Correspondence An International Review of Culture and Society

Issue No. 4 Spring/Summer 1999

An Inte rnational Project sponsore d by the Suntory Foundation (Japan),
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

In This Issue
History Revised
The Querelle Over Cultural History 2
Gulag Denial
History for Sale
The War That Will Not Thaw
Post-Zionism & the Myths of Memory 6
The Two Italies
Historians Under National Socialism 9
The Greek Civil War in Retrospect 10
Revising Roger Garaudy
America the Radical?
History and Historians
History Goes Pop: Two Views
Hungarian Women’s History
A New Kind of History
Frontiers of Science
Icelandic Genes
Left Darwinism
Peter Singer
Justice for Neanderthals!
Out of Africa?
Essays
Fractures of Modern Civilization
The Resumption of History
(continued on next page)
History Revised
N othing stimulates the writing of history more than the end of history.
This is one conclusion that might be drawn from the geyser of fresh
historical work that has burst forth over the past decade. The books
that have received the most attention in recent years are devoted to revivifying
“public memory,” as it is now called. Among these the most famous have been
committed to returning all that has been “repressed” to the official record of our
bloody century. Such works are useful and can be morally admirable, especially
when they challenge the many new forms of historical revisionism that would
like to shape historical memory for some questionable contemporary purpose.
Yet there are other, more productive and interesting revisions also taking place
in the field of history today, and it is these which we have chosen to highlight in
this issue of Correspondence. The first such revision is the active reexamination of
the national myths that grew up in the decades following World War II and have
shaped our political experience since. These myths have come under increasing
scholarly scrutiny in many countries recently. In Greece and Italy, for example,
the standard historical accounts of the internal political conflicts that raged over
Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy are all being rewritten, as political
3 scientists Stathis Kalyvas and Nadia Urbinati report. In Israel, by contrast, a con-
4 tentious debate has broken out over what journalist Gadi Taub here calls the
5 “founding myths of Zionism,” whether in relation to the declaration of the State of
Israel in 1948, the wars that followed, ethnic tensions between Sephardic and
7 Ashkenazi Jews, and misunderstandings between the Orthodox and secular pop-
ulations. In all three cases the fact that national history is finally open to such pub-
lic controversy is a hopeful sign of political maturity and confidence in the future.
Quite different sorts of revision are taking place within the history profession
12 itself. As Michael Becker reports, German historians are currently disputing the
13 purposes to which certain founders of the most important postwar schools of
research put their work during the war years. Elsewhere the debates are less
politically charged and more concerned with the aims and methods of the histo-
15 rian writing today. As Daniel Gordon writes in our pages, the controversy over
16 historical method has long been centered in France, where for years the domi-
17 nant approaches focused on language, culture, and social transformations while
downplaying the importance of purely political phenomena. Now political his-
tory may be staging a comeback there. Another discussion has taken place
18 among Anglo-American historians over the current vogue of “popular history,”
19 some of which is simply standard work aimed at reaching a broader audience,
19 while the rest uses different narrative techniques to escape the limits of tradi-
20 tional scholarship. We here consider several views of these developments and
publish an original contribution to the question by historian Anthony Grafton.
20
The most important contemporary myth in need of revision may be that of the
“end of history” itself. As Daniel Bell writes in his essay for this issue, recent
21 events in the Balkans demonstrate that history is resuming, fueled by all the
hatreds and passions—especially religious passions—that have always driven it.
39
If he is correct, we can probably expect history as a form of intellectual inquiry
to become more difficult yet all the more necessary. ◆
—Mark Lilla
 History Revised
(continued from previous page)
Japanese Economy
Japan & the Global Financial System 23
The Philosophy of Money
Japanese Melting Pot
Multiethnic Japan
Buraku Liberation Movement
Views of Japan
Japan, Made in U.S.A.
Korean-Japanese Reconciliation?
Responsibility of Intellectuals
Word & Image in Japan
In the Beginning Was the Word…
The Kanji Cultural Sphere
Plea for the New Japonisme
Reports from Europe
The “Forgotten” Germans
The New Right in Jacket and Tie
Rhetoric of Social Cohesion
Tintinitis
First Lady of Feminism
Iran Between Tradition & Modernity
Swedish Brain Drain
Régis Debray’s Excellent Adventure
The Faceless Euro
Necrology
Buñuel’s Regret
Louis Dumont
Jean Malaquais
Giulio Einaudi
Miscellany
Noblesse in Distress
Arendt and Heidegger
Sentimental Education in Senegal
The Mother Tongue
Dewy Decimas
Letras Libres
List of Contributors
A Report to Our Readers
2
The Querelle Over Cultural History
24
F rom 1945 to the late 1970s, European and North American scholars deba-
ted passionately the relative merits of social and political history. Since
the 1980s, the old dualism has been subsumed under the social and politi-
cal rubric of “culture.” A long historical deadlock has been broken by a third
party: cultural history.
Or has it? The new cultural history has created a confusing set of choices of
what to study. Intellectual history or popular practices? National history or
25 microhistory? Conscious actions or behavior-inducing institutions? Rapid
26 change or immobile structures? So many choices abound that the impulse to
restore a happy and orderly dilemma is already evident. The old dualism is re-
emerging, as a recent exchange between philosopher Marcel Gauchet and histo-
27 rian Roger Chartier superbly illustrates.
27 Chartier is a leading scholar of early-modern Europe and a prolific essayist on
28 methodology. In his latest meditations, On The Edge of the Cliff: History, Language,
and Practices (Johns Hopkins, 1997), he has tried to synthesize the cultural turn
and social history, rejecting economic determinism and emphasizing the “negoti-
29 ated” character of all relations. He insists that ideas are not the byproducts of class
29 interests, but the very stuff of individual and group identities. Yet, paradoxically,
30 he repeatedly uses the term “social” to posit a layer of reality that explains culture
and politics: “discourse,” he declares, “is itself socially determined;” historians
should focus on “the social configurations that make...political forms possi-
31 ble.”The word “social” crops up everywhere—“social science,” “social world,”
33 “social actors,” “social differences”—a mantra freed from linguistic analysis as if
34 it were an assured reality, not a rhetorical item with its own intellectual history.
35 In a long examination of Chartier’s book in Le Débat (Jan.-Feb. 1999), Gauchet
faults him for this contradiction. Gauchet is a political philosopher and historian
36
of modern democracy and the major heir to François Furet’s revisionist interpreta-
36 tion of history, which stresses the autonomous play of rhetoric in the political
37 sphere. While questioning Chartier’s notion of the social, Gauchet advocates a
38 political mode of cultural history he calls “reflexive history,” one that includes
38 the traditional terms of political analysis in its subject matter. A historian of party
conflict in modern France, for example, would not casually invoke “Left” and
“Right” but make the emergence of those very concepts a key part of the story.
41 Gauchet, unlike Chartier, deftly illustrates his methodological claims, espe-
41 cially his most provocative one that reflexive political history envelops social
41 history. Class conflict, he argues, is political, not socio-economic. During the
42 1789 revolution it was the idea of the rights of man that created intergroup
hatreds. In the nineteenth century, the working class in England could not have
arisen without the preexisting idea of shared nationality.
14 Chartier responds to Gauchet’s criticism, but the social methodologist appears
22 no match for the political theorist. They end in a stalemate. While Gauchet’s
examples of the primacy of the political are fascinating, the notion of “the polit-
34
ical” is imprecise. What makes both the rights of man and the nation-state exam-
40 ples of a “political” rather than a “social” configuration? What is the global def-
42 inition of “political?” At one point Gauchet defines “political history” as the
43 study of “the political dimension” of history. Chartier notes this tautology and
Gauchet’s yoking everything into his concept of “reflexive political history”—
43 everything, that is, except the concept of politics itself.
Thus, each criticizes the other for being insufficiently self-conscious of his
44 categories and for exempting his methodological terms from the history of ide-
ologies. The impasse suggests that while history is enriched by self-conscious
study of language, it cannot easily relinquish its traditional scientific aims. Even
as theorists of language, historians cannot stop searching for a nonsubjective
method and causal forces independent of the imagination. ◆
—Daniel Gordon
 History Revised
Gulag “Denial”
A t the beginning of this decade, it looked as though Russians were finally facing up to the
nightmares of seventy years of totalitarian rule. Not a day went by, it seemed, without some
new revelation about the past. Every newspaper, every magazine, every serious television
show probed the wound. Official commissions rehabilitated survivors as well as the dead; unofficial
curiosity-seekers quite literally stumbled upon the skeletons of the past in fields where the abandoned
ground heaved and rippled in distinctive patterns. In the
wake of the failed coup attempt in 1991, euphoric crowds
descended on Lubyanka Square, the most notorious address
of Russia’s secret police, and dismantled the statute of Feliks
Dzerzhinsky, the confederate of Lenin who created the All-
Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-
revolution and Sabotage in December
1917. They did not destroy the statue
but moved it a few miles to a sculpture
park by the banks of the Moscow River.
Nowadays, it seems Russia has come
full circle. Last December 2, the State
Duma, the lower house of parliament,
voted overwhelmingly to restore Dzer-
zhinsky’s statue to its former site. That is
unlikely to happen, for several reasons—
some of which demonstrate the extent of
Russia’s rejection of its totalitarian past.
But the vote genuinely reflected a funda-
mental shift in recent Russian politics.
Eight years ago the apologists for the So-
viet system’s crimes were on the defen-
sive. Defying firm evidence of millions of
murders, they could only duck and dodge. Today denial is in
fashion, as readers of Zyuganov’s Veryu V Rossiyu [I Believe in
Russia] and the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya can attest.
The ranks of the deniers include people like Sergei
Feliksovich, a forty-one-year-old professor who lives sur-
rounded by photos of Castro and Stalin in a dingy room in a
communal apartment. He claims, interestingly, to despise many
of the gray-faced members of the modern-day Communist
Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). When it comes to
socialism, he is a self-acknowledged snob whose preferred
model is a dictatorial “republic of scholars.” Yet he is no dilet-
tante. Colleagues credit him with keeping the youth organiza-
tion of the old Soviet CP alive in the underground during the
ban on communist activity after 1991. Like most deniers, he
doesn’t claim that everything was sweetness and light; he con-
cedes that “repressions” took place under Stalin. But he
believes, first, that they were justified (by the greater good of
the revolutionary masses who weren’t repressed) and, second,
that they weren’t as bad as all that. “According to the Interior
Ministry, there were 643,000 deaths between 1921 and 1953,”
says Sergei Feliksovich. “Perestroika scholars agreed with that
estimate.” It is hard to know which scholars he is talking about.
Most self-respecting historians assume Soviet-era death tolls
(collectivization, purges, Gulag) run into double-digit millions.
The late-1990s techniques here can be encountered from
park bench to parliamentary record. Unlike Holocaust
deniers, most Gulag revisionists concede that there were vic-
tims; but very much like their German counterparts, the apol-
ogists of Soviet terror use a variety of strategies to reduce the
death toll to an “acceptable” minimum.
And the justifications are extremely
diverse, from the open rationalization of
revolutionary terror, as in the case of
Sergei Feliksovich to the blurring of the
juridical definition of “criminal.” In an
interview with national radio last fall,
Communist Duma deputy Vassily Shan-
dybin remarked, “Yes, truly, a certain
number of people suffered. They in-
formed on each other: stool pigeons did
their best, they informed, these people
were arrested. They confessed, and they
were sent away to certain places. For this
reason I don’t agree when people say that
we had political prisoners in the Soviet
Union.” Shandybin was merely repeating
arguments he had made in a Duma debate a week earlier, telling
about a minor amendment to a law on “the rehabilitation of the
victims of political repressions.” The ambitious original law had
passed without a peep in the post-putsch euphoria of fall 1991.
But when it came around to voting on a miniscule, essentially
symbolic improvement in pension benefits for a small class of
victims, it was roundly rejected by the Duma.
Russian society still remains deeply divided over the coun-
try’s past, and the resulting calculations of realpolitik have
intensified the climate of denial. The anniversary of the Great
October Revolution of 1917 is still celebrated as a holiday in
Russia by its opponents as well as its enthusiasts—but it’s now
known as the “Day of Harmony and Reconciliation,” a compro-
mise formula ironically demonstrating how far from those ideals
Russia remains. The most recent Russian secondary-school his-
tory textbooks fudge the issue of Soviet terror: a 1998 official
text for eleventh-grade students gives no total figures for those
“repressed” under Stalin; on the Great Terror of the 1930s it
counts only the army officers shot in 1937-38 (“more than
40,000”) and victims of “conflicts within the repressive
organs”(“several tens of thousands”). Otherwise, the text bends
over backward to stress the “constructive” aspects of what one
chapter heading calls “Stalinist modernization.” Meanwhile,
3
 History Revised
while the Moscow city government has erected huge monu-
ments to Peter the Great and other Russian patriotic heroes at
high-profile sites, to date, the capital has only two monuments
to the victims of Stalinism, both virtually invisible and
unknown. In a capital of 10 million, there is only one small
museum dedicated to the horrors of the Gulag, and it is a sub-
ordinate part of the privately funded Sakharov Museum.
Across town at the state-funded KGB Museum, the only men-
tion of the Gulag comes in the context of heroic Soviet intelli-
gence agents who landed there after their recall to the home-
land at the height of Stalinist paranoia. “The end of the 1930s
was our most difficult period,” the guide will tell you, “20,000
of our members died.” The tragedy, it seems, was one primarily
for the security police who were swallowed up by the terror.
In Russia, public arguments over the meaning of the past have
always been dictated less by criteria of scholarship and politi-
cal morals than by brute political expediency. Perestroika lib-
erals were quite open about the usefulness of history as a tool
in the struggle against their authoritarian opponents. Never
was this clearer than in the 1996 presidential elections, when
Yeltsin’s campaign managers rediscovered the emotive force of
historical Communist terror—a long-neglected subject which
would be abandoned again as soon as the elections were over.
By December 1997, Yeltsin sent fulsome congratulations to the
security police on the eightieth anniversary of Dzerzhinsky’s
Cheka—not exactly what one would expect from the anti-Com-
munist “democrat” to whom the voters had given their bless-
ing a year earlier. But Yeltsin, battered by poor health and plum-
meting popularity, reckoned that having the security police on
board outweighed the concerns of his erstwhile supporters.
This points to an additional problem: the continuity of
Russia’s political elite. Whatever their current political affilia-
tions, virtually all of the country’s ruling class consists of for-
mer leading members of the CPSU. Fence-sitting is the rule
among most of them. The two leading candidates in Russia’s
presidential race, Yevgeni Primakov or Moscow Mayor Yuri
Luzhkov, won’t praise the Gulag. But neither will they address
the tragedy of “Soviet terror.” Luzhkov clucks disapprovingly
about “excessive criticism” of the Soviet past. Primakov, the for-
mer spymaster, has recently proposed vacating the prisons to
make room for “economic criminals.” Similarly, he has advocated
making prison regimes so tough that inmates would consider
themselves “better off dead” (which has reminded some ob-
servers of Stalin’s famous speech in July 1938 when he claimed
that imprisoned enemies of the people were enjoying “holiday
camp” conditions and demanded a tougher prison regime).
Politicians will be politicians, of course. They could never
get away with such talk were it not for public apathy on the
subject. The days of joyous taboo-breaking are long gone in
Russia. Economic troubles and the chaos caused by abortive
reforms have also compromised the moral authority of the lib-
eral idea. (Characteristically, Russian communists nowadays
parry mentions of the Great Terror by referring to the “geno-
cide” of falling population figures under Yeltsin.) A recent
poll asked ordinary Russians to name the best of their leaders
this century. The answer of the majority: Leonid Brezhnev.◆
—Christian Caryl
4
History for Sale
H ow is historical research to be paid for? History has
always been “sponsored,” first by rulers hoping to
glorify their realms, later by private and ecclesias-
tical patrons hoping to glorify themselves, and most re-
cently by universities, government, and non-profit founda-
tions hoping to contribute to the historical profession. As
historian Michael Pinto-Duschinsky recently wrote, the rise
of corporate sponsorship of research, mainly focused on
World War II, may mean creating collective memory “on
behalf of those with the deepest pockets or…those with the
strongest motives to purvey their side of the story.”
Pinto-Duschinsky is commenting on the current dispute
over whether German companies owe compensation to
their slave laborers, and European banks to Jews whose
assets they acquired. Several corporations, including
Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and Deutsche Bank, have hired
historians to write about their wartime records. The most
controversial research was a book on Volkswagen workers
during the Third Reich by the widely respected historian
Hans Mommsen. Pinto-Duschinsky considers such books
tainted, a charge vehemently denied by Mommsen and
other historians who have written them.
The immediate effect of corporations’ sponsorship of
research on themselves, apart from apparent bias, is the
closing of archives and files to other researchers and the
public at large. Another problem has been over-reliance
on corporate documents, which are often incomplete and
self-serving. Finally, the protocols of the researchers and
their relations with the corporations remain private.
These problems are not unique to corporate sponsorship.
Large budgets always affect research. Pinto-Duschinsky
cites the European Commission’s investment in research
promoting the European Union, a program that includes
409 Jean Monnet professorships, hundreds of sponsored
university courses, and a “Europaeum” linking Oxford to
continental universities. Euro-skeptics are unlikely to gain
such funding. Just as Cold War government sponsorship
decisively shaped Western universities, today there is “the
academic equivalent of an arms race between Arab and
Israeli interests” in American and English universities—
whereas East European studies remains an impoverished
field, despite the largesse of George Soros.
Pinto-Duschinsky is convinced that “foreign funding and
corporate sponsorships are here to stay,” and that “prop-
erly managed, they add to the pluralism and prosperity of
academic life.” But safeguards must ensure the intellectual
researchers’ independence. He suggests that scholars dis-
close the sources of their funding and that a code of con-
duct limit exclusive access to documents and guarantee that
evidence can be checked. Only then can the history profes-
sion protect itself against the charge that it is for sale.
—ML
Source: Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, “Selling the Past,” Times
Literary Supplement, October 23, 1998.
 History Revised
The War That Will Not Thaw
T he bipolar struggle between the United States and the
Soviet Union, though it ended a decade ago, still casts
a lengthening shadow over America’s political and
intellectual culture. Documents recently declassified by intel-
ligence agencies in the United States and the Soviet Union are
transforming our understanding of the Cold War. Allen
Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood
(Random House,1999), based on KGB materials, includes
clinching evidence that Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg—defendants in the most celebrated Cold War spy
trials—were guilty as charged, along with others named dur-
ing the Red hunts that catapulted
Richard Nixon and Joseph Mc-
Carthy to fame. Another book,
published this spring, examines
the fruits of the Venona Project, a
top-secret code-breaking program
inaugurated during World War II
by U.S. military intelligence. The
effort ultimately identified some
350 Americans “who had a covert
relationship with Soviet intelli-
gence,” write John Earl Haynes and
Harvey Klehr in Venona: Decoding
Soviet Espionage in America (Yale
University Press, 1999).
How will future historians grap-
ple with unimpeachable evidence
that Hiss, Harry Dexter White,
and Laurence Duggan, to name
only three, all rose to senior posi-
tions under President Roosevelt
even as they reported to Soviet
handlers and furnished them with
confidential reports and papers?
For the moment these revelations are renewing a long-stand-
ing debate, less about American Communism (never more
than a marginal feature of the nation’s political life), than
about anti-Communism, the ideology that shaped foreign pol-
icy in the United States from 1945 to 1989, the very years in
which the nation consolidated its position as the world’s pre-
eminent superpower.
In We Now Know: Rethinking American Cold War History
(Oxford, 1998), John Lewis Gaddis draws on a wide range of
archival documents to argue that the architects of American
foreign policy accurately appraised Stalin as an ideologue bent
on global expansion of the Soviet state in the middle to late
1940s. Contrarily, in her recent study Many Are the Crimes:
McCarthyism in America (Little, Brown, 1998), Ellen Schreck-
er concedes that Soviet espionage was a reality but judges anti-
Communism the greater menace to American democracy and
disparages Cold War liberals who, though opposed to
McCarthyism, were also critical of the American Communist
Party. The most vocal skeptics come from the populous ranks
of “revisionists,” who, having maintained since the 1960s that
Cold War policy was disastrously shaped by an exaggerated,
even paranoid, fear of world communism, are not giving up
the fight. A letter signed by nineteen historians, academi-
cians, and journalists, and published in the New York Review
of Books (April 8, 1999) in response to my January 14 review
of Schrecker, “The Red Scare,” protests that the smug spirit of
“triumphalism” has infected recent studies of the Cold War
and that revelations from intelligence archives, however star-
tling, do not “exculpate U.S. misconduct in Iran, Guatemala,
Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere” or “settle broader
debates over responsibility for the
division of Germany or Europe,
the duration of the Cold War, the
length, intensity, and dangers of
the nuclear arms race, the cause of
the Soviet collapse, and many
other issues.”
The debate has also spilled over
into cultural zones. In his latest
novel, I Married a Communist
(Houghton Mifflin, 1998), Philip
Roth examines the competing hys-
terias and self-delusions of the
1950s and its campaign against
Soviet subversion. On the opposite
end of the political spectrum,
William F. Buckley, Jr., who
staunchly defended Joseph Mc-
Carthy in a book published in
1954, revisits the subject in his
forthcoming novel The Redhunter,
which offers a surprisingly nu-
anced portrait of the most effec-
tive demagogue of the postwar era.
The latest flare-up came when the film director Elia Kazan,
an ex-Communist, was given an Academy Award for “lifetime
achievement” despite having yielded up the names of Commu-
nists to a congressional committee in 1952. Kazan, who turns
ninety this year, was freshly denounced in numerous journals
and newspapers, though he found a defender in one of the best-
known Cold War liberals, Arthur Schlesinger, who pointed out
in the New York Times that Kazan’s harshest critics include
many who remain curiously forgiving of the Stalinist movement
he repudiated. When Kazan came on stage to receive his award,
presented by Martin Scorsese, some in the audience rose to
applaud (including Warren Beatty, well-known for his liberal
politics) while the actors Nick Nolte and Ed Harris, among oth-
ers, sat by silent and grim. Thus do yesterday’s ideological dis-
putes endure into the contentious present. American liberals
seem unwilling to concede that the United States did, after
all, defeat its archrival, while conservatives seem unable to
declare victory and turn to new struggles. ◆
— Sam Tanenhaus
5
 History Revised
Post-Zionism and the Myths of Memory
O ver the past decade the debate over “Post-Zionism”
has captured the public imagination of Israel’s elites.
Spearheaded by “New Historians,” “critical sociolo-
gists,” and other new-style radicals, Post-Zionism gradually
became the popular label for an all-out ideological assault on
the Zionist idea. Rather than a Jewish national revival, the
neo-radicals claimed, Zionism was yet another instance of
Western colonialism. It enforced European “hegemony” on
oriental Jews through the melting-pot ideology; it underwrote
“patriarchy” through a militaristic ethos; it erected power
structures to support the elite; and so forth.
The book that first sparked the public debate, long before a
flood of postmodern “radicalism” took the lead, was surpris-
ingly conservative in its methodology. Benny Morris’ s The
Birth of the Palesti-
nian Refugee Prob-
A confident Western lem, 1947-1949, pub-
lished in England in
Goliath in the guise of 1988 and translated
into Hebrew in 1991,
zionism stormed back is a carefully docu-
mented research of
through time… archives aimed at un-
covering what Morris
sees as the truth a-
bout Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Although he first set
out to show that Zionist leaders had a comprehensive plan to
expel the Arab population of Palestine, he found that the mas-
sive exodus of Arabs was a result of the war: partly a hasty
flight from war zones, partly a failure of Arab leadership, and
partly an ad hoc policy of deportation that stemmed from mili-
tary considerations. The book managed to bring to the fore
what lay dormant in Israel’s collective memory: the scale of
expulsions and the atrocities of the 1948 war. It downplayed,
however, the fact that the war was imposed on Israel.
Academic historians were not entirely surprised by what
Morris exhumed from newly opened archives. Most of this was
known, although never before given such thorough documen-
tation. The more profound influence of the book lay in the chal-
lenge to the popular perception of Zionism. Its readability and
the explosion of public relations around it were all aimed at
reversing the myth of a just Jewish David triumphant over an
evil Arab Goliath. All this landed on fertile emotional ground.
Thirty years of occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
had tarnished Zionism’s righteous self-image. But Post-Zionists
did not offer a new, more sober view of Israel’s history. By
painting the picture in the colors of the 1967 occupations, they
created a negative image of the old popular one: the Palesti-
nians, in their current state of oppression, were projected back
in history to 1948, and a confident Western Goliath in the guise
of Zionism stormed back through time to the cradle of their
tragedy, in the process overrunning women, oriental Jews, Ho-
locaust survivors, ultra-orthodox Jews, and other minorities.
In a programmatic essay in Tikkun (Nov./Dec. 1988), Morris
6
coined the name “New Historians,” and from then on all who
refused the image of Zionism as thoroughly evil were dubbed
“old historians.” As the debate spilled out from the history of
the ’48 war into other subjects and popular media, it became
complex. But complex descriptions of history did not stand a
chance against Post-Zionist provocations. On top of Morris’s
conservative historiography, a fashionable intellectual arsenal
was deployed by the New Historians: Edward Said’s theories
of colonialism and orientalism, postmodern relativism, radi-
cal feminism, multiculturalism, etc. All contributed to the fur-
ther radicalization of the arguments. New Historian Ilan
Pappe, for example, accused Morris of being trapped in the
confines of the “Zionist Paradigm.” It is not enough, he
argued, to point to atrocities. One must first discard the notion
of truth, for “truth” is the invention of “hegemony” designed
to suppress a plurality of “narratives.” Along with “critical
sociologists”—Uri Ram, Baruch Kimmerling, and others
—Pappe set out to show that Zionism, viewed outside its own
paradigm through “neutral” eyes, is clearly a part of the colo-
nial movement. Under the paradigm of colonialism, immigra-
tion too appeared in a new, not entirely neutral, light. Rather
than refugees from the ashes of death camps seeking shelter
in the forming Jewish state, Holocaust survivors were por-
trayed as cannon fodder for David Ben-Gurion’s imperialism.
Simultaneously Ben-Gurion was accused of abandoning
European Jewry to Nazi death camps: having placed the
“negation of the Diaspora” at the heart of its official ideology,
Zionism became indifferent to non-Zionist Diaspora Jews, and
finally indulged a systematic negation of all “others.”
The new interpretation of oriental immigration also struck
a deeply emotional chord. The traumatic immigration of Jews
from Muslim countries in the fifties, the shock of abrupt tran-
sition from a traditional to a modern society, is still a bleeding
social wound. The arrogance of Israel’s leadership toward
these people only added insult to the original injury. Socio-
logists Shelomoh Svirski and Yehouda Shenhav blamed the
hardships of assimilation on deliberate racial discrimination.
According to Svirski, the ruling elite created a system of edu-
cation designed at directing oriental Jewry to proletarian jobs.
The melting pot, “critical sociologists” said, was a deliberate
attempt to rob these Jews of identity and heritage, to enforce
Western hegemony. Argument soon assumed a tautological
form: those who assimilated were depicted more or less as trai-
tors to their heritage, while those who did not remained liv-
ing testimony to discrimination.
What emerged from all these new forms of criticism was a
denial of the strong national sentiment that animated Zionism
and made it a mass movement. The new interpretations replaced
a social force from below with manipulation of elites from
above. Since conspiratorial world-views have their own dynam-
ics of radicalization, soon nothing was what it seemed: the Oslo
peace accord, Post-Zionism declared, was a continuation of the
occupation by other means; the peace with Jordan a scheme to
suffocate the Palestinians. Some even denounced human rights
 History Revised
organizations for “duplicating” the “language of occupation”
by promoting the “illusion” of objective description.
At a rather late point in the debate, as provocation became
routine and Zionism-as-evil a standard assumption in the high-
brow press, Zeev Sternhell sought to reformulate the anti-
Zionist sentiment in a more traditional Marxist vein. The root
of evil is, according to his The Founding Myths of Israel
(Princeton, 1998), that labor-Zionism was really nationalism in
the guise of a socialist project. The discovery of nationalism
apparently offered Sternhell an indisputable, final proof of the
“falseness” of the socialist rhetoric. While Post-Zionists re-
jected this emphasis on nationalism, the most devastating cri-
tique of the book arrived from outside Post-Zionist circles.
Respected historian Anita Shapira wrote a sarcastic, somewhat
amused essay entitled “Sternhell’s Complaint.” Sternhell, she
said, is an expert on French Fascism and so tends to find French
Fascism wherever he looks. His socialism was more in keeping
with the Marxism of the British Museum Library than with
political reality. Where, except in books, she asked, did we
ever see a successful non-national socialist government?
Caught in the crossfire, Sternhell’s ill-informed book failed to
draw from Israelis the attention it received abroad and soon
sank into oblivion amid the uproar of the Post-Zionist debate.
Recently, as arguments for and against Zionism seemed to
grow more and more predictable, Daniel Gutwein of the
University of Haifa, in an essay on “‘New Historiography’ or
the Privatization of Memory,”advanced a new interpretation
of the debate with a more sophisticated Marxist twist. He first
pointed out that the important arena of debate was not the
academy but the media. What seemed at the start like a schol-
arly assault on established historiography turned out to be an
ideological assault on the authority of academic research. The
success of this attack is accordingly not to be explained on
academic grounds, in Gutwein’s view. The Post-Zionists them-
selves attributed their emergence to the decline of the heroic
mentality of young Israel and the maturing of a civil society
now able to tolerate a critical look at its past. But that, accord-
ing to Gutwein, is at best a partial explanation. Rather, the
growth of this neo-radicalism from within the heart of the elite
academic institution is more comprehensible against the larger
socio-economic background: the general privatization of Is-
raeli society and the rise of the new professional and financial
elites. The gradual disintegration of the welfare state, and its
replacement by a free market economy, came up against the
obstacle of old Israel’s cultural heritage. They clashed with
the old collective memory and its emphasis on social cohesion
and mutual responsibility. The “privatization” of memory, the
“celebration” of a multiplicity of “narratives” and identities,
is progressively diminishing solidarity and is therefore paving
the way for the ongoing rise of the managerial class. Rather
than a campaign for the socially marginalized, Gutwein ar-
gued, Post-Zionism is better understood as a party in the con-
flict between the old and the new elites. By “privatizing mem-
ory,” by tearing the old cultural fabric that formerly bound
Israelis together, it furnishes “the ideological basis for an
ethos of privatization in its struggle for hegemony.”
—Gadi Taub
The Two Italies
I n Rome in 1942 a clandestine anti-Fascist party called the
Party of Action [Partito d’azione] was formed. It had sev-
eral different currents–republican, liberal, liberal-social-
ist–yet was held together by its admiration for two important
figures in Italian politics: Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli.
Gobetti (1901-1926) was the first to suggest that ever since the
Risorgimento there were “two Italies:” one enlightened and
modern, but small and weak, the other premodern, tradi-
tional, and dominant. Writing in the years Fascism took
power, Gobetti was convinced that Italy’s hostility to liberal-
ism could only be overcome if a “change in the national cul-
ture,” or cultural revolution, first took place. Although he
endorsed a radical liberalism, he also believed that the
Communists could play a crucial role in democratizing Italy
by helping to develop a secular culture. He died in Paris in
1926 of a heart attack a few weeks after escaping from Turin,
where he had suffered a physical assault by local Fascists.
Rosselli (1899-1937) was founder of the clandestine anti-fas-
cist movement Justice and Liberty [Giustizia e Libertà] and
also believed that socialism, once stripped of its statist ten-
dencies and Marxist roots, could contribute to liberalism
because it was a coherent interpretation of liberalism. Rosselli
participated in the Spanish civil war and was assassinated by
Mussolini’s hired killers. Like Gobetti, Rosselli was a militant
ideologue and victim of fascism, which added to the charis-
matic appeal of the Party of Action.
The Party of Action disappeared almost immediately after
the war, during the first democratic elections of 1946. It was
known unofficially as “The Party of the Intellectuals,” a party
of commanders without an army, as Communist Party leader
Palmiro Togliatti sarcastically called it. The Action Party
attracted the best minds of the anti-fascist culture—historian
Franco Venturi, political thinker Guido De Ruggiero, philoso-
pher Norberto Bobbio, economist Luigi Einaudi—yet was
unable to attract the Italian people. As Bobbio explained in
his Autobiography, the defeat was unexpected because the
leaders of the party were sure they were on the side of the
angels and were working toward establishing a “real and
mature” Italian democracy. They interpreted their defeat as
testimony to the fact that the majority of the Italians were not
sufficiently mature: Italy preferred the programs of the new
Churches, that is to say, of the Christian Democrats and the
Communists to the clear and reasonable program of the Party
of Action. The “other” Italy, the enlightened Italy, had once
again been abandoned by a hopelessly backward, premodern,
and illiberal Italy.
Until recently this short episode in modern Italian politics
remained in the shadows of other, more dramatic historical
events. But since the end of the Cold War, a heated polemic
has arisen over what the failure of the Party of Action—or
azionismo—really meant. On the one hand, it has played a part
in a general reassessment of Italian postwar history and the
relation between Italian fascism and the Resistance. On the
◆ other, it has re-ignited an older debate about whether modern
liberalism can ever grow in Italian soil.
7
 History Revised
Even before the end of the Cold War, questions were raised
about atrocities committed by partisans of the Italian Resist-
ance in the waning days of World War II. As the history of the
period began to be rewritten, the standard account of the
Resistance seemed an ideological construction, and soon it was
argued that the Resistance had not pursued a war of libera-
tion but a civil war. This was a quite radical revision of his-
tory because it also changed perceptions of fascism and anti-
fascism. The Italians who fought on the “right” side–mainly
the Communists–had never called the Resistance a “civil war;”
only the Fascists did. What finally broke that canonical tradi-
tion was the publication in 1991 of Una guerra civile: Saggio
storico sulla moralità della Resistenza [A civil war: historical
essay on the morality of the Resistance] by Claudio Pavone, a
highly respected historian and anti-Fascist. Pavone argued
that three wars had been fought during the Resistance: a
domestic war between Fascists and anti-Fascists; a war of lib-
eration against the Nazis, who after the armistice of 1943 were
a de facto occupation army; and, finally, a class war, which was
fought by the Communists with the intention of overturning
capitalism and instituting a Communist regime. These three
wars, Pavone concluded, could be defined as moments of a
broad civil war because in all three the enemies were Italians.
Why has this interpretation of the Resistance as a civil war
been so explosive? Because, as Norberto Bobbio has ex-
plained, in international law a civil war is one considered just
by both parties and does not allow for clear moral judgment.
If the Resistance was a civil war, then each Fascist was legiti-
mately an enemy of each Communist and anti-Fascist, and vice
versa. And that would mean that the Resistance was not a
force of unity against a foreign enemy but a source of division
among Italians. Contrary to what both the anti-Fascists and
the Communists have claimed, Italy lost its unity precisely
during the Resistance.
In a provocative book, La morte della patria [The death of
the fatherland] (1997), the political scientist Ernesto Galli della
Loggia used this reasoning in order to denounce the role of
azionismo in the making of postwar Italy. In his view, Italy in
fact had a unitary identity before the collapse of Fascism. It
had a patria that was identified with the state and could have
resisted the German occupation had the government not aban-
doned Rome to the German army in September 1943. The state
dissolved at the precise moment it was needed, forcing Italians
to guard their life and liberty and leaving them in the hands
of the Communist partisans or the Fascists. The Resistance
then deepened the fracture between the state and the nation
by dividing Italian society into tribal ideologies. Thus, con-
trary to the leftist common wisdom, the Resistance did not
contribute to making the state legitimate, but rather made the
state an object of conquest by factional interests and encour-
aged citizens to identify themselves with parties instead of
the Italian Constitution. This determined the political charac-
ter of Italy until the early 1990s.
According to Galli della Loggia, the only possibility for
political redemption could have come from the liberals.
However, Italy did not in fact have a strong liberal party, nor,
above all, a liberal culture. The Party of Action, then, the only
8
liberal party, might have played a role here but proved inca-
pable of being truly neutral between Fascists and Communists.
Its radicalism, its lack of moderation, its anti-Fascist origins
made it a de facto pro-Communist party.
The intellectuals who have led the polemic on azionismo in
recent years have insisted on the intolerant and Jacobin char-
acter of the Party of Action and its myth of “the two Italies.”
This is part of what the philosopher Augusto Del Noce called
“the Italian ideology” in a series of books he published in the
1970s, and which have now inspired a young generation of
intellectuals writing for periodicals like Liberal and newspa-
pers like Corriere della Sera. Del Noce (1910-1989) taught at the
Catholic University of Milan for many years and was known as
a sharp critic of the modern age. In his view, it was the rejec-
tion of transcendence and the ensuing divinization of the indi-
vidual that inspired the negative utopias of modernity. Without
external and superior values capable of limiting the individual
will to power, all values—even the liberal values of liberty and
equality—could be turned upside down. For Del Noce, azion-
ismo was the most mature political form of a rationalism that
descends into nihilism. In fact, he argued, the leaders of the
Party of Action were even more radical than their opponents,
since they rejected any form of religiosity or communitarian
belonging. The anti-fascism of the azionisti was as destructive
as that of the Communists while sharing a certain nihilism with
fascism. The belief that azionismo was the expression of “the
other Italy” only reflected what Del Noce called the “absolute
solipsism” of “the Italian ideology,” the dogmatic belief in
modernity that cannot tolerate any mediation or compromise.
“The Italian ideology” could only breed denial and division, as
the war of Resistance has shown.
Galli della Loggia translates Del Noce’s theory into a politi-
cal argument against the presumed modernity of azionismo.
Whereas Del Noce criticized modernity in all its facets, Galli
della Loggia instead accused “the Italian ideology” of having
removed the country from modernity by having identified the
modern age with the Enlightenment and political Jacobinism.
Italy lacked a moderate liberalism because its intellectuals
regarded France, not England or America, as their model.
Rather than simply aiming to build a liberal state, they
wanted, with ironically Jacobin rigidity, to forge a new man,
albeit a liberal one. And in this they failed.
Yet polemics about azionismo cannot but bring to mind
those of the Cold War. And in this sense it can be said that
the intellectuals engaged in them are no less Jacobin than
their predecessors. ◆
—Nadia Urbinati
 History Revised
Historians under National Socialism
A major controversy flared up at the annual meeting of the German Historians’ Association
last autumn. It divided the profession, scandalized the general public, and rages on in the
cultural sections of the German national press. Basically, it concerns the Nazi past of German
historians, in particular that of Werner Conze (1910-1986) and Theodor Schieder (1908-1984). But it
also involved a conflict between generations and between historical schools. Oonze and Schieder entered
the historical profession during the 1930s. Both were among
the most prominent members of their discipline, dominating
personalities, innovators, and influential teachers from the
1950s on, and both became later Presidents of the German
Historians’ Association. Conze founded the Working Circle for
Modern Social History in Heidelberg and initiated research on
social history, especially on the industrial work force, when this
was still unusual terrain. He also co-edited—with Otto Brunner
and Reinhard Koselleck—the great dictionary for Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe [Basic Historical Concepts], still the touchstone
for conceptual history in Germany. Schieder was editor of the
Historische Zeitschrift, the country’s leading historical journal.
He introduced comparative study of the modern nation-state,
made contemporary history a more accepted field, and greatly
broadened the scope of social history.
In the fifties and sixties both Conze and Schieder led at-
tempts to establish a new approach to social history in Germany.
The real breakthrough only occurred in the late sixties and
early seventies through efforts of a younger generation. Its main
representatives were Schieder’s student Hans Ulrich Wehler,
and Jürgen Kocka; together they established what was later
called the Bielefeld School of social history. Until then the vast
majority of German historians viewed history mainly from the
standpoint of politics and were politically conservative.
Starting in the early seventies the Bielefeld School provided the
first visible alternative to a political history approach by focus-
ing on society. They did not ignore politics and events, but they
felt that socio-economic factors, long-term trends, and class
conflict had not received due attention. They borrowed freely
from the methodologies of the social sciences, especially sociol-
ogy and economics, and kept abreast of historiographic devel-
opments abroad. The School called its approach ”Historical
Social Science,“ and founded its own journal, Geschichte und
Gesellschaft [History and Society], in 1975.
One achievement of the Bielefeld School was to have rede-
fined the relation of historical studies to the present, drawing
on responses to National Socialism. They saw history as cri-
tique, with a practical dimension and public function. It was
crucial to them never to lose sight of 1933 in studying the
German past. Politically, the School flourished in the period
of the first coalition government of liberals and social democ-
rats, when Willy Brandt was redefining German foreign pol-
icy, and the student movement was in full swing. Their work
epitomizes many of the sentiments of the period.
Today the Bielefeld School is part of the academic historical
establishment, but not predominant. Many historians still
work along more traditional lines. And since the 1990s a
young new third generation of postwar historians have turned
from social-history approaches to cultural studies, gender his-
tory, micro-history, and other new trends in history, with
themes they consider to have been neglected in the work of
the older political, social, and economic historians. In posing
their questions they have also turned to new kinds of sources
and new methodological approaches. Being further removed
from the war than older historians were and are, some of them
have also raised their own questions about it.
Today the older distractions of the Cold War have all but
disappeared, to be replaced by a widely felt need to redefine
policies of remembrance and memory under new political cir-
cumstances. One fruitful new area of investigation is the his-
tory of academic research under National Socialism, and its
partial integration of research activities into the war efforts
and the Holocaust. There have been studies of organizations
like the Forschungsgemeinschaften (“research communities”)
which had been largely ignored. And we now know much
more about the involvement of certain fields like eugenics,
geography, or population studies in the planning and ideolog-
ical justification of the war of destruction in the East. And,
finally, all this has led to new explorations into historical work
under National Socialism.
Early studies in this area suggested that the National Social-
ist views of history had mainly penetrated a few institutions,
leaving the rest of the profession relatively untouched. The
general view was that the historical profession had been very
conservative and mainly not averse to National Socialism, but
that this had not radically affected historical research between
1933 and 1945.
This image changed radically when the work of some acad-
emic historians in the 1930s came under closer scrutiny. New
investigations by the younger historians in the 1990s altered
the image of several historians who became prominent in the
1950s and 1960s, and first met with a mixed reception from
the older generation of the 1990s. Although some of these
studies were reviewed in the national press there was no pub-
lic reaction to them until the annual convention of the German
Historians’ Association, when the panel on this subject over-
shadowed all other meetings and events there.
The public debate revolved around the cases of Conze and
Schieder, and their relations with the Volksgeschichte (People’s
History) school of the thirties, based largely in Königsberg,
which some have seen as heavily involved in National Socialist
ideology. According to Wehler’s summary of others’ recent
9
 History Revised
research, the Volksgeschichte school attracted young histori-
ans who, disappointed by the state, turned to study of “the
people” as a more reliable source of historical continuity. To
this end they introduced statistical and demographic methods
and other innovations into historical research. This was intel-
lectually more attractive than following the common paths of
mainstream political history. Later, of course, the social ro-
manticism of this concept of “the people” later turned into a
racist conception under the influence of National Socialism.
For example, the research methods of Volksgeschichte were
used in 1939 when the Nazis began planning large forced
migrations in Eastern Central Europe, with the aim of ethnic
cleansing. Two of the historians involved were Conze and
Schieder. Their plans for such population shifts were couched
in an anti-Semitic language that seems to blur any difference
between forced deportation and physical annihilation. This
part of the story has been told by the journalist and historian
Götz Aly and others, who unearthed a series of shocking quo-
tations that jarred with the existing image of Conze and
Schieder. Many of these quotations came from unpublished
memoranda found in archives, though hints of their views
could also be found in their publications.
Reactions to these discoveries varied. For Götz Aly, the
demographic strategies Conze and Schieder proposed are
intermediary steps to the Holocaust. Aly’s critics see him as a
muckraker pulling quotations out of context, without analyz-
ing the character, function, and institutional background of
their sources or their real effects on the bureaucratic decision-
making processes. In fact, they say, we still know very little
about the interactions between Volksgeschichte, National So-
cialist ideology, and the planning and decision-making
processes of World War II. While these rebuttals may damage
Aly’s interpretational framework, they leave the power of his
telling quotations untouched. In an effort to reconcile these
quotations with Conze’s and Schieder’s postwar work it has
been argued that the two should be credited with having
undergone a “learning process.” This has raised the objection
that a true learning process would have broken the silence
both Conze and Schieder preserved with regard to their past.
For some in this controversy, silence is the real scandal.
And some of the more accusatory younger historians use
the scandal to implicate the Bielefeld School in this silence.
Did Conze and Schieder enter into a conspiracy of silence with
their students? Did their students press them hard enough
with questions about their past, or shy away for their own rea-
sons? Why have these stories come to light only now? From
lack of active interest, or fear of what one might find?
Ultimately, these overlapping conflicts of interpretation,
generation, and schools of thought raise the deeper question:
Are intellectual and moral achievements naturally linked? ◆
—Michael Becker
Sources: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “In den Fußstapfen der Kämpfenden
Wissenschaft” [In the footprints of a warring discipline], Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, January 4, 1999.
Jürgen Kocka, “Die Zukunft hat erst begonnen” [The future’s just
begun], in Paul Nolte, ed., Perspektiven der Gesellschaftsgeschichte,
München, 1999.
10
The Greek Civil War
in Retrospect
T he Greek civil war, one of the three major contempo-
rary European civil wars (along with the Spanish and
Russian ones), was fought on and off between 1943
and 1949. It began during the joint German-Italian-Bulgarian
occupation of the country following Greece’s defeat in 1941.As
the occupation shattered old structures and loyalties, a pow-
erful Communist-controlled resistance movement emerged:
EAM (the Greek acronym for National Liberation Front). In
1943, EAM eliminated almost all non-Communist resistance
movements. The same year, the occupation authorities formed
a collaborationist army, generically known as “Security
Battalions.” In 1944, fighting between ELAS (EAM’s partisan
army, the National Popular Liberation Army), and the Security
Battalions evolved into a full-fledged civil war that created
thousands of victims and long-lasting hatreds—along with
the political identities that still inform Greek politics.
Following the Germans’ departure in October 1944, the entire
country with the exception of Athens came under EAM con-
trol. In mass reprisals, the partisans massacred thousands of
Security Battalionists.
When the government-in-exile, supported by Britain,
returned to Athens and established its authority, a wave of
bloody retaliation against EAM members, often led by former
Security Battalionists, took place. Eventually, right-wing and
left-wing irregular bands fought each other (with civilians
being the primary target) in 1945 and 1946. In 1947, the
Communist Party decided to fight an all-out war which lasted
until 1949 and is often referred to as “the Greek civil war.”
The implementation of the Truman Doctrine, the unwilling-
ness of the Soviet Union to enter the fray, and the Tito-Stalin
fallout all contributed to the ultimate and total defeat of the
Communist Party, which was to remain outlawed until 1974.
Thousands of its supporters left Greece for the Soviet bloc in
the wake of the defeat—a sizeable part of them ending up a
far as Uzbekistan. Suspected Communist sympathizers were
harassed and discriminated against. Overall, about 600,000
Greeks died of various causes between 1940 and 1949—in a
country populated by less than seven million. Hundreds of
thousands became refugees.
The historical literature that emerged right after the end of
the civil war was consistent with the adage that history is
written by the winners. The main thesis was that EAM was
no more than a cover used by the Communists to win power
either peacefully, or, if this proved impossible, violently.
Terror was widely used by EAM, and its dominant position
within the Greek resistance was the result of the systematic
destruction of nationalist resistance organizations. In such cir-
cumstances collaboration with the occupiers could be excused
since the prospect of long-term communism was a bigger
threat than short-term fascist occupation. Having failed to win
power in 1944, the Communist Party then planned a new
insurrection in 1947, helped by the Soviet Union and its satel-
lites—in partial exchange for which it accepted the country’s
 History Revised
partition through the transfer of Greek Macedonia to Greece’s
northern neighbors.
Most of the work produced during this period took the
form of popular pamphlets, rich in references to the violence
and the “un-Greekness” of the Left, but rather short on facts.
The emphasis was placed more on the last phase of the civil
war than on the period of the occupation. The most useful
part of this otherwise forgettable production are memoirs
published by prominent military leaders of the government
army and a series of publications of military history pub-
lished by the Historical Service of the army. For years, the
basic source on the period of occupation remained the mem-
oirs of the British agents who worked with the partisans.
During this period historical works sympathetic to the Left
were only published outside Greece.
The political liberalization of the 1960s was eventually
reflected in the historiography of the Civil War. The first left-
wing interpretations began to appear in Greece. The main
lines of the leftist thesis (which, of course, comes in many ver-
sions) can be summarized as follows: EAM was a broad-based,
mostly non-communist mass movement, which expressed the
popular aspirations for liberation from foreign occupation and
a more just social order. EAM would have come to power by
peaceful means had it not been stopped by the British who
supported the local oligarchy and sponsored mass violence
against it. Forced by the British to resort to arms in December
1944 and 1947, this popular movement lost only because of
foreign (British and, then, US) intervention. Those who fought
against Nazi Germany were executed or languished in prisons
while former collaborationists became part of the postwar
power establishment.
After a seven-year hiatus due to the military dictatorship
(1967-1974), this literature all but erased former right-wing
interpretations. A Greek-American journalist, Nicholas Gage,
who visited Greece in 1977, describes a situation in which
“posters, movies, books, popular songs and the youth organi-
zations in the universities were united in celebrating the guer-
rillas of the civil war as heroes. It seemed that the best talents
of Greece were busy rewriting the history of the war.” When
the same journalist published an autobiographical book in the
early 1980s about the execution of his mother by the
Communist guerillas in 1948, the intellectual establishment
and the majority of the media reacted in a vociferously nega-
tive way; and when the Hollywood filmed version of the book
was released soon after, the Communist youth organization
picketed movie theaters and harassed moviegoers. Around the
same time, when the renowned Greek philosopher Cornelius
Castoriadis voiced a public criticism of leftist interpretations
of the civil war (he deemed them Stalinist), he was openly and
vehemently insulted in the first page of the Athens newspa-
per with the highest circulation. The victory of the Socialist
party (PASOK) in 1981 turned this version of the civil war into
state orthodoxy much along the same lines that the right had
with its own in the 1950s. Following the long-awaited official
recognition of EAM as a resistance organization in 1982 (in the
context of a highly emotional debate in the National Assembly
during which the opposition center-right New Democracy
party walked out in protest), the left-wing version of the civil
war became a staple of official discourse and schoolbooks.
Contrary to expectation, the end of the Cold War has hardly
altered this situation. The last months of 1997 saw the succes-
sive (and commercially successful) publication of a significant
number of historical books, heavily biased in favor of the Left.
A climate of ideological suspicion prevails. For instance, a
Greek journalist writing a book review in 1998 quipped that
the political orientation of the authors of books on the civil
war can be “sensed immediately and with certainty.” More-
over, serious historical research has been impeded by the sad
state of the Greek archives, the non-availability of the largest
part of the archives of the Communist Party, and one of the
most outrageous acts of destruction of a country’s collective
memory: the burning of millions of personal files (held by the
police) and related state documents concerning both the civil
war and the postwar period in celebratory bonfires all over
the country during the summer of 1989. The intention was to
celebrate the “national reconciliation” and the “true end of
the civil war” on the occasion of the formation of an extraor-
dinary coalition cabinet which included the Greek right and
a leftist coalition containing the Communist party!
Yet despite these obstacles, a revisionist trend is slowly (and
still timidly) emerging. Recent work focuses more on the
period of the occupation, takes into account social and eco-
nomic factors, adopts a view “from the ground up” with a
strong local bent, places Greek history in a wider comparative
perspective, and relies on unconventional material to make up
for the absence of archival sources, such as oral history, local
studies, personal memoirs. What emerges is a very complex
and nuanced set of shifting and segmented loyalties, heavily
informed by local considerations and conflicts, in which ter-
ror was never the monopoly of a single camp. In addition, new
groundbreaking work examines the civil war in Macedonia,
which appears to have been an exceedingly complex conflict
blending ethnic and ideological conflict with such diverse par-
ticipants as Slavophone Macedonians, Greek Macedonian Tur-
kophone refugees from Asia Minor, Greek Macedonian refu-
gees from Bulgaria and the Caucasus, and various groups of
transient nomads—all speaking different dialects and lan-
guages. We still know little about the multifaceted aspects of
this conflict in which identities were so fluid. For example, a
Slavophone peasant of Macedonia could be a self-professed
Bulgarian komitadji collaborating with the German occupation
authorities, a member of the Slavophone guerrillas of ELAS, a
member of Tito’s Macedonian partisans, or a right-wing Greek
nationalist. The first findings to come out of this literature
undermine the perception of the civil war as a conflict between
two well-defined and entrenched ideological camps. In Greece,
as elsewhere, a sensible understanding of civil war only seems
to emerge when its passions have subsided. ◆
—Stathis N. Kalyvas
Sources: Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: the Experience of
Occupation, 1941-44, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Giorgios Margaritis, Apo tin itta stin exegersi: Ellada, anixi 1941-
fthinoporo 1942 [From defeat to insurrection: Greece, spring 1941-fall
1942], Athens, Politis, 1993.
11
 History Revised
Revising Roger Garaudy
I n a narrow side street off the Rue Saint-Honoré in the first
arrondissement of Paris, lost amid the laundries and small
boutiques is an unremarkable green storefront with
drapes fastened shut. There is no sign or bell to be rung,
though the door is left unlocked. Were the curious flâneur to
stir up his courage and wander in, however, he would discover
a small book shop crowded with publications and patrons. It
feels like a pornographic bookstore, and in a sense it is one.
For what is on offer is the political pornography of the
European radical right. There are books on European pagan
mythology, which one wing of the
French radical right wants to revive;
there are learned compendia of
ancient pagan symbols, including the
swastika; there are large tomes
defending the government of Vichy;
there are books complaining about
immigration and the Maastricht
treaty; and there are souvenir items
for the younger set, including com-
pact discs by right-wing skinhead
bands, T-shirts emblazoned with
Wotan’s presumed image, and post-
cards bearing the portrait of Céline.
And among all this paraphernalia
there is a long shelf of the works of
Roger Garaudy.
This is a surprise. It was not too
long ago that Roger Garaudy was, if
not a household name, certainly a
well-known thinker on the European
left whose books were translated into dozens of languages.
His book on Hegel, Dieu est mort [God Is Dead] (1962) is still
widely cited, and his later books on Marx (1965) and Lénine
(1968) were required reading for young radicals at the time.
Having joined the Party’s political bureau in 1956, Garaudy
was best known, however, as the chief ideologue of the French
Communist Party when Maurice Thorez led it. He was a
Communist member of the national assembly from 1944 until
1962, and even served two years as its vice president. His main
work was intellectual, though, including a year spent as chief
Moscow correspondent for L’Humanité, the French commu-
nist daily. He was eventually purged from the party in the
1970s for opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the
leadership of Georges Marchais, yet he remained ideologically
close to it and even published a defense of the Soviet experi-
ence in 1994.
But it is not this Roger Garaudy who interests the radical
right today; it is Garaudy the writer on religion. He was born
in Marseilles in 1913 into an atheistic working-class family
but at the age of fourteen converted to Protestantism, and at
some later stage to Catholicism. As a young man he befriended
Romain Rolland, Picasso, Matisse, Paul Éluard, and Le Corbu-
sier, but also kept company with priests and theologians.
12
During the Second World War he spent thirty-three months
in a North African prison camp, and it was there that he first
had contact with Islam, which became a passion. In 1966 he
published Grandeur et décadences de l’Islam and in 1981 Pro-
messes de l’Islam. And in 1982 this ex-atheist, ex-Protestant,
ex-Catholic, and ex-Communist became a Muslim, sometimes
using the name Rajaa Garaudy.
It quickly became apparent, however, that Garaudy’s reli-
gious attraction to Islam was intimately connected with his
political antipathy toward Zionism and Israel. In the early
eighties he made a violent public
intervention attacking the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon, and by the time
of the Gulf War in 1991, he had be-
come a vocal and relentless critic of
anything connected with Israel. At
that time he began circulating in the
far-right intellectual circles of
GRECE [the Groupement de Recherche
et d’Études pour la Civilisation Eu-
ropeénne] and the Club de l’Horloge,
and apparently took up Holocaust
negationism through the works of
Robert Faurisson, Paul Rassinier, and
David Irving.
In 1995 Garaudy then published a
book called Les Mythes fondateurs de
la politique israélienne [The founding
myths of Israeli politics] that made
reference to all this “scholarship,” not
only attacking Israeli foreign policy
but what he called the “myth” of the Holocaust. Garaudy
claimed that evidence for the Shoah was inconclusive, that
estimates of the number of those murdered varied widely, that
it was at most a “massacre,” but that, in the end, the matter
should be left to historians to decide. He then went on to
equate Zionism with colonialism, nationalism, and Nazism in
this book he called an “anthology of Zionist crimes.”
The reaction was swift and furious. Garaudy was attacked
from every side, including his former comrades at L’Human-
ité, and soon he was prosecuted under the 1990 Gayssot Law,
which makes it illegal in France to deny crimes against
humanity, to defame people on racial grounds, or to provoke
racial hatred and violence. The case quickly became a cause
célèbre not least because Garaudy retained as his lawyer the
notorious Jacques Vergès, who had defended Klaus Barbie. It
also received wide attention in the popular media when
Garaudy was defended by, of all people, the Abbé Pierre. The
Abbé was a very special figure in France and was sometimes
called the French Mother Teresa for his ministry with factory
workers, the poor, and, most recently, the homeless of Paris.
But Abbé Pierre was also an old friend of Garaudy’s who felt
obliged to send him a letter vouching for his character and
making subtle allusions to the background of his accusers.
 History Revised
Eventually the Abbé was forced publicly to withdraw his
support, but by then the attention of the media was focused
on the case.
After a long series of legal maneuvers, Roger Garaudy was
finally tried and convicted in early 1998 and fined nearly
$25,000. The case is still on appeal. In the meantime, how-
ever, the Garaudy case had been picked up by certain Arab
intellectuals who claimed he was being punished for his faith
and who themselves were beginning to repeat his negationist
theses. This tendency was recently attacked by the long-time
Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said, who in Le
Monde diplomatique (August 1988) argued that any such
negationist strategy was morally repugnant and politically
suicidal. “How can we expect the entire world to recognize
our sufferings as Arabs if we are unable to recognize those of
others, even if they are our oppressors?” he asked, adding
that “the measures of oppression and censorship of the press
and public opinion are in any case much more disquieting in
the Arab world than in France!” But Garaudy’s case is still
the focus of attention in parts of the Arab world, as can be
seen by browsing through the several Web-sites devoted to
his trial.
And while all this controversy swirls around him, the eighty-
six-year-old Roger Garaudy continues to write, apparently reju-
venated by his most recent conversion to scientific anti-
Semitism. Among his books published last year was Le procès
du sionisme israélien [Israeli Zionism on Trial], which defends
his position on the Holocaust, charges the Zionists with having
collaborated with the Nazis, and unmasks the “pseudo-theo-
logical myth of the chosen people.” Another was Les États-Unis,
avant-garde de la décadence [The U.S., Avant-Garde of Deca-
dence], which holds up to ridicule America’s obsession with the
market, its cultural imperialism, and, of course, its support of
Israel. Most of these small works are now published by a press
in Lebanon, which then presumably spirits them into France.
And eventually they make their way to the little bookshop
behind the curtain, off the Rue Saint-Honoré. ◆ phy of the Scottish Enlightenment (and especially the writ-
—ML
America the Radical?
H ow radical was the American Revolution? According
to an academic consensus that dates back to the late
1940s, not radical at all. Born of complaints about
taxes and constitutional irregularities, the American rebel-
lion was supposedly a legalistic affair lacking apocalyptic
intentions or results. America’s so-called “radical” leaders
declared repeatedly that, by fighting for national indepen-
dence, they sought to conserve the rights of freeborn Eng-
lishmen which they believed the British Crown had sought
to squelch. In search of validating political ideas the Ame-
ricans looked backward, to John Locke and the Glorious
Revolution, and not to some fresh emancipatory doctrine. Far
from impoverished or oppressed, the white colonists who led
and fought for the patriot cause were the freest, most pros-
perous, and least governed people in the eighteenth-century
Atlantic world—and they knew it. Their revolution, so the
argument goes, aimed chiefly to cleanse and preserve, and
not to destroy, the status quo.
Although it was long fashionable to link this historical view
to the advent of the Cold War and America’s increasingly com-
placent, conservative political mood, its roots run much
deeper. Long before 1945, Marxists and other neo-Jacobins
had set the terms of debate about modern revolutions (among
Marxists and anti-Marxists alike). Accordingly, the French
Revolution was widely considered the eighteenth-century
harbinger of the great revolutions to come. By comparison,
the American Revolution looked tame—happily so to some,
sadly so to others. There was no reign of terror in America, no
cult of the Supreme Being, no Bastille or regicide or sans-
culottes. And instead of Marat, Saint-Just, and Robespierre,
the American Revolution produced James Madison, Thomas
Jefferson, and George Washington—gentlemen radicals, in-
deed, slaveholders all.
To be sure, early in this century, a generation of so-called
Progressive historians tried to locate underlying class strug-
gles within the American Revolution. Yet the acknowledged
failure of the scattered American movements from below made
it difficult to see them as the Revolution’s guiding force. In
those few places where such movements succeeded (as they
did, for a time, in revolutionary Pennsylvania), they hardly
amounted to radical insurgencies on a par with later move-
ments in France. Even the most incendiary pro-American agi-
tator, Tom Paine, was no match for his Gallic counterparts, a
fact dramatized when Paine, fresh from his American victo-
ries, lent his hand to the French Revolution—and wound up
languishing in a Jacobin prison for nearly a year as a sus-
pected counterrevolutionary.
Yet today, the familiar consensus about the American
Revolution has crumbled. The researches of Bernard Bailyn,
Gordon S. Wood, and others have raised serious doubts about
the Lockean origins of the American rebels’ political ideas.
Some scholars have found that the “common-sense” philoso-
ings of David Hume) played a much larger role in America than
had been previously assumed. More broadly, ideas associated
with the Country Party opposition of early eighteenth-cen-
tury England (referred to in academic shorthand as “republi-
canism”) appeared to have been much more influential in the
American patriots’ thinking than had Lockean liberalism. By
those precepts, public liberty could be secured only in a com-
monwealth of virtuous, independent citizens, ever vigilant
against concentrations of power in the upper echelons of poli-
tics. And far from a rehash of late-seventeenth-century Eng-
lish ideas, the American vision of building a New World re-
public assumed the dimensions of a radical, nearly utopian,
anti-monarchical ideology.
In 1992, Wood’s survey, The Radicalism of the American Re-
volution, restated this revision of the Revolution’s intellectual
history, with the added insistence that the Americans initi-
ated a social revolution as well. By appropriating the political
language of the radical Whigs and attacking the aristocratic
abuses of patronage and family interest, Wood claimed, the
American revolutionaries were “tearing at the bonds holding
13
 History Revised
traditional monarchical society together.” In their place the
revolutionary leadership tried to substitute new forms of
social cohesion, based on benevolent dedication to the com-
mon good, undertaken by citizen-freemen free of any politi-
cal or economic reliance on other men. It was not, Wood was
quick to add, a democratic or commercial ideal, but a gentle-
manly, gentry ideal, suspicious of money-making for its own
sake, eager to promote men of cultivation as well as talent to
political power. But by eradicating an entire social order (as
well as the political connection to England), the American
Revolution was, he writes, “as radical and social as any revo-
lution in history.”
Yet ironically, Wood contends, the Revolution’s success also
paved the way for the much more aggressively democratic and
commercially-oriented America that evolved in the early nine-
teenth century. Emboldened by national independence and
spurred by the promise of individual prosperity, vulgar, ordi-
nary Americans refused to obey the high-minded strictures
laid down by the virtuous republican gentry. They agitated
for widened access to capital; they formed (and joined) new
mass political parties; they celebrated the pursuit of individ-
ual interest above and beyond the exercise of selfless virtue.
And thanks to their overwhelming energy, they changed
America yet again, dashing the classical ideals of the revolu-
tionary era and building what Wood calls “a new society
unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the world,” the
most egalitarian, democratic, commercially-minded—and, not
coincidentally, evangelical Christian—nation on earth.
Although widely praised as a landmark study graced with
what the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove calls
“Tocquevillean power,” Wood’s account has not met with uni-
versal assent. Much of his analysis, particularly on the shift
from republicanism to democracy, is based on developments
limited to the northern states. While he notes how the
Revolution’s ideology helped energize anti-slavery opinion,
he says little about how and why a renaissance of slavery, and
of pro-slavery ideology, also came in the aftermath of
American independence. His account of republicanism’s erad-
ication slights how republican ideas (sometimes in combina-
tion with democratic ones) served as an abiding resource, in
very different ways, for reactionary slaveholders and urban
radicals well into the nineteenth century. And by connecting
democratization wholly to the efforts and social aspirations of
aggressive entrepreneurs, he ignores how, especially after
1815, democratic movements often found their chief followers
among embittered and indebted semi-subsistence farmers and
workingmen who viewed such hustlers with alarm.
Still, Wood’s analysis has done a great deal to vindicate the
far-reaching radical implications of the American Revolu-
tion—implications which political writers on both sides of the
Atlantic recognized at the time. In doing so, he has helped his-
torians rid themselves of the blinders imposed by what had
become traditional assumptions about modern revolutions.
And, though he may not have intended it, he has written an
interpretation of his subject that is in harmony with a more
general post-Cold-War and post-socialist mood. ◆ The Guardian (London), March 24, 1999.
— Sean Wilentz
14
Miscellany
Noblesse in Distress
I f you’ve meant to help French aristocracy but won-
dered how, the Association d’entraide de la noblesse
française may have the answer. The ANF, claiming that
two-thirds of the 120,000 members of France’s noblesse
(0.2% of the population) live below the poverty level, pro-
vides tuition and even clothing for titled children “as need
or rank demands.”
Which leaves unaccounted for not only elderly nobles, but
those driven increasingly to crime: the young duke jailed for
credit-card fraud, or the hitherto civic-minded count, a
small-town mayor who wrote himself a municipal check to
maintain a castle and grounds that were ruining him.
Still, ANF aid means careful screening will protect your
gifts from going to “pseudo-nobles,” the two-thirds of
Frenchmen with “de” names—some 15,000 families—
who, like Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, by often excessive cor-
rectness and traditionalism, make themselves “laughing-
stocks of ‘high society.’”
Elsewhere in the European Community, one impover-
ished aristocratic both asserts and challenges the notion
of noblesse. “HRH Prince” Michael James Alexander
Stewart, a Belgian-raised and -accented, forty-one-year-
old socialist, dclares himself true heir to James II (James
VII of Scots, wrongfully deposed from the British throne
in 1688), and thus, rightful king of Scotland. Having
revived their parliament after three centuries, should the
Scots also crown this veritable anti-Windsor, who admires
the ‘cycling monarchs’ of Scandinavia and the Netherlands
and views monarchy chiefly as the people’s mainstay
“against the encroachments of the state?”
To crown Michael, the Scots need to overlook the many
historians who trace today’s Stuart line to Bavaria, and
most journalists, who find Michael’s genealogical and per-
sonal claims preposterous. Bonnie Prince Charles’s “secret
second marriage,” on which he rests his claim in his best-
seller The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland, is unsubstanti-
ated. The book’s endorsed by dignitaries with titles
“awarded by Prince Michael himself.” The thirty-three-
nation European Council of Princes whose president
Michael claims to be, eludes discovery. Alleged seizure of
Michael’s royal passport by a “pro-Windsor conspiracy”
reduces him to Michael Lafosse, who sold insurance in
Belgium and shortbread in Edinburgh.
Such humility suits the infinitely higher lineage another
bestseller, ‘Sir’ Laurence Gardner’s The Bloodline of the Holy
Grail and Genesis of the Grail Kings, traces to Michael from—
Jesus Christ, whose own secret marriage the book reveals....
In the age of “empathetic post-Diana royalty,” asks The
Guardian, can the Scots be kept from proclaiming another
compassionate lord by “the cold details of pedigree?”
—David Jacobson
Sources: Die Weltwoche (Zurich), January 7, 1999.
 History and Historians
History Goes Pop: Two Views
For several decades the academic historical profession has been in a sort of identity crisis, wondering what its aims are and how to
reach them. Yet at the same time, popular history – reflected in television documentaries, in movies, in glossy special-interest maga-
zines, and history books – has never seemed more vigorous. Are these facts related? If so, what do they tell us about the prospects for
history in the decade to come? We offer two views on the subject, from journalist Daniel Johnson, a critic of over-popularization, and
Simon Schama, one of the most distinguished practitioners of both genres of historical writing.
David Johnson
F or the past fifty years, British historians have dominated
the writing of Europe’s history. Or so argues Daniel
Johnson, an editor at the London Daily Telegraph, in a recent
article in the monthly Prospect. The reason for this domina-
tion, in Johnson’s
view, is that British
British historians historians managed
to remain free from
managed to remain the continental fads
of Annales-school so-
free from the conti- cial history and also
postmodernism,
nental fads… while still reaching
out to a large, non-
academic reading
public. History books sell well in Britain, are regularly serial-
ized in newspapers and debated on television, and the obliga-
tion of having to face “the jury of the educated public” has
meant that “the most reliable and readable books on European
history are often British.” Where would European history be
today, he asks, without the works of J. H. Elliott and Hugh
Thomas on Spain, Denis Mack Smith on Italy, Richard Cobb
on France, Ian Kershaw on Germany, Robert Conquest on the
Soviet Union, the Marxists Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher
Hill, and many others?
Whether this superiority can be maintained is, however, an
open question. In his article Johnson traces the lineage of con-
temporary British historical study from the prewar to the
postwar generation and then to recent decades. He notes the
rise in the 1980s of what have been called the “media dons”
in Britain, most of them historians equally at home in the
library, the book pages, and on television. Mentioning Nor-
man Stone, Roy Porter, and Simon Schama by name, Johnson
remarks that the “symbiotic nexus of press and professors has
revealed a sinister aspect too,” and suggests that “if it is bad
for scholars to do nothing for the general public, it is also pos-
sible to do too much.”
While he heaps contempt on “the young stars of the
1990s…cold-bloodedly advancing their parallel careers while
moving seamlessly from scholarship to ephemera and back,”
Johnson offers grudging praise of the youngest of the bunch,
the omnipresent Niall Ferguson. Ferguson, an Oxford-based
Scot still in his thirties, has already made his name as a seri-
ous historian with learned works on German business in the
early twentieth-century (Paper and Iron, 1995), the Rothschild
family (The House of Rothschild, 1998), and, most recently, a
study of 1914-18 called The Pity of War. But he has also en-
tered the media world of magazines and television. How this
has affected his history-writing can be seen in his collection
of essays, Virtual History, which explores a number of
counter-factuals (what if Britain had stayed out of World War
I?) in a popular style that Johnson compares to that of
“thrillers.” He is also at work on a study of the sexual exploita-
tion of victims in the Nazi death camps, a book that “risks the
accusation of reducing history to pornography,” according to
Johnson, and for which Ferguson has already received a siz-
able advance.
Ferguson denies the charge of sensationalism but adds,
somewhat defensively, “It’s good news that history is box
office.” Here Johnson sees the expression less of blind ambi-
tion than what he calls the “one common denominator among
virtual historians of the 1990s”: “skepticism about the very
idea of a definitive work of history.” “Their subjectivism,” he
writes, “is sotto voce, but it is audible in their ostentatious
self-awareness, and in the final elision of any distinction
between history and journalism.” Ferguson obviously be-
lieves in the craft and standards of academic history, but the
test will be whether his less talented contemporaries seek to
be anything more than “flâneurs of the fin de siècle.”
Simon Schama
A defense of popular history comes from Simon Schama of
Columbia University. In a recent lecture Schama notes
what he calls the “schizophrenia” of American attitudes
toward the study of
history. The cable-
only History Channel Perfect history is “a
is hugely successful
with roughly 50 mil- compound of poetry
lion subscribers. In
American schools, and philosophy.”
however, history has
been almost entirely
replaced by “social studies,” which is taught with enormous
(and expensive) textbooks aimed mainly at what Schama calls
“identity-group therapy.” They are filled with bureacratic
prose about the American present, glossy pictures of histori-
cal figures bearing no clear relation to the text, and precious
little historical narrative. What has happened? he wonders.
Schama notes correctly that Americans for much of this cen-
tury have been in the grip of a pedagogical idea promoted by
John Dewey, who held that “knowledge of the past and its
heritage is of great importance when it enters the present, but
not otherwise.” The notion of history as a repository of chas-
tening, complicated knowledge about the past has itself come
15
 History and Historians
to seem lost in the past. First-year high school students in the
town where Schama lives are required to take a “Global
Studies” course, though up until that point they have never
been taught any history, whether of the United States or other
countries. What can such courses teach, he wonders, beyond
platitudes about intercultural understanding?
The popularity of history on television obviously reflects a
deep desire for and interest in historical narrative that the
schools no longer satisfy. But it also reflects problems with aca-
demic history. As Schama explains, professional historians have
willingly abandoned a crucial feature of successful narrative to
television, and that is the power of images. Images are not only
created through photographs and film. The greatest images in
historical writing, he suggests, have always been created
through prose. To prove his point, he quotes a short passage
from Tacitus’s Annals, which he remembers being struck by as
a young boy. “In the plain…were whitening bones, scattered
or in little heaps, as the men had fallen fleeing or standing fast.
Hard by lay splintered spears and limbs of horses.” Here Taci-
tus proves himself the equal of Eisenstein or Kurosawa.
There are, of course, ancient and medieval examples of his-
torical chronicles that took purely visual form, such as Trajan’s
Column or the Bayeux Tapestry. But the great historical visu-
alizers have always been writers, especially in the nineteenth
century, when novelists like Walter Scott and Victor Hugo
showed professionals how to weave the threads of historical
evidence into a compelling story with haunting images. What
is needed, Schama suggests, is fresh confirmation of Mac-
aulay’s dictum, that perfect history is “a compound of poetry
and philosophy.” He suggests that graduate students in his-
tory be encouraged to consider writing popular history, its
possibilities and pitfalls. He has himself been working steadily
over the past few years on a sixteen-part television series on
British history for the BBC. As Macaulay also understood, his-
tory must be “received by the imagination as well as reason,”
and there is no reason why the new technologies that excite
the imagination should not also serve the muse Clio. ◆ has been the subject of several scholarly investigation, espe-
—ML
Sources: Daniel Johnson, “The Pop Historians,” Prospect (London),
November 1998.
Simon Schama, “Visualizing History,” Culturefront (New York
Council for the Humanities), Winter 1998-99.
16
Hungarian Women’s History
A camera obscura is a device for projecting the image
of distant objects with the help of a darkened room,
a screen, and a prism. After being invented by astro-
nomers for scientific purposes it was used from the eighteenth
century on to entertain the general public by showing the
view of towns, with the prism rotating above the spectators’
heads. This simple but ingenious apparatus was based on ele-
mentary principles of optics and delighted not only lay peo-
ple but professionals as well, since the grinding of the lens
required a high degree of theoretical and manual skill.
Andrea Peto’s new book on the changing role of Hungarian
women and their organizations in the crucial postwar years of
reconstruction and Communist takeover works like just such
a camera obscura. The work is based on sound archival mate-
rial critically used, and consciously addresses a wide audience
without a compromise of scholarly quality. It invites the
reader and critic to see the landscape of Hungarian history
from a different standpoint.
In Nohistóriák Peto investigates the historical roles of the
institutionalized women’s movements, from traditional femi-
nist and religious organizations to the women’s section in the
Social Democratic Party and the communists’ Democratic
Union of Hungarian Women. Each chapter employs a differ-
ent historical method, from analyzing police reports and polit-
ical speeches to studying the narrative constructions of per-
sonal memoirs about beloved male partners. Each describes a
different facet of the world of women’s movement, from the
revival of Jewish women’s organizations to the recruitment of
women into the police force. But essentially the book is a social
history that draws on archival sources recently made available
in Hungary, such as reports and minutes of the Interior
Ministry of the Communist Party.
The chilling story of how the Communist Party expanded
its influence over every aspect of Hungarian life after 1945
cially after 1989. The perspective of women, however, has
been missing from the story so far. The surprising fact that
ninety-three women’s organizations existed between 1945 and
1951, and that all fell victim to the Communist Party’s mission
of dominating the civic body, is a prime example of the politi-
cization of society. The real importance of Nohistóriák lies
elsewhere, however. Peto, fluent in the methodology and
vocabulary of women’s history and equipped with a thorough,
up-to-date knowledge of its literature, escapes one typical
mistake of East European scholars educated in the West who
use the overly sophisticated, linguistically distorted jargon
that alienates the audience in their home country. It is to be
hoped that Nohistóriák will help to establish a new approach
to history writing in Hungary, and that an English version
will be forthcoming so that it can also make a useful contri-
bution to the international field of women’s history. ◆
—Borbála Juhász
Sources: Andrea Peto, Nohistóriák—A politizáló magyar nok
történetébol (1945-1951) [Women’s Histories—From the history of
Hungarian women in politics (1945-1951)], Budapest: Seneca, 1998.
 History and Historians

A New Kind of History

I n Lawrence Durrell’s stories about British diplomats in

Serbia—stories now so laden with ironies that their
humor is hardly to be borne—more than one character
proves expert at what the narrator’s friend Antrobus calls
“Viewing with Alarm.” This exercise, once confined to pro-
Sea (1996), tracing the multiple social and civil histories that
have intersected by its shores; Janet Malcolm, in The Silent
Woman (1994), comparing and confronting the biographers
of Sylvia Plath.
Each of these books has a formal and stylistic distinction
fessional diplomats, has become endemic in recent years in rarely found in the work of professional historians. Each of
critical discussions of the discipline of history. Essay after them reflects the widespread belief that historical research is
essay laments such features of recent historical work as the rarely objective, that historians always have an agenda, and
disappearance of the footnote, the evident loss of interest in that sources, when closely inspected, always present obsta-
establishing the truth about the cles and reveal gaps. Each of
past, and the increasingly fre- them dramatizes the author’s
quent claim that historians enjoy own research difficulties, from
a license to invent what they the problems involved in inter-
need to fill in what the sources viewing a contemporary to those
have omitted. posed by the interpretation of
Not only staunch conserva- ancient or foreign texts and
tives, but innovative practition- objects. And each of them shows
ers and open-minded observers how different scholarly commu-
of the historical scene like Roger nities—depending on the stand-
Chartier and Richard Evans see points they begin from—may
contemporary historians as ca- view the same place or person in
reening along “the edge of the diametrically opposed ways. The
cliff,” to quote the title of a Black Sea may be center or
recent book by Chartier. Threats periphery, depending on whe-
to objectivity abound, and even ther one looks at it from Rome or
responsible historians seem to from Odessa; Sylvia Plath may
have abandoned the belief that be victim or aggressor, creator or
all interpretations of the past are exploiter. Each author has clear-
constrained by evidence—rather ly read and pondered recent
than constrained simply by the works by professionals that have
standards of the historical com- furthered, or been used to fur-
munity that exists at a given ther, the belief that history is all
time. Can postmodernism and construction. But none of them
history co-exist in a single intel- postures or despairs; instead,
lectual space? Many spokesmen they intercalate the story they
for the former, and even some defenders of the latter, seem to wish to tell and the story of their own and others’ research.
think they cannot—and there is genuine reason for concern All of these writers criticize some versions of the past for
when experienced historians, who have done distinguished being less consistent with the documents. All of them show
research in the past, maintain that no interpretation of histor- that historical error and distortion can have disastrous
ical evidence is preferable on technical grounds to any other. human consequences at both the individual and the collec-
Chartier and Evans draw attention to real absurdities and tive level. All of them have a lively sense of paradox. And,
exaggerations. But both of them, in their concentration on the in a way more reminiscent of the great historians of the early
history written by and for professionals, have failed to note nineteenth century than of the fashionable Deep Thinkers of
what may be the emergence, outside the universities, of a his- the late twentieth, they see how present and past are con-
tory which both treats historical evidence with genuine nected and how a whole tolerant civilization may depend on
respect and shows that historical narratives inevitably reveal, that correction.
in their warp and woof, the standpoint of those who create Both more readable and more responsible than much of what
them. In the last twenty years, a group of journalists with con- the professionals have recently written, these three books and
siderable academic training have experimented more boldly others like them suggest one way that history might move in
and productively with historical narrative than anyone work- the next twenty years—if the professionals can muster the
ing within the Anglo-American academy. Consider only three independent judgment, the controlled scepticism, and the
examples: Amitav Ghosh, in his In an Ancient Land (1994), complex expository skills that make these amateur histories
writing of how Arabs, Jews, and Europeans have interacted so rewarding. ◆
in the middle ages and in modernity; Neal Ascherson, in Black —Anthony Grafton

17
 Frontiers of Science
Icelandic Genes
I celand attracted worldwide attention in 1998 due to a controversial parliamentary bill enabling
the creation of a centralized database containing health records of the whole population. Advocates
of the database proposal claimed it would yield valuable information concerning public health
and preventive medicine. The media attention resulted from a clash between two forces. On the one
side were the main promotors of the bill, Dr. Kári Stefánsson, Chief Executive Officer of a private
genomics company, the Icelandic government, and enthusias-
tic citizens; on the other, the Icelandic Medical Association,
the Data Protection Commission, the former Director of Public
Health, the Genetics Committee, three national ethics boards,
various geneticists, physicians, members of parliament, and a
growing number of alarmed citizens.
The controversy began in March
1998, and continues as the Icelandic
health system is restructured for its
database future. The controversy
mainly centered on the abrogation of
informed consent (data from the liv-
ing will be included unless individu-
als opt out, and data from the dead
cannot be excluded), on freedom of
research (the retainer of the exclusive
database licence stands to gain a
unique advantage in medical and
genetics research), and possible
infractions of the privacy of the
country’s 270,000 inhabitants.
Ina Kjøgx Pedersen recently ob-
served in the Danish newspaper
Weekendavisen that Iceland may well
become the setting for the worldwide
debate over genetics. To understand
Pedersen’s prognosis it is important to understand the finer
details of the story, especially how the aggressive and charis-
matic Dr. Stefánsson managed to succeed. The advantages of
such a project, he argued, were many. He trumpeted the
promise of controlling runaway health costs and stemming
the brain drain from Iceland by offering high-skill jobs. He
also appealed to the pride of the local population by claim-
ing that its health records were a natural resource akin to fish-
ing stock and hydroelectric and geothermal power. Finally,
he sold gullible foreign investors and reporters on the myth
of Icelandic genetic and racial homogeneity. The propaganda
has been facilitated by uncritical reporting in foreign media
that was lapped up by the Icelandic media and by the Feb-
ruary 1988 signing of a five-year contract, potentially worth
$200 million, between the Icelandic genomics company and
Hoffmann-La Roche, one of the world’s major pharmaceuti-
cal companies.
Foreigners have had opportunities to sample the utter banal-
ity of Dr. Stefánsson’s rhetoric. Weekendavisen quotes him as
saying: “There is no evil knowledge, only evil administration
18
of knowledge, and that I confidently leave to our politicians
to handle.” This sanguine assessment stands in stark contrast
to the inability and unwillingness of the government and min-
isterial bureaucracy to deal competently with the database
project. The database law might actually be described as an
attempt to serve the interest of one com-
pany by dismantling regulatory struc-
tures that had evolved since the 1960s
when the Genetics Committee was estab-
lished and funded by the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission.
As an increasing number of Icelanders
ask to be kept out of the centralized data-
base, the genetics company has resorted
to advertisements in the country’s largest
newspaper, the Morgunbladid. The com-
pany appeals to citizens’ responsibility
to contribute to global improvements of
health and help fight diseases by agree-
ing not to desert the database. The
Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson
even argues in Weekendavisen that
Western post-Renaissance morality be
reassessed in light of biotechnology
breakthroughs. In the New York Times
he claims that the database controversy
was resolved as a result of “a democratic process,” implying
that it was a reasoned process, that the database project enjoys
broad community support, and that the controversy is over.
Similar hubris led the current Director of Public Health to
speak in the New Yorker of stepping into a new world, and
seeing little reason to be bound by rules “that existed in a dif-
ferent era for a different world.” The database controversy
highlights the need to protect hard-won human rights like
informed consent and protect vulnerable cultures against
databank takeovers. What kind of human rights will be possi-
ble in the brave new genomic world? ◆
—Skúli Sigurdsson
Sources: Sturla Fridriksson, “Erfda-audlind Íslendinga” [Genetic
national resource of the Icelanders], Morgunbladid, December 12,
1998.
Ina Kjøgx Pedersen, “Genetisk nationalisme,” Weekendavisen,
February 26 - March 4, 1999.
Uta Wagenmann, “Island: Ein Volk wird abgespeichert [Iceland:
A People is being stored], Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst/GID,
February 1999.
 Frontiers of Science
Left Darwinism?
A mong the countless proposals for refounding the
Western left after the collapse of communism, one of
the more astonishing has just been put forward by
Australian philosopher Peter Singer. Singer, who is both
famous and infamous for his writings on animal rights and
euthanasia (see box), maintains that the left can only have a
future if it learns to appropriate the evolutionary discoveries
of Charles Darwin.
“It is time for the left to take seriously the fact that we have
evolved from other animals,” Singer announces. This hardly
seems a promising start for a left-wing political theory, and
Singer admits that ever since the nineteenth century Darwin’s
ideas have mainly appealed to the right. But since Darwinian
theory is scientific theory, and science in Singer’s view is not
politically determined, there is no reason why there cannot
be a Darwinian left as well. The Western left has failed to see
this in the past because of its belief in the infinite malleabil-
ity—and therefore perfectibility—of man. Darwin demon-
strated the limits of this malleability by showing that the
struggle for existence is unending for all living creatures, and
that certain forms of behavior therefore persist. Darwinism
does not imply biological determinism, Singer insists; it sim-
ply teaches us to distinguish between those features of human
life that show great variability across cultures and those that
do not. Economic structure, religious practices, and forms of
government show great cultural variation; sexuality, concern
for kin, hierarchy, and gender roles show far less.
The lesson such a distinction can teach the left, in Singer’s
view, is that certain attempts to reform society may come at a
high cost or will have unintended consequences. That the
hierarchies of European hereditary aristocracy were replaced
by new hierarchies based on wealth or military and police
power should not have surprised us. If the left wishes to abol-
ish one hierarchy, it is obliged to consider which others might
replace it. A left that hopes to banish human conflict or blames
all inequalities on oppression or ideology simply does not
understand our natures.
Another lesson the left might draw from evolutionary the-
ory is that while developed animals are self-interested, they
also have an incentive to cooperate with each other in soci-
ety. Competition and “reciprocal altruism,” as Singer terms
it, are both natural to us, and the latter can be cultivated
through correct social planning. Here he relies on the thriv-
ing work in “game theory” inspired by the writings of polit-
ical scientist Robert Axelrod, who has demonstrated through
computer simulations the rationality of cooperation. A
Darwinian left would have to accept the fact that people will
always act competitively, but that under certain circum-
stances they can be encouraged to engage in mutually bene-
ficial forms of cooperation; it would then try to bring about
those circumstances.
Singer admits that he offers “a sharply deflated vision of the
left, its utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of
what can be achieved.” But beneath his realism lurks a new
utopianism, based on the achievements of genetic engineer-
ing. Appealing to Hegel, Singer seems to believe that we are
approaching a state of absolute knowledge about the human
condition, knowledge that will one day permit us to manipu-
late more fully our natures. “For the first time since life
emerged from the primeval soup, there are beings who under-
stand how they have come to be what they are.” This, he
believes, may portend a new kind of freedom, “the freedom
to shape our genes so that instead of living in societies con-
strained by our evolutionary origins, we can build the kind
of society we judge best.” How Darwinism can help us to
judge what “best” means, Singer does not say. ◆
—ML
Source: Peter Singer, “Darwin for the Left,” Prospect (London),
June 1998.
Peter Singer
P eter Singer, who was born in Australia in 1946,
recently came to the attention of readers of the
New York Times (April 10, 1999) due to the
controversy surrounding his appointment to a chair
in bioethics at Princeton University. Professor Singer
is probably best known for his promotion of animal
rights and as the author of the best-selling Animal
Liberation (Avon, 1990). But he has also been widely
attacked for his promotion of euthanasia, including
the decision to kill—and not merely “let die”—
infants with severe disabilities such as spina bifida
and hemophilia. In a book written with Helga Kuhse,
called Should the Baby Live? (Melbourne, 1985), and
in his own Practical Ethics, second edition, (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993), and Rethinking Life
and Death (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Singer has put
forward the moral case for making such decisions
with a view to “quality” rather than “sanctity” of life.
Over the years these views have earned him verbal
and physical threats from two sorts of groups: conser-
vative organizations opposed to abortion and euthana-
sia, and radical left-wing groups who have portrayed
Singer as a new Dr. Mengele. The debate has been par-
ticularly intense in Germany, where “anti-fascist”
groups have established Web-sites about his work and
routinely try to stop him from speaking in public. A
group called Princeton Students Against Infanticide
has now formed, established its own Web-site, and
recently staged a demonstration against the Singer
appointment.
For an overview of the Singer debate, see Dale Jamieson,
ed., Singer and his Critics, London:Blackwell, 1999.
19
 Frontiers of Science
Justice for Neanderthals!
R oughly thirty thousand years ago the last of the
Neanderthals (homo sapiens neanderthalensis) disap-
peared after flourishing for 200,000 years. From that
point on, the territory belonged to modern man’s direct ances-
tor, the Cro-Magnon (homo sapiens sapiens). This transition
did not take place overnight, obviously, so it is probable that
for some period the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon cohab-
ited. Archeologists and anthropologists have long tried to
answer the question of how long this cohabitation might have
lasted and how it affected the two creatures.
This issue seems straightforwardly scientific, but in recent
years it has set off a bitter, ideological dispute among a vari-
ety of scientists. The status of the Neanderthals has been
revised several times before in this century. Until recently
they were considered retarded creatures with few accomplish-
ments. Then, in the 1960s, it became fashionable among some
archaeologists and anthropologists to portray them as biologi-
cally and behaviorally quite close to modern humans. This
revisionist position came under attack on the basis of DNA
research, which showed that the Cro-Magnon and Nean-
derthal populations separated genetically quite early and that
the modern creature probably arose out of Africa.
The question of cultural interaction between the populations
remains open, however, and highly charged. As Cambridge,
U.K., archaeologist Paul Mellars reported in the October 8, 1998
issue of Nature, evidence discovered in southern Spain suggests
that the Neanderthals survived for five thousand to ten thou-
sand years after the arrival of modern populations. What hap-
pened during this period? The scientific consensus, Mellars
writes, is that this long cohabitation is probably owing to eco-
logical peculiarities of the region, but there is no evidence that
the Neanderthals ever adopted Cro-Magnon technologies or
behaviors there. Yet north of the Pyrenees one does see such
similarities: there Neanderthals produced bone tools and deco-
rative objects. The question is whether these developments
occurred independently of contact with the Cro-Magnon pop-
ulations or through simple copying.
The notion of independent behavioral development is sta-
tistically unlikely, in Mellars’s view, yet it has become popu-
lar with those who wish to raise the status of the Neanderthal
and (presumably) lower that of the Cro-Magnon. A recent
issue of the journal Current Anthropology was devoted to this
heated controversy. There, a group of European researchers
argued that evidence from France points to independent
Neanderthal development, and they reject any suggestion of
“Neanderthal inferiority.” In their conclusion they claim that
“archaeologists should turn their attention to the problems
posed by the cultural achievements of the late Neanderthals,”
which would include “a reevaluation of Neanderthal cogni-
tive abilities and a critique of biological determinism.” “Our
main purpose,” they write, “has been to illustrate how anti-
Neanderthal prejudice has been blocking a correct appraisal
of the empirical data.” Yet as Mellars remarks about this line
of argument, “the eagerness of some scientists to claim close
20
kinship with the Neanderthals could come close to denying
that human evolution actually took place.”
—ML
◆
Sources: “Special Issue: The Neanderthal Problem and the
Evolution of Human Behavior,” Current Anthropology, June 1998.
See the Web-site of the newly opened Neantherdal Museum,
Dusseldorf, Germany: www.neanderthal.de
Out of Africa?
G enetic evidence made available by new techno-
logies has complicated the controversy over human
origins. For example, as Elizabeth Pennisi reports
in Science (March 19, 1999), a new analysis has cast doubt
on the popular notion that all modern humans descended
from a small population of ancient Africans. This “Out of
Africa” thesis was itself the result of genetic studies which
pointed to a single group of sub-Saharan people that made
the final evolutionary leap and then migrated across the
world, replacing Neanderthal populations as it spread.
But now an American anthropologist and a population
geneticist have thrown doubt on this theory by present-
ing new evidence that there may have been two human
populations dating back at least 200,000 years, and that
both have left their genetic legacy to modern peoples. One
group gave rise to modern Africans, the other to all non-
Africans, they believe. This “multiregional” hypothesis
suggests that human traits evolved in various populations
and then were spread around the world by small groups
of migrants who interbred with other populations.
The scientists supported this hypothesis by gathering
DNA from a diverse group of present-day humans, includ-
ing French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mongolians, Senegalese,
Pygmies, Khosians (from Angola), and South African
Bantus. They then compared different versions, or “hap-
lotypes,” of a gene on the subjects’ X chromosome called
PDHA1 and developed an “evolutionary tree” for the
gene. The tree showed that modern variants of the gene
go back to two ancestral haplotypes, one at the root of
modern African variants, the other at the root of all other
variants. This is the first time such a fixed regional differ-
ence has been found in human genes.
These results confirm earlier genetic research that
pointed towards the multiregional hypothesis, but the
American researchers stress that evidence for one gene can-
not offer definitive proof of human origins and migrations.
They also note that both groups with different PDHA1
genes could have lived in Africa and interbred at an early
stage, so that the fundamental traits that distinguish mod-
ern humans would have emerged in two groups. They call
for the study of more genes, especially so-called nuclear
genes, to see if they follow the multiregional pattern.
—ML
 Essay
The Four Fractures of Modern Civilization
T oday, as worldwide media and computer networks cre-
ate a single global pool of information and as the econ-
omy—particularly finance—becomes increasingly
global and borderless, modern civilization is being split and
pulled in two different directions. The conflict between the
demands of the state and those of the market is painfully obvi-
ous. This is paralleled, however, by emerging fault lines
within both the nation and the marketplace, as well as within
our systems of knowledge. In these and other areas, one can-
not avoid the impression that the union of reason and irra-
tionality, of universality and plurality, that characterizes mod-
ern civilization is facing a crisis in analogous ways.
The conflict between the state and the market is the con-
flict between the natural distribution and the equitable redis-
tribution of wealth, between
individual freedom and social
stability, between internation-
alism and traditional group
identity. In the past the state
controlled the market on the
national level and competed in
it on the international level. But
the emergence of a global econ-
omy has undermined the state’s
ability to function on either
level. The free flow of capital
threatens not only the state’s
authority to protect and regulate economic activity, but even
its autonomy with regard to taxation. On the other hand, this
flow unquestionably works to invigorate the global economy
and force national governments to correct flawed economic
policies. The decline of the state as market custodian and com-
petitor seems to be an inexorable historical trend.
The market cannot implement either contemporaneous
redistribution of wealth (through welfare) or redistribution to
the next generation (through conservation of resources and
environmental protection). Nor does it have the power to pre-
vent crime or otherwise maintain a safe and stable market
environment. All these things require the authority to impose
taxes and regulations. For the foreseeable future, the state,
and federations of states, will remain the only organs with this
authority. The reason is that for people to submit peacefully
to taxes and regulations, they must have confidence in the
organ imposing them, and the state, as an institution backed
by tradition, is in the best position to foster such trust.
Although the authority to impose taxes and regulations is
exercised by means of rational systems, it is, paradoxically,
sustained by irrational sentiment, namely, a native tendency
to identify with a community.
Ever since its inception, the modern nation-state has pos-
sessed a dual nature. On the one hand, it is a rational system;
on the other, a cultural community. It is at once an efficient
administrative organ based on universal law and a body that
fosters fellow feeling and a sense of belonging among its peo-
ple. However, as the market—a more universal and efficient
force—expands its power, people grow increasingly dissatis-
fied with the state on both counts. Hence the widespread
opinion that the efficiency of government bureaucracy today
is inferior to private enterprise and to civic groups of various
types in providing commonality and a sense of belonging.
Individuals who cherish freedom of economic activity seek a
world beyond the borders of the state, while people who pre-
fer the stability and fellow feeling of the community look to
intermediate institutions of like-minded individuals, whether
the objective is religion, hobbies and interests, service to soci-
ety, or simply relating to other people.
Interestingly, though, the same kind of split is inherent
within the market itself. Even as finance and the giant manu-
facturing industries become
global and create a market that
operates transparently and in
accordance with universal eco-
nomic principles, consumers are
seeking increasingly varied and
individualized services. When
it comes to medical treatment,
nursing, education, beauty and
fashion, financial and legal con-
sulting, and travel, as well as
dining and other forms of
entertainment and leisure, peo-
ple demand customized, individualized service. This need fos-
ters close, ongoing, personal, extracontractual relationships
between the provider and the customer, giving rise to count-
less tiny opaque markets. These small markets represent sta-
ble human relationships and thus serve the function of inter-
mediate institutions, offering individuals a sense of group
identity. This split threatens to undermine modern industry’s
basic marketing strategy of focusing its efforts on a single
brand, which is periodically updated. As long as manufactur-
ers rely on mass production, they will be hard pressed to
respond to consumers’ demand for increasingly differentiated
and individualized products, no matter how often a brand is
updated. Yet, ironically, the globalization of many manufac-
turing industries is predicated on mass-production and ever-
increasing standardization.
But, in all likelihood, the most serious fracture is taking place
in the realm of human intellectual endeavor. Knowledge, the
pursuit of which has made such dramatic strides in the modern
era, is both synthetic and active in nature. Today, however,
knowledge is fracturing into information, which is dynamic but
not synthetic, and intuitive wisdom, which is synthetic but sta-
tic. Our information age is not simply an era in which the media
have made technological innovations but one in which society
is awash in, and places a high premium on, fragmentary, dis-
jointed, and up-to-the-minute information: news, stock market
quotes, advertising, and so forth. Information does not come
with a value system that assigns significance to it. It is neutral
21
 Essay
in that it offers no guiding principles for behavior or anything
else in and of itself. As a result, the more deluged people are by
information, the less certain they are of how to live. People have
responded to this uncertainty by clinging to the kind of irra-
tional and authoritative wisdom that offers something on which
they can lean emotionally. The information age has given rise
to a situation in which people’s hearts are easily won over by
cults, divination, fundamentalist morals, or the rigid and dog-
matic notions of “justice” propounded by social activists.
By contrast, systematic knowledge—which assigns signifi-
cance to and finds connections within the vast body of infor-
mation, and which tends at once toward the preservation of
continuity and toward self-innovation—is clearly a waning
force within our society. It continues to exert indirect influ-
ence through science and technology and policy planning,
but the exalted view of learning as an enlightening force that
banishes superstition and offers guidance to people in their
daily lives while conferring honor on “people of culture” no
longer holds sway. Sales of books and magazines of an intel-
lectual tenor are plunging, and independent intellectuals
unaffiliated with a university or newspaper are a dying breed.
The focus in scholarship is increasingly specialized, and the
ability to synthesize various branches of knowledge is on the
decline. At the same time, disillusioned by “the end of ideol-
ogy,” society places less and less value on the goal of con-
structing an overarching Weltanschauung.
The way to cope with these four fractures is not by at-
tempting some comprehensive counterattack but by estab-
lishing our defense by limiting the scale of our battlefields as
much as possible. We should abandon the notion of the state
as the direct object of any fellow feeling and concentrate on
its rational functions—the redistribution of wealth and the
maintenance of the market’s environment. We should let
intermediate institutions answer people’s need for cultural
identity and hope that they will continue to cherish an indi-
rect sort of fellow feeling with regard to the state in appreci-
ation of its role in protecting these institutions. Similarly,
manufacturers should abandon their futile attempt to stimu-
late demand through frequent model changes and devote
their efforts to the kind of substantive technological innova-
tion that will enable the development of radically different
new products. In the realm of intellectual endeavor, we
should accept the fact that science can no longer wield
unchallenged authority and abandon the dream of integrat-
ing all knowledge in a single world-view. We should lay aside
all arrogant fancies about providing guidance to people in
every aspect of their lives and open the door to the fine irra-
tional wisdom of religion and folk culture. Knowledge can
survive independent of ideology if we recognize, even while
interpreting information and expanding our systematic view
of the body of knowledge, that the results of these efforts are
nothing but a hermeneutic circle. ◆ attempt was made. Were Heidegger’s Being and Time, his
—Masakazu Yamazaki
Sources: Masakazu Yamazaki, “Daibunretsu no jidai” [The age of
fragmentation], Chuo Koron, May 1998.
“Kyoyo no kiki o koete” [Beyond the crisis of culture], This is
Yomiuri, March 1999.
22
Miscellany
Arendt and Heidegger
From our colleague Masakazu Yamazaki, a report on
Japanese response to the lingering controversy ( which our
Issue No. 3 examined) surrounding disclosures about the two
philosophers’ personal relationship.
E lzbieta Ettinger’s Hannah Arendt/Martin Heideg-
ger (Yale University Press, 1995) unexpectedly
united two quite disparate groups of Japanese
intellectuals. Arendt, known for The Origins of Totalita-
rianism and The Human Condition, has enjoyed exception-
ally widespread respect in Japanese intellectual circles.
She ranks with Isaiah Berlin as an intellectual respected
by both conservative liberals and left-wingers. Heidegger,
on the other hand, whose Being and Time once attracted
the interest of academic philosophers, has lost his influ-
ence on most postwar readers even as a leading exponent
of existentialism.
Heidegger still has a small band of loyal followers around
Kyoto University who seek to link the somewhat mystical
philosophy of his late years to Zen thought. But in postwar
Japan existentialism has tended to be understood in the
context of the left-wing political philosophy exemplified
by Jean-Paul Sartre. For the last thirty years mainstream
academic phenomenology has either abandoned existential-
ism by returning to Edmund Husserl, or leaned toward Karl
Jaspers’s or Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations.
Ettinger’s book, widely read on the strength of Arendt’s
name, had the ironic effect of reminding Japanese intellec-
tuals of Heidegger’s existence, which had all but faded from
memory. That these two philosophers—a Jewish woman
who staunchly opposed totalitarianism and a man who was
both directly and indirectly connected to the Nazi
regime—had been romantically linked certainly made for
sensational reading. In particular, anecdotes showing that
Arendt, a woman of strong intellect, clung to memories of
her youthful liaison with Heidegger until the end of her life
gave the book the appeal of a popular novel.
Nevertheless, Japanese intellectuals found Hannah
Arendt/Martin Heidegger a letdown. In the Mainichi Shim-
bun newspaper, the literary critic Toru Shimizu wrote:
“This book does nothing but tell the story of the love,
parting, and reunion of a brilliant man and woman, using
material from new sources and mingling many facts that
elicit happy smiles, wry laughter, and disappointment.”
In his opinion, the book would have been of interest had
it shed new light on the place of philosophy and political
science in the protagonists’ lives as a whole, but no such
nationalism, and his love all underpinned by German
romanticism? The book is devoid of the kind of analysis
that would most attract intellectual interest.
 Japanese Economy
Japan and the Global Financial System
J apan is suffering from financial system uncertainties
while America is enjoying prosperity in the stock mar-
ket. This is a curious contrast. Japan is in fact the world’s
largest creditor and America the largest debtor. While Japan,
through exports, has a trade surplus, it continues to invest
money back into the United States, yet sees little growth in its
domestic economy. Meanwhile, the U.S. economic boom, sup-
ported by foreign investment, is allowing Americans to con-
sume ever more, which fuels even greater investment by
Japanese and other foreigners. In a sense, the United States has
become dependent on foreign investment, making it poten-
tially as vulnerable to speculation as Thailand or Indonesia.
In the United States, it is widely believed that the economic
problems facing Asian countries resulted from outmoded
forms of capitalism there. While many Japan specialists rec-
ognize that a type of backwardness existed in the Japanese
and Asian financial markets, unstable exchange rates (in one
year the yen rose and fell against the dollar by almost 30 per-
cent!) and financial panic have now given rise to a global fund
market which is unreasonable and violent. This has had a big
impact on the Japanese, who have been confident and proud
about keeping costs down in industrial production lines while
improving quality. As a result of the Asian financial crisis,
interest in the overall international financial system has grown
stronger in Japan. Once a specialty subject, articles on the
international financial problem have been appearing regularly
in magazines and journals.
Economist Mototada Kikkawa has pointed out that the U.S.
dollar’s dominance of the international financial market is the
origin of the problem. No matter how large a deficit the United
States runs with its trading partners, as long as the dollar is the
key currency, the U. S. can finance its economy with dollars
from abroad. The U. S., for example, can easily put pressure on
its trading partners when a trade problem emerges if it simply
“talks down” the dollar. In other words, as long as the dollar is
the key currency of the world’s economy, the United States is
not only free from international balance of payments discipline,
but also enjoys the privilege of placing the risks of exchange
rate fluctuations on its trading partners. Kikkawa argues that
America, despite being the largest debtor nation, leads the
world because of the structure of the financial system.
On the other hand, as a creditor nation Japan has strangely
neglected to develop the yen as an international currency. The
dollar and the pound became recognized as international cur-
rencies when England and America made their appearances
on the world stage. In the 1980s, rather than attempting to
internationalize the yen, Japan worked hard to support the
dollar. Whenever the dollar fell, Japanese authorities encour-
aged greater Japanese investment in the U.S. economy by low-
ering interest rates and putting pressure on banks and life
insurance companies. Rather than expose itself to one-sided
risks in the exchange rate fluctuations, Kikkawa argues, Japan
should strengthen its relationship with Europe to check
America’s conduct in the international monetary system,
while liberalizing its financial markets and promoting the
internationalization of the yen.
Meanwhile, other articles in Japan have argued that the
Asian financial crisis was not due to Asia’s inherent back-
wardness but rather to the extremely sensitive and sometimes
reckless nature of today’s international financial system.
Takatoshi Ito, a leading economist who worked for the Inter-
national Monetary Fund (IMF) and as an advisor to the Thai
Government, has argued that the IMF and America cannot be
depended on to solve the financial crisis in the Asian coun-
tries, which must address the problem together. The Ame-
rican response has been to pressure Asia to undertake a
painful restructuring that has actually made the situation
worse. Meanwhile, the U.S. has taken a softer approach to the
crises in Russia and Brazil and poured in large amounts of
money, which Ito considers a double standard. Moreover,
despite the United States having in actuality controlled finan-
cial aid to Asia through the IMF, the American contribution
to the fund attracted strong opposition in the Congress.
Although only Japan disbursed rescue loans to Asian coun-
tries during this time, President Clinton joined with China
during his recent visit there in criticizing Japan, and the
United States also buried a Japanese proposal for an Asian
Monetary Fund requested by the ASEAN countries. Because
of this double standard, Ito argues, Japan should take the ini-
tiative in creating an Asian Financial Stabilization Fund.
The frustration with the international monetary system led
by America and dominated by the dollar shapes the back-
ground to the above discussion. Masayuki Tadokoro, an inter-
national political scientist (and one of the directors of the CIC
project), points out a brighter side to the Asian currency cri-
sis. He notes that it has led to the strengthening of coopera-
tive networks for solving currency problems between Japan
and other countries in Asia, and has also contributed to the
development of regionalism more generally in Asia. Moreover,
while strongly supporting Japan’s involvement in building
institutions in international finance, Tadokoro also warns of
the dangers of over-politicizing this issue. While Japanese
frustration is high over America’s criticism of and pressure on
Japan’s economic policies, expectations among most Asian
countries that Japan seize the initiative are stronger than ever
before. Caught between America’s pushing and Asia’s pulling,
Japan’s monetary diplomacy could unnecessarily find itself in
a confrontational relationship with the United States. Instead,
Tadokoro argues that Japan should appeal to America in its
own interests to help stabilize the global financial system. ◆
—Masayuki Tadokoro
Sources: Mototada Kikkawa, Mane Haisei [Defeat in a money war],
Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1998.
Takatoshi Ito, “Ajia Kinyu Anteika Kikin no Teisho” [A proposal
for an Asian financial stability fund], Toyo Keizai [The Oriental
Economy], October10, 1998.
Masayuki Tadokoro, “Guroburo Jidai no En to Doru” [The yen
and the dollar in a global age], Asteion, April 1999.
23
 Japanese Economy
The Philosophy of Money
A s Japan’s recession drags on, the country’s economic
commentators appear to have been reduced to a
state of advanced confusion. The same people will
at one point preach laissez-faire as the prescription for the
economy’s ills, and at another point call for intervention in
the market. The lack of consistency is pronounced, but there
is a reason.
According to the textbook interpretation of Keynesian eco-
nomics, over time prices and wages will rise or fall until the
labor market reaches equilibrium. If one focuses on this ele-
ment, it appears necessary to deregulate and refrain from
market intervention so as to increase the elasticity of prices
in the long run. But because of the short-term rigidity of
wages, unemployment appears. This makes it necessary to
intervene in the market with fiscal and monetary policy mea-
sures. The contradiction in policy prescriptions arises from
the difference between short-term and long-term views of
the economy.
Recently, however, some economists have disputed this
interpretation. They assert that the contradictions arise from
a flaw in Keynesian theory itself. After all, Japan’s economic
slowdown over the past ten years can hardly be considered
“short-term,” which is why extraordinary fiscal and financial
measures to stimulate the economy have been taken. The
Keynesians do, of course, have a counterargument. When the
view takes hold that prices will continue to decline in the
future, they say, would-be buyers of real estate and homes
postpone their purchases in hopes of better bargains to come;
this exacerbates the shortfall in aggregate demand and pro-
duces a “deflationary spiral.” According to this Keynesian
view, stabilization policy measures thus become necessary
even over the long term when deflationary expectations have
become established.
But the situation we are in may well be different from what
the Keynesians suggest. People who want to buy real estate
for their own residential use may harbor hopes for deflation
because they want to get the best possible deal on their pur-
chases. But in today’s Japan, personal consumption is lagging
because people are reducing their everyday spending out of a
generalized fear about the future that reflects everything from
job insecurity to uncertainties about an unreliable pension
system. This fear about future uncertainties appears to be
affecting not just asset markets but the entire economy. In
other words, the deflationary spiral has occurred not because
deflationary expectations have become established but be-
cause consumers have become gripped by fear. If this is the
case, even induced inflation will not conquer the recession as
long as the fear persists.
If aggregate supply is running in excess of aggregate
demand, then we are told that we should deregulate so that
prices and wages can quickly shift to produce equilibrium.
But moving to deregulate and require self-responsibility is
likely to produce not equilibrium but an ongoing deflation-
ary spiral. Masaru Kaneko explains this point in his recent
24
work Han keizaigaku [Anti-economics], offering three exam-
ples of how this works in practice. He cites the behavior of
the banker, the corporate executive, and the consumer. The
banker seeks to fulfill personal and institutional responsibil-
ity by avoiding bankruptcy at all costs, which means cutting
back on lending. The result of this behavior in the aggregate
is a credit crunch. The corporate executive seeks to act respon-
sibly by implementing restructuring. But repeated by other
executives, this produces fears that lead to a deflationary spi-
ral on a national level. And the consumer, fearing unemploy-
ment and determined to avoid personal bankruptcy, saves as
much money as possible, which on a national level causes
effective demand to decline. What we see here is the “fallacy
of composition”—that is, behavior that is rational on the mi-
croeconomic level producing something qualitatively differ-
ent at the macro level.
Why does aggregate supply exceed aggregate demand?
Yoshiyasu Ono in his book Fukyo no keizaigaku [The econom-
ics of recession] offers an explanation. According to Ono, the
demand shortfall occurs because people hold on to money
for its own sake. Ordinarily people have money so that they
can buy things, and even if they hold on to it for specula-
tive purposes, eventually they use their profits to purchase
goods. According to this conventional view, the level of the
money supply is proportional to the amount of goods pro-
duced, and, over the long term, aggregate supply and
demand for goods and money will reach equilibrium and
unemployment will be eliminated. But if people hold on to
their money indefinitely, the excess of money supply over
demand will persist.
I believe that the reason people hold on to money during a
recession is fear. In Japan’s case, fear about the future course
of the economy has aggravated the downturn. And why does
fear make people want to hold on to money? That is a ques-
tion that falls into a field we might call “the philosophy of
money,” and it does not lend itself to an easy answer. But as
long as this behavior persists, a deflationary spiral will be at
work attempting to adjust prices to bring supply and demand
into balance.
Terms like “laissez-faire,” “self-responsibility,” and “dereg-
ulation” provided key concepts for understanding the mar-
kets of the nineteenth century, which centered on the real
economy. But the twentieth-century economy that John
Maynard Keynes observed requires a philosophy of money
and cannot be adequately explained with the above concepts.
We should review the century that is now ending with a reex-
amination of the conclusions reached by Keynes. ◆
—Ryuichiro Matsubara
Sources: Ryuichiro Matsubara, “Keinzu saiko” [Reconsideration of
Keynesian economics], Asteion, Spring 1999.
Masaru Kaneko, Han keizaigaku [Anti-economics], Tokyo:
Shinshokan, 1999.
Yoshiyasu Ono, Fukyo no keizaigaku [The economics of recession],
Tokyo: Nihonkeizai Shimbunsha, 1994.
 Japanese Melting Pot
Multiethnic Japan
T he growing size of the foreign population in Japan poses new challenges to the Japanese wel-
fare system, which is based upon the assumption that all children and parents speak Japanese,
share Japanese customs, and eat Japanese food. Setsuko Lee, an associate professor at Tokyo
Women’s Medical University, has edited a book that examines the health and welfare of children with
foreign parents in light of their legal status and access to medical services and education. Professor Lee
worked as a midwife at a hospital in Osaka before studying at
Osaka University and Tokyo University, where she took a doc-
torate in public health.
Japan is usually portrayed as a homogeneous country with
almost no non-Japanese residents, but the reality is now much
different. Today the presence of foreigners is considerable in
parts of Tokyo and other big cities. Traditionally the great
majority of the foreign nationals living in Japan were Koreans,
with a sprinkling of Chinese. But starting in the late 1980s,
newcomers from the Philippines and Brazil as well as the
United States and other Western countries have dramatically
altered the composition of the foreign population in Japan.
With more foreigners living in Tokyo, the number of children
with foreign parents is also increasing dramatically; the
Japanese birth rate, meanwhile, is in steep decline. In Tokyo
and Osaka, more than 7 percent of total marriages performed
in 1996 were international. As a result, 2.7 percent of the
babies born in Japan today have at least one foreigner for a
parent. In Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, the figure is a startling 12.2
percent. Japan is experiencing both the benefits and chal-
lenges of multiethnicity.
One of the trickiest problems is language. Except for Kore-
ans who have lived in Japan for many years, it is still rare for
foreign mothers to speak Japanese, and it is even more unusual
to find Japanese who can speak Tagalog or Portuguese. Local
authorities and health-care providers started tackling these
difficulties by introducing multilingual services, organizing
“mother groups” who speak the same languages, or introduc-
ing translation machines. The Japanese medical services also
face challenges because many of the newcomers are not cov-
ered by medical insurance. Since all Japanese nationals are
covered by some medical in-
surance program, doctors tend
to give treatment without dis-
cussing the costs involved,
which can create trouble in the
case of foreigners. The way that
Japanese doctors handle infor-
mation also tends to lead to
conflict with their Western
patients, who tend to prefer a
more forthright approach.
Grade-school children are
generally better at adopting
the Japanese lifestyle than
their parents. But the relatively
stringent school rules and distinctive customs traditionally
accepted by Japanese parents sometimes confuse foreign par-
ents. For example, female students are usually forbidden to
dye their hair or paint their nails in Japanese schools.
Part of the problem is quite simply that Japanese schools are
not designed to teach students who do not speak the Japanese
language. Starting in the 1970s, however, the Japanese educa-
tion system found itself confronting a new problem: Japanese
children whose fathers had been assigned to jobs abroad were
returning to the homeland with little or no formal instruction
in their native language. Since then, special Japanese language
classes have been established in some schools. Even though
the linguistic problems children with foreign parents face are
much greater, of course, this experience of the 1970s means
that Japanese schools have not been caught entirely unawares
by the multicultural dilemma.
An even more difficult problem is how to keep the Ja-
panese-speaking children of foreigners from losing their
native tongue. Children who speak only Japanese could face
a serious handicap on their return to their native countries.
If they stay in Japan, however, other communications prob-
lems may grow out of the gap between the Japanese-speak-
ing younger generation and their non-Japanese-speaking
parents. Moreover, if initial reports are any indication, these
children can expect to run into a serious identity crisis as
they get older. In a country based on the assumption that
everybody speaks only one language and shares the same
cultural background, children who have foreign parents but
can speak only Japanese are bound to discover something
“non-Japanese” in themselves. At some point, inevitably,
they begin to wonder who they “really” are. Some local
authorities have set up classes
for local students in Spanish
and Portuguese, but this is a
cosmetic effort at best. What
Japan ultimately needs is a
society better equipped to cope
with people of different ethnic
backgrounds. ◆
—MT
Source: Lee Setsuko, ed., Zainichi
gaikokyjin no Boshikenko [Public
health services for foreign mothers
and children], Tokyo: Igaku Shoin,
1998.
25
 Japanese Melting Pot
The Buraku Liberation Movement
T he idea that Japan is an ethnic monolith without
minorities, and therefore without ethnic discrimina-
tion, is of course a myth. The country has a substan-
tial population of resident Koreans, and the large northern
island of Hokkaido is home to an indigenous people known
as the Ainu. But the largest minority subject to discrimina-
tion in Japan is the Burakumin, or Buraku people. (Buraku is
a Japanese word meaning “village” or “hamlet”; min means
“people.”)
According to a 1993 government survey, there were about
1.2 million Buraku people living in
4,442 Buraku communities nation-
wide. These people are not a racial or
ethnic minority, but a caste-like
minority among the ethnic Japanese.
They are generally thought to be
descendants of outcaste populations
from feudal times. Outcastes were
assigned such social functions as
slaughtering animals and executing
criminals, which the general public
perceived as “unclean” acts accord-
ing to Buddhist and Shinto tenets.
The organized movement to liber-
ate the Burakumin started in the first
half of the twentieth century, but it
was only in 1969 that a law was
enacted to eliminate the discrimina-
tion against them. Since then the gov-
ernment has budgeted some ¥13 tril-
lion to improve material conditions
for people in Buraku communities,
and it has worked at including anti-
discrimination education as part of the compulsory-education
curriculum. Also, the Buraku Liberation League has been con-
ducting a vigorous campaign against discrimination. As a
result, while certain forms of social discrimination persist in
the everyday lives of the Burakumin, affecting their marriage
and employment opportunities, for example, their living stan-
dards have clearly improved, and open discrimination against
them has receded.
While recognizing the advances that the antidiscrimina-
tion movement has achieved, Tsutomu Yamashita of the
Buraku Liberation League and Keiichi Fujita, a researcher
specializing in Buraku affairs, have noted some new prob-
lems. Many of the younger generation of Burakumin have a
less clear sense of their Buraku identity; also, with the high
mobility of people in Japan today, many have moved away
from their native communities and refrain from revealing
their Buraku origins to others. This has caused participation
in the movement to weaken.
Another problem is that the movement has come to be seen
by many as overly aggressive, and the idea has taken hold that
it is virtually impossible even to argue with its adherents. This
26
has led to a backlash of sorts arising from the judgment that
the movement is no more than a self-interested lobby of peo-
ple asserting their own victimization as a means of gaining
economic benefits. Yamashita and Fujita believe that the move-
ment has in this way abetted a quiet regeneration of discrimi-
natory sentiment. They also recognize that it has been indif-
ferent to the issues of discrimination against other groups,
such as Koreans and the physically handicapped.
Quoting an American black activist, Yamashita argues that
the Buraku movement needs to free itself from the psychol-
ogy of victimization and turn itself
into a movement to promote a shar-
ing of diverse identities and cultures.
He also calls for a change in the ex-
cessive emphasis on lobbying and
protest activities directed at local
governments, which have perversely
made the movement overdependent
on the government.
Behind this change of thinking lie
some changes that have taken place in
recent years in the approach to
Buraku history. Previously the dis-
crimination against Burakumin was
seen as having originated in the feu-
dal class system consolidated in the
seventeenth century, and the prevail-
ing view blamed its persistence on
the incompleteness of Japan’s nine-
teenth-century modernization pro-
cess, which left the monarchy in
place. Also, scholars influenced by
Marxist thinking attempted to inter-
pret discrimination against Buraku people in terms of class
struggle. But more recently the trend among scholars of
Buraku history has been to insist that the discrimination orig-
inated with ordinary people, not with some special political
force, and that its roots are not feudal but modern, arising out
of the concept of the nation-state. This new current in Buraku
history has produced revelations of cooperation by Buraku
activists in Japan ‘s march to war starting in the 1930s, and it
has also led to the emergence of assertions of Buraku discrim-
ination against other groups, such as women and Koreans.
In short, people involved in the Buraku movement have
come to the realization that discrimination cannot be elimi-
nated simply through the passage of laws or the exercise of
political power. ◆
—MT
Sources: Keiichi Fujita, “Buraku kaiho undo no genzai” [The
Buraku Liberation Movement today], Gendai Shiso, March 1999.
Tsutomu Yamashita, “21 seiki wo mokuzen ni shite fushime o
mukaeta buraku kaiho undo no genjo” [The current state of the
Buraku Liberation Movement, on the eve of the 21st Century],
Gendai Shiso, March 1999.
 Views of Japan
Japan, Made in U.S.A.
T he Japanese public has a good deal of faith in the press
generally and views leading Western publications like
the New York Times with special respect. As a result,
the Tokyo correspondents of foreign papers tend to enjoy
ready access to Japanese information sources, both politicians
and bureaucrats, despite the fact that the correspondents,
with few exceptions, speak very little Japanese. One reason
the Western media hold such sway is that Japanese intellectu-
als have vaguely thought of major American publications as a
model for the free flow of information in a prosperous democ-
ratic society. But a bigger reason for officials’ readiness to talk
to Western journalists is that their publications are read and
quoted all over the world, unlike the Japanese media, which
have virtually no international reach. Even among Japan’s
Asian neighbors, intellectuals get much of their information
about Japan through the American media.
But the New York Times, the flagship of America’s authori-
tative media, transmits a very distorted image of Japan. That is
the central assertion of Japan, Made in U.S.A., a book put
together by a group of eleven Japanese people living in New
York who have found much that is questionable in the paper’s
coverage of their country. The group, which calls itself Zipangu
(which was Marco Polo’s name for Japan), assesses problematic
aspects of specific articles, and bolsters its thesis by including
short essays by and interviews with American and Japanese
scholars and journalists. The book even contains an interview
with Nicholas Kristof, chief of the Tokyo news bureau of the
Times and writer of some of the articles that the group deemed
problematic. Japan, Made in U.S.A. is a bilingual publication
in Japanese and English, and published simultaneously in
Japan and the United States.
The compilers contend that Japan-related coverage in the
New York Times focuses on events and phenomena at the
periphery of Japanese society, such as loveless marriages,
rush-hour subway mashers, and comic books full of depic-
tions of rape. By presenting these isolated cases as the norm,
the authors say, Times journalists exaggerate the eccentricity
and otherness of Japan. The journalists invariably attribute
these phenomena to Japan’s “backwardness,” as exemplified
by feudal tradition, a herd mentality, sexual inequality, and a
bureaucratic mind-set. Japan, Made in U.S.A. clearly demon-
strates the frequency of such articles. One of the contributors
is Charles Burress, an American journalist who decries the
heavy use of war metaphors in Times articles about Japan,
including references to Japanese investment in the United
States as an “invasion.” He says articles often present Japan as
a monolith, which is a caricature far removed from reality, and
often portray Japanese citizens and leaders in condescending
terms. He also notes a lack of real effort to present the Japanese
position in coverage of trade and other issues on which Japan
and the United States have differences.
The portrait of the American press that emerges from these
observations is not a flattering one. Rather than challenge
people’s preconceptions, the American media peddle an image
that appeals to the market by playing up stereotypes. And so
the American picture of Japan as peculiar and backward
remains unchanged. But as noted by Carol Gluck, a scholar
interviewed in this book, the idea that Japan is singularly dif-
ferent holds wide currency even among Japanese journalists
and commentators, and these perceptions on both sides tend
to feed each other.
— MT
◆
Source: Zipangu, ed. Japan, Made in U.S.A., New York: Zipangu,
1998.
Korean-Japanese
Reconciliation?
J apan and South Korea have never been good neighbors
in modern times. Despite the fact that more than fifty
years have passed since colonial rule ended, and that
the two industrial democracies share security, political, and
economic interests in the region, the darkness of history has
continued to sour their relations. Kim Dae Jung, who was
elected President of the Korean republic in December 1997,
is trying to change that. Even the Japanese recognize that he
is taking a more conciliatory approach than his predecessors,
who focused on issues of history and territory (there is a dis-
pute over a small island in the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, as
Koreans call it). Shortly before President Kim’s official visit
to Japan, which left a highly positive impression there, the
Japanese monthly Sekai printed an interview with him in its
October 1998 issue.
Given strong popular Korean sentiment against Japan, Kim
did not fail to comment on the history question. But the tone
of his comments was moderate and constructive. “In coming
to terms with the past, the most important thing to under-
stand is that it is really meaningless for other countries to
demand that Japan do so or tell it how it should do so. It is,
rather, a problem of how the Japanese people themselves and
the Japanese government reflect upon and come to terms with
the past…. The Korean people do not harbor feelings of re-
venge toward Japan. It is incorrect to say that Koreans persist
in bringing up the past. Yet there is a strong fear that because
Japan’s own efforts to come to terms with its past are still lack-
ing, in the future Koreans may be victimized again. Out of this
fear, Korea always feels the need to mention the past to Japan.
In turn, I think, Japan gets tired of hearing the same thing
over and over, and a vicious circle occurs. Because of this
recurring pattern, the Korean people focus only on the past
and do not know enough about some of the positive sides that
Japan has shown in the postwar period, such as fifty years of
successful democracy, the renunciation of war, the Peace
Constitution, as well as its being the largest aid donor to devel-
oping countries.”
What is the reason for Kim’s move toward reconciliation? It
may be his philosophical commitment to democratic values,
which are shared by contemporary Japan and may outweigh
concerns about the past. Instead of portraying the two coun-
tries as aggressor and victim, Kim made clear that both coun-
tries share problems which they should overcome together.
27
 Views of Japan
On democracy he remarked: “Lee Kwan Yu has said that in
Asia, the traditions and fundamental philosophy of democ-
racy do not exist and as such, it is unreasonable to call for
democracy in Asia. I do not think that is true and would argue
in response that there are numerous examples of democratic
thinking and traditions in Asia…. If we had truly applied
democracy to Korea,” he continued, “and not permitted
bribery or collusion between business and politics, and
allowed only internationally competitive enterprises to thrive,
I think Korea’s economy would not be in its present terrible
state.” Kim concluded, “I think it is necessary in Japan and
Korea that the two principles of democracy and a market econ-
omy develop in parallel.”
Another important factor in reconciling the two countries
may be a positive role played by Japan in helping South Korea
overcome the recent economic crisis. With unusual directness
Kim expressed gratitude toward its richer neighbor and,
instead of expressing concern about Japan’s economic ‘impe-
rialism,’ he called for its leadership. “The Japanese govern-
ment and financial groups truly and faithfully cooperated dur-
ing the recent crisis in Korea, and our people and government
thank Japan…. As President of Korea, I hope from the bottom
of my heart that the Japanese economy improves. In Asia,
Japan is the largest economic power, and no one can deny that
Japan leads in the Asian economy. Japan’s economy is essen-
tially strong and I hope that it moves toward stabilization as
soon as possible.”
Are these expressions of goodwill merely diplomatic, or do
they reflect deeper and more meaningful changes in relations
between the two countries? The latter view looks more plausi-
ble when one considers that Kim took several other concrete
measures to change the mood of relations. One was to encour-
age the gradual introduction of Japanese culture into Korea,
including Japanese movies and music, which had been
banned. Moreover, Japan-Korea cultural exchange festivals are
to be held annually until 2002, heralding all sorts of other
large-scale exchanges. “In efforts to become friends,” President
Kim remarked, “exchanges are most fruitful: exchange of writ-
ers, artists, laborers, scholars, and students. I read recently that
of Japanese high school students that travel abroad on class
trips, seventy percent now go to Korea. That type of activity
will add to understanding in both countries.”
—MT
28
The Responsibility
of Intellectuals
I f one had looked at Japan’s leading magazines in the pre-
war period, one would have thought Japan was turning
into a socialist country. The country had no tradition in
the social sciences until the latter half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, so intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century
were enthralled by Marxism’s “scientific” explanations of
poverty and war. As militarism and repression increased, be-
ginning in the 1930s, many Marxists “converted” and coop-
erated in the war effort. But after Japan’s defeat and the war’s
end in 1945, these Marxists and “empty, idealistic pacifists,”
who had contempt for militarism and fascism, came to domi-
nate Japan’s intellectual world.
Inoki Masamichi, who was born in 1914, has criticized both
Marxism and irresponsible pacifism throughout his life. He
studied at Tokyo University before the war, and afterward
moved to Kyoto University, where he would teach some of
Japan’s leading scholars; and he served later as president of
the National Defense Academy, outside Tokyo. Now 85, Inoki
continues to spend his days researching and writing. In a
recent interview, Inoki reflected on some of Japan’s contem-
porary intellectuals.
Japan’s postwar intellectuals, he explained, were unable to
accept any criticism directed against Stalinism or Commu-
nism. (A good example was the outstanding scholar Maru-
yama Masao, whose obituary appeared in Issue No. 1 of the
CIC Newsletter). In Inoki’s view, Japanese progressive intel-
lectuals did not try to understand the true nature of Stalinism
because they were situated in Asia, far from the civil war in
Spain or the uprising in Hungary. And the reason for their
strong attachment to “idealistic pacifism” was the shock that
came with defeat in a reckless and unjustified war, as well as
Japan’s dependence on the United States for its postwar secu-
rity. Moreover, Inoki suggests, because the political culture
which brings concrete policy alternatives into the national
debate did not establish itself in Japanese parliamentary pol-
itics, Japanese intellectuals got into the habit of repeating
beautiful but empty ideals, without a sense of political
◆ responsibility.
On the other hand, Inoki was also critical of the attempts
by ultra-conservative politicians like prime ministers Kishi
Nobusuke and Hatoyama Ichiro to amend the so-called Peace
Constitution created by the American occupation forces in
the postwar era. (The Peace Constitution, which has a clause
that, taken literally, forbids Japan from possessing any arma-
ments, has become a sacred pillar of “idealistic pacifists.”)
Now that the remnants of militarism have all but disappeared,
Inoki warns that Japan cannot expect to earn the respect of
international society if it does not play a responsible role in
world affairs. ◆
— MT
Source: Masamichi Inoki, “Watashi ga Tatakatta Kusoteki-Heiwa
Shugisha Tachi” [The idealistic pacifists with whom I struggled],
This Is Yomiuri, March 1999.
 Word and Image in Japan
In the Beginning Was
the Word…
J apanese art is fascinated with the word. Painted folding
screens, scroll paintings, ukiyo-e prints, gold and silver
lacquerwork, and other genres often incorporate kanji
ideograms and/or kana phonetic characters as a key part of the
composition. In addition to explicating the theme of the pic-
ture or suggesting the text inspiring it, these characters serve
as decorative motifs and are integral to the overall composition.
The combination of word and image has generated master-
pieces of European art as well, as seen in medieval books of
hours and other illuminated manuscripts. But it takes much
more intricate and diverse forms in Japanese art, such as e-
moji (also known as moji-e), which are pictures made up
largely of kanji and/or kana script, and paintings that blend
words and images. These forms were applied to an extremely
wide range of genres: religious art, monogatari-e (pictorial ren-
ditions of famous tales), furniture decoration, popular wood-
block prints, and so on.
There are three reasons for this love of blending word and
image in Japanese art. First, we can cite the complex Japanese
writing system, which combines kanji and kana. Because kanji
are stylized hieroglyphs or combinations thereof, they are
complex and varied in form and are close to pictographs. This,
too, is why the art of calligraphy developed to such an extent
in both China and Japan. Kana, meanwhile, are derived from
the cursive form of kanji (hiragana) or parts of block-style
kanji (katakana). The angular kanji and katakana and cursive
hiragana add piquancy to Japan’s pictorial art.
Second, as indicated by the major place in the tradition of
Japanese art of the widely loved genre of monogatari-e, litera-
ture and art have enjoyed an especially close relationship in
Japan. Waka (thirty-one-syllable poems divided into lines of
5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables) are also closely bound up with paint-
ing, witness the many uta-e (literally, “poem-pictures”) and
byobu-e (folding screen paintings) combining poems and pic-
tures. In the Heian period (794–1185) the court nobility
enjoyed the elegant artistic pastime of exchanging poems,
often accompanied by paintings, as a form of both social inter-
course and the communication of sentiments.
Of course, to appreciate these paintings the recipient had to
have the knowledge to understand their textual background.
Just as knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics was the
cultural legacy of cultivated Europeans, knowledge of such
famous tales as the Genji monogatari [Tale of Genji], the waka
in the imperial poetry anthologies, and the Buddhist scrip-
tures was the cultural currency in Japan. Thus, a brief phrase
from a poem brushed on a painting was enough to evoke the
entire poem and enhanced appreciation of the painting. Over
time, this kind of textual knowledge also spread among the
common people.
Third is the spirit of play so prominent in Japanese litera-
ture and art. This is epitomized by the riddling hanji-e, or
rebus pictures, and ashide-e, depictions of nature made up
largely of characters (a kind of moji-e.)
Interestingly, the Japanese tradition of cleverly combining
word and image lives on today in poster art. Poster art is also
a good example of the confluence of Japanese and European
culture. The poster originated in fin-de-siècle Paris as an atten-
tion-getting medium conveying essential information amid
the city’s bustle. This was achieved through bold composi-
tion, bright colors, caricature, and imaginative typography —
all elements admired by European artists in the Japanese art
that was so fashionable at the time, the heyday of japonisme.
(The great innovator of poster art Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
like his older contemporary Vincent van Gogh, was an afi-
cionado of Japanese art.)
When poster art was introduced to Japan, then, it was hardly
surprising that Japanese artists not only saw the genre as epito-
mizing European modernity but also instinctively felt its affin-
ity with their own tradition. The word contributed as much to
a poster’s compositional impact as color and form. And the play-
ful sophistication of the Japanese has cultivated the harmonious
interplay of word and image as expressive elements for cen-
turies. This is why poster art flourishes in Japan today. ◆
—Kiyokazu Washida
Source: Shuji Takashina, “Dezain no seiki: Infomeshon ato no deji-
taru to anarogu” [The century of design: Digital and analog in infor-
mation art], Tokyo: Suntory Museum Tenpozan, 1998.
The Kanji Cultural Sphere
F or many centuries a so-called “kanji cultural sphere,”
existed in East Asia, centered in China. It comprised
groups of people who were able to communicate
through the medium of a specific script—Chinese ideograms,
known as kanji in Japanese—and a specific syntactical struc-
ture. This enabled them to surmount the barriers of nation
and dynasty and differences in spoken language. As long as
there were people who had a knowledge of kanji and could
compose Chinese prose (kanbun) and verse (kanshi), there was
almost no need for translation. Europe, too, was once a cul-
tural sphere defined by the shared use of Latin, but the kanji
sphere was vastly greater in historical duration and geograph-
ical extent. Moreover, whereas Latin is now a dead language
(except in the Vatican), kanji are still used on an everyday
basis by large numbers of people.
The development of a cultural sphere defined by kanji, and
its effective functioning over a long stretch of time, had an
incalculable effect on the formation and development of an
international community in Asia. The reason peoples like the
Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese, whose languages were
completely different from Chinese, could use the writing sys-
tem of the Han Chinese was that kanji are ideograms. Thus
they could be used for their semantic value alone, regardless
of their original phonetic value.
The erstwhile bond of the kanji cultural sphere no longer
exists in East Asia, however. Only the Chinese and Japanese
now use kanji as their main medium of written language. The
reason is that after World War II kanbun stopped being taught
in most East Asian countries, and thus their people ceased to
share this cultural heritage. China, Japan, and Korea under-
29
 Word and Image in Japan
took various language and script reforms. Vocabulary
changed, and abbreviated forms of characters were adopted,
changing the very form of kanji. All this made cross-cultural
communication via kanji difficult.
With the advent of the computer, however, things took
another major turn. Today the Japanese use computers to
write their own language, which mixes kanji and the pho-
netic characters known as kana. It has also become common-
place for people in China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea,
Vietnam, and ethnic Chinese communities in the United
States to use computers to write in kanji. Meanwhile, differ-
ent countries and regions have created their own kanji codes.
As a result, Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and South
Korea have different codes for the same kanji. There is an
urgent need to rectify the problem of incompatible codes in
this age of instantaneous international information exchange
via the Internet.
The kanji cultural sphere steadily dismantled in the post-
war period is about to be resurrected on a vastly wider scale
in the age of electronic media. There is a certain irony in the
revival of a traditional Eastern culture sphere by means of
state-of-the-art technology first developed in the West. Be that
as it may, with closer regional interchange via kanji once more
becoming possible, the existence of this shared script will
undoubtedly contribute in no small measure to Asia’s future
development and stability. ◆ story rather than the movements, was emphasized. In this
—Kiyokazu Washida
Source: Tetsuji Atsuji, “Kanji bunkaken no kobo” [The rise and
fall of the Kanji cultural sphere], InterCommunication, Winter 1999.
Plea for the New Japonisme
A sked what anime is, a knowledgeable foreigner will
almost invariably refer to Japanese animation—
which reflects the worldwide reputation this Jap-
anese art form enjoys. Most good video shops in Europe and
North America have a section devoted to Japanese animation
videos. More than 65 percent of the animation works in the
world are Japanese-made (as are an astonishing 90 percent
of video games). It’s not just volume—the work itself is
highly regarded.
Within Japan, however, animation has been looked at as no
more than a type of subculture, and it would be hard to say
that anime has necessarily received the credit that it deserves.
In examining the topics recently discussed in some of the
more popular animation, many titles reflect the undertaking
of challenging and large themes, like problems between soci-
ety, and technology, and the environment. For example, we
see this trend in Kaze no Tani no Naushika [Nausicaa of the
Valley of the Wind], which looks at the coexistence of sav-
agery and mercy in nature; in Akira, about the revelations of
life in the city of Tokyo; a look at the conflict of Japan’s infor-
mation society in this high-tech country (Patolabor series);
as well as an examination of the dark side of children’s hearts
(Neon Genesis Evangelion).
In other words, the form of Japanese media that people the
world over are in most contact with and that is most highly
30
praised, is not drama or movies, nor documentaries or books,
but animation. Because the writer’s own personality is
strongly reflected in the contents, anime can be said to be the
software that Japan can be most proud of.
This is not the first time that a subculture in Japan, which
has not received praise in its own country, was recognized
and highly valued abroad. In the Edo Era, ukiyo-e was looked
upon as artwork of the masses done on what seemed to be
wrapping paper. However, when japonisme reached abroad,
ukiyo-e became one of the major influences on the formation
of the French Impressionists. In learning the methods of
ukiyo-e, Western art expanded the scope of expression, find-
ing a new form of expression.
In this sense, animation and comics can be said to represent
the modern japonisme. What is really interesting is that just
in the same way that as ukiyo-e was able to respond to the sit-
uation in which as it was being seen as a dying form of art in
Japan it was also being praised in the West, so too in anima-
tion do we see the same trends. The reasons for this trend are
as follows.
The reason that the animation industry in Japan grew is
because it chose a path different from that of Walt Disney. In
order to reduce both production costs and time, techniques
were used to reduce the characters’ movements.
In the era of low budgets, this technique, the flow of the
way, expressions were deeper than in the family-type car-
toons of Disney. Moreover, because Japan’s broadcast rules
were looser than those in America regarding references to
and displays of sex and violence, the target age of its viewers
was increased and in turn this steadily created more demand
for anime.
In this way the gold rush for animation began. Countries
like Korea, China, India, and Canada are actively seeking to
develop skilled people and expand the technology of anima-
tion by establishing courses at universities and national insti-
tutes of research and high education in the hope that they
can drive a wedge in Japan’s near-domination of the indus-
try. Japan, on the other hand, due to a lack of investment,
has gotten off to a late start in the technology revolution,
specifically the introduction of digitalization. In one other
point Japan is also seriously lagging—the development of
qualified personnel. In Japan, for example, no universities
for the development of such people exist, nor does Japan
even hold international animation events where people from
abroad can meet with their Japanese counterparts to ex-
change information. In order to break this worsening trend,
it may become necessary to use public funds to give oppor-
tunities to re-train animators as well as to pay for tax-breaks
for small, new production companies which are actively try-
ing to digitalize. In any case, if trends continue as they are,
the culture of Japanese anime will follow the same path that
ukiyo-e did—the road to extinction. ◆
—KW
Source: Hamano Yasuki, “Nihon Kokokuron” [A Plea on Behalf of
the New Japonisme], Chuo Koron, April 1999.
 Reports from Europe

German Identity and the “Forgotten” Germans

Two connected stories, the demographer’s of the changing facts and perceptions of German migration movements, and the histo-
rian’s of identity formation over German generations intertwine in an article by the demographer Rainer Münz and the historian
Rainer Ohliger. If their thesis is correct, that over the last fifty years of German history a waning victimization myth gave way to a
very different set of German identity constructs, then those new forms of identity differ significantly from those of other countries,
particularly in the wealthy, liberal West. Or so claims Ian Buruma in “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood” in the New York Review
of Books (April 8, 1999), in which he deplores the increasing numbers of cultural, ethnic, religious, or national communities who
base their communal identities “almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood” as traditional distinctions
between communities “are becoming fuzzier all the time.” A half-century of secular, democratic, progressive change and globaliza-
tion have led to a “disenchanted world of broken-down ideologies, religions, and national and cultural boundaries.” For some this has
meant increasing emancipation, for others a “loss of the rich, old kitchen comforts of ethnicity.” In an increasingly Americanized
world, almost any community can view itself as a minority. Whereas “memories, fictionalized or real, of shared victimhood” shaped
so much of nineteenth-century nationalism, what is new today “is the extent to which so many minorities have come to define them-
selves above all as historical victims. ” Identification with past trauma and suffering becomes one of the last tags of communal iden-
tity, a false shortcut to historical roots, a pseudoreligion, an irrational, neo-Romantic union of kitsch and death. What Buruma’s,
Münz’s and Ohliger’s cases all stress, however, is generational difference, an awareness of the long silence in which real survivors
contain their trauma or guilt, and attention to migrants, minorities, and processes of assimilation and integration.

S ocieties, according to Münz and Ohliger, live on histor-

ical constructs, collective memories and myths. To some
extent these adapt themselves to changing circum-
stances. At its founding in 1871, the German empire excluded
a large number of Germans living in Austria-Hungary and
Russia. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles created a new political
geography with large German-speaking minorities in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Belgium, France, and
Italy, and a migration movement of 1.3 million people. In 1937,
around 8.5 million Germans were living in countries east or
southeast of Germany and Austria. Two million Germans had
to leave their traditional settlements during World War II.
Another 11 to 12 million Germans migrated to Germany in the
first four years after the war. In 1950 roughly 3.5 million
Germans were still living outside Germany in Eastern Europe.
Within Germany every sixth German in the German Federal
Republic and every fifth German in the German Democratic
Republic was a refugee. During the forty-year period before
1989 the huge population movements of the past almost ebbed
away. After 1988 the tide rose, again bringing another 2.4 mil-
lion German migrants to Germany. But in 1997 only every
twenty-fifth German citizen was a German migrant.
Refugees, expellees, and emigrants after the war—as well
as the 3.8 million Germans who moved from East Germany to
West Germany before the building of the Berlin Wall in
1961—were not exactly welcomed upon arrival but were inte-
grated very quickly, the success story of rebuilding Germany
covering up social tensions and distribution struggles. The
fate of the refugees from the East was seen as part of the com-
mon destiny of Germany. The idea of victimhood attached to
German minorities in the East had in the past even provided a
pretext for international conflicts and war. Now Germans—
refugees and non-refugees—saw themselves as victims of the
war without asking awkward questions about causality and
guilt. Helping refugees was just one element in the common
task of rebuilding Germany.
This view determined the discourse about refugees and the
conditions under which they had to cope with new circum-
stances. Accordingly, everyone of German descent was given
the same legal rights and had a claim to German citizenship
and to the solidarity and support of those who were better off.
In the 1950s German refugees formed special-interest groups
within the major political parties and their own associations
to advance their interests, cultivate their traditions, and cope
with the loss of their milieux de mémoire. Their presence influ-
enced housing programs and town development. They had
streets named after the regions they came from. Four to five
hundred memorials went up to commemorate their flight and
expulsion. State-funded cultural centers catered to their cul-
tural needs, and large state-funded historical research projects
documented their specific fate. There even was a federal min-
istry for refugees until it no longer fit into the Federal Repub-
lic’s new foreign policy in the late sixties and early seventies.
By the late eighties the fate of German refugees had almost
faded from public discourse and remembrance in the Federal
Republic, while in the former German Democratic Republic
they had always been a taboo.
After 1989, German minorities in Eastern Europe again
began to migrate in large numbers to Germany. Their legal sta-
tus was still based on laws from the 1950s. But the material
aid they received was now being reduced while other restric-
tive measures tried to curb this new influx. Their rising num-
bers led to a controversy about ethnically privileged migra-
tion and the limits of national solidarity which called into
doubt their claims to German citizenship and solidarity based
on descent. Their decision to emigrate—whatever possible
discrimination they faced in the countries they came from—
was increasingly viewed not as the result of shared victimiza-
tion, but as a more voluntaristic step comparable to that of
other migrant labor.
The victimization and rebuilding myth of the fifties had
been the first of three possible alternative reconstruction of a
national identity. German migrants had been one of the sub-
jects as well as one of the objects of its construction. The con-

31
 Reports from Europe
cept of a nation of victims, not actors or offenders (the German
word Täter covers both translations), had originally allowed
all Germans, migrants as well as others, to push supposed out-
ward ascription of the role of offender into the background
and to concentrate on the collective memory and traumas of
misery, deprivation, and loss. The GDR had chosen the sec-
ond alternative, antifascism without self-reflection. Seeing the
new socialist state as an inheritor and offspring of the tradi-
tions of resistance to National Socialism, it incorporated in its
identity and accepted cultural heritage only those selected
elements of the national past which it regarded as progressive.
The construction of the third alternative, a more critical,
less selective, and self-reflective look at the national past, only
set in during the sixties and seventies. As the images of war,
destruction, and refugees began to recede first from reality
and then from memory, the victimization myth no longer
made sense and was gradually replaced by an actor’s myth
connected with three other central themes of the German past
and present which increasingly became main sources of iden-
tity building and national memory.
According to Münz and Ohliger, one of these three central
topics has been the German economy. Over the past fifty years
Germans constructed for their “country of poets and thinkers”
a new economic identity around their trust in the strength of
their new export-oriented economy symbolized in the DM cur-
rency. In the nineties this has taken the form of seeing Ger-
many as paymaster and motor of the European Union.
Secondly, the role of the foreigner, in contradistinction to
whom a German national identity has been constructed, has
changed. The construction of France as the traditional enemy
of Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
had been replaced by the anti-bolshevism and anti-Semitism
of the Nazis, and then by the anti-communism of the West,
and the anti-capitalism and anti-fascism of the GDR. Since
1989 there has been a vacuum here. There are signs that it may
be filled either by the construction of a new enemy around
Islam and foreign, especially Turkish, migrants in Germany,
32
or by a counter-tendency viewing all policies of ethnical
cleansing as the enemy while pleading for the granting of
German citizenship to everyone living in Germany continu-
ously, irrespective of descent.
The third central topic in the construction of a German
identity and a national past has been the historical place of
the Holocaust in German history. In the last twenty years it
has become the object of intensified debates. Two genera-
tions of Germans coming of age in the sixties and nineties
have broken the silence of the fifties by questioning their
parents and grandparents about the Holocaust. To them the
Shoah appears as more strange and foreign and is therefore
all the more suitable for seeing themselves by contrast to it
as completely different Germans. They have engraved the
Holocaust into the predominant German image of history
and defined it and the steps leading to it as something every
civilized state has to prevent.
As the numbers and public perception of German emigrants
from the East have changed, these three elements of identity
construction have gradually replaced the victimization myth
which in the 1990s did not seem to have much to offer to a
Germany preoccupied with the themes of unification, the
transition from the Bonn to the Berlin republic, and the unem-
ployment problem. The refugee organizations have largely lost
their political influence. The integration of refugees and
migrants has not resulted in increased appeals for repeated
public recognition of their past traumas. On the contrary,
their living memory has almost become a private affair, ex-
pressed through increased tourism to their former living habi-
tats. According to Münz and Ohliger, the revival or attempted
instrumentalizations of past myths remains, however, a slight
possibility. ◆
—MB
Source: Rainer Münz and Rainer Ohliger, “Vergessene Deutsche—
Erinnerte Deutsche: Flüchtlinge, Vertriebene, Aussiedler” [Forgotten
Germans—Remembered Germans: Refugees, Expellees, and Emi-
grants], Transit, Autumn 1999.
 Reports from Europe
The New Right in Jacket and Tie
W hen the leader of the French National Front (FN),
Jean-Marie Le Pen, roughed up a political oppo-
nent in a local election campaign last August, few
realized that the FN founder would end up sundering his own
party. This, however, has been precisely the dramatic result.
For in a ruling upheld in a French appeals court last Novem-
ber, Le Pen’s antics were deemed criminal assault; the FN
founder barred, as a consequence, from holding public office
for a year. With the June, 1999 elections to the European
Parliament fast approaching, Le Pen faced a critical decision.
Who would head, in his absence, the FN’s electoral list in the
upcoming campaign? Bypassing leading Front officials in
favor of his wife “Jany” (inexperienced, vaguely glamorous,
but by her own admission, completely uninterested in poli-
tics), Le Pen set off a furor amongst FN militants, who in
January convened an emergency party congress in response.
Openly challenging Le Pen’s leadership, they elected FN
General Delegate, Bruno Mégret, their new head. Suddenly,
France was engaged in a two-Front war.
With the support of much of the party bureaucracy, half the
1,700-member internal security force and even one of Le Pen’s
own daughters, Mégret’s secession is more than simply a palace
coup. Rather, his challenge marks the eruption of a strategic
dispute over the nature—and future—of the French right that
has smoldered in and around the party for some time.
Central to the struggle are competing visions of the Front’s
place in the political constellation of France. At 49, over 20
years Le Pen’s junior, Mégret came of age, intellectually, in the
wake of 1968, and was formed in the current of thought
known broadly as the “New Right.” The New Right set out in
the 1970s to re-think and re-energize conservative ideological
positions mainly through two organizations that have served
the FN, effectively, though not formally, as policy think tanks:
GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisa-
tion Européenne) and the Club de l’Horloge. Deeply impressed
by the Left’s intellectual sophistication, and by its ability to
insert radical concepts into the mainstream of public debate,
Mégret and others fashioned in response what they termed a
“Gramscism of the Right,” a reference to the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci’s belief that concrete political power is al-
ways won first in the realm of ideas. Just as the New Left had
effectively inverted the traditional Marxian hierarchy, mak-
ing intellectual innovation the motor of material change, the
New Right would similarly abandon discredited means for
novel methods, replacing brown shirts and street fights with
well-cut suits, administrative expertise, and carefully crafted
op-ed pieces. By winning what Mégret calls the “vocabulary
battle,” the semantic struggle to define the terms of estab-
lished political discourse, the New Right would conquer the
minds—and then the hearts—of the French people.
Closely associated with this notion is the conviction that the
Right must offer a presentable face to the outside world, one
shorn of Nazi symbolism and the stubble of Vichy. It is reveal-
ing in this regard that both Mégret and his closest FN allies,
Club de l’Horloge founders Yvan Blot and Jean-Yves Gallou, all
first sought to carry out this battle from within the mainstream
Right. A product of the prestigious engineering school Ponts-
et-Chaussées, and the University of California, Berkeley, Mé-
gret was actually a member of the Gaullist party’s (RPR) cen-
tral committee from 1979 to 1981. Blot, for his part, is a
graduate of the élite National School of Administration (ENA),
and a former protégé of French president Jacques Chirac, while
Gallou was active in the more centrist UDF party. Ultimately
frustrated by the constraints of the established conservative
parties, these so-called “moderns” entered the FN in the mid-
1980s. And though in terms of intellectual formation and polit-
ical background markedly different from the party Old Guard,
the moderns nonetheless provided Le Pen with desperately
needed ideological vitality and technical sophistication.
For over a decade this fusion of old and new has been mutu-
ally beneficial and extremely effective. Rapidly assuming
positions of responsibility within the party, the moderns took
hold of the FN’s various ideological strands and knit them
together into a coherent whole. At the same time, they erected
a formidable apparatus of business organizations, youth
groups, think tanks, and other associational structures
designed to insinuate Front ideas into the heart of civil soci-
ety. Mégret’s role has been crucial in this task, and indeed it
was largely his early recognition that the demise of Marxism
would demand an intellectual reconfiguration of the Right, as
well as of the Left, that provided the Front’s main ideological
impetus of the 1990s. As he has emphasized in all three of his
most recent theoretical works, L’Alternative nationale (1996),
La Troisième voie [The third way] (1997), and La Nouvelle
Europe (1998): “The opposition that once prevailed between
capitalism and communism, between liberalism and socialism,
has completely expired with the facts. The true cleavage today
is the one that separates the supporters of the national ideal
from those of globalism.” Globalism (mondialisme)—here was
a protean concept, one that could be slotted smoothly into the
stealth arsenal of the New Right’s vocabulary battle. For the
hydra of mondialisme stands for many things: the influx of
immigrants who threaten French sanctity and security; the
loss of national sovereignty to supra-national organizations
such as the UN and the EU; the crushing competition of a
global market that unfairly favors the United States; and the
demise of French culture before the horrible trinity of
“Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Walt Disney.” Juxtaposed
with the need to preserve the purity and strength of the
French nation, mondialisme has thus become a multivalent—
and monolithic—concept within the FN lexicon.
By presenting a moderate face to the outside world, chang-
ing the terms of public discourse, and pursuing strategic
coalitions with other parties, the FN can become a national
political player, Mégret argues. For Le Pen and the FN old
guard, however, such a turn in unacceptable. They pride
themselves on their incorruptibility and their staunch refusal
to cooperate with the political mainstream. Conditioned in the
33
 Reports from Europe
1950s and 1960s, when a lightning putsch was more conceiv-
able than slow electoral ascendance, they have watched the
moderns’ rise with circumspection, enjoying the FN’s success,
but mindful of the dangers the moderns pose to the party’s
integrity. For Mégret, such foot-dragging, coupled with Le
Pen’s mercurial propensity to alienate potential supporters
with senseless sallies (Holocaust denial, gratuitous insults)
have kept the party down too long.
Is the FN indivisibly linked to Le Pen, or will the movement
transcend the man? The outcome, of course, remains to be seen.
If Le Pen’s history and charisma are assets that his diminutive
rival lacks, Mégret’s youth, presentability, and political acumen
cannot be discounted. For the time being, the conventional wis-
dom in France is that open dissent within the FN is a good
thing. But until the country comes to terms with the social con-
ditions that have allowed the Front to flourish, it is probably
well to remember that many Germans thought much the same
thing at the time of the Night of the Long Knives. ◆ analogies are anachronistic and unhelpful. They represent
—Darrin McMahon
Sources: Bruno Mégret, La Flamme: les voies de la renaissance [The
flame: the paths of rebirth], Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1990.
Miscellany
Sentimental Education in Senegal
T he Senegalese newspaper Sud Quotidien reports
that Western romance forms the staple reading of
young girls in that part of Africa. Dakar abounds
in used-book stands piled with Harlequin Romances and
their French-language equivalents, photo-novellas in
series called Kiss, Color, Lucky or Riviera, and magazines
like Paris Match and Nous Deux. Fulfilling girls’ need for
escape, such reading, according to some of its consumers
(who often claim to outgrow it), puts girls on another
wave-length from Senegalese boys, and lets them “forget
the dull reality of daily existence.” In the view of one
author, romance writing provides ”answers, however
stereotypical, to the questions young women pose about
the major events of existence, answers school and educa-
tion don’t provide.”
Yet does this high-gloss sentimental education, for all its
apparent harmlessness, also pose a threat? Psychologist
Serigne Mor Mbaye thinks so, underscoring the “absence
of identification” with dominant values such escapism
implies. While acknowledging the “pathetic banality” of
this literature, he links girls’ “interiorization and exag-
gerated, unconscious imitation of a number of different
feelings to the impressive rise” in the number of teenage
girls’ suicides in Senegal—a more than 60 percent increase
over the last decade.
—DJ
Source: Alioune Badara Dieye, “Education sentimentale sur
papier glacé” [Sentimental education on glossy paper], Sud
Quotidien (Dakar), in Courrier International, Dec. 10-16, 1998.
34
The Rhetoric of Social
Cohesion
W hat keeps societies from falling apart? What pre-
serves their inner unity? These are questions that
increasingly preoccupy German politicians. Jo-
hannes Rau, who was just voted in as president of the Federal
Republic of Germany, recently compared society to a house
whose mortar is gradually disappearing; Wolfgang Schäuble,
the opposition leader, speaks of the “lining” of society, or of
the “habits of the heart.” But they all share the assumption
that there is a resource that makes society cohere, and that the
resource is being depleted. They express an anxiety that the
dissolution of shared values and outlooks threatens public
discourse about the common good.
According to Christian Geyer, such exaggerated organic
misconceptions about how modern, functionally differenti-
ated societies operate, without the need for a center or head.
The tension created among different social spheres—politics,
economics, science, art—does not dissolve society, in Geyer’s
view, but rather stabilizes it. The division of labor is not only
an economically fruitful principle, but a cultural one too.
Disintegration is both the norm and the hidden resource of
modern society.
Communitarians, according to Geyer, place their trust in
preconceived conceptions of social wholeness instead of rec-
ognizing the steering and coordinating potential of decentral-
ized bourgeois life. The tendency of orthodox communitari-
ans like Alasdair MacIntyre to regard differences of opinion
as polarizing society have borne political fruit in Johannes
Rau’s appeal to revitalize associations like political parties,
churches, and sport clubs.
Geyer illustrates the risks of this “rhetoric of social cohe-
sion” by comparing it to the logical of demographers. Popu-
lation studies today have come to the ‘scientific’ conclusion
that the liberal state would be well advised to resist multicul-
turalism on the grounds that it will threaten integration. And
if one defines the mortar of society ethnically, it follows that a
high birthrate is necessary to keep society together. Demo-
graphers today tell us that if Germans do not develop a sense
of the importance of reproduction, the German population
will shrink, and the dream of a common identity will evapo-
rate. Sexual intercourse for reasons of state? Geyer quotes the
demographer Herwig Birg, who recently argued that if we do
not attack the demographic problem, in fifty years time our
descendants will look back in horror at us, just as we look in
horror at earlier events in this century. Such a comparison is
obscene, according to Geyer, but not surprising. Anything is
possible once the question of social cohesion becomes primary
in people’s minds. ◆
—MB
Source: Christian Geyer, “Wohin wir driften: Brav, nicht harmlos:
Die Rhetorik des sozialen Zusammenhalts” [Where we are drifting
to: Well behaved, not harmless: The rhetoric of social cohesion],
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 8, 1999.
 Reports from Europe
Tintinitis
When a nation’s parliament devotes a day to determining the
politics of a comic-book hero, some clarification is called for—
especially for Americans, most of whom grow up without Tintin
albums. The February 3 debate of five deputies of France’s
National Assembly who are also members of the Club des par-
lementaires tintinophiles was televised throughout Europe but
also in Canada and Australia (one wonders if it aired in Russia,
since Tintin’s “rehabilitation” by the French Communist Party
for his counterrevolutionary behavior “in the land of the Soviets”
in 1929). Seventy years after the
amiable boy-reporter set out on
adventures that would pit him
against Soviet communism, U.S.
free-market excesses, African
slave-trading, Latin American
dictatorship, Asian drug traffic,
and much more, French politicians
across the political spectrum
claimed Tintin for their own—
Gaullist or centrist, “the perfect
synthesis of the current Left coali-
tion”—though ultimately found
him to stand “to the right of the
Left and the left of the Right.”
A strange concern to show a boy
not French at all but Belgian-born,
as his early adventures in the
Congo attest. Hugely popular in
his homeland, he caught on in
France particularly during the Oc- from Hergé’s Les Aventures de Tintin au Pays des Soviets, (Casterman) Hergé’s sensibilities are quite far
cupation, when French paper rationing allowed the Belgian dis-
tributor of his creator “Hergé” to profit from sudden lack of com-
petition. Indeed it is Hergé’s conduct in the war years, as revealed
in recent biographies—his alleged Nazi sympathies and collabo-
rationism, his anti-Semitic gags run in his far-Right newspaper
strip but suppressed in later book versions—that first called into
question the political correctness of a character who is the first
hero of many millions of children (or boys, at least). Since the
French parliament examined the political record of Tintin him-
self and not his maker, we asked our friend Rémi Brague to elu-
cidate l’affaire Tintin through his lifelong familiarity with the
books themselves.
I n France, an entire postwar generation of children learned to
read through Tintin comic books. We all knew the heroes of
these albums: Tintin himself, a round-faced, blond-tufted
teenage boy, inseparable from his dog Milou; Captain Haddock,
the cranky sailor with a heart of gold, aficionado of exotic epi-
thets; Professor Tournesol (“Sunflower”), the quintessential
absent-minded professor; Dupont and Dupond, two sleuths as
alike in appearance as they are in obtuseness. To say nothing of
scores of other true-to-life minor characters.
More than teach us to read, though, Tintin taught us to
see the world. I sense a definite tendency in myself to view
the world as one big Tintin album, less successful than the
real ones, to be sure, but like them, colorful, nuanced, and
full of interesting characters good and bad. Nor, I fear, am I
alone in this, since the twenty-odd albums that make up the
Tintin series have been translated into some forty languages
and dialects.
The central hero first appeared exactly seventy years ago,
to no great acclaim—in a badly drawn, badly narrated album.
He would surely have been quickly forgotten if the quality of
the drawing and of the plots had
not improved almost miracu-
lously, reaching a pinnacle in the
work of the 1950s and ‘60s.
And while the immense talent
of Tintin’s creator, the Belgian
draftsman Georges Rémi, who
signed himself Hergé, has never
been in doubt, his personality is
regularly called into question. It’s
been dissected by sociologists and
mined by psychoanalysts, who’ve
put both him and his characters
on the couch. (Thus Captain Had-
dock’s becoming the owner of a
castle has been seen as compensa-
tion for the author’s frustration
over his illegitimate birth.)
Certain historians (mainly ama-
teurs ) have also pointed out that
from contemporary: in Tintin au Congo, the second album, the
blacks of what was then a Belgian colony are presented with a
paternalism one can at best smile at: nice folk, of course—his-
tory’s bad guys are the whites—but naïve and gullible. Other
critics have noted that, during the German occupation, Hergé
wasn’t quite as brave as we know we would have been.
These attacks have only increased with the republication of
Hergé’s very first Tintin album on the occasion on the hero’s
seventieth anniversary. Criticism would be confined to its
still-rudimentary technique if the story didn’t concern
Tintin’s adventures in the Land of Soviets [Tintin au pays des
soviets], which was first published in 1929. Its portrayal of
the misery and oppression created by the Leninist regime
couldn’t be less subtle, nor could its unmasking of that
regime’s propaganda. In France, of course, a good many “intel-
lectuals” bent over backwards for the Communist Party well
into the late 1970s or, at the very least, aligned themselves
with the USSR’s “globally positive” vision. Anti-Communists
were, in the lovely words of Jean-Paul Sartre, mere “dogs.”
Even today, to cover over your silence for the murder of tens
of millions of people, you need only sneer at a caricatured
Hergé, who at least wasn’t trying to excuse the inexcusable,
but to denounce it, albeit clumsily.
It’s also been remarked that, in a somewhat later album,
35
 Reports from Europe
Hergé was hard on Japan for its occupation of China, and laid
the facts out in a particularly harsh light: an intervention jus-
tified by a faked coup. Unmasking its underlying ideology, he
shows its “civilizing mission” to be a cover-up for sordid inter-
ests, the control of the opium traffic.
To the charges leveled against Hergé, let me, however, add
an observation that’s rarely been made, though it’s incredibly
obvious. I’m referring to the album Tintin en Amérique. In it,
we glimpse a society in which a policeman winks at a dis-
guised gangster who holds a smoking gun in one hand and a
wad of dollar bills in the other. At the height of Prohibition
the sheriff collapses dead-drunk so that he can’t rescue Tintin,
who’s about to be lynched. Workers in a jam factory go on
strike because the management has decided to lower the price
of the dead rats they buy to make “hare pâté.” We see Indians
being evicted by the army from their reservation, where oil’s
just been discovered. A low-angle shot shows a papoose being
whisked off by his mother who, with a bundle on her shoul-
der, is being chased down by a bayonet-wielding soldier. The
child, in tears, drags a teddy bear that could have come
straight out of some riveting scene in The Third Man.
The point is clear by now: I solemnly accuse Hergé of anti-
Americanism. But anti-Communism? Nonsense! If there’s any-
one to accuse of that, it would be people like Ciliga, Orwell,
Kravchenko, Milosz, or Solzhenitsyn. And everything sug-
gests they were just basely plagiarizing Hergé—outdoing him
at that because, next to the way they present the reality of the
Soviet Union, Tintin’s caricature seems almost mild.
Hergé’s real, unpardonable crime is his anti-Americanism.
So why is there no outcry against it? What is the government
doing? ◆ long article written exclusively for the Frankfurter Allgemeine
—Rémi Brague
Sources: Frédéric Potet, “Au Parlement, Tintin est à droite de la
gauche et à gauche de la droite” [In Parliament, Tintin’s left of the
Right and right to the Left], Le Monde, February 5, 1999.
Tim Judah, “‘Tintin in the Dock,” The Guardian (London),
January 30, 1999.
First Lady of Feminism
E ver since the Ford presidency, it has been expected that
American first ladies will also become authors. Begin-
ning with Betty Ford’s Betty: A Glad Awakening, a new
genre was born which now includes Rosalynn Carter’s First
Lady from Plains, Nancy Reagan’s My Turn: The Memoirs of
Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush’s Millie’s Book, and Hillary Rod-
ham Clinton’s It Takes a Village and Dear Socks, Dear Buddy.
Not to be outdone, Hannelore Kohl, the wife of former German
chancellor Helmut Kohl, published A Culinary Voyage Through
Germany a few years ago, which became something of a sensa-
tion: a best-selling German cookbook translated into several
languages, including English.
Perhaps out of pudeur the wives of male French politicians
have not been quick to contribute to this new literature. Yet
last year Sylviane Agacinski, the wife of French prime minis-
ter Lionel Jospin, published a learned work on feminism that
was greeted with great acclaim. Ms. Agacinski is, in fact, a
36
well-known philosophy professor in Paris who has also pub-
lished on Kierkegaard and on architecture, as well as the
Critique de l’égocentrisme [Critique of egocentrism], which
appeared in 1996. Her most recent work, Politique des sexes
[Politics of the sexes] (Seuil) is a defense of “parity,” the prin-
ciple that a fixed percentage of political offices should be
reserved for women.
The French debate over parity has been interesting for two
reasons. First, it shows that although French feminism is not
as militant (nor as suspicious of sexuality) as American femi-
nism, it is far from dead. Second, the debate has split both the
right and the left, so that defenders and opponents of the prin-
ciple can be found all across the political spectrum. Ms.
Agacinski’s position is that the question of gender should be
seen as one more manifestation of human “difference” that
challenges Western notions of universal humanity. What dis-
tinguishes gender, however, is that it is a universal form of dif-
ference—that is, everybody has one. Since that is the case,
she argues, there is no risk that taking gender into account in
politics risks making it the special interest of a few. Once we
have, she then hopes we will become more comfortable with
what she calls mixité in general, and less blindly attached to
abstract notions of universal citizenship. ◆
— ML
Iran Between Tradition
and Modernity
Mohammad Khatami, President of Iran, recently published a
Zeitung. This in itself is a remarkable event: voices from Iran’s
wide spectrum of debate normally reach a German audience only
through journalistic or scholarly mediators from the West. And
at the moment, news from Iran is quite contradictory. Iran’s polit-
ical system faces not only increasing social discontent, but all the
problems inherent in a dual-sovereignty system. One aspect of
this situation is the copresence of censorship with broad-ranging
debate. Another is the ambivalent image of Khatami. Is he just a
more flexible defender of theocratic rule, or Iran’s only chance for
a peaceful transition to modern democracy?
I n this article Khatami speaks for himself, discussing his
country’s relation to modernity and urging acceptance
of the contradiction between Islamic tradition and
Western civilization rather than uncritical embrace of one or
the other. Khatami writes that the three concepts preoccupy-
ing Iranian intellectuals today are tradition, modernity, and
development. When a new civilization and its cultures make
other cultures obsolete, the latter become decadent and self-
contradictory. At the start of modern civilization Western
society had to break with its own traditions before that civi-
lization could conquer Europe and North America and begin
influencing other countries. Iranian culture changed under
this Western influence but still partakes of a medieval.
respect for God’s position in human works, thoughts, values,
and feelings. Such medieval ideas and beliefs are still of
 Reports from Europe
importance to the majority of the Iranian people. Iranians
must therefore accept the fact that the contradiction between
their culture and the West’s is one of the most important
sources of the crisis in their lives.
But Khatami also insists that it will not help to barricade
oneself behind tradition, since many elements of modern civ-
ilization will inevitably enter traditional societies. The crisis
of traditional society only becomes more intense if this fact is
ignored. Yet unqualifiedly embracing modernity is also
unhelpful. An uncritical attitude toward Western culture does
not lead to understanding its foundations and ignores tradi-
tions with deep roots in most peoples’ lives. Rather, tradition
needs to be analyzed and criticized.
Development is not a mechanical process; it needs to be con-
sciously shaped. Western society does not block new ques-
tions and needs, and therefore it will change, too. A civiliza-
tion only continues to exist as long as it has the potential
within itself to answer new questions and satisfy new needs.
Such curiosity lies at the very origins of modernity.
It is neither logical nor human to accept the hegemony of
the West without reserve; but it is also impossible and unrea-
sonable to rebel against certain aspects of it. Therefore one
must first get to know the West properly, but without care-
lessly treating tradition, which is the source of a people’s his-
torical and social identity. Hard as it is to part with any cus-
toms, it is all the harder when when they are deemed holy and
religious ones.
In the long run, cultivating such customs may work to a cul-
ture’s advantage. Tradition is, after all, as human and as
changeable as civilization. Shouldn’t one be armed with a cri-
tique of both modernity and of tradition, Khatami asks.
Wouldn’t this make possible a new civilization based on our
past identity and the impressive achievements of modern civ-
ilization? Such a dream cannot be realized by reactionary
return to the past, he concludes, but only by searching for a
safer position from which to transcend the present and reach
a future built on past and present. ◆ As one official from the Federation put it, “For young
—MB
Source: Sejjed Mohammad Khatami, “Auch die Tradition ist nicht
ewig: Eine Gesellschaft, die nicht nachdenkt, ist verloren”
[Tradition’s not eternal, either: A society that doesn’t think is
doomed], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 1, 1998.
Swedish Brain Drain
A s if the flight of Swedish firms to foreign lands
weren’t troubling enough, it now appears that ever
more young Swedes are leaving the country in search
of work as soon as they obtain their diplomas. Until recently,
most would have hoped to pursue their careers in one of the
large multinationals based in Sweden. But as Marianne Björk-
lund recently reported in the Stockholm paper Dagens Hyheter
(see Courrier international, April 8-14, 1999), now they are
looking for work abroad.
What are they looking for? Mainly higher salaries, a better
social climate, and lower taxes. Some also clearly enjoy the
challenge of making it abroad. In fact, the Swedish Central Of-
fice of Statistics reports that, between 1992 and 1998, the
number of students emigrating for work has nearly doubled,
from 12,600 to 24,6000. The most likely to flee? According to
the Office, engineers and dentists between the ages of twenty-
fice and thirty-five, with the preferred destinations being
Norway, the United States, and Great Britain.
Employers are clearly worried about this trend. An official
at the Federation of Swedish Industries remarked, “We lack
qualified people in Sweden, especially engineers and ad-
vanced researchers. At present, one-quarter of them leave the
country, and half of these never return. The problem is that
these departures are not matched by new arrivals of foreign-
ers with similar skills. It is good that people are mobile but
that means we need more young foreign workers to immigrate
here. We need new blood.”
Why has attracting foreigners been so difficult? High taxes
is one reason; another is the lack of good schools for their chil-
dren. But businesses must also bear some responsibility for
this deficit: they simply don’t or won’t employ enough for-
eign workers with degrees. A 1997 study by the Federation of
Civil Engineers showed that 25 percent of unemployed white-
collar workers in Sweden were foreigners.
Swedes, learning about other cultures and establishing a net-
work of foreign contacts is a good thing. But Sweden itself
must show more openness, flexibility, and dynamism to keep
its own graduates and attract new ones.” One barrier is that
the diversity of employees’ training makes it difficult for
employers to know exactly what foreign workers can do. An-
other is simply salary. A Swedish engineer who finds work in
Germany can expect to earn 50 percent more and pay fewer
taxes. In Denmark and Norway salaries are 30 to 40 percent
higher but the tax level is roughly that of Sweden’s. When
students at a Swedish business school were recently asked
their views on emigration, 90 percent mentioned the salary
differential as a main attraction.
All these might be considered “demand-side” problems. But
what about supply? Why doesn’t Sweden simply produce
more graduates with advanced degrees? Clearly there are also
problems in the educational system, which are reflected in
one astonishing statistic: only 60 percent of those who begin
their studies in professional school in Sweden actually finish
their degrees. ◆
37
 Reports from Europe
Régis Debray’s
Excellent Adventure
R égis Debray is a survivor. Well before the Latin Quarter
clashes of May ‘68, the young Debray embraced revo-
lutionary Marxism and sped to the Latin American
jungle to fight at Che Guevara’s side. Captured, he was jailed
until 1970 in Bolivia, where his Revolution in the Revolution?
(1967) and Strategy for Revolution (1970) made him famous.
Debray’s celebrity waned in the 1970s but revived in 1981
with his appointment as President Mitterand’s special coun-
selor, a position he held until 1989. In that period Debray
wrote several acclaimed books on French intellectuals and on
military strategy, as well as essays and novels. He had also come
to be regarded as a leader of an important faction on the French
left, the so-called republicans, who defend the integrating
function of the French school system, admire De Gaulle (sub-
ject of another Debray book), and see the United States as the
greatest threat to French sovereignty. More recently Debray
has also founded, named, written books and edited journals
on a new social science, “mediology.”
Debray is, if nothing else, unconventional. But the willful
nonconformist may undermine himself and make the com-
monest, most predictable of errors. So Debray’s critics and
many ex-comrades interpret his controversial article in Le
Monde (May 13, 1999) on his recent trip to ex-Yugoslavia. As
Correspondence goes to press, French debate still rages about
NATO’s Balkan air-war. But while many French contest the
war, everyone seems to concede that Serbia has committed
atrocities in Kosovo. Everyone, that is, but Debray. Like 1930s
travelers to the U.S.S.R., Michel Foucault in post-revolution-
ary Iran, or, more recently, dramatist Peter Handke in Serbia,
Debray has made a brief visit to the Balkans and discovered
something no other journalist, diplomat, or aide-worker has:
that nothing particularly wrong is happening there.
Debray’s article takes the form of a letter to French president
Jacques Chirac (old habits die hard), reporting on his seven
days in the Balkans, only four of which were spent in Kosovo.
He boasts of employing his own translator, since, he says, the
locals are notoriously unreliable and sympathize with the
Kosovar army. He begins in Serbia and notes the schools and
children’s theaters destroyed by NATO bombs, and factories
turned to rubble, leaving thousands unemployed. Otherwise,
he finds Belgrade a perfectly normal city, with cafés full of
vocal critics of the ruling party. Debray admits President
Milosevic is “an autocrat, a fraud, a manipulator,” but notes
he has still been reelected three times in free elections.
In Kosovo, Debray shows more prudence. Relying on reports
of western journalists (one of them of Serbian origin), he finds
no evidence of crimes against humanity in the region. The exo-
dus of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars he attributes entirely
to the NATO air campaign, aided by the cynical military strat-
egy of the Kosovar army, itself guilty of atrocities. As for the
Kosovars, it is hard to ascertain now why they left: out of fear,
to emigrate to the U.S. or Switzerland, who knows? We do
know the Serbs resisted the Nazis and have always been
38
philosemitic, while some Albanians formed SS units under the
occupation. Debray draws a final parallel between the wars in
Kosovo and Algeria, warning Chirac that France risks losing as
much in the Balkans today as it did in North Africa forty years
ago. De Gaulle rightly pulled out then, and Chirac would be
wise to pull out now—especially since NATO, as De Gaulle
once defined it, is nothing but “an organization imposed on
the Atlantic alliance [for] the military and political subordina-
tion of Western Europe to the United States.”
“Adieu, Régis Debray” ran the headline over philosopher
Bernard-Henri Lévy’s article in Le Monde the next day. Lévy
calls Debray’s article “the ‘live’ suicide of an intellectual,” and
attacks him for vainly thinking his sprint could have taught
him more than the eye-witness accounts of hundreds of out-
side observers in the region for eight years now. The same day
Alain Joxe, a noted academic researcher, marvelled that
Debray’s article omitted any reference to recent Balkan his-
tory—Sarajevo, Srebrenica—and unskeptically accepted Ser-
bia’s propaganda about Kosovo and its own regime. So the crit-
icisms have mounted, day after day these past two weeks
—except in L’Humanité, the paper of the French Communist
Party, which praises Debray’s intellectual courage. It is
unknown if Debray welcomes this support or not. ◆
—ML
The Faceless Euro
O n January 1, 1999, a new currency, the euro, was
born, and if all goes as planned it will be the only
European currency as of January 1, 2002. So what
does this euro look like?
In a scathing article published late last year, the French
writer Régis Debray analyzed the new currency’s design, call-
ing it “virtual” money for a “virtual” nation. The five-euro
note shows an antique aqueduct, the ten-euro bill a Roman
portal and bridge. And the 200-euro note shows only a glass
door and a viaduct. In other words, on the new euro there is
not a single human being—no Erasmus, Shakespeare, New-
ton, or Goethe. The ancient pillars and columns have no foun-
dations, and there are no recognizable landscapes, either.
What does this imagery say about the new Europe? In
Debray’s view, it represents “Euroland,” a no-man’s-land
without historical memory. Money is a kind of “collective ID
card” that tells people they belong to a nation’s imaginary
community. The euro, on the other hand, looks like Monopoly
money. And isn’t this the truth about Europe, Debray won-
ders. Given its continued dependence on the United States, it
is the dollar, with its strong and evocative imagery, that
remains the real lingua franca of the global economy, and
Europe remains a vassal to American power. Post-Maastricht
Europe is a land that has no founding event, no destiny, no
battle of independence—and thus no independence. The euro
visually represents a bitter political truth, that Europe has yet
to mature and remains in its adolescence. ◆
—ML
Source: Régis Debray, “A Faceless Currency Representing a Virtual
Europe,” International Herald-Tribune, November 28-29, 1998.
 Essay
The Resumption of History
T he year 1989 represented the victory of “the past”
over an imagined future. Socialism had promised a
world in which Prometheus would be unbound,where
man would be “equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless.”
Soviet Marxism imposed a blanket over peoples, inflicting a
single creed that smothered historic allegiances. Yet the future
was a chimera, as was the “end of history.” What we have been
witnessing over the past decade is the “resumption of history”
—with the political explosion of ethnicities and nationalism,
the fragmentation of societies, and the re-assertion of primor-
dial identities and loyalties.
In this respect, the twentieth-century was framed by two
critical events: the disbanding of empire (the historic charac-
teristic of political rule) and the rise and
fall of Soviet power. The end of World
War I saw the break-up of the Habsburg,
Wilhelminian, and Romanov regimes, as
well as the Ottoman Empire that spanned
Asia Minor. The end of World War II saw
the passing of European colonialism. Be-
fore that time, 80 percent of the world’s
land mass and 80 percent of the world’s
peoples had been under the control of
Western powers. With a rapidity at
which future historians will marvel, the
British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and Por-
tuguese empires were dismantled, and
about 120 new states were created. Yet
most of these states had no natural boun-
daries or clear geographical or tribal uni-
ties. India became divided, nominally on Hindu/Muslim lines,
and Pakistan then broke in two, with Bangladesh emerging in
the East. Indonesia became a chain of a thousand islands made
up of disparate cultures, and claiming the territory of East
Timor. Sub-Saharan Africa became a messy patchwork of
dozens of states with diverse clans and tribes overflowing each.
Only the Soviet Union enlarged its territory at the end of
World War II. Yet today its empire has crumbled, leaving in
its wake a multiplicity of peoples, large entities and small, each
struggling to define its own identity. From the old Soviet
Union came the large republics in Central Asia, but also the
small ethnic nationalities of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Udmur-
tia, Bujryatia, Tuva, Komi, and Sakha-Yakutia—all of whom
claim, in their constitutions, a desire to secede or to achieve a
preferential status in their republics. In fact, about 25 million
Russians now live in former Soviet states and have, de facto,
second-class status.
The most salient political fact in the world today is that every
nation on the globe is a plural society, a polysemous melange
with large admixtures of minority linguistic and ethnic groups,
each clinging, however desperately, to some historic identity
outside the majority group. No nation in the world is still
homogeneous, culturally or linguistically. Japan, which once
had been, today has knots of Korean, Pakistani, and Chinese
groups occupying distinct enclaves in Tokyo. Sweden, once rel-
atively homogeneous, today has groups of gypsies and Turks
who are not assimilable into the native population.And then
there are the dispersed groups desperately seeking to become
a state, such as the Kurds who are spread across Turkey, Iraq,
and Iran. (And there are even the Israeli Kurds, who think of
themselves as a people but accept Israeli citizenship.)
Nationalism, according to Ernest Gellner, was a product of
modernity. It followed from the logic of industry, which
destroys local particularities and inculcates a common language
and common culture in a people. What is startling, and even
awesome in its intensity, is the resurgence of ethnic nationalism
in the modern world—which had assumed that such passions
had been leached away by the cosmopoli-
tan culture. Yet ethnic nationalism is pri-
mordial, as against the inclusive cultures
of the United States (and in a more modi-
fied form, of France) which unites diverse
peoples under the banner of citizenship.
Ethnic nationalism is “pre-modern” and
integral to traditional societies. Common
understandings and obligations to kin are
transmitted from fathers to sons, clans are
formed by bands of brothers, and emo-
tional bonds are strengthened by religion
and history. Ethnic nationalism claims a
common kin-folk, rooted in common ori-
gins, common history, and a common fate
—even when they derive from legends
and myth and become transformed into an
emotional identity. This is a phenomenon which contemporary
sociology has forgotten. Today it drives events in areas such as
the Balkans or the former Soviet Union. The prime example, at
the moment, is Serbia.
The Serbs, a Slavic people, came to the Balkans in the sev-
enth century and have remained in the area continuously
since then.The defining moment came in 1389, when the
Ottoman Turks defeated the Serbs at Kosovo Poljie, the Field
of Blackbirds, and beheaded the Serb leader, Prince Lazar. His
legendary action—choosing death rather than surrender—
became the founding myth of Serbian national consciousness
and pan-Slavic aspirations.
For centuries pan-Slavism has played a subterranean role in
the history of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, similar to the
inchoate ideas of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. In nine-
teenth-century Russia, Slavophiles such as Dostoevsky pro-
claimed a mystical bond, l’âme slave, and the Orthodox
Church to be the essence of Slavism.Territorially, there are the
East Slavs (Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia), the West
Slavs (Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks), and the South Slavs (Serbia,
Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro). Only the fact
of a South Slavic state came to tangled and fratricidal fruition.
With the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after
World War I, the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia
39
 Essay
was created under the rule of Peter I of Serbia. He was suc-
ceeded by his son, Alexander I, who had been the army chief
in the Balkan wars of 1912. But disorders multipled, and
Alexander established a dictatorship in 1929, renaming the
country Yugoslavia. In October 1934 Croatian terrorists assas-
sinated King Alexander in Paris.
The victory of Tito in 1945 brought an uneasy peace within
the region, but also the seeds of future trouble. The new
Yugoslavia was made up of six republics—Serbia, Croatia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Slovenia—
and two autonomous regions, Kosovo and Vojvodina. But
within the divisions lay a contradiction: Yugoslavia was not
itself a single nation-state, and within it the distinction
between nation and state was blurred. Only in the case of
Slovenia were the two coterminous. Yugoslavia was to be a
union of peoples, all under Communist rule. Yet the fact
remained that out of a population of 20 million persons, four
million, or one out of five, had been displaced and moved
away from their original homeland.
A melancholy tale of terror, massacres, and deportation fol-
lowed. It has been said that the wars in the Balkans are not due
to ethnic hatreds but to the manipulation of evil men. That evil
men manipulate emotional feelings goes without saying. Yet
one should not underestimate the seduction of the impulse to
kill for revenge or the idea of dying for a cause, especially
when fueled by the power of nationalism and history. I think,
for example, of Mihalo Markovic, a courageous dissident dur-
ing the Tito regime and an editor of the liberal Marxist maga-
zine Praxis, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania dur-
ing the Tito period. Today he is the vice president of
Milosevic’s Serbian Socialist Party and the ideologue of the
regime, defending Serbian efforts to maintain Yugoslavia
against break-away republics by invoking Abraham Lincoln’s
efforts to save the Union in the American Civil War.
Nor should one underestimate the role of religion. Through-
out all the expulsions and migrations, what kept the Serbs
together, as Serbs, has been their religion. And here we return
to Prince Lazar of 1389, whose legends were written down by
church scribes and canonized in repeated cycles of folk poetry.
His body was laid to rest in Pristina, but then transferred in
1401 or 1402 to a monastery Lazar had founded in Ravanica.
His dried body was dressed in a coat adorned with lions ram-
pant, clothes he reputedly wore in the battle where he met his
death. He was also covered with a shroud of red cloth embroi-
dered in gold with the prayer of the nun Jefima: “Don’t forget
your beloved children, who need your help, O Martyr.” Over
the centuries the bones were moved from place to place until
transferred to Belgrade, where they lay in the patriarchal
church. As prelude to the commemoration of the 600th
anniversary of the great battle, Lazar’s bones were taken in
1989 for a tour around Serbia and Bosnia, from monastery to
monastery. Today they lie once more in Ravanica, and on
Sundays the coffin is opened, though only his brown and with-
ered hands peek out from under the shroud.
There are no comedies in history, for there are no happy
endings—or, for that matter, any endings. ◆ Source: Both articles appeared in French translation in
—Daniel Bell
40
Miscellany
The Mother Tongue
T ill recently an intellectual debate over language was rag-
ing in continental Europe. The issue, put simply, was
whether language reflected and changed with the state
of society, or whether it helped to shape society and determine
its evolution. Two journalists’ reports on linguistic shifts in
Great Britain and Russia offer new answers to the question.
In the Independent on Sunday British journalist John Morrish
reports on the democratization of the English accent and how
it’s been received. The British high-society accent, he sug-
gests, is endangered because it is being abandoned both by
the shrinking upper-classes and overtaken by street language.
This so-called posh accent has grown so rare that the National
Sound Archives has commissioned actress Prunella Scales to
record a posh anthology to teach future drama students how
to deliver the lines of Wilde, Coward, and Shaw.
Posh is a variant of what the British have for over a century
called “received pronunciation,” or RP. RP was first defined for
public school use in 1869, though it dates, apparently, from the
sixteenth-century London court. Until recently, it existed in
several forms. U-RP, for example, was the pronunciation of the
upper-most class, the royal family; the BBC also used it through
the 1960s. Thereafter it adopted “modified RP” for news broad-
casts, and still uses it—though only three percent of the British
population can speak it. Instead, “estuary English,” the pro-
nunciation of the area near the mouth of the Thames, now dom-
inates the increasingly-democratic British society, from non-
BBC disk jockies to the Spice Girls, who speak it perfectly.
A different sort of linguistic transformation is occurring in
Russia, as Alexei Mitrofanov reports in Izvestia. Until 1989, it
was customary (if not obligatory) for Russians to address each
other as tovarich (comrade), avoiding the older term gospardin
(sir). What to do now? Immediately following the Russian
Revolution, tovarich was reserved for the Communist Party
elite and gospardin was used especially by those dissatisfied
with the revolution. “Comrade” was mainly a badge of honor
for supporters of revolution, foreigners included. Mitrofanov
recounts that dancer Isadora Duncan, staying in Moscow in
the early 1920s, would correct those who addressed her as
Mademoiselle Duncan with a brusk “Comrade Duncan!”
Over time, “comrade” won out, though not without some
very Russian hybrids popping up (“comrade little-father”).
With the Gorbachev era Russians grew embarrassed by the
term, yet gospardin had come to sound so ridiculous to Russian
ears, people hardly knew what to do. No solution’s been found,
so Russians try to avoid situations requiring formal address.
Administrative letters generally omit a title, using only the fam-
ily name of the person addressed. On buses and in the streets
people are addressed impersonally, since no other option—com-
rade, sir, miss, madame, “hey, you”—makes sense.
Gospardin will return, Mitrofanov thinks, if only faute de
mieux. Foreigners in Russia use this rather literary word un-
abashedly. Unlike tovarich, which already sounds archaic. ◆
—ML
Courrier international, April 15-21, 1999.
 Necrology
Buñuel’s Regret
 
“As I drift toward my last sigh I
often imagine a final joke. I convoke
around the deathbed my friends who
are confirmed atheists, as I am. Then
a priest, whom I have summoned,
arrives; and to the horror of my
friends I make a confession, ask for
absolution for my sins, and receive
extreme unction. After which I turn
over on my side and expire.
But will I have the strength to
joke at that moment?
Only one regret. I hate to leave
while there’s so much going on. It’s
like quitting in the middle of a ser-
ial. I doubt there was so much
curiosity about the world after
death in the past, since in those
days the world didn’t change quite
so rapidly or so much. Frankly,
despite my horror of the press, I’d
love to rise from the grave every
ten years or so and go buy a few
newspapers. Ghostly pale, sliding
silently along the walls, my papers
under my arm, I’d return to the
cemetery and read about all the
disasters in the world before
falling back to sleep, safe and
secure in my tomb.”
—Luis Buñuel
from his memoir My Last Sigh
Louis Dumont
T he most influential social science in
the English-speaking world is
undoubtedly economics. In twentieth-
century France, economics has played
little role in intellectual or political life,
while anthropology has been absolutely
central. And, after Claude Lévi-Strauss,
surely the most important anthropologist
in postwar France was Louis Dumont,
who died last November at the age of 87.
Dumont first made his reputation as
an Indologist, publishing a now classic
work in the field, Homo hierarchicus, in
1966. This book received little attention
when it first appeared, mainly due to
the fact that “structuralism”—whether
that of Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, or
Michel Foucault—was all the rage. Yet
its attentive readers saw that Dumont’s
approach to anthropology, which he
claimed had been inspired by Tocque-
ville, offered a potentially powerful cri-
tique and alternative to the various
structuralisms then. In a famous preface
to that work, Dumont argued that
anthropology had foundered on the
problem of individualism. Old-fash-
ioned anthropologists studied inequal-
ity among individuals in societies where
the very notion of the individual was
absent; structuralists, on the other
hand, made the inverse mistake by
treating modern societies as though
they were “structured” like premodern
ones. Anthropologists saw individual-
ism everywhere, or nowhere.
What Dumont learned from Tocque-
ville is that there are two sorts of soci-
eties in the world—holistic-hierarchical
and individualistic—and that they must
be studied in different terms. While he
began his career studying the former
type, he devoted his mature years to
analyzing the modern world of democ-
ratic individualism. As French intellec-
tuals began moving away from Marxism
and structuralism in the 1970s, Du-
mont’s work on modern individualism
became highly influential among philo-
sophers, political theorists, sociologists,
and even historians, among them Fran-
çois Furet, who was also rediscovering
Tocqueville in this same period.
Dumont’s later work, which he col-
lected under the general title Homo
aequalis, focused on the rise of the mod-
ern West out of Christianity, the devel-
opment of individualist ideology in eco-
nomic and social thought, and, in his
later years, the development of racism
and nationalism as a reaction to the
process of individualization. The last
works focused on Germany, for more
than one reason. Dumont spent five
years in a German prisoner-of-war
camp, during which time he learned
Sanskrit and reflected on the German
Sonderweg. As he reported in his last
book translated into English, German
Ideology: From France to Germany and
Back (1995), these two apparently unre-
lated research projects actually nour-
ished each other. In the end they drove
him to the conclusion that the rise of
individualism is fraught with dangers,
not least of which is a nostalgia for a
holistic world we can never return to.
Among his other works in English are
From Mandeville to Marx (1977) and
Essays on Individualism (1986). 
—ML
Jean Malaquais
J ean Malaquais, who died in Decem-
ber at the age of 90, was a French
writer of a rare sort. He was, to begin
with, not French at all. Born Wladimir
Malacki in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1908,
Malaquais ran away from home as a
teenager and made his way to France,
where he worked as a miner, a deck
hand, and a vegetable porter in the Les
Halles Market of Paris. He also learned
French, and by 1938 had written his
first novel, Les Javanais, which de-
scribes the life of foreign workers in the
“Java” lead and silver mines of Pro-
vence. This work made its way into the
hands of André Gide, who admired its
realistic style and epic grandeur, and
arranged for its publication in 1939.
Leon Trotsky immediately reviewed it,
favorably, which helped it win the pres-
tigious Prix Renaudot.
Malaquais received news of the prize
while serving on the Maginot Line in
1939, the beginning of a war that would
change his own destiny. He eventually
made his way to the free zone in the
south of France, where he befriended a
number of important émigrés, among
them Heinrich Mann and Walter Ben-
jamin. With the help of one of the
unsung heroes of that period, Varian
Fry, Malaquais eventually got to Vene-
zuela and Mexico where he spent the
war years writing his extraordinary
journals, which appeared immediately
in English as War Diary (1944) but
could not be published in Vichy France.
Malaquais spent the rest of his life writ-
ing in semi-oblivion, living for a while in
the United States, where he befriended
Norman Mailer, who wrote a preface for
his novel The Joker. Mailer wrote that
Malaquais “had more influence upon my
mind than anyone I ever knew from the
time we had gotten well acquainted” and
held him up as the example of the
devoted writer. “How many friends can
41
 Necrology
one count on to set examples for a life?”
he asked. Malaquais never attracted such
devotees in France, though that may
change. In the last five years of his life Les
Javanais was republished to much
acclaim, followed by his war journals.
There are now plans to reissue the rest of
his long-neglected works.
Giulio Einaudi
G iulio Einaudi, one of the major
Italian publishers of this century,
died on April 5 at the age of 87. From its
founding in 1933 his house, Giulio
Einaudi Editore, combined remarkable
literary talent with a vanguard of polit-
ical, social, and scientific analysis. The
catalog came to include many modern
classics, by political theorists Antonio
Gramsci and Norberto Bobbio and
authors Cesare Pavese, Carlo Levi, Carlo
Emilio Gadda, Eugenio Montale, Natalia
Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Leonardo
Sciascia, and Italo Calvino. Einaudi
“deprovincialized” a still relatively
backwater culture at its potentially
most insular moment; through what
Pavese termed “the decade of transla-
tions,” the house offered Italians contact
with a foreign literary modernism
whose liberties native writers under
Fascism could themselves scarcely take
with impunity. As Bobbio recently said,
Einaudi Editore was “the house of anti-
fascism,” all its founders directly active
in the Resistance, most—Giulio among
them—imprisoned, and at least one
murdered, for their political beliefs.
Given their heroic origins, Einaudi
books could not help but lose much of
their aura well before their publisher’s
physical death—particularly in 1994,
when the “princely,” utterly cost-
unconscious founder was forced into full
merger with Mondadori, a vast holding
in the media empire of future right-wing
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In the
wake of 1989 Giulio, son of liberal econ-
omist Luigi Einaudi, Italy’s President
from 1947 to 1955, was accused of long-
time Communist “sectarianism,” of hav-
ing “forced” a Left hegemony on Italian
culture. His defenders, Bobbio among
them, point out that in fact he remained
loyal to his father’s economic liberalism,
“wedding” Italian communist political
42
thought (the unorthodox Gramsci’s,
above all) with the liberalism of the
movement Giustizia e Libertà (see page
7, “The Two Italies”); nor did he ever
neglect staunchly Catholic writers,
though his Catholics were invariably
Communist or left-wing. Launched with
 a volume on America’s New Deal, the
Einaudi list included the first publica-
tion in the West (1957) of the USSR-
banned Doctor Zhivago as well as
Khrushchev’s speeches (1964); its social-
science titles in psychoanalysis and
ethnography in particular belie the
charges of rigid adherence to Italian
Communist Party dictates.
The vast and commercially successful
Storia d’Italia Einaudi launched in the
1970s typifies its period’s mingling of a
class-oriented materialist approach with
a fashionably French-influenced stress
on “total” social history and mentalités:
it must, says one critic, be the only
multi-volume social history that barely
mentions the family, health, or the
spread of welfare provisions, and that
only gradually takes up Italy’s transfor-
mation over the past century.
In recent years, despite its takeover,
the house has seemed to meet harsh new
market demands with a balance of old
strengths and fine new writers. Last
year’s publication of the Letters from
Youth by labor historian Vittorio Foa
attested above all to Giulio Einaudi’s
political and personal fidelity. Though
published by Einaudi only from the
1970s on, Foa had been arrested with
him in 1943, and these letters from
youth, which were, more importantly,
letters from prison, contained passages
police censorship had made illegible
since their delivery. In an act of “neces-
sary reparation,” Einaudi had police
labs restore them through new forensic
technology. While the Einaudi catalog
of over five thousand titles will doubt-
less take on important new titles, its
glory is decidedly linked to a former
era, one of progressive aesthetics as well
as politics—when its elegantly white-
clad, strikingly illustrated, durable
paperback volumes, paragons of post-
war design, symbolized a fresh begin-
ning for Italy, a newly European stature,
a national coming of age.  writes it down.”
—DJ
Miscellany
Dewy Decimas
T oday’s international vogue for live
audience-vote poetry contests was
partially inspired by the birth of the
poetry “slam” in the 1980—to be exact,
at the NYorican Café, on New York’s
Lower East Side. Evoking aggressive
collisions, early “slams” were neo-Beat,
yet also contemporary with the psycho-
agons of daytime talk-shows; now, even
a Dutch poetry festival announces its
slam sections in the TLS.
This April a National Public Radio
reporter visited the NYorican Café to
cover a much different poetry contest.
True to its roots, the café hosted the dec-
ima competition of young U.S. Puerto
Ricans. Thriving in Latin America, dec-
ima concursos are held across Puerto
Rico every weekend. The island cham-
pion flown in to judge this meagerly
attended, fledgling New York version
claimed to have performed before an
audience of 100,000.
The decima is a venerable form from
medieval Spain. Its ten lines each con-
tain eight syllables, in a rhyme scheme
of abbaaccddc. Backed now by a four-
piece band, the trovador improvises
toward a final, “forced” line, the pie
forzado, assigned, and usually com-
posed, by the judge, who hands it to the
contestant on a folded slip of paper and
deducts points for “sloppy rhymes
(including repetitions) or thematic blur.”
Solemn or humorous, the form re-
quires a skill often ignored in the more
eclectic “slams,” where ‘attitude’ is
nearly all, and any improvisation is at
most thematic. Perhaps, like rap lyri-
cists, young Hispanics will soon be
rhyming aloud in public—to master a
form whose closest analogue may be
those mandarin fugue improvisations
organists rarely attempt still on sight-
unseen themes one of their guild
devises for the occasion. Bungling, says
one contestant, “feels like you’ve killed
someone.” But U.S. proficiency still
varies widely in this difficult genre.
Decima judge Arturo Santiago hides his
art in wistfully concluding: “It’s some-
thing that comes out of you. And you
lose it; it goes in the air.... Nobody
■
—DJ
 Miscellany/Contributors

of the magazine is shown by Krauze’s someone else, a lurch to the political

Letras Libres own essay in the debut issue—a long, right or to the left. The rumors attest to

I n Mexico, the modern tradition of

high literary magazines was domi-
nated for many years by Octavio
Paz, the surrealist poet and Nobel-Prize
winner, who published a series of jour-
nals devoted to avant-garde literature
and liberal politics. Paz died in the
spring of 1998 and his long-time col-
league, the historian Enrique Krauze,
bought up the shares of the last of those
journals, called Vuelta, and closed its
offices down. Krauze is a powerful fig-
ure in the intellectual life of Mexico—a
writer of major histories of Mexico, a
successful book publisher, and the pro-
ducer and narrator of a series of popu-
lar and serious television documentaries
on Mexican history. Now Krauze has
come out with a successor magazine to
Vuelta, which he has called Letras Li-
bres [Free Letters].
Judging from the first issues, the new
magazine will retain something of Paz’s
devotion to the literary avant garde—as
can be seen in, among other items, a
skillful essay by Mario Vargas Llosa on
André Breton. Krauze is not a poet,
though, and certainly not any kind of
surrealist. His style as historian is lucid
and liberal—a style strongly allergic to
the mythologizing that has character-
ized so much of Latin American histori-
cal writing in recent years. Letras
Libres, in its first issues, has mostly
reflected the editor’s traits. The texture
scholarly analysis of Samuel Ruíz, the
Catholic bishop of Chiapas in southern
Mexico. As Krauze demonstrates, Bi-
shop Ruíz is a formidable and influen-
tial figure, a theologically-sophisticated
man from a right-wing background who
evolved many years ago into a charis-
matic champion of a decidedly left-
wing liberation theology.
Ruíz’s diocesal activities have played
a significant role in fostering a religious
spirit of left-wing rebelliousness among
the Indians of Chiapas, and the rebel-
lious spirit eventually merged with
other political currents to generate the
Zapatista guerrilla rebellion beginning
in 1994. Krauze’s account of Bishop
Ruíz’s intellectual evolution and of his
place in some extremely old Catholic
traditions in Mexico is admirably
clear—surely the most reliable guide
yet written to the Catholic dimension of
the troubles in Chiapas.
Krauze’s liberal ideas, his prestige as
Paz’s successor, his magazine’s commit-
ment to high literature, and his success
at giving the magazine a lively design
and appealing graphics, have already
made Letras Libres a cultural event of
the first order in Mexican life. The intel-
lectual scene in Mexico City seems to be
continually abuzz with exciting or at
least amusing rumors about the maga-
zine—the rise to power of this or that
writer within the magazine, the fall of
how much excitement the magazine has
generated. But will Letras Libres be able
to establish an influence over the intel-
lectual and literary public in other parts
of the Spanish-speaking world? Will it
mark a significant extension of the lib-
eral intellectual resurgence in Latin
America, perhaps even in Spain? That is
difficult to know.
The literary aspect of Letras Libres
has been cosmopolitan, with contribu-
tions from a variety of non-Mexican
writers, including Vargas Llosa, Guiller-
mo Cabrera Infante, the late Reinaldo
Arenas, and others. Letras Libres will,
in addition, bring out in Spanish a num-
ber of articles that originally appeared
in the New York Review of Books. Al-
ready it has published one by Alma Gui-
llermoprieto. So far, though, the histor-
ical writing in Letras Libres—a series of
essays on Chiapas and the Zapatistas in
the first issue, excerpts from diaries of
leading Mexicans in the second issue—
has focused rather parochially on Me-
xico. That is not a flaw. The Mexican
focus may reduce the magazine’s inter-
national influence, though. In any case,
Letras Libres has already shown itself to
be a journal of a high literary and intel-
lectual rank. ■
—Paul Berman
Anyone wishing to contact Letras Libres
can E-mail them at:
cartas@letraslibres.com.mx

Bylines in this Issue

Michael Becker directs several programs at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in Germany. Daniel Bell, emeritus professor of
sociology at Harvard University, is scholar-in-residence at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Paul Berman is a fellow
at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Rémi Brague is professor of philosophy at the Université
Paris-I. Christian Caryl is the Moscow Bureau Chief of U.S. News and World Report. Daniel Gordon is associate professor of
history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Anthony Grafton is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University.
David Jacobson is a translator and critic in New York. Stathis Kalyvas is professor of politics at New York University. Mark
Lilla teaches political theory at New York University. Darrin McMahon is a Mellon Fellow in History at the Society of Fellows,
Columbia University. Ryuichiro Matsubara is associate professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University
of Tokyo. Skúli Sigurdsson, an historian of science, is writing a book on the history of the electrification of Iceland. Masayuki
Tadokoro is professor of international relations at the National Defense Academy in Yokosuka, Japan. Sam Tanenhaus is author
of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Gadi Taub is co-editor of the Israeli literary journal Mikrov. Nadia Urbinati is assistant
professor in political theory at Columbia University. Kiyokazu Washida is professor of philosophy in the Graduate School of
Literature at Osaka University. Sean Wilentz is director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. Masakazu
Yamazaki is artistic director of the Hyogo Prefecture Theatre in Kobe.
Editor’s Note
Since our report on Pierre Bourdieu in Issue 3, we discovered that the author’s On Television and Acts of Resistance: Against
the Tyranny of the Market have now been published by the New Press.

43
 A Report to Our Readers
THE COMMITTEE ON
INTELLECTUAL CORRESPONDENCE A Report to Our Readers
is an international project spon-
With this issue the Newsletter of the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence
sored by the Suntory Foundation acquires a new title. When the Committee was formed in 1997 by representatives of
(Japan), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu the Suntory Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the American
Berlin and the American Academy Academy of Arts and Sciences, our aspiration was somewhat grand. As we wrote in
of Arts and Sciences. the first issue, “we wish to contribute, if possible, to the renaissance of a cultural
milieu where intellectuals and serious teachers and writers, as well as curious scien-
Directors tists and public figures, can learn about the cultural and intellectual issues of other
Daniel Bell countries.” But since our means were limited the decision was made to begin slowly
Wolf Lepenies with a project that would be of immediate use to those interested in intellectual life
Masakazu Yamazaki abroad. Our first project was to produce a low-budget newsletter that would report
on recent intellectual debates taking place in international publications, while giv-
ing our readers enough references to find the original articles or books in question.
Associates The publication would be edited cooperatively in three countries, appear twice a
Michael Becker year, and be distributed free-of-charge to leading figures in intellectual and cul-
Masayuki Tadokoro tural life in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Yet under the editorship of Daniel Bell, the Newsletter immediately became a more
Editor substantial and (in our view) more handsome publication, appearing as a forty-odd
Mark Lilla page, type-set review. The reaction of our readers and the international press has
been so overwhelming that it was felt the publication’s title should more accurately
reflect what it had become. And so we present Correspondence: An International
Managing Editor
Review of Culture and Society. The review will still appear twice yearly and continue
David Jacobson to cover developments in Western Europe, the U.S., and Japan, though we hope
soon to be in a position to bring news from Latin America, Africa, and Eastern
Graphic Designer Europe. We are also planning to develop special sections on important themes, such
Glenna Lang as the symposium on history in the current issue. Among the themes we hope to
cover soon are religion and educational policy.
We would like to think we are succeeding in our efforts and are encouraged to learn
U.S. Address:
that others think so, too. The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit (March 11, 1999)
CORRESPONDENCE recently devoted an enthusiastic article to the review which led to over five hundred
c/o Council on Foreign Relations inquiries to our offices from German readers alone. Keeping in mind that vanity goeth
58 East 68th Street before the fall, we have decided to share with you what Die Zeit had to say:
New York, New York 10021 Usually anything we receive marked “newsletter” is some institution’s dreary
sheet of random information—anything but news of actual interest to an out-
Telephone: (212) 434-9574 sider. Here is something completely different: the Newsletter of the Committee
FAX: (212) 861-0432 on Intellectual Correspondence comes out twice a year and there’s hardly a dull
moment in its packed forty-eight pages.
E-mail: cic@cfr.org

This English-language publication manages quite charmingly to ignore stan-
dard modern layout expectations—there are a few Grandville illustrations, and
as much text as possible—a boon for readers, and particularly those readers who
The Committee on Intellectual grieve that they can’t read everything. The Newsletter presents news of what
Correspondence acknowledges with used to be called “intellectual life.” The team scours periodicals, academic litera-
gratitude the financial support of the ture and belles lettres from the world over, to inform its readership of the latest
Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan. developments in clear, comprehensible language. Today, everyone bandies about


the term “globalization,” but who really knows what’s on their neighbors’ mind?
Daniel Bell writes: “Our intention was to overcome the cultural parochialism
that has walled off many countries from one another, and the specializations
that have created hermetic discourses which isolate the disciplines “
In this particular issue, the subjects include the future of the publishing indus-
try after digitalization, English culture policy after Blair, news of the Italian book
trade, Pierre Bourdieu’s radicalization, Latin-American novels after Magical
Realism, the German cult of Hannah Arendt, the end of egalitarianism in post-
recession Japan. The delight of the Newsletter is the sense this has all been shaken
together and tossed over its pages like some marvelous surprise packet.
We hope you share in that delight. ■
— ML

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