leading role in the state. By the time it was clear that would not happen, it was too late to go back. The Cold War ended the way most wars end, with the defeat of one side, a largely peaceful defeat to be sure, but a defeat nonetheless.

AE: I am fascinated by those cases in which people living under totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe stood up against their oppressors, often knowing that their own political actions were bound to fail. The cases of the 1953 uprising in the GDR, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring will always inspire us and force us to acknowledge that even in situations that seem to exclude human agency, individuals and groups can exercise their ability to act and their wish to live freely.

Why is it valuable to examine how both the rise and fall of the Wall impacted culture in Germany and even throughout Europe?

JS: Obviously the Wall shaped East German culture and, to some extent, continues to do so. I am less convinced that the Wall was of central importance for the West. Many West Germans tended to forget about the East, the possibilities of unification seemed remote, the attractions of Western Europe much more compelling. A major impact of the Wall's fall on both Germanies was to reveal how far they had grown apart.Many West Germans tended to forget about the East, the possibilities of unification seemed remote, the attractions of Western Europe much more compelling. A major impact of the Wall's fall on both Germanies was to reveal how far they had grown apart.

AE: It’s valuable because the building of the Wall was not only the result of the communist regime’s will to stop the flight of its own people to the West but also the result of the West’s inability to effectively counter what is now universally acknowledged as an unbearable crime. The Wall is a lesson in the history of tyranny but also in the inability to face up to tyrants. The mistakes of those who allowed the Wall to be built may be repeated in the future. Learning what happened before, during and after the building of the Wall in 1961 may help us avoid the emergence of similar repressive artifacts in the future.

The fall of the Wall, on the other hand, gives us many lessons regarding the ability of political actors – on both sides of the East-West divide – to overcome, by way of decisive actions, decades-long tyranny.

How do you approach such a far-reaching era of history in a research project?

JS: It is important to see the end of the Cold War in the light of long-range trends, especially changes in global economic institutions. At the same time, we should try to understand the human impact of these events. In her recent book on 1989, Mary Elise Sarotte describes how East Germans fleeing to the West in the fall of 1989 threw away their Eastern currencies as they reached the border. It seems to me that this episode captures the intersection of deep structural transformations and immediate human experience. Money, including the physical appearance of East German coins, the "welcome money" given to East German arrivals in the West, and of course, the 1-1 exchange of East for West Marks, had an extraordinary symbolic and practical significance for this story.

AE: I study the ways in which literature and the arts reflect on the past. In the case of postwar German literature, the past consists of the two totalitarian regimes that dominated Germany in the twentieth century: Nazism and Communism. It is to a significant extent by way of revisiting the past, I believe, that cultures and socio-political institutions evolve. In telling and retelling what occurred in Europe during the twentieth century, postwar German literature (one of my main subjects of interest) made a substantial contribution to the creation of the modern, progressive Germany we know today.

Could you describe examples of how the Wall, and what it represented, influenced German cultural and aesthetic works created during its existence?

JS: East Germany had a vibrant literary culture and produced a great many novels that reflect the experience of the Wall. I especially admire Christa Wolf's Divided Heaven. Her career illustrates both the accomplishments and the limitations of culture in a society like the GDR. Since 1989, there has been a great deal of work reflecting on the meaning of the Wall. I just read Uwe Tellkamp's novel, Der Turm, which is set in and around Dresden in the late 1980s. It is a remarkable book in many ways, a sprawling family saga as well as a sharp political portrait of the regime's last days.

AE: The Wall played a crucial role in the writing of such significant writers as Christa Wolf (of the former GDR) and Peter Schneider (of the Federal Republic of Germany). In novels such as Divided Heaven (1963), Wolf gave us a lasting image of life in the shadow of the Wall. In The Wall Jumper, Schneider made the absurdity of an edifice such as the Wall painfully tangible. Yet, a novel like Ian McEwan’s The Innocent makes it clear that the Wall and the division of Germany also left a significant mark on European literature as such. In recent years, films like "The Lives of Others" began exploring the meaning of the East-West divide and the lasting impact of European totalitarian regimes on the lives of individuals and societies.

During the course of your work what kind of evidence have you encountered that illustrates how the Wall impacted the legacy of European Jews?

JS: East and West Germany dealt with the legacy of Nazism--and the meaning of the Holocaust--in quite different ways. East and West Germany dealt with the legacy of Nazism--and the meaning of the Holocaust--in quite different ways. In the GDR, Nazism was seen as a particularly toxic form of fascism, that is, an expression of capitalism's structural crisis. From this perspective, the racial dimensions of Nazism did not seem central: there was, for instance, very little about the Holocaust in the exhibitions on Nazism in the old East German museum of German History. Like the museum itself, this view of Nazism is now largely gone.

AE: The Jewish community of both the GDR and the Federal Republic was rather small when the Wall was built. While the Federal Republic accepted early on the German responsibility for Nazism, the GDR regarded itself as representing the legacy of the ‘better Germany’ that is of the German left. This has been as many scholars have since claimed, the foundational myth of the GDR. In the decades following the building of the Wall, the issue for German-Jewish relations was less the East-West divide and more finding ways to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust, acknowledging the crimes of the Nazis and developing a German-Jewish dialogue based on mutual respect and different memories. However, one of the most significant contemporary German-Jewish authors is Barbara Honigmann, who in her writing also reflects on what it meant for her and others like her to grow up and come to age as a Jew in the GDR.

From the perspective of your research, what do you feel are the most lasting implications of the Berlin Wall today?

JS: In the euphoric days after the fall of the Wall, many people underestimated the material and spiritual difficulties of unification. It is not surprising that, after 40 years apart, the two Germanies have only slowly grown together. Like parts of the American south after the Civil War, parts of the old GDR have a nostalgic view of the "good old days" before 1989. This has an impact on German culture, especially in Berlin. A more lasting implication is the Left Party, a somewhat improbable alliance of Western German leftwing Social Democrats and the former East German Party of Democratic Socialism.

AE: The Wall will always remain a symbol of tyranny. It will also continue to remind us what fantasies about a ‘perfect’ human society such as those that guided the Soviet Union and the GDR may end up producing: endless human misery and the creation of enclosed, repressive political systems.

Do you believe there’s still more to learn from this transformative period of history?

JS: Historians always believe there is more to learn. In the case of 1989, I think one lesson is how often history surprises us. No one expected the Wall to fall so suddenly and so peacefully, just as no one expected the Soviet Union to collapse with such speed. Nor has the post-Cold War world turned out quite the way many people expected.

AE: Absolutely. The learning about the nature and the challenges of totalitarian thought and totalitarian regimes has just begun. Contemporary totalitarian regimes across the globe such as Iran, Syria, Myanmar or North Korea make the study of the Wall and how we—those living in open societies may react to them—crucial for the freedom of millions who suffer by those regimes. The study of the Wall and of such regimes may also prove crucial for our survival given the fact that these regimes strive to acquire deadly military capacities.

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Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization

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The lecture is preceded by a workshop at 10am in the same location. For additional information please access the DLCL site listing here.

Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460)
Terrace Room (Room 429)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak University Professor Speaker Columbia University
Lectures
History, Memory and Reconciliation

The Origins of Democratic Institutions in Europe

What explains the variation in the democratic institutions of contemporary European and North American societies?

The implications of electoral rules and legislative institutions for social and economic outcomes are well established.  For example, proportional electoral rules are associated with more extensive social policy in cross-country data sets, and within countries, the representation of regions in upper chambers of legislatures help explain fiscal flows.

Thomas Koenig

University of Mannheim
PBox 103462
D-68131 Mannheim

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Professor of Political Science, University of Mannheim
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Thomas König has the chair for international relations and is co-director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Before, he was professor at the German University Speyer and at the University of Konstanz. For his research, he was nominated for the Descartes Research Prize of the European Union and the Harrison Prize, received the Fulbright chair at Washington University St. Louis and the Karl W. Deutsch professorship at the Wissenschaftscentre Berlin, and was Marie Curie- and Heisenberg Fellow of the German National Science Foundation. König’s publications include the major scholarly journals and a variety of topics. He collaborated with a large number of scholars, including Chris Achen, Thomas Bräuninger, Ken Benoit, Daniel Finke, Simon Hug, Dirk Junge, Michael Laver, Brooke Luetgert, Bernd Luig, Lars Mäder, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Gerald Schneider, Jonathan Slapin, Heiner Schulz, Frans Stokman, Robert Thomson, Vera Tröger, George Tsebelis – just to name a few.

In his early publications in the 1990s, he studied the influence of interest groups on labor and social legislation in Germany, USA and Japan using network analysis and exchange theory. With Franz Urban Pappi and David Knoke he gathered data and extended the Coleman exchange model for modeling the institutionalized access of interest groups to political decision makers. Using spatial analysis, he also studied legislative gridlock in Germany in this period. From the mid-1990s, König devoted more attention to European integration by gathering data on EU constitutional, legislative and implementation politics. Today, König established a historical archive on EU politics containing all constitutional, legislative and implementation activities since the mid-1980s. For Germany, he also collected legislative data since the 1950s. These two topics – German and European politics – are dominating his further work, which is about the estimation of actors’ preferences. Regarding the European Union, König tested rivalry approaches on the power of the European Parliament, the impact of enlargements on Council decision making and the strategies of member states when they attempted to revise the institutional framework of the EU. In the beginning of the 2000s, he directed the DOSEI project and investigated the constitution-building process of the EU. Following, he studied the implementation process of EC directives and the power of the European Court of Justice.

All these data is used to evaluate the empirical implications of game-theoretical models with some focus on the analysis of Germany and European integration, including the constitutional, legislative and compliance level. In this regard, König also established the first EITM summer institute in Europe training young scholars in order to use sophisticated techniques for the study of politics. Recent publications include "Troubles with Transposition: Explaining Trends in Member State Notification Failure and Timelines", British Journal of Political Science 2009 (with Brooke Luetgert), "Why don’t veto players use their power?", European Union Politics 2009, "Why do member states empower the European Parliament?", Journal of European Public Policy 2008, "Bicameral Conflict Resolution in the European Union. An Empirical Analysis of Conciliation Committee Bargains", British Journal of Political Science 2007 (with Lindberg, Lechner and Pohlmeier).

Professor König was a Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center and at the Hoover Institution during Fall 2009.

Erick Arenas

Department of Music
Stanford University
Braun Music Center
541 Lasuen Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-3076

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Ph.D. Candidate, Musicology, Stanford University
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Erick Arenas is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford. His research focuses on the relationship between musical culture and ritual life in the capitals of Catholic Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Before coming to Stanford, Erick studied music history at the University of the Pacific and the University of Oregon. His master’s research dealt with the persistence of liturgical music traditions in nineteenth-century Paris and the music of Charles Gounod.

Erick’s doctoral dissertation, “Johann Michael Haydn and the Missa solemnis of Eighteenth-Century Vienna and Salzburg,” explores the style, tradition, and significance of the elaborate musical rendering of the Mass within the imperial-Viennese and archepiscopal-Salzburg contexts. He seeks to draw greater attention to the central place of sacred music in the Austrian musical legacy, a research area that has been dominated almost exclusively by concert and theatrical music scholarship. As a case study, he examines the achievements of J. M. Haydn (1737-1806), a figure once considered the preeminent composer of liturgical music within the milieu of Joseph Haydn and W. A. Mozart. By shedding light on the extent to which eighteenth-century musical life was still influenced by waning Baroque and Counter-Reformation values, Erick’s project offers one significant lens for a broader examination of the complex musical culture of the Age of Enlightenment.

In Summer 2009 Erick was awarded the FCE Advanced Graduate Student Travel Fellowship in order to study manuscript sources in Austrian music archives.

Anti-Semitic Fascism(s) to Fascist Anti-Semitism: Jews in Interwar Europe

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Dr. Aristotle Kallis is a senior lecturer in European Studies at Lancaster University, UK and a well know expert on interwar fascism. Dr. Kallis works specifically on Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, both individually and in comparative terms.  He researches fascism in generic terms - as an intellectual phenomenon with various national permutations - and explores its links to indigenous nationalist traditions. His research on fascism has also extended to different areas, such as totalitarianism, propaganda, eugenics and genocide. His current project is devoted to Fascist Rome in the 1922-43 period. This project, which combines urban, cultural and intellectual history, examines the way in which Fascism attempted to re-create 'space' and symbolism in Rome with a view to transforming the city as a statement of its universal utopianism. It analyses the Fascist intentions (placed in a wider framework of urbanistic debates, both inside Italy and across Europe/ the world) and examines the extent to which they were translated into practice in the two decades of Fascist rule.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and Department of History at Stanford University.

Margaret Jacks Hall
Building 460
Terrace Room

Aristotle Kallis Senior Lecturer, European Studies, Lancaster University, UK Speaker
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