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by Mohammed Khallouk

The place of Islam in the European public sphere

Nilüfer Göle (source: EHESS, original photo: IHS; thumbnail image is considered 'fair use').

The  Turkish-born sociologist Nilüfer Göle, currently director of studies at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris is the author of a number of books in Turkish, German and French, in which she investigates the identity conflicts of young Muslims, especially women, in European society. Several of her books have since been translated into English. Her latest book, an essay with the original French title “Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe”, first published in 2005, was issued in an English version last year by Markus Wiener Publishers; as the title for the English edition, translator Steven Rendall and the publisher chose the phrase “Islam in Europe: The  Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism”. In a somewhat fragmentary way, the author claims for young educated Muslims in Europe to be a part of this continent, although – or maybe because –  Islam with its own value system is a basic element of their identity. The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent debate were a decisive turning point in the consciousness of Muslims, who realized that they had to find a workable arrangement with Western modernity. The word “Interpénétrations” in the original title was meant to show the non-Muslim majority in the most important European countries that they could no longer continue to ignore the fact that Islam had become part of their civil societies and that, instead, they would have to come to an arrangement with Muslims living among them. Moreover, they would have to accept Muslims as European citizens with their own values and opinions that differ  from those shaped by Christianity as well as those of secular-minded Europeans.

Turkey’s “Third Way” between Islam and European Modernity

A main theme of Göle’s essay is the difficulty for Europeans to define themselves and the European Union as a pluralistic project that includes Islam in a modern interpretation. Europeans need to rid themselves of the thought, promoted by Samuel Huntington’s theory of a ‘clash of civilizations’, that Islamic civilization is a hostile opponent to their own civilization. What is needed is the realization that one can be member of the same civilization, even if one holds on to divergent religious beliefs and value categories. For Göle, the young veil-wearing Muslim women of the third immigrant generation in European cities like Paris or Berlin constitute evidence for her thesis. On the one hand, these women identify with a conservative female role as well as with traditional ethical codes  and sexual morals. On the other hand, they opt for a career of their own and pursue university diplomas and academic positions. As Göle sees it,  Islam, for a whole generation of young women in Central Europe, as well as in Turkey, is a means of becoming part of modernity and of finding their individual way of life in the world of modern Europe. They confront both the non-Muslim majority in Europe and the traditional Kemalist elites in Turkey with a new understanding of secularization – one that does not intend to hide religious symbols, but instead bring them out into the open, without thereby forcing others to submit to them.

In this context, both the ongoing tension between a (self-professed) Islamic-oriented government and the Kemalist elite in Turkey and the European debate about Turkey’s application to join the EU, in Göle’s eyes are equally significant. Indeed, with the help of Göle’s concept of “Interpénétrations”, a ‘Third Way’ between Political Islam and Secularism may be within reach, as may be a Turkey that is a member of a truly multireligious European Union, in which Islam has long been  represented by Muslim immigrants in Western European countries, where they share the public sphere with non-Muslim natives.

Cosmopolitanism as an alternative to radical Islamism and intellectual Islamophobia  

For Göle, the movie “Auf der anderen Seite” (English title: The Edge of Heaven, 2007) by Fatih Akin, a son of Turkish immigrants in Germany, illustrates how the envisaged interpenetration of Turkish Muslim culture with Western European urban culture can work in practice, and how classic European attitudes can likewise become part of the Turkish value system. However, the best example of a  modern European Islam, interpreted as a foundation for a new symbiosis of Islam and Europe, are the young Muslim women mentioned earlier. Although they believe in conservative Islamic values, with many of them wearing a headscarf  and adhering to traditional sexual morals, these women, according to Göle, pose the  most formidable challenge to radical Islamists, since their way of life is evidence of the fusion of the West and Islam – that is, of their own female individuality and religious spirituality, as well as of Oriental tradition and European modernity. Islamist terrorists are their enemies because the latter deny any possibility of finding an arrangement within Western modernity that does not require giving up  their own (“non-Western”) religion.

In summary, one can state that Göle’s essay shows, at many levels, what cosmopolitanism amounts to and in which direction lies the future of a Europe where Islam is a basic ingredient. The book is a stimulating read and presents a wealth of new aspects in the debate about the integration of Muslims into European society with its Christian roots and its basis in secularism. What is missing, unfortunately, is a common thread that would connect the various theses discussed – one that would offer a coherent answer to the question of how all these different aspects might be integrated. Nevertheless, Göle’s essay is recommended reading for anyone in search of a dissenting voice to the image of Islam and Muslim immigrants conveyed by such authors as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Oriana Fallaci, and, most recently, the former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin. Göle’s essay in no way glorifies Islam – least of all of political Islam, which she characterises as a very real danger; instead, she offers the prospect of an Islam that has arrived in the modern world: an Islam that is compatible with European democratic pluralism.

Nilüfer Göle: Islam in Europe. The Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism.
Translated by Steven Rendall
Markus Wiener, Princeton 2011.
ISBN-13: 9781558765269
Paperback, 320 pages, US$26.95

Mohammed Khallouk was born in Morocco and works as a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies at the Phillips University of Marburg and the University of the German Federal Armed Forces in Munich. His work analyses Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East, which was the topic of his doctoral work. Another research theme of his is the history of the Jewish community in Morocco, which he is writing his Habilitation thesis on. He also works as a translator of German contemporary literature into Arabic.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Katrina Gulliver

Crawford Market, Mumbai. (Photo by Greg Younger, used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

In this book, Gyan Prakash offers not a traditional history of a city, but rather a portrait of the city’s culture and image. By using its popular culture, he reflects the kaleidoscope of this multiethnic community. From the grand colonial architecture to more recent land reclamation projects, he traces the spatial dimensions of the city and their cultural meanings. In so doing, he emphasises the ways in which history, particularly urban history of a still-changing community, is made up of the myths we choose to remember, or the fables of his title. Like all great cities, Mumbai has more than one fable in its story. As he describes:

“The nostalgic ‘tropical Camelot’ and the dystopic city of slums appear as compelling bookends of Mumbai’s story because they seem to have the force of historical truth. In fact, it is a trick of history, inviting us to believe its Bombay-to-Mumbai tale as an objective reading of the past when it is a fable.” (p. 23)

The Bombay Chronicle, January 26th, 1931. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain)

Prakash links the real city to its many depictions in popular culture. Bombay’s rapid growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and diversity of religion and language, meant it developed a multiplicity of communities within the city. Prakash argues that the act of reading the newspaper served as the secular version of morning prayer, and in this multicultural society, newspapers could serve to link readers together. However, as he points out, this world — in the mid twentieth century – was still largely limited to those who could read English. Nonetheless, popular culture in the form of tabloid press, such as Blitz newspaper, which offered a downmarket popular option in the English-language press. Through such media, celebrity scandals and other tales of the city were promulgated. As Prakash describes, the cues Blitz offered about the lives of the rich and (in)famous informed the residents of the rest of the city about how the other half lived, and bound many readers in fascination with their lurid stories.

Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, is particularly drawn to the creators (writers and film makers) who made Bombay their home in the twentieth century and the ways they presented the city’s many layers in their work. In demonstrating this, he expends many pages summarising the plots of short stories and films created in or about Bombay – the creation of these “fables” becoming part of the city’s narrative.

Eros Movie Theatre, Mumbai. Opened in 1938, exemplifying the late Art deco style. (Photo: Colin Rose. Used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

From the creative to the theoretical, Prakash uses the analyses of Henri Lefebvre and other urban theorists to discuss the use of space, and the ways that urban planning, with its focus on abstract “efficiency” failed. He also acknowledges the effect of political corruption, with the assignment of land and contracts for new development schemes. He also discusses at length the architectural style of Art Deco, which flourished in Bombay in the interwar period. Its acquistive, eclectic nature — taking on motifs from other styles — meant it offered a bridge to modernity in the machine age. The glamour of this period is clearly part of Mumbai’s visual heritage, as well as being the point — before independence and partition — when the city shone for many of its nostalgic fans.

But for all the glitz of the Marine Drive denizens, the situation of shanty-town dwellers is not overlooked here. As he describes the cycle, poor people arrive in the city, and build their own makeshift housing. Although the settlement is illegal, the municipal authorities are forced to provide some civic facilities. But once the land has thus become habitable, it is valuable, and the residents will be evicted so the land can be sold for development. (p. 310) Prakash draws on the plot of the comic book Doga, a hero of the slums, to illustrate these issues and their popular presentation. (While this is interesting, spending over 30 pages on the plotline of a comic book seems perhaps a little indulgent.)

The book contains some unfortunate repetitive phrasing (which looks like some cut and paste) and some rather infelicitous colloquialisms — people “get on like a house on fire”, noses are “thrown out of joint” — which are somewhat jarring in the context. There is also a small glitch in his passing account of the Sassoon family tree (p. 41), as part of his discussion of David Sassoon, one of a number of merchants who were influential in the city’s industrial development.

Mumbai Fables is an engaging narrative, and offers a different way for urban historians to write the biography of a city. But it will have more to offer for those familiar with the city, for whom the gleam of recognition will be a benefit.

Gyan Prakash: Mumbai Fables. A History of an Enchanted City
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010.
ISBN-13: 9780691153179
Paper, 424 pages, US$19.95

Katrina Gulliver is a cultural historian and postdoctoral research fellow based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current project examines the development of four colonial port cities, Malacca, Havana, Pondicherry and New Orleans, from the early sixteenth century to 1900.

by Leon Rocha

JULIUS FROMM WAS BORN Israel Fromm on 4 March 1883 in Konin, what was then a small town in the Russian Empire and now part of Poland. Like many Jewish families in the region, the Fromms moved in 1893 to a rapidly expanding Berlin in search of a safer life and better opportunities for the children. They were culturally assimilated, and Israel Fromm adopted the name Julius. The Fromms made a living rolling cigarettes during the day, and selling them one by one in cafés at night. This was a line of work which lent itself to impoverished immigrants in Germany who often had little more than manual dexterity. The patriarch Bernhard Fromm died in 1898 at the age of forty-two and Regina died in 1911, leaving Julius and his elder brother Salomon the responsibility of raising the entire family. Julius Fromm, a “quintessential ‘entrepreneurial proletariat’”, and a modest man with minimal education, sought a career alternative to making cigarettes and began taking evening classes in rubber chemistry around 1912.

Fromm's rubber factory, Berlin-Köpenick, 1927. (Picture taken in 1932; copyright expired.)

Julius Fromm then hit upon the idea of making condoms. The early condoms from the eighteenth century were generally made of animal intestines, and were used primarily by wealthy men – like Giacomo Casanova, who referred to them as “English riding coats” – to protect against the incurable syphilis. These condoms were difficult to use, diminished pleasure, frequently broke, and offered only limited protection against venereal diseases. In 1893 the American industrialist Charles Goodyear developed rubber vulcanisation. When the sap of the rubber tree is formed into rubber, then treated with sulphur and heated to high temperatures, it forms an elastic and durable material that can be used to make raincoats, shoes, tyres and condoms which rather looked like bicycle inner tubes with bulging seams. Later a dipping method was invented that made possible the production of thinner and seamless condoms. Julius Fromm saw a market he could tap into and founded his company in 1914, opening a small workshop in the Bötzow area in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. With World War I and the liberalisation of sexual values in the Weimar Republic, the demand for condoms exploded and Fromm’s business quickly expanded, and he established factories near the Spree River in Berlin-Mitte.

Fromm improved on the manufacturing technique. He used glass moulds, which were mounted on carrier frames and dipped into a vat of rubber solution liquefied with gasoline, benzene and tetrachloromethane. After two dippings, a thin rubber skin formed around the glass moulds and this was then vulcanised in special ovens with sulphur vapours. The condoms were dusted with a lubricant, rolled off the glass moulds and tested by inflation with compressed air, inverted and packaged. Fromms’ condoms were sturdy yet elastic, durable enough to be warehoused and transported for long distances. In fact this technical process of condom manufacturing has remained largely unchanged, with the exception of automation and the replacement of the benzene treatment with a latex process in the 1960s. Using a similar setup, Fromm also made surgical finger cots, rubber gloves, pacifiers and teats for baby bottles – another sound business move given the rising birth rate in Germany.

In 1916 Fromm decided on “Fromms Act” as his brand name. In adopting the English spelling of the word “Act” (Akt in German), Julius Fromm wanted to transmit a cosmopolitan image for his product. It was also a humorous name, as “Fromm” also meant “pious” in German, and at the same time somewhat risqué, as “Act” carried a sexual connotation. Fromms Act condoms came in instantly recognisable small cardboard boxes with green and purple stripes, and each box contained three condoms and was sold for seventy-two pfennigs. This was not inexpensive but Fromms Act was a high-quality and reliable product. It was even endorsed by famous sexologist and homosexual activist Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin in 1919. By the 1920s Julius Fromm was a very successful and wealthy man. He received a certificate of naturalisation in 1920 and acquired German citizenship. In 1926 Fromm moved his operation to Friedrichshagen in Eastern Berlin; in that year alone his factory produced 24 million condoms. In 1930 Fromm established another factory in Köpenick, an impressive and ultra-modern complex built by the famous architects Arthur Korn and Siegfried Weitzmann in the Neue Sachlichkeit style, complete with full-length glass façades and climate control systems. Annual production rose to 50 million condoms in 1931. Fromm had agencies in all parts of Germany and exports were handled by branches in the Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Iceland and even as far as New Zealand. Fromms Act became the first global condom brand, older than the current bestselling brand around the world, Durex, which was established by London Rubber Company in 1929. Fromms was so popular that apparently German cabarettists and comedians name-checked the product in their routines, singing lines such as “Fromms zieht der Edelmann beim Mädel an”, “Wenn’s Euch packt, nehmt Fromms Act” and “Ich bin ganz Fromms – zum Platzen gespannt”. 

ADOLF HITLER became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Two managers of Fromms Act became members of the National Socialist Party, and a red swatiska flag and a photograph of the Führer were soon displayed in the cafeteria of Fromm’s factory. Julius Fromm began to emphasise the German nature of his products, in an attempt to ward off boycotts of his Jewish company. His naturalisation was reviewed by the Berlin police commissioner, though the plan to revoke his citizenship was abandoned a year later in 1934. Julius Fromm did remain optimistic about the future and did not feel that Hitler posed a real threat, but his company increasingly became a target of harassment. He therefore converted Fromms Act into a corporation and assumed the role of consultant, drawing profits from the business and retaining possession of the buildings and equipment. He also sent his children to safety in Britain and Switzerland. Fromm continued to promote his products and refined the manufacturing process. Collaborating with I.G. Farben, he developed a synthetic rubber and improved his condoms’ lubrication. However, by 1937 Fromm realised that Germany was no longer safe and decided to sell Fromms Act. In May 1938 the sales of Jewish property had to be approved by the Reich Economics Ministry, and Hitler’s economic advisers began to take serious interest in Fromm’s lucrative enterprise.

A buyer was brought in by the Ministry – Baroness Elisabeth von Epenstein, the godmother of Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Göring. The offer was 200,000 Swiss francs; Nazi officials steamrolled the transaction. According to the official exchange rate, Epenstein’s offer was the equivalent of 116,000 Reichsmarks. Even though the offer was worth several times that amount because Swiss francs were valuable foreign currency, this was still a fraction of Fromms Act’s estimated market value of 5 million Reichsmarks. Julius Fromm’s life project was now Aryanised. Elisabeth von Epenstein also received a large piece of property in Gösing in lower Austria, belonging to another Jewish industrialist who was forced to sell all his assets at bargain basement prices before emigrating to the United States. In return, Elisabeth von Epenstein gave her godson Hermann Göring a mediaeval castle in Veldenstein near Nuremberg, and bequeathed to him the Mauterndorf castle in Lungau, Austria.

Julius Fromm and his wife Selma left Berlin in October 1939 for London, where his second son Herbert and his family were already living. The Fromms proved to the British Aliens Department that they were able to support themselves, and were granted visas from the Home Office. They stayed at first at Hotel Esplanade in Warrington Crescent, where Sigmund Freud also lived between August and September 1938. They later moved to an apartment in Regent’s Park. Julius Fromm’s siblings also tried to get out of Germany, though they initially found it difficult to leave behind what they had earned. Salomon and Alexander Fromm both owned successful optician’s shops, which were ransacked and demolished on Kristallnacht. Siegmund, Berhard, Else and her husband Willy Brandenburg sold Fromms Cosmetics to Fromms Act, now owned by Elisabeth von Epenstein, for a fraction of its market value. But Salomon Fromm’s wife Elvira and son Berthold, as well as Else and Willy Brandenburg, never made it out of Germany. Berthold was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he was shot, and Elvira Fromm and the Brandenburgs were murdered in Auschwitz. Most of the Fromm family members who made it to London were classified as unsuspicious enemy aliens, but with the rise of fear of Nazi spies and the “enemy from within” in Britain, some of the Fromms were detained in barracks and camps, and Salomon Fromm’s daughter Ruth ended up in Holloway Prison. Julius Fromm’s youngest son Edgar was deported to Australia in 1940, abroad the infamous HMT Dunera, and found his way back to London after nearly eighteen months of internment. 

MEANWHILE IN GERMANY, property that belonged to the Fromms and other German Jews continued being expropriated by the Nazi state. In accordance with wartime international laws, Julius Fromm’s property was subject to enemy asset administration once the British declared war. In 1942 expelled German Jews were renaturalised as German citizens, in order to subject them once again to Reich laws and enabling the Nazi government to expropriate Jewish property.

Julius Fromm’s savings in various bank accounts were emptied out and “invested” in government bonds, and their safe deposit boxes were raided. Former business partners refused to pay their debts to “the Jew Fromm”. The Fromms’ villa in Berlin was transferred to the Reich and then given to “war hero” Colonel Wolf Hagemann. The furniture and other valuable items of the Fromm household were sold to high-ranking officers or auctioned off, nominally in the name of Julius Fromm. The revenue generated from these sales were then taxed away or siphoned off. In total, the German state’s profit from the Aryanisation of Fromm’s holdings was 2 million Reichsmarks, in today’s purchasing power an equivalent of 30 million euros.

Julius Fromm died on 12 May 1945 of a heart attack in his London home, four days after the Allies’ victory. His family recalled that he was overjoyed with the demise of the Nazis and in fact looked forward to returning to Germany. The Fromms factory in Köpenick – which was part of the Soviet occupied zone – was almost destroyed by air strikes, and the machinery that remained intact were shipped to the Soviet Union. The older plant in Friedrichshagen continued to supply Red Army soldiers with condoms. According to the Potsdam Agreement, the Fromms ought to have had their factories returned to them, but Communist officials in East Berlin prevented this and forcefully nationalised the company, arguing that Julius Fromm was a “Jewish proprietor, capitalist exploiter, anti-social, anti-labour and pro-Nazi”. Later, Fromms condoms were produced by the Volkseigener Betrieb Plastina in Erfurt, and the brand was renamed to Mondos, which became synonymous with condoms in the German Democratic Republic.

After Elisabeth von Epenstein’s death in September 1939, Fromms Act was passed onto her lover and financial consultant, the Viennesse businessman Otto Metz-Randa. After the War Metz-Randa transformed himself from a profiteer of “Entjudung” and passed himself off as a victim of the National Socialist regime. He refused to hand the company and the trademark back to Julius Fromm’s sons Herbert and Edgar, and argued that Fromms Act was not sold under duress and the transaction  unrelated to the Nazi regime. In 1951 the Fromms were forced to agree to a settlement at the restitution tribunal in Berlin, and outrageously the Fromms had to pay 174,300 West German marks to Otto Metz-Randa in order to regain ownership. An agreement was signed between the Fromms and the Hanseatische Gummiwerke Bachmann & Co. KG, which would allow the Bremen-based company to use the Fromms Act trademark. Hanseatische Gummiwerke, now MAPA, continued to make a range of condoms in the present day – Billy Boy, Blausiegel and Fromms. Even in the 1960s Germans still knew exactly what a “Fromms” (plural “Frommse”) was, just as Kleenex had become synonymous with tissue paper. 

THIS COMPACT AND COMPELLING BOOK is co-written by Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, and expertly translated into English by the award-winning Shelley Frisch. In 2004, Aly organised a reading group at the Sunday Club – “a meeting place for lesbians, gays, and trans-, bi- and heterosexuals” – in Berlin, and shared with his colleagues a file on Fromms Act that he discovered at the German Federal Archives. Although Aly’s recollection sounds strangely inappropriate: he was challenged by “the person in charge of cultural programming” at the Sunday Club to come up with something to read that was different from the “run-of-the-mill hetero claptrap”. Aly thus decided to show his friends the sexy Fromm file to “uphold his reputation” (as what?). Independently, Michael Sontheimer, a correspondent for Der Spiegel, managed to track down Julius Fromm’s son Edgar after watching him on a TV chat show in 1996. Crossing paths with Aly, the two men decided to co-write a book on Fromms Act. Aly and Sontheimer admit that the story is compiled from fragments. Neither Fromm’s personal papers nor his company’s archives survived, and Aly and Sontheimer only managed to unearth a handful of documents – wills, Julius Fromm’s application for German citizenship, correspondence with the police commissioner in Berlin, marketing materials for Fromms Act, certificates and photographs. Nevertheless, this book is meticulously researched and packed with fascinating detail.

The German title of the book is far clearer about Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer’s intentions – Fromms: Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel. This is literally Fromms: How the Jewish Condom Manufacturer Julius F. Fell Prey to German Robbers. Compare this to the English title Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis, which: (a) omits mention of Fromm’s Jewishness; (b) draws attention and prioritises the condom part of the story by rendering Kondomfabrikant into “condom empire” (a cynic may wonder if this is the publisher’s marketing ploy to make the book sexier); (c) conflates deutschen Räuber with the National Socialists. Deutschen Räuber in the German title is not only intended to refer to the Nazis, but also the officials of the Federal German Republic and the German Democratic Republic who fraudulently manipulated the Fromm’s heirs application for restitution, in order to not pay out that which the family was entitled. So the English title is unfortunately somewhat misleading.

Fromms is never intended as a history of sexuality, or a history of a contraceptive technology. In fact Aly and Sontheimer do not seem to be that interested in condoms; only the first pages of Chapter 13 discusses the modern manufacturing process of condoms, and Fromm’s method was passed over in Chapter 2 in about one-and-a-half pages. There is no discussion on where Julius Fromm might have sourced his raw materials and chemicals, other than a quick mention that “Ceylon rubber is best suited to the manufacture of Fromms products”. One begs to find out the trade networks that transported rubber from Southeast Asia to Germany. We get little sense of how Fromm might have obtained his machinery, no details on the other hygienic and surgical rubber products that his company made, or how his competitors operated, or how Fromms Act were distributed and marketed from Antwerp to Auckland, or how Durex eventually took over as the leading brand around the world. Moreover, we gain little new understanding on the sexual culture – only Chapter 1 provides some historical background on the transformation of sexual mores and the question of family planning in Weimar Germany. The bibliography lists eight secondary sources on the history of gender and sex in Germany. The essential Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005) by Dagmar Herzog is not cited; although she appears on the dust jacket praising the book.

Aly and Sontheimer do not tell us how National Socialists discussed condoms, other than a quick mention of their compulsory use in military brothels. Nor do we find out more about the discourses of sexually transmitted diseases and birth control in the German Democratic Republic. Aly and Sontheimer’s story stops with the death of Julius Fromm and the painful process of seeking restitution, well before the age of HIV, when the sales, promotion, public discussion and use of condoms dramatically increased again. These are not the priorities of Aly and Sontheimer – and admittedly the sources that will enable them to address some of these issues may be severely limited – so it is no wonder that the historian of medicine and sexual science Lesley Hall seems disappointed in her recent view in Social History of Medicine. (As another historian of medicine and sexuality, I am similarly disappointed, though tremendously educated by the book.) Hall, “with eager anticipation”, wanted to read a history of the material culture of pre-hormonal contraception that concentrates on technical developments, marketing and dissemination of these devices. But Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer set out to deliver a work that – in the words of Julius Fromm’s son Edgar – “put [Fromm] back on the map” – and that offered a case study of the Nazi plundering of Jewish property. A comprehensive, academic, global history of the condom remains to be written. 

TO THOSE WITH PASSING FAMILIARITY WITH the field of Modern German History, Götz Aly requires little introduction. Though he deservedly enjoys a considerable scholarly reputation, Aly is perhaps best described as a “maverick historian”. He has won numerous prestigious awards, such as the Heinrich Mann Prize of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2002 and the Marion Samuel Prize in 2003. He was a Visiting Professor for Interdisciplinary Holocaust Research at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt. He was appointed by the German Federal President Horst Köhler to the board of trustees of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and in 2007 received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

No stranger to controversy, Aly caused a minor media storm at the press conference of a 2009 exhibition held at the Werkstatt der Kulturen on “The Third World in the Second World War”, when he accused black Allied soldiers of the systematic rape of German women during World War II. He also upset the British press – The Daily Telegraph  and the First World War Veterans’ Association, when at the same event he asserted that Gandhi was one of the greatest fans of Nazi Germany. (Though to be fair to Aly, he was arguing against what he perceived as an instance of “political correctness” gone wrong; the exhibition at Werkstatt der Kulturen was cancelled and later reopened at a different site, because the exhibition also included material on “non-White admirers of the Nazis”.) Aly’s 2008 book Unser Kampf: 1968 – ein irritierter Blick zurück (a deliberately provocative title that plays on Mein Kampf), argues that 1968 was merely a delayed offshoot of European totalitarianism, and that the ’68 generation was no different from the ’33 generation in their propensity to violence and their anti-democratic, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist and anti-American attitudes. In a couple of recent columns in Berliner Zeitung, Aly has also launched an attack on the current German pension scheme by arguing that it had its basis in the Nazi regime – in other words, social egalitarianism is just National Socialism under a different name. This has won Aly a number of conservative supporters who argue for the dismantling of the welfare system in Germany.

Aly’s profile at the Goethe Institut website uses the word Querschläger to describe him. Querschläger is literally a “ricochet”, but in this context means a provocateur, a dissenter, a lone pioneer, a “gadfly” perhaps, someone who revels in his role as a critic challenging all sorts of received wisdom, particularly the accepted opinions of the “academic establishment” in which Aly wishes to have no part. Aly’s self-fashioning as an outsider is apparent on the third page of Fromms’ preface. He argues that Jewish businesses like Fromms Act “are almost universally ignored by historians”, because:

[T]hese companies were unceremoniously destroyed, they cannot sponsor business historians, who prefer to follow the money. Over the past twenty years, scholarly interest guided by this monetary inequity has produced a peculiar asymmetry, with the perpetrators and profiteers dominating historical inquiry. The companies’ legal successors have supported research because of their professed interest in “coming to terms with” an unappealing past fosters their images and thus the marketing of their brands; among the many cases in point are Volkswagen, Krupp, Allianz, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Degussa, Dresdner Bank, Flick, and Bertelsmann. Because business history functions in this manner, a giant of the twentieth century like Julius Fromm, the  creator of the world’s brand-name condom, seemed destined for oblivion.

Elsewhere Götz Aly stated that “invoking the names of Dresdner Bank, Allianz, Generali, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Krupp, I.G. Farben or Thyssen may serve to veil the real historical background of Aryanisation in a cloak of anti-capitalism, but it cannot provide a remotely satisfactory explanation” (“Rede zur Verleihung des Heinrich-Mann-Preises der Akademie der Künste 2002”). So in Aly’s scheme, those who study the collusion of big companies with the Nazi regime are either mercenary historians following the scent of money and hired to perform a public relations exercise to improve the companies’ image, or they are irrational anti-capitalists or conspiracy theorists with an axe to grind and who cannot provide any interesting or adequate explanation of the financial workings of the Nazi state.

Fromms should be read alongside Götz Aly’s earlier work, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (2005, translated in 2007 as Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State), the book that caused by far the greatest stir among German historians. At the heart of Hitlers Volksstaat are two simple questions: What was it that held the Third Reich together, and why did ordinary Germans support Adolf Hitler? Aly’s answer is surprising: the ordinary Germans supported Hitler not because they were anti-Semites and or driven by Nazi ideology, they were quite simply bribed and bought – Nazi Germany was a “dictatorship of favours” for everyone. The Third Reich, Aly claims, in fact operated a programme of “progressive taxation” that redistributed wealth; this was funded by Jewish assets and properties systematically plundered from Germany and its occupied territories. The result was that the ordinary Germans hardly bore any financial costs of the war, and actually enjoyed a much improved standard of living. This argument, seductive it may seem, is fiercely criticised by other historians. While it is true that the Germans did systematically pillage on an unprecedented scale, critics such as Adam Tooze (The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, 2006) argue that the second half of Aly’s thesis – that the Nazis provided its citizens with a progressive welfare state and that seventy percent of the costs of the German war effort was transferred to the non-Germans – “[is] wrong not in the sense of debatable or contentious, but wrong in the sense that it is contrary to all empirical evidence and to any known body of economic theory”. Limit of space here will not permit a detailed analysis of Aly’s book and its many critical reviews; interested readers may start with Alfred Mierzejewski’s review “The Latest Phase of Germany’s Effort to Master its Nazi Past” (http://bit.ly/hRsxcW) and Adam Tooze’s strident though entirely judicious essay, “Economics, Ideology and Cohesion in the Tird Reich” (http://bit.ly/f1cdfl).

The problem with Aly and Sontheimer’s Fromms is that, in Chapter 10, “‘Jew Auction’ as Aryan Haunt”, the indisputable fact of the expropriation of Julius Fromm’s property is subtly mobilised to support Aly’s argumentative grandstanding in Hitlers Volksstaat. Chapter 10 is by far the most detailed of the book, and describes the transfer of the Fromm villa into the hands of Wolf Hagemann and the auctioning of Fromm’s possessions. Aly ends the chapter on a dramatic note: 

Julius Fromm had fallen prey to the robbers. These were not a bunch of bandits in the bushes, however, but a state and its citizens. Millions of Germans – Nazi and others – seized the opportunity to profit. According to the principles of social participation, helping the Nazis meant helping themselves. The National Socialist movement may have sprung from an ideological foundation but it was now fully fused with material interests, thus uniting the Görings, Hagemanns, and Metz-Randas, the men who ran the elevators and the men who ran the country, the tenants in the modest back units and stately front buildings, lower-ranking and top-level officers. Instead of going to a carnival or a sale, everyone happily trotted off to the Jew Auction.

But this only seems partly true. It is beyond doubt that the Görings, Epensteins, Hagemanns, Metz-Randas, the men who ran the country, the tenants in stately front buildings, the top-ranking Nazi officers – in other words the elites – profited from the plundering of Fromm property. It is not obvious, however, how the men who ran the elevators, the tenants in the modest back units, and lower-ranking officers – the ordinary Germans – benefited from the hideous and harrowing spectacle of the Jew Auction. Aly asserts that “even Germans who arrived late or came with an empty wallet and left empty-handed still stood to profit in the end, because the proceeds flowed into the Reich coffers and reduced the tax burden across the board”. According to Adam Tooze, this is based on “kitchen sink accounting techniques” – “the evidence suggests that up to the early 1940s, contrary to the impression created by Aly [in Hitlers Volksstaat], the per capita tax burden in the Third Reich was […] among the highest in the world”. The argument that the expropriation of the property of affluent Jews provided substantial per capita benefits to the entire German population simply does not hold up. But even if the only people to benefit from the pillaging of Fromms’ property were Hermann Göring, Elisabeth von Epenstein, Wolf Hagemann and Otto Metz-Randa, this would not make this any less of a moral outrage. What emerges here is that the idiosyncratic arguments from Hitlers Volksstaat are smuggled into Fromms. And the case of Julius Fromm is then enlisted to bolster the theses from Hitlers Volksstaat. Julius Fromm is indirectly made to service Götz Aly’s argumentative acrobatics, perhaps argumentative excesses.

Julius Fromm’s grandson Raymond wrote a heartfelt Afterword to the book. For the Fromms, the book clearly is more than “simply another tale of persecution and the Holocaust, for it serves as an example of the fate that befell […] countless other German and Continental Jewish families” – families torn apart, often stripped of their possessions, rendered destitute and homeless, sent to extermination camps, and the descendants humiliated as they sought restitution that never arrived. Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, as Edgar Fromm requested, admirably put Julius Fromm “back on the map”. They told a powerful story that absolutely needed to be told, and wrote a book that absolutely needed to be read. The problem is Aly also appears to have dragged Julius Fromm into his fight against other German historians, and have turned part of the Fromm saga into grist to his theoretical mill.

Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer. Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis.
Translated by Shelley Frisch. With an afterword by Raymond Fromm.
New York: Other Press, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1590512968
Cloth, xii + 219pp., US$23.95.

Leon Rocha is the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Alex Prescott-Couch

Every Friday morning, postmasters in the United States send out over a million copies of US Weekly to subscribers. Combined with the approximately 800,000 newsstand copies sold, about two million Americans pay every week to leaf through page after page of the smiles, tears, tragedies, and triumphs of the famous and photographed. Whatever the drama or celebration, the pages – awash with pictures and dotted with text – guide the reader through an emotional program of tension (“Is Brad and Angelina’s marriage on the rocks?”) and release (“Lindsey’s new look”), giving instruction of what to feel about the events of the day. Should one feel outrage or concern at Kardashian’s latest stunt? Betrayal or vindication at Brad’s suspected dalliance? The exclamation points and rhetorical questions tell the tale. 

Paparazzo statue, Laurinska street, Bratislava. (Photo: Benmil222; used under a Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licence)

One of US Weekly’s most famous features is a two-page spread of photos depicting the quotidian banalities of celebrity life. These photos are overlaid with spunky exclamations – “They cheer at baseball games!” “They walk their dogs!” –  to the effect that even these people must hail cabs, buy babywipes, eat hotdogs, and wait for restrooms. Those who might seem to roll out of bed to a red carpet and take their morning coffee on a talk show couch, even they need to attend to the biological and social requirements of everyday life. The pictures and captions both embody and invert the standard sensationalism – a pack of paparazzi have dug up the dirt, and the joke is that what’s so startling is the utter lack of spectacle. “Stars – They’re Just Like Us.”

I’m not sure that Fred Inglis would like a review of his A Short History of Celebrity to begin with US Weekly. He might think such a beginning expresses surrender to the temptation to write a “lofty malediction over the celebrity cult” (p. 13) rather than a more fair-minded, less curmudgeonly treatment that his book seeks to present. Or it might provide the mistaken impression that celebrity is a new invention of the industrial mass media, exactly the impression he wishes to dispel by tracing the concept and practice of celebrity back over two hundred and fifty years. Maybe he would simply find it too easy.

Yet, despite such objections, the image encapsulates two main themes of his vivacious history of celebrity – the way celebrity and celebrities serve to educate our feelings, and the way celebrity makes us experience certain individuals as both intimately familiar and utterly supernatural. This notion of celebrities as otherworldly intimates who reflect and construct a certain point in the “history of feeling” is the thread that ties together the sometimes meandering but usually insightful biographical vignettes that constitute his “history” of celebrity.

Inglis begins his tale in eighteenth-century London, “the first city to construct itself as a city in a form that would prove recognizable to modernity” (p. 37). Powered by the forces of incipient industrialization, London was a mix of marketplace, gossip hub, urban sewer, and bourgeois leisure garden. Importantly for Inglis, it was also the site of a transformation in the nature of public acclaim. Up into the eighteenth century, public acclaim primarily took the form of “honor” or “renown.” “Renown” was the sort of acclaim “assigned to men of high accomplishment in a handful of prominent and clearly defined roles” (p. 4). Monarchs, military heroes, and learned men – just to give three examples – were known to their societies, but their acclaim was based on great deeds and rooted in their position in the social hierarchy. But in eighteenth century London, a new sort of acclaim was emerging, the “celebrity” possessed by the actors and artists that edified and entertained the urban bourgeoisie. This fame was still mediated by the social hierarchies omnipresent in eighteenth century England – as Inglis notes (p. 44), famed actor David Garrick kneeled to his audience – but signs of a celebrity-conscious consumer society were unmistakable. The life of Lord Byron most clearly exemplifies this tendency. Bryon scandalized London society by skillfully seducing aristocrats – including his half-sister – and then brazenly writing up his escapades in the verse that made him famous. Unlike renowned literary figures of the past, Byron was not only a social position but a man, an individual so overflowing with personality that his lyrics seemed a mere spillage from his life of passionate feeling. Byron’s public acclaim was bound up not simply with the work but with the life brought to expression in the work. Thus, Byron plays a key role in what Inglis dubs a “history of the feelings” not only because he was a public promoter of the Romantic ethic of authentic sentiment but because his life illustrates the new constellation of feelings through which the public relates to the famous, “the interplay of envy, admiration, generous acclaim, malicious denigration, prurient attentiveness, swift indifference” (p. 57).

Inglis’s narrative continues in nineteenth century Paris, the center of a new political and urban imaginary. As perpetual political upheaval forged a new language of democratic self-assertion, the city space was being restructured to make way for the boulevards, public parks, and glasshouse department stores that inscribed the ethos of the World Exhibition into the environment of everyday experience. These new aspects of the city augmented the oft-discussed arcades, those “fantasy avenues of the rich open to everybody to gaze into the shop windows and dream of unfeasible extravagance” (p. 86). With such spectacles just lying around in the streets, it isn’t surprising that urban perambulation became one of the chief entertainments of the rising bourgeoisie. The creature of the flaneur embodied a new culture of going out to see and be seen, a culture in which glamour and fashionable appearance became crucial. Individual attention-seeking paralleled the economics of the urban spectacle in which shops’ profits followed the number of passers-by lured in by their storefronts. This notion that success consists in successful attention-seeking is of course one of the cornerstones of modern celebrity culture.

The story continues in the money-and-gossip-obsessed New York of the Gilded Age. With the Weltgeist drifting across the Atlantic and the Hudson overflowing with cash from real estate, railroads, oil, steel, financing, the boom of big business generally, a new moneyed magnate aristocracy emerged with its own understanding of the basis of social respectability. While old money and a good name retained a certain status (p. 116), mammoth wealth more and more took the place of blood and breeding. The aura of money – and the realization that the whims of the mighty controlled the destinies of the working poor – raised curiosity about the goings-on of the mansioned rich, and newspapers adapted to slake this curiosity by passing on inner circle gossip. The mix of admiration, envy, bitterness, and adulation that Inglis sees as the constellation of feelings mediating our relations to celebrities today was born in the gossip column and in media profiles by journalists who were both muckrakers and sycophants. The mass press was a celebrity-making machine.

These first three stages – London, Paris, New York – form the core of Inglis’s history of celebrity and orient his analysis of a smattering of topics in the twentieth century. He devotes a chapter to the way our understanding of geography changed as the leisure industry cordoned off certain parts of the world as exclusive vacation destinations, and he provides some insightful commentary on the paraphernalia of capitalist success (yachts, diamonds, vacations on the Riviera, etc.).

One of the most interesting – but also most problematic – chapters, concerns Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, “supreme celebrities” (p. 160) in the era of mass politics. Inglis emphasizes the elective affinity between the theatrics of 1930s political celebrity and literal theater performance – the elaborate pageantry, the controlled outward appearance, the mechanisms of psychological projection that bring the audience under the performer’s will. Moreover, the air of intimate familiarity yet inapprehensible mystery that defined these dictators’ public image would reappear in the perception of Hollywood stars.

Since modern celebrities and dictators are both receiving public recognition within technologically advanced societies with developed media apparatuses, it should be no surprise that there are similarities in the modes of public acclaim. Yet the relationship between the public and the prominent in consumer society and that between a dictator and his subjects in an authoritarian state are importantly different, and more careful attention to this would have improved the discussion. First, the authoritarian press is beholden to the authorities rather than devoted to uncovering their secrets. Pravda was hardly a muckraking outfit. Second, celebrities operating in the market are dependent on the whims of an adoring public, while a despot is largely immune to such caprice. Mussolini didn’t need the paparazzi to hold the attention of the public. Third, the press served to maintain the dictator’s image rather than create it on its own. Magazine profiles aren’t going to contain any surprises. These features reflect the general fact that in a consumer society the customer is king, but one would be hard-pressed to say this about the subjects of an authoritarian government.   

The last chapters bring the narrative into the present. Inglis discusses the era of great film stars with great sympathy, and does an admirable job articulating both the cultural importance and personal magnetism of icons like John Wayne, Cary Grant, and especially Marilyn Monroe. Despite the backdoor dealings and blatant criminality of Hollywood filmmaking in those days, such stars were able to represent “the best part of the national character narrative in which the audience believed” (p. 190) and “the impossible version of the best selves audiences could hardly be in everyday life” (p. 206). They showed an audience a way of looking, acting, and feeling. Inglis possesses notably less patience for the current denizens of the fashion world and reality TV. Unfortunately, Inglis’s inner curmudgeon here seems to get the better of him.  He writes, for instance, of fashion models:

“Having no accomplishments to display, no action to render as artistry, pitifully lacking such personal resources as reflective intelligence and meaningful experience, they are quick to take offense, and, living between public adulation on the catwalk and in the restaurant, and the hot, endless tedium of the dressing room, it cannot be a surprise how many turn to the deathly, uncreative recreations of passing sex and playful cocaine” (p. 245).

There is fairer treatment to be had.

Inglis’s discussions of particular figures in these last chapters are often individually insightful, but the chapters don’t possess the unity of previous sections. While he is a perceptive observer of popular culture and his general erudition is impressive, Inglis’s method of stitching together biographical sketches becomes less illuminating the closer we get to the present where much of this biographical detail is familiar. In these last chapters, we get a patchwork of fascinating details and commentary but not enough conceptual tools to systematically comprehend the historical changes behind the biographies.  

Moreover, some of shortcomings of the end indicate problems profound and present from the start. The narrative that Inglis provides is so readable and his prose so full of verve that problems with the basic analytical categories and argumentative strategy can be easily covered over. The most obvious of these is the term of “celebrity” itself. First, are we talking about a person, a concept, a social role, or something else? One might think that distinguishing these doesn’t make a difference, since they are all interconnected: particular persons are celebrities in virtue of occupying a certain role in the social matrix, and applying the concept of “celebrity” to a person can have the effect of promoting or stabilizing this role (e.g. being classified as a celebrity leads one to be featured in celebrity magazines, which maintains one’s position as a celebrity). However, it’s important to differentiate person, concept, and role because the effects of each are distinct. It’s one thing to say that particular individuals, or a class of individuals, molded our feelings, actions, and ideals in a particular way. For instance, perhaps stars of the classical Hollywood cinema made us long to be debonair democrats, as Inglis says. It is quite another thing entirely to say that the concept of celebrity (or Hollywood starlet) affected feeling. Yet this is what Inglis seems to be getting at when he remarks that understanding the concept is important because it “serves to pick out those lives and ways of life which shaped themselves into the significant constellations of the past and provided quite a lot of people with stars to steer by” (p. 3). I take the idea here to be that the concept organizes people’s understanding and experience of success, and this way of understanding success has particular consequences. Similarly, it is important to distinguish the effects of the concept from the effects of the social role the concept picks out. For instance, a potential consequence of being universally acclaimed for one’s wealth and glamour may be to develop a certain dependence on the attention of others. It would be a very different thesis to claim that the need for continual attention a consequence of conceptualizing one’s position as a person who is universally admired. In the first case, the admiration of others is what is creating your need for attention, while in the second case, it is your conception of yourself as a celebrity that creates the need.

I mention these distinctions not to be pedantic but because I believe their elision explains the book’s strange combination of ease and obscurity. What makes the text both readable and confusing is that while much of the narrative focuses on the reception of particular individual celebrities, one of the main purposes of the book is to examine the consequences of the concept of celebrity and social role it picks out. If Inglis wants to understand “what celebrity does to people” (p. 16), then examining “historical examples, of individual life stories which neither constitute a sample nor provide epitomes” (p. 3) can muddle the issue.

Another pair of concepts that I believe could use some sharpening is the contrast between “renown” and “celebrity” that structures the text’s historical narrative. It isn’t clear how helpful this conceptual pairing is. First, each term groups together a rather heterogeneous array of features regarding the basis and object of public acclaim as well as the feelings of the admiring and the admired. Yet it isn’t clear whether these features are closely connected enough to form an ideal type that is useful for analysis. For instance, many current celebrities – the Prince of Monaco – receive acclaim on the basis of the social prominence of their offices and the public deeds that that their social position make possible. The fact that their prominence is attached to great public deeds performed from privileged positions of the social hierarchy (and those deeds reinforce the honor of the office) does not prevent them participating in “the interplay of envy, admiration, generous acclaim, malicious denigration, prurient attentiveness” (p. 57). Of course, we’re dealing with ideal types here, but the point is that the types Inglis picks out don’t seem to possess any sort of internal logic.

Given that the features of acclaim Inglis groups together often pull apart, the reader (or at least, this reader) had the feeling that the narrative of the book would have been clearer and the discussion of particular figures more illuminating with the addition of a few more distinctions. For example, when Inglis discusses Seamus Heaney (!) as the epitome of new celebrity, one feels something has gone awry. Heaney is of course well known in the literary world, but does the social role he occupies and the type of attention he commands bear even a family resemblance to that of Paris Hilton, let alone The Situation? There are some obvious distinctions – e.g. between those who are famous for their work and those famous for their social life – that would have helped the reader get a clearer sense of the historical and cultural topography. Adding some categories and making some distinctions would better enable us to explain our ambivalent feelings about the cult of celebrity. Inglis often expresses this ambivalence, and provides examples of why we should be ambivalent, but there is a slightly more general level of analysis that would be helpful. Without a more general discussion of different sorts of celebrity, Inglis’s attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff might seem appear to rely more on predilection than principle.

Despite these worries, A Short History of Celebrity is an excellent book. The prose is fabulous, and Inglis is brimming with insight and humor.  Moreover, one can’t help being drawn into tales of the rich and fabulous. However we may flatter ourselves, the stars are just not like us.

Fred Inglis: A Short History of Celebrity
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3439-6
Hardcover, 322 pages, US$29.95

Alex Prescott-Couch is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University. He lived in Berlin from 2005 to 2008.

(c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Mohammed Khallouk

Recent polls conducted by a number of polling institutes indicate that, in the minds of Germans and Europeans, Islam – more than any other religion – is associated with negative feelings. The phenomenon of resentment towards Islam, which is widespread in society, has been ignored for a long time and has recently begun to attract some attention; in particular, there have been efforts to investigate, and publicly debate, its origins, heterogeneity, and repercussions, by a number of prominent representatives from various academic disciplines. One such effort has resulted in the present volume, edited by Thorsten G. Schneider, under the title “Islamfeindlichkeit – Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen” (roughly, “Islamophobia: When the Limits of Criticism become Blurred”), which draws a line from the slander of the Prophet Muhammad in medieval Europe all the way to contemporary internet-based incitement against Islam.

As the first chapter of the book, about the historical evolution of the European perception of Islam, makes clear, large parts of the European population have tended to stigmatise the dominant religion of ‘the Orient’ – in spite of the, at times, significant anticipation of cultural achievements in the Near East. From the mid-20^th century onwards, due to the increase in encounters with Muslim immigrants and ‘guest-workers’ (as well as, more recently, the acceleration of globalisation), these sentiments have again surfaced more prominently.

However, as the first of the contributions by the theologian Thomas Naumann shows, by reflecting on the supposedly ‘darkest chapter’ in European-Islamic history – the age of the Crusades –  the direct encounter with Islamic culture sometimes also made it to possible to overcome feelings of resentment. When viewed from this angle, the present volume can also be understood as a manifesto for cultural dialogue with Muslims, with the goal of finding a consensus on values.

Since negative reports tend to have a stronger emotional impact on a non-expert audience than positive reports, some pundits with an, at best, reserved attitude towards Islam, have succeeded, time and again, in reviving historical legends about Islam, even in the context of what are essentially modern contemporary problems – thereby bringing outdated historical ressentiments back into public consciousness.

This might also explain the observation, well-documented by Werner Ruf, an emeritus political scientist, in his contribution based on an analysis of official NATO documents, that both the scenario of an ‘imminent threat’ from the Muslim world (a familiar trope in medieval and early modern Europe) and a feeling of cultural superiority (which has its roots in 19^th-century imperialism) are enjoying renewed popularity in some political quarters and certain mass media.

The second chapter in the volume analyses the deep repercussions of the resentment that persists in European civil society towards the Muslim faith and its adherents. In particular, it creates barriers for the – politically desirable – integration of Muslim immigrants into German society, and for the recognition of legitimate religious demands, as far as the educational system, professional life and legal system are concerned.

The contribution by Navid Kermani, the Iranian-German scholar of Islamic studies, emphasises that the prejudice-laden image of Islam in parts of German society is, to a large extent, fuelled, and perpetuated, by the use of selective quotations from the Quran, which are taken out of context and then related to specific social problems or developments. As a result, any negative occurrences may then be blamed on Islam itself, whereas other attendant circumstances, such as political conditions, educational backgrounds, or the immigrant status of those involved are often ignored.

The role of the media in perpetuating and cultivating negative connotations of all things Muslim, is analysed in detail in chapters 3 and 4 of the book. What is especially problematic is that some, originally left-leaning, liberal intellectuals, have adopted a tone of wholesale criticism of Islam and ‘the Muslims’. The contribution by the editor, Thorsten G. Schneider, a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies, unmasks the unsavoury methods by which some of those intellectuals (many of whom have never pursued degrees in Islamic studies or Orientalistik) pass off their warnings against an undifferentiated Islamic threat as an exercise in ‘casting light on the nature of Islam’.

In addition to these mildly depressing findings about the attitudes and behaviour among German civil society towards Muslims – who, after all, by now have become an integral part of it – the papers in the volume also present some reason for hoping that Islam might one day be recognised as on an equal footing with Christianity and Judaism. Several contributors point to the painful, but eventually successful, path towards equal treatment that, historically, was part of the Jewish experience in Christian societies and which might now serve as an inspiration for Muslims.

Even though the number of papers included in the volume – the total of which runs to 28 – might seem a little daunting to the layperson and casual reader, the diversity of disciplines and approaches represented by the contributors shows clearly the relevance of the phenomenon of “Islamophobia”, and its consequences, across society as a whole.

Thorsten G. Schneider (ed.): Islamfeindlichkeit. Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-3-531-16257-7
Softcover, 485 pages, EUR 39.90

Mohammed Khallouk was born in Morocco and works as a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies at the Phillips University of Marburg. His work analyses Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as the history of the Jewish community in Morocco. He also works as a translator of German contemporary literature into Arabic.

The German version of this article first appeared in Gazelle Magazin; translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books. All rights reserved.

by Daniele Archibugi

Anyone who thought that the history of piracy was now something out of a Hollywood movie has had to think twice. The events in the Gulf of Aden lead us to wonder what differences there are between ancient piracy and the modern version. Perhaps if we examine the piracy that reached its peak between the end of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, and preyed on the major trade routes, we may get a clearer understanding of modern piracy. However, opportunity makes men thieves and the cleverly written and witty book by Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook. The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009), enables us to do so.

U.S. navy capturing suspected pirates in the Gulf of Aden, May 2009. (U.S. Navy photo, public domain)

According to Leeson, pirates applied economically rational principles aimed at obtaining the maximum result with the least effort and above all minimum risk. They too, in other works, apply the rules of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or rather the invisible hook. Pirates were not cruel out of sadism but simply because by spreading terror they were able to increment their booty. Flying the infamous “Jolly Roger” served the purpose of generating what economists call the “announcement” effect: the potential victims were warned that any attempt to stave off the attack by a pirate vessel would lead to ferocious reprisals. If, on the other hand, the vessel attacked surrendered without any resistance, everything of value on board would be seized but the crew would be spared. The same applies to the pirates’ widely publicized ruthlessness against prisoners: many of the latter were tortured, others forced to walk the plank. Also in this case the pirates’ intention was to create what economists call the “reputation” effect. Prisoners might try to conceal information about valuable goods or about the routes followed by other trading or navy vessels and would be induced to reveal all their secrets by the terrible reputation enjoyed by the pirates.

Leeson gives credence to the economic interpretation of the pirates’ behavior: mutineers were certainly attracted by high profits; in the early 18^th century a sailor of a merchant vessel earned no more than 25 pounds a year, and a courageous pirate could earn as much as 300. But as well as borrowing from the trappings of economic theory, Leeson does not disdain also casting a penetrating glance at the social and political motives of these odd outlaw communities. Life on board ship, whether a merchant or a navy vessel, was regulated in an authoritarian and hierarchical fashion (and it might be added that things have not changed much since those times). The ship’s commander had the power to inflict very severe corporal punishment, stop crew members’ pay without good reason and demand that the crew perform work not envisaged in the original contract, and more besides. On board the captain had the power of life or death without any checks or balances. It is true that the sailors could sue for justice in the courts on returning home, although the latter usually sided with the commanders, also because the judges came from the same social class.

It is thus not surprising that, far beyond the reach of the dominant authority on land, sailors should set up a completely different social organization. And it is striking to see the extent to which this was based on principles of equality. In the first place, political equality. “Every Man has a Vote in the Affairs of the Moment” runs article one of the Code of Conduct on board the private vessel of Captain Bartholomew Roberts. Furthermore, it was the crew members who elected their own captain. Furthermore, the commander could be deposed by the pirates themselves if judged to be inadequate, corrupt or not bold enough, as happen to the famous Captain Edward England. In the rudimentary system of checks and balances characterizing the pirate republics, also a quartermaster was elected to look after the ship’s management, and who had the power to avoid individual crew members being unjustly punished. Nor must it be overlooked that, in an era in which the European nations were getting rich from the slave trade, many pirate ships granted equal rights also to colored men.

The pirate communities were in other words far from being anarchic: indeed, they developed a democratic system opposed to the autocratic system prevailing in the other vessels. Pirates had even too many rules: their codes of conduct prohibited sailors from gambling and smoking on board, from drinking after sunset and from keeping lamps alight late at night. They were also prohibited from bringing women on board to avoid causing jealousy.

The distribution of the rewards was much fairer than the pay on merchant or naval vessels: the pay of the captain and the quartermaster was only twice as high as that of ordinary pirates. Moreover, in the case of accidents in the “working place”, the pirates’ republics had a much more highly developed welfare system than that applied on the other ships: they meticulously specified how much was due to any crew member who had lost a hand, a leg or an eye. On the other hand, desertion during a boarding operation was punished by death or marooning on a desert island.

If piracy offered so much more to its members than was available to other sailors, the question is not so much why there were so many (it is estimated that there were two or three thousand in the early 18^th century) but rather why so many sailors did not become pirates. Perhaps it is because when captured they were almost always hanged: a count of executions between 1716 and 1726 indicates that about 400 were hanged, about 40 per year on average. But if we consider the high death rate among law-abiding sailors it must be concluded that the “announcement” and the “reputation” effects worked more for the scaffold than for the Jolly Roger.

Peter T. Leeson: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-0691137476
Hardcover, 296 pages, US$24.95

Daniele Archibugi is director of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and professor of innovation, governance and public policy at Birkbeck College.

This article first appeared on openDemocracy.net ; it is here republished under a Creative Commons Licence.

By Joel Harrington

The Execution of Peter Stumpp (Cologne, 1589). (cc) Wikimedia Commons

June 5, 1573. “Leonardt Russ of Ceyern, a thief. Executed with the rope at the city of Steinach. Was my first execution.” So begins the sixteenth-century journal of Nuremberg’s Frantz Schmidt (1555-1634), who during 45 years of professional activity personally put to death 361 individuals and tortured, flogged, burned, or disfigured hundreds more. Legally empowered to torture, maim, and kill suspected or convicted criminals, the professional executioner is one of the more evocative and charged symbols of pre-modern Europe’s otherness. A ubiquitous and integral part of the European social fabric well into the modern era, these human “weapons of justice” were simultaneously viewed with suspicion and disdain by the very communities they served, formally marginalized as members of the “dishonourable trades”, a delimited menagerie that included slaughterhouse workers and gravediggers. And yet “Meister Frantz”, as he was popularly, endearingly known, remained a revered member of the local establishment, widely respected for his piety and steadfastness.

The dichotomy begs to be reconciled, or, at least, interrogated: How did early modern executioners square their unsavoury occupations with aspirations to social respectability and Christian morality? Was Schmidt a rare anomaly, or was he an indication of something of broader social significance underway, perhaps laying a foundation for modern rationalizations of the use of state violence?

Schmidt maintained his personal journal between 1573 and 1617, recording and describing each and every execution and corporal punishment he administered in Bamberg and Nuremberg. Although the original volume is no longer extant, several manuscript versions of it circulated during the subsequent two centuries. Three published versions appeared during the hundred years after that, the last in 1928. While relatively well-known among German early modernists, the journal itself has appeared curiously resistant to in-depth analysis, perhaps due to its seemingly disaffected chronicle format. There are no introspective crises resulting from extended torture sessions, nor lengthy philosophical discourses or even brief musings on the meaning of life.

Excerpt from Schmidt's diary.

But just below the surface, beyond the facticity of all the deaths caused by his very hand, the journal of Meister Frantz opens up a rich source for topics ranging from early modern concepts of identity and social status to notions about the human body and the development of both the picaresque and autobiographical genres. As Schmidt grows in both professional and storytelling experience, his accounts of the various unfortunates he encounters become both more colourful and more revealing of his inner world. Consequently, the journal unveils not so much a detailed portrait as a vivid sketch of the moral cosmology of a sixteenth-century executioner.

Frantz Schmidt considered himself first and foremost a professional, a master in the guild sense. And as in other crafts, the trade of the executioner was often passed from father to son, with Frantz following his own father, the hangman of Bamberg, into the family occupation, at the age of 18. After five years’ work as a journeyman, he secured a permanent appointment at nearby Nuremberg, succeeding his future father-in-law as the city’s official executioner – a position he would hold for a remarkable 40 years. Throughout this period Schmidt enjoyed a life of bourgeois respectability with his wife, Maria, and seven children in their spacious Nuremberg residence, boasting an annual salary that put him on a par with the city’s wealthiest jurists. After his retirement, in 1617, Schmidt began a lucrative career as a medical consultant, exploiting his extensive knowledge of human anatomy – now to the end of saving lives. Upon his death, in 1634, Schmidt enjoyed a state funeral and burial in the city’s most prominent cemetery, a few paces away from other famous sons, Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. Schmidt’s life, in virtually every respect, had been a great social success, although the dishonourable nature of his profession consistently precluded his open participation in patrician and craftsmen circles alike, placing him and his family in a unique kind of social limbo.

Excerpt from Schmidt's diary.

Forty-five years of personal entries reveal a good deal about Meister Frantz’s internal reconciliation of apparently sincere personal piety and hunger for respectability with the violent acts he regularly performed – torture by various methods, flogging, cutting off of fingers or ears, as well as judicial execution by hanging, beheading, burning, drowning, live burial, or breaking on the wheel. Two aspects of his professional identity emerge most consistently, both of the moral and religious in a broad sense, rather than in a more constricted denominational or even evangelical sense. The first is, unsurprisingly, his self-identity as a restorer of social order, a kind of moral accountant, who, in his own words, “did his duty and made things right again”. As if making entries in a ledger, Meister Frantz carefully lists all known offenses committed by each individual, including full itemization of all stolen property, and numbers all of his punishments, capital and corporal, providing annual totals of each.

While Schmidt’s tone is almost always dispassionate, the relative length of the entries and other clues reveal his implicit hierarchy of social values. Violent crimes, particularly the outrages committed by vicious robber gangs, were clearly the worst and required the most severe punishments to restore justice. Abuses of trust, however, were nearly as grievous in Schmidt’s eyes, including treason, the murder of a relative (especially a child), the rape of a young girl, or audacious financial fraud, such as the one-legged “treasure finder” Elizabeth Aurholtin (a.k.a. “Scabby”), whose schemes amassed a considerable personal future, or the master forge and con-man Gabriel Wolf, who defrauded nobles across Europe of huge amounts. Crimes against property in general required strict rectification, often including hanging for theft. But most such offenses – except when they directly abused people’s good will or hospitality – did not arouse Schmidt’s ire. His complacency was even more evident in a variety of “victimless” sexual offenses (not rape), typified more by exasperation at the defiance of recidivist prostitutes and their pimps than by any evangelical fervour.

Excerpt from Schmidt's diary.

The other self-image that appears prominently is that of a healer-priest, likewise evident in his pervasive concern with full accounting of each individual’s crimes and sins, no matter how small, and Schmidt’s own active role in reconciling the sinner with God. Strikingly, his approach is much less overtly doctrinaire than that of his colleague, prison chaplain Johannes Hagendorn, who also kept a personal journal of criminal cases. Rather, Schmidt seeks to create in the elaborate spectacle of public death a sort of preliminary last judgment that provides the condemned the opportunity to achieve “a good end” or “fine death”, and in his journal he comments extensively on his own success or failure in ensuring that they did not part the world “godless” or “with no hope of salvation”. Above all, the journal entries and supplemental legal sources portray a man steeled to the use of torture and other violence on the offenders before him but also consistently attentive to avoid unnecessary cruelty. Schmidt, for example, successfully leads a pioneering campaign to abolish the drowning of female felons and execute them by what he considered the more humane method of decapitation. He also regularly persuades his magisterial colleagues to behead those condemned to die by fire or being drawn and quartered.

Meister Frantz’s style and thinking evolved over the course of his long career as did his reactions to the range of individuals he encountered during his professional duties, alternately evoking his pity, disgust, indifference, bemusement, and, occasionally grudging admiration. His matter-of-fact recitation of hundreds of state killings, including some horrendous punishments, cannot fail to jolt our modern sensibilities. At the same time, his work ethic, commitment to restoring civic order, and attempts at personal redemption are immediately familiar, perhaps to an uncomfortable degree.

Joel Harrington is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and a fall 2009 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His most recent book, The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany, has just been published by The University of Chicago Press.

This article first appeared in The Berlin Journal, no. 18; reproduced with permission.