By Stephen John

Martha Nussbaum’s latest book opens with a chilling warning: we face “a worldwide crisis in education” of “massive proportions and grave global significance”. The crisis is that the arts and humanities are losing their place in the curriculum at all levels of education. Indeed, even “the humanistic aspects of science and social science – the imaginative, creative aspect and the aspect of rigorous critical thought” are being lost. This is to be lamented, according to Nussbaum, because the proper goal of education is the cultivation of citizens who can play a full and active role in democratic societies, and such cultivation requires exposure to the arts and humanities. Such concerns are, she thinks, not reflected in contemporary thinking about education, which stresses the teaching of narrow technical skills, and associated “thin market norms”, in the name of economic growth. Nussbaum proposes an alternative to the market paradigm, according to which education should be child-centred, and include a full and proper understanding of global history and economics, training in Socratic reasoning skills, and creative engagement in artistic activities. Such an education will create citizens who can feel compassion for others, whom they also respect, while making wise judgments about political issues which reflect a broader understanding of global interconnectedness without an exaggerated respect for tradition. As a side effect, such citizens will also be more economically productive.

Clearly, no-one could reasonably hope to prove all of these claims within a book of 170 pages. This volume is, I assume, intended more as a political act, rather than as a scholarly tract. Furthermore, I find myself more-or-less in agreement with what I take to be Nussbaum’s key political aim: to ensure a place for the humanities and arts in schools and universities. As such, it is tempting to overlook this book’s deficiencies in the name of political expediency, or to defend Nussbaum by stressing that her book is polemic, rather than careful study. Unfortunately, the entire point of this book is to defend an ideal of “Socratic critical inquiry”, where “only the nature of the argument counts”. Even taking into account issues of genre, Nussbaum’s arguments are bad. They rest on sweeping sociological generalisations, confuse different concepts, and fail to engage with possible criticism. 

A liberal arts education -- good for those who can afford it, but does it save democracy? (Photo: ECLA, used under a Wikimedia Creative Commons Licence)

One key flaw is Nussbaum’s tendency to speak ex cathedra on extremely complex empirical topics. For example, at one point, she describes the Indian state of Gujarat as “well known for its combination of technological sophistication with docility and group-think”. Not content with stereotyping fifty million people, she later asserts that the deadly anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002 were the result of “no critical thinking in the public schools and a concerted focus on technical ability”, combined with “propaganda purveyed … in state history textbooks”. To be fair, this extremely tendentious causal claim is supported by a single reference (to her own earlier work). However, it is surely an egregious simplification of an extremely complex social phenomenon. The sweeping generalisation mentioned above is not, it should be stressed, a slip into Orientalism; we also read, for example, that European academics (all?) “have no training” in teaching and so, “would be horrible” at small group teaching. Similar examples abound in the text. I suppose that such exaggeration might be justified by saying that Nussbaum’s examples are not intended as literal truths, but as vivid summaries, designed to illustrate, rather than support, her more theoretical claims. These more general claims about the declining prestige of humanistic education, and about the proper role and value of education are interesting, and of more general import. In the rest of this review, then, I shall resist the temptation to list implausible claims and focus on two key issues: precisely what Nussbaum thinks the current crisis is and her account of why we need the humanities. 

Nussbaum seems to diagnose three threats to humanistic education: first, an emphasis on the teaching of narrow technical skills in the name of maximising GNP; second, attempts to twist the teaching of history and social science to stoke nationalist and ethnic agendas; third, an increasing emphasis on standardised testing. I agree that a narrow, economically-driven curriculum, a desire to stoke nationalist sentiment and a focus on bureaucratically tractable outcome measures each poses a potential threat to humanistic educational ideals. I was far less convinced by Nussbaum’s apparent assumption that these three threats are all, somehow, inter-related. There might be Marxist arguments that capitalism survives best when the workers are stoked up to their eyeballs on religion and their energies focused on ethnic, rather than class warfare. However, on the face of it, inculcating rampant ethnic nationalism in workers seems in tension with creating workers who will play a docile role in multi-national corporations. Furthermore, it is unclear how either the neo-liberal or ethnic-traditionalist trends which, according to Nussbaum, threaten humanistic education relate to her real bugbear: standardised testing and quantifiable measures of educational “output”. Whether hatred has been inculcated is rather hard to measure; it may be easier to measure whether people have marketable skills, but it is unclear that the market itself demands excessive testing. Distinguishing different trends which might threaten humanistic education is not merely of theoretical interest. Rather, even if Nussbaum’s book is part of a political struggle, it is important to recognise that different societies face different problems: Indian academics who lament the BJP-driven rewriting of textbooks face different challenges to UK academics who wish to resist proposals for allocating research funding on the basis of “impact”. 

Furthermore, in in . Nussbaum herself notes that those who value economic growth might often have reason to value humanistic education. However, she seems to overlook deeper grounds of agreement. Nussbaum draws a very sharp boundary – between an “old”, “growth-based” model of development and society with an associated narrow technocratic model of education – and her proposed alternative, which sees the promotion of capabilities “ranging from life, health, and bodily integrity to political liberty, political participation, and education” as the goal of a good society. One obvious worry about this distinction is that it seems to overlook alternative mixed models of development, which, arguably, actually motivate many policy-makers. Furthermore, and more seriously, Nussbaum also seems to overlook why people might adopt a growth-based model of development, and, in particular, how such a model might be compatible with her own concerns. Even if the main goal of education is to promote citizens who can contribute to political debate, and this requires exposure to the humanities, such citizens might democratically agree on the value of economic growth. Conversely, full democratic participation might be a dream in a country where all are extremely poor. Nussbaum writes as if we are faced with a stark choice, but it is unclear that the choice is as stark as she paints it, and even that we have a choice to make at all. Along similar lines, Nussbaum seems to ignore the fact that even if actual bureaucracies have adopted stupid and self-defeating measures of educational attainment leading to what she calls a “pedagogy of force-feeding for standardised examinations”, there are excellent democratic reasons to seek to measure and assess the success of publicly-funded education. 

In short, even if, as a matter of fact, humanistic education is under threat from a variety of directions, and even if, as a matter of principle we think that growth-based models of development are incomplete or problematic, the threats to humanistic education are not all necessarily motivated by concerns which are deeply incompatible with humanist or democratic values. Again, I stress, these claims are not solely of scholastic interest; rather, they point to a serious problem with using this book for the political purpose of defending the humanities. On the one hand, Nussbaum tells us that training in the humanities produces citizens who “understand other traditions from within” and who can “think well about political issues affecting the nation”. On the other hand, her own arguments seem ill-suited to forming political alliances based on an understanding of others’ concerns. Not only does this tension rather undercut Nussbaum’s own assertions, but it makes it unclear who Nussbaum believes will be convinced by her arguments; were I a supporter of increased technical education, of the BJP or of standardised testing, I would find nothing in this book which spoke to my concerns. 

One resolution of this tension is that Nussbaum is preaching to the converted: rousing humanists to fight their corner, and providing them with tools with which to do so. The tool Nussbaum provides is an argument that the arts and humanities are valuable because their teaching is part of an education for “a more inclusive type of citizenship”. This is an interesting proposal, because many humanists seem tempted to defend teaching and research in their subjects by appeal to something like the intrinsic value of a humanistic education, and, as such, to resist attempts to justify curricula and research programmes in terms of “impact”. Nussbaum seems to suggest, however, that, rather than resist talk of impact, humanists should, instead, challenge prevailing conceptions of what constitutes impact. In general, this strikes me as an excellent proposal: given that continued teaching and research in the arts and humanities depends to a large degree on taxpayers’ money, it seems incumbent on humanists that they can provide a justification for their subjects which clearly relates to political concerns and demands. What worries me, however, is that Nussbaum seems to confuse two different issues. The first issue is whether we should conceptualise the good society in narrowly economistic terms or in broader terms, which include a concern that citizens are able to make reasoned contributions to debate. The second issue is what we should teach in Schools and Universities. Nussbaum’s argument seems, often, to run together these two questions, because she seems to assume that there is some very strong relationship between what we teach and the health of democracy. While I agree that there might be some relationship here, I was uncertain precisely what Nussbaum sees this relationship as, and without further specification of the precise relationship between curricula and democracy, it is unclear how best to use Nussbaum’s argument. 

An obvious worry here is that it seems that we have excellent inductive evidence that those highly trained in the arts and humanities can, often, fall very far short of Nussbaum’s ideal citizens. This is a point she herself notes in a brief aside on the anti-semitism of Wagner and Humperdinck. Furthermore, to choose an example Nussbaum does not mention, we might note that Nineteenth Century English public schools and Oxbridge turned out many men who had an excellent education in the classics, but who went on to administer a brutal Empire. In short, it is unclear that exposure to the arts and humanities is sufficient for crafting good citizens. In response to such concerns, it might be suggested that it is not exposure per se, but the right kind of teaching which suffices for good citizens. However, if this is Nussbaum’s thought, then it is unclear how useful her arguments are for practical purposes, given that, as she herself sometimes seems to acknowledge, there is a huge gap between actual current educational practice and her proposals; even if the curriculum set out in this volume would create a new kind of citizen, we might worry that this does not represent a practicable ideal. 

An alternative way of reading Nussbaum’s arguments would be as claiming that some exposure to the arts and humanities is necessary for maintaining democratic societies; in a rousing phrase, we read that “knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour”. In a nearby passage, we also read that in the absence of humanistic education human interactions are “likely to be mediated by the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain”. Leaving to one side the complicated issue of why Nussbaum assumes that we are faced with a stark choice between markets and democracy, the general thought she expresses here may seem plausible. However, they are exceptionally hard to pin down once we recognise that the vast majority of the world’s population has had little education; either Nussbaum must think that most of the world’s population are likely to engage in “bad behaviour” or she must think that the merest touch of a humanistic education can avoid “bad behaviour”. Neither of these claims strikes me as particularly plausible (furthermore, the claim that the particular form which the bad behaviour of those not educated in the humanities must take is a tendency to see others as instruments for economic benefit seems completely implausible: to return to some of the issues mentioned above, whatever else went wrong in Gujarat it was not that Hindus saw Muslims in merely economic terms). 

It is a favourite trick of philosophers to say that X is neither necessary nor sufficient for Y, and, therefore, that there is no interesting relationship between X and Y. This is a bad trick, and not one I want to play here; there might well be a relationship between humanistic education and democratic citizenship, even if that relationship is not simple. Intuitively, such a claim seems plausible – how could people educated in the arts and humanities fail to be better at arguing over policy? – and politically appealing – what even minimally enlightened policy-maker could disagree that strengthening democracy is an important end? My worry is that Nussbaum provides no way of spelling out such concerns. Furthermore, to raise a final worry, it also seems that one aspect of Nussbaum’s approach is likely to be particularly problematic in this regard: her insistence that all education from the kindergarten to undergraduate study should be understood in terms of the creation of better citizens. 

This strategy is, unfortunately, rather ambiguous. It is unclear whether Nussbaum believes that the needs of democracy demand that all citizens receive at least an undergraduate level education (with a strong focus on the humanities, and so on) or that the needs of democracy demand that all those who receive a University education are trained in critical thinking and so on. The first claim seems excessively utopian; were Nussbaum engaged in what political philosophers call “ideal theory”, then the claim that democracy requires that all citizens be educated until 21 might be a valid claim. As a basic assumption in what is essentially a polemical work, however, the claim seems, at best, to engender despair. Even in a developed country such as the UK, fewer than 50% of 18-year-olds attend University. Matters are, of course, even worse in Nussbaum’s beloved India, where female literacy is about 54%. Not only do such facts make the normative claim that all must be educated to University level seem excessively utopian, but they also make it difficult to understand the precise relationship between education and democracy; clearly, if democratic citizenship requires a University education (with a stress on the humanities), we are, and always have been, a long way from democracy. 

Maybe, then, Nussbaum’s argument is intended to be that, for as long as citizens are educated, their education should stress humanistic and humane virtues. This strikes me as a pleasant enough claim, but deeply problematic if the value of such virtues is because of the ways in which they equip citizens to function in democracies. After all, if some do not receive the training in democratic virtues accorded to others, then it seems all too easy to argue that, under real world conditions, it is the well-educated (specifically, those well-educated in the humanities) who should hold greater power in political debate. It is undoubtedly true that in modern societies, it is the well educated who tend to hold real power, and, as such, it may well be true that it is they who most need critical skills and the virtue of tolerance. However, to make such an argument is, in effect, to acquiesce in a form of oligarchy, where what really matters is that decisions made in Whitehall or Wall Street or the World Bank are reasoned and humane. (In this regard, it is a striking feature of Nussbaum’s argument that she thinks that it is a good thing that many US Universities rely on private funds from alumni who appreciate their “liberal arts” training, and a bad thing that UK Universities must rely on government funding. She is also keen to stress how enlightened businesspeople appreciate their humanities education, and employ others with a similar education. A strange undercurrent of the book, then, is that the real dangers to the humanities are posed by small-minded policy-makers and close-minded parents, rather than by big business.) Were Nussbaum asked to clarify her position, I have no doubt she would deny that it has such oligarchic implications. However, it strikes me that there is an important distinction between viewing the ends of compulsory primary and secondary education in terms of the promotion of democratic capabilities, and also viewing University, non-compulsory education in the same way. Even if there is a plausible argument that humanistic training needs to be part of the curriculum all the way through the education system, it seems that we need to be careful that this argument is compatible with the values of democracy more generally. 

This book has an important message: if we think that a good society is one characterised by relationships of democratic equality, rather than merely by the maximisation of GNP, then this should be reflected in debates over educational policy. In turn, such a framework seems to suggest that we should value the arts and humanities, as they can play an important role in shaping citizens’ capabilities. Unfortunately, what Nussbaum fails to provide us with is a clear sense of how we should develop this argument, who opposes it, and how we should respond to such opposition. Furthermore, in failing to do any of this, this book leaves an unsavoury impression that its contents belie its conclusions. 

Martha C. Nussbaum: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3422-8
Hardcover, 177 pages, US$22.95 

(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 Hugo Wilcken

There are books that can never escape the circumstances of their creation. Suicide is one of them. French artist and author Edouard Levé submitted the manuscript of his novel on October 5th, 2007; three days later his editor at Editions P.O.L. called to tell him that he was utterly captivated by it, and they arranged to meet on the 18th to discuss publication. The meeting was not to be. On the 15th, at the age of 42, Levé hanged himself in his Parisian apartment.

Cover featuring an untitled photograph from Edouard Levé's series "Rugby" (2003). (Image provided by the publisher, Gallimard/Folio.)

Edouard Levé was born on New Year’s Day, 1965. A business school graduate, he soon discovered that he had an artistic vocation and started painting in 1991. A few years later, after a lengthy trip to India, he destroyed most of his work and reinvented himself as a conceptual photographer. At the same time he began to write, under the influence of Raymond Roussel and other practitioners of “constrained writing” techniques. His first publication, Oeuvres (2002), is an imaginary catalogue raisonné, self-defined in its first entry: “1. A book describes the works the author has thought of, but never produced.” There follows a list of a further 532 conceptual projects. Later, Levé brought some of these to fruition. One was Amérique (2006), photographs of small American towns named after great world cities (Berlin, Delhi, Rio, etc.). These seemingly banal portrayals of the American heartland unsettle with their desolate streetscapes, tombstones and war memorials, empty skies. Portraits of residents are all composed with exactly the same mortuary-like poses and expressionless faces. Pornographie (2002), another project drawn from Oeuvres, is a photographic series of men and women wearing office-worker clothing but posed in stereotypical porn positions. In Rugby (2003), the blandly clothed participants are photographed in scrums or reaching out to catch an absent ball. Again and again, Levé’s photography plays the trick of reducing subjects to absurd archetypes, captured within a glacial geometric diorama.

Levé’s penultimate publication, Autoportrait (2005), is a disorientatingly “cubist” autobiography, consisting of 1,500 self-descriptive sentences, organised as non sequiturs. A long sentence on the second-last page describes a boyhood friend who, years later, “told his wife that he’d forgotten something in the house just as they were going out to play tennis; he went down to the cellar and shot himself in the head with a gun he’d carefully prepared.” Suicide begins with this same scenario. On hearing the gunshot, the wife runs back inside and discovers the body. The suicide has “left a comic book on the table, open on a double page. In the emotion of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book topples over and closes on itself, before she could understand your last message.” (Levé’s body was also found by his wife, but he was more careful with his own last message.) The rest of the book reads something like Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction written with the distance and economy of Camus’s L’Etranger – radiating the same clinical intensity as Levé’s photography. Addressing the unnamed suicide in the second person, the author recounts various episodes from his short life, not necessarily in chronological order (“I remember you haphazardly. My brain resurrects you by random detail, as one digs out balls from a bag.”).

Suicide seems to be a memoir, but after 20 or 30 pages, the reader begins to doubt. There are unlikely moments (the night where the protagonist talks for eight hours straight about Marx and Freud); even more suspicious is the way the author gets inside the suicide’s head, and recounts scenes he couldn’t possibly know about, especially as he doesn’t even claim to have been a close friend (“If you’d lived, you might have become a stranger to me. In death, you are alive, vivid.”). Eventually, it becomes clear that the protagonist is a fiction, a sort of double. Levé – whose only photographic self-portrait is of himself as twins – has split himself in two. There’s the suicidal “tu”, plus the shadowy, observing “je”, of which we learn almost nothing, although the very fact of the book tells us that he’s obsessed with his friend’s suicide. The doubling effect – the fact that, in Rimbaud’s words, “je est un autre” – crops up often in the book. Looking in the mirror while shaving, “you thought you saw a stranger… the absurdity of the situation made you think that you were someone else.” The protagonist walks over to look at a photograph of his wife. At that very moment he hears footsteps, and turns around to see his wife in the flesh. “It was certainly her, you recognised her, but did you know her? She was abstract, like the objects in the background.”

In a Sebald-like sequence, the protagonist spends a few days alone wandering around Bordeaux. His first port of call is a museum, which he has the impression of having visited “dozens of times in other towns”. It contains a 200-year-old panorama of the city stretched out along the banks of the Garonne. Later, walking by the actual Garonne, he realises that he “preferred the old town of the panorama, or even the future town that [his] mind constructed, to the real thing.” His random wandering takes a conceptual turn, when he decides that he’ll follow a pattern of taking a first left then a second right. Eventually he ends up at an art exhibition of austere architecture photography – not unlike, one imagines, Levé’s own Amérique or Angoisse series (Levé had a show in Bordeaux in 2006). Later, he muses that “seeing an island from a boat might be better than actually visiting it.”

Enigmatic suicide is a familiar literary theme. It’s one that Levé sets up only to knock down, since his protagonist is such an obvious case (introspective, evasive, passive in relationships, a perfectionist, dislikes social situations, has bipolar episodes). The enigma lies elsewhere. The fact of Levé’s own suicide irredeemably colours our understanding of his book. Even if Levé hadn’t perceived his suicide as an aesthetic, conceptual act, he must have realised that others would. It is, in any case, what the “je” of his novel thinks: “Your suicide was of a scandalous beauty,” he writes.

Suicide is not a fictionalised account of Levé’s death; in some respects it is a negative image of it. “You didn’t leave any letters for loved ones to explain your death,” he writes, although Levé himself reportedly did. Levé’s art and life nonetheless converge, fuse, and end brutally together. Ironically, Suicide represents a new departure for Levé: his previous books could be considered conceptual conceits, whereas Suicide is something else, a purely literary work. At the end of his life, Levé had by no means exhausted his art. In his last photographic project, Fictions, he abandons the play on established visual codes to portray mysterious, anguished scenes of ceremony, illustrations of a narrative we are never given.

Near the end of this slim work, the protagonist buys an elegant pair of black leather shoes in a second-hand shop. A few days later, at a political meeting, a middle-aged woman’s face collapses at the sight of them. “She was on the verge of tears, her lips trembled. She recognised the shoes you were wearing. She’d given them to her nephew, and her mother had sold them after his suicide.” The faux-memoir concludes with the words: “You didn’t like the selfishness of your suicide. But, on balance, death’s reprieve won out over the painful agitation of life.” There is a puzzling coda, a collection of tercets supposedly discovered in a drawer by the protagonist’s wife after his death. The last of which is as follows:

Happiness precedes me

Sadness follows me

Death awaits me

Edouard Levé: Suicide
Gallimard (Collection Folio), Paris 2009.
ISBN-13: 9782070398621
Softcover, 128 pages, EUR 4.50

Suicide has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. A German translation is forthcoming with Matthes & Seitz (Berlin). English language rights have been bought by Dalkey Archive Press. All passages above translated by Hugo Wilcken.

Hugo Wilcken is a Paris-based, Australian-born writer and translator. His most recent (2009) novel, Colony, is published by Harper Collins.

 (c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Christiane Peitz

2nd of December, 2009: National Day in the United Arab Emirates. To mark the occasion, Dubai is offering fitness events and family entertainment, local musicians perform alongside folklore ensembles from Syria and Andalusia, another highlight are Egyptian show horses: all attractions courtesy of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Community Development. Only Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building at 811 metres, was not completed in time for the festive occasion. Its opening had to be postponed until early 2010.

Who knows what else is in the offing for Dubai. At the end of November, government-owned holding company Dubai World asked its creditors for an extension on debt re-payment, citing its 60 billion dollar debt as the reason. Hotel and real estate prices plummeted immediately, along with stock markets in the Gulf region. The one-time wonderland seemed to turn into one giant yard sale.

Bubble within a bubble: Dubai airport. (c) BRB

Michael Schindhelm is one of many who has left. In March 2007, the luckless former director of the Berlin Opera Foundation (which runs the German capital’s three opera houses) arrived in Dubai. As Cultural Director of Dubai’s Culture and Arts Authority, he was supposed to spearhead the construction, from March 2008 onwards, of an opera house and a Museum of World Cultures. Leaving Berlin, whose coffers were empty, Schindhelm was hoping to be able to draw on Dubai’s abundant financial resources. Surrounded by ten-lane highways, artificial islands, and towering skyscrapers, his new employers nourished dreams of, amongst others, a new multiplex theatre for entertainment and music, with a dozen or so stages and a supersized museum complex attached to it. In the summer of 2009, Schindhelm threw in the towel; he now lives in Rome. Whereas construction of the Louvre’s Abu Dhabi branch is well underway and I.M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art has just celebrated its first anniversary in neighbouring Qatar, Dubai’s cultural bubble has burst.

Is this a case of visionary turned disillusionist? 49-year-old Michael Schindhelm – trained as a chemist in East Germany, and active since as a translator, dramatist, artistic director at the Basel Opera House, arts manager, and writer – has always been reinventing himself and his career; perhaps because of this he fits well into Dubai with its artificiality and allure to fortune-seekers. Fortunately, during his stint in Dubai, Schindhelm was vain enough to keep a diary of his adventures as one among the many well-off ‘new nomads’ that used to flock there. In fact, ‘vain enough’ may be an understatement. As a reader one does not really care which brand of car Schindhelm drives in Dubai, how he copes with the heat, which swearwords he uses when he gets into a tussle over a parking spot, and what he feeds his two tortoises (the female, in case you are wondering, is called ‘Europa’). In other respects, Schindhelm’s vanity is to the benefit of the reader. ‘Dubai Speed’, Schindhelm’s chronicle of his year-long stay in this ‘bay of paradise’, offers an insightful view from inside the bubble.

Schindhelm does not bother with the pretense of understanding. His attitude is one of wonder. He allows himself to lower his guard, and simply describes his experiences in the mega-construction site that is Dubai: The sudden changes in scenery, from desert to highway, from idyllic beach to the synthetic world of shopping malls. Artificiality, kitsch, hubris, simulation, conspicuous consumption. “This city is a case of total mobilization”, Schindhelm writes. It embodies “not merely a race against time, but an objection to time itself”. And yet, he still sees in Dubai “a tiny nucleus of hope” – the promise of a multicultural existence, in the face of political and religious radicalization among such neighbours as Iran, Saudi-Arabia, or Jemen. The final image of the book is a pavilion by the beach, a temporary exhibition hall under the scorching Arabian sun: a happy end, wrung from adverse circumstance, and quite possibly spurious.

Schindhelm hopes for a portion of the global flow of capital to be diverted to cultural projects and purposes. He wants to transmute the greed of the financial markets and turn it into a sense of curiosity; he imagines an opera house whose programme would include Così fan tutte, Lebanese dance theatre, the Cirque du Soleil, Chinese opera, and a Bollywood musical.

More interesting than Schindhelm’s visions for the future, however, are his run-ins with an understanding of ‘culture’ that equates art and commerce without so much as a flinch. None of Schindhelm’s interlocutors gets his point that a musical theatre with a capacity of 3000 is hopeless, simply because of the bad acoustics this would entail. In the eyes of his business partners, anyone who believes that for a museum to be successful it need not yield a high return on investment, is simply stuck in an obsolete European mindset. Dubai, an “imagination of a world made purely by humans”, also wants to redefine culture: as a means of profit maximization, which drives up real-estate values. Culture becomes just another show horse.

Schindhelm’s eventual failure is not so much due to overt confrontations of this sort, but is the result of inscrutable hierarchies of men of some importance, and of strange forms of non-communication that characterize the meetings and discussions he holds with the Cultural Council. Who is really in charge? When is a concession merely an instance of stonewalling, whose handshake is binding?

Schindhelm takes exception to the accusation that he is ignoring the existence of censorship in the Arab world. Instead he portrays himself as a victim of the “Idomeneo” affair, in which a controversial, modernist production of the Mozart opera, to be staged by Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, was cancelled, for fear of reprisals by Muslim groups. Schindhelm pokes fun at the “three generals” – the overeager Heads of the State Museums of Berlin, Dresden, and Munich – who visit Dubai in their quest for cooperation. He notes, with a tone of bemusement, how translating a catalogue for the exhibition “Muslim Faces” (the only project Schindhelm completed while in Dubai) led to problems, because of uncertainty about the attributes of prophet Muhammad. Schindhelm accuses the West of arrogance – and yet he himself embodies it. His zest for action, coupled with good intentions, is a phenomenon that is typical of the West.

As a result, the scintillating bubble that is Dubai becomes a bizarre reflection of our modern age. Schindhelm hints at a number of parallels and comparisons: between the construction from scratch of a modern megacity, the square layout of the city of Mannheim (conceived during absolutist rule), and the imported Florentine style of architecture found in St. Petersburg: “The city is a product of genius coupled with savage contempt for human life. In some sense this is probably true of all cities… Who built Babel? Who St. Petersburg? Who Dubai?”

The plot of land that was reserved for Schindhelm’s opera house, in the meantime has been sold on. The new investor plans to build a car park.

Michael Schindhelm: Dubai Speed. Eine Erfahrung
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-3-423-24768-9
Softcover, 256 pages, EUR 16.90

Christiane Peitz is a journalist and head of the cultural section of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.

The German version of this article first appeared in Der Tagesspiegel, 2 December 2009 (original article); translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books. All rights reserved.

By Gloria Origgi

In one of his perfect narratives, Heinrich von Kleist tells the sad story of two secret lovers separated and condemned to death just before the earthquake that was to destroy Santiago de Chile in 1647. Having miraculously survived, they enjoy for a few days the mercy of an enchanted social atmosphere. Their judges and executioners, transformed by the tragedy and the ensuing chaos, multiply gestures of altruism and generosity. The blissful mood persists for a short while, but soon the rules and norms of civil life are being reinstated and a Mass is celebrated during which the crime of the two poor lovers is denounced as the cause of all the evil. The lovers, unable to escape the fury of collective condemnation, are clubbed to death. The reciprocal altruism and the disinterested society that the cataclysm had spawned turns out to be ephemeral, unnatural, as if the ferocious end were a way to compensate for the uncanny sense of self that the people had experienced when acting in such a disinterested manner.

Jon Elster’s latest book, Le désintéressement, based on his Collège de France lectures in 2006-2007, discusses the very possibility of disinterested action. Is it possible for a human being to act in a truly disinterested manner? Do disinterested actions have a psychological unity or are they the mere product of circumstances? Is disinterestedness an individual or a collective phenomenon?

From a strictly rational point of view, that of utilitarian economic rationality, to the critique of which Elster had devoted an important part of his work, disinterestedness looks irrational. It violates the rules of maximisation of utility. As if human action without the kind of rational and interested motivation that optimise the individual utility was bereft of justification, irrational or at least arational. Elster’s aim, in this first volume of a trilogy that will be dedicated to the critique of the classical theory of Homo Economicus, is precisely to combine a critique of the motivational model of interest with a methodological individualistic approach, and not to go along with holistic explanations in terms of superstructure characteristic of other social science traditions such as Marxism and structuralism. Pierre Bourdieu for instance reduces the possibility of disinterested action to the social mechanics of distinction, assuming that it only occurs as a means of increasing one’s symbolic capital in an economy where not all exchanges are material. Elster, on the contrary, seeks individual motivations for disinterested acts, disinterested reasons to act that are moreover independent of the social superstructure.

There are two defining features of Homo Economicus that disinterested actions may undermine: rationality and interested motivation. Elster’s approach saves rationality at the expense of interested motivation. Actually, if classical economic theory insists on the univocity of interested motivation, it is first and foremost for reasons of simplicity and elegance. Leaving out interest, the theory gets lost in a thousand directions since, writes Elster paraphrasing Tolstoy, “if all interested agents are interested in the same manner, disinterested agents are so each in its own way.” Still, rational choice theory is so equipped that, while it could not do without the presupposition of rationality, it could do without interested motivation.

So Elster, equally familiar with French XVIIth century moralists and with current experimental research in behavioural economics, gives up on a univocal explanation and sketches a taxonomy of disinterested motivations that are, all the same, rational. Altruistic and disinterested action is typically suspected of having in fact other motivations: self-pride, desire for the approval of others, awareness of the benefits of a good reputation. To these essentially ‘allocentric’ social motivations that could be reduced to a form of indirect egoism, Elster adds motivations that are not egoistic but that may be ‘egocentric’, for instance: 1) disinterested consideration for others’ welfare (altruism, egalitarianism, everyday Kantianism), and 2) internal approval of disinterestedness, that is, the desire we have to appear, in our own eyes rather than in the eyes of others, as motivated by disinterested consideration of the interest of others. For Elster, these motivations are independent of the mechanisms of social recognition and intrinsically disinterested.

A series of case studies complements conceptual analysis: the mechanisms of disinterest are being brought to light in behavioural economics experiments on cooperation and reciprocity, and people are shown not to maximize their own utility in exchanges, in intergenerational donations, in reparation among countries, in decision processes in assemblies, and in the motivation of kamikaze terrorists, all cases that Elster had analysed in previous work.

The wide range of phenomena analysed and of explanations is typical of Elster’s style, who, to reductionist social sciences that aim at being “exact”, opposes a model of vectorial explanation that proceeds by articulating a variety of causal mechanisms. There remains a doubt regarding the unity of the phenomenon: if so many forms of disinterestedness are possible, and so many different motivations may underlie it, are we still talking about one and the same thing? Is there then a unitary theory, a mechanism that explains in an integrated way this “ivresse du désintéressement,” and that provides the phenomenology of this ecstatic freedom from our egoistic drives, that Kleist illustrated so clearly with a few strokes.

Jon Elster: Le désintéressement. Traité critique de l’homme économique (tome I)
Seuil, Paris 2009
ISBN-13: 978-2020965903
Paperback, 376 pages, 23 EUR

Gloria Origgi is a philosopher and a researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Her most recent book is on the issue of trust as a philosophical problem (Qu’est-que la confiance? Vrin, Paris 2008).

A version of this article, with minor modifications, was first published on the website www.cognitionandculture.net under a Creative Commons Licence (which also applies to the present article); reproduced with permission of the author.

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.

(cc) Wikimedia Commons

By Hans-Dieter Gelfert

The favourable reception that Safranski’s book met with from critics as well as from the reading public seems to justify his title. Romanticism as he defines it was and is indeed a German affair. Germany’s most characteristic contributions to nineteenth-century world culture, music and speculative philosophy, are so thoroughly romantic that they alone would give the whole movement a German flavour. But in Germany romanticism did not stay within the boundaries of art and philosophy, it gave momentum to political nationalism, to an irrational Lebensphilosophie and to a fatal departure from the path of the Enlightenment. All this, as Safranski narrates in detail, added to the ideological powder-keg that eventually exploded in Hitler’s Germany. Safranski traces the fatal development, but does not condemn the movement as such. On the contrary, he defend its creative energy and arrives at the conclusion that a “romantic excess of unworldliness” is not only desirable, but necessary for counterbalancing the rationality of the modern world.

Scholars of German literature traditionally date the beginnings of Romantik either on the year 1798, when Friedrich Schlegel published his programmatic definition of the new concept, or two years earlier with the publication of Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar), the first instance of full-fledged romanticism in German literature. Safranski is more generous and traces the beginning back to the year 1769 when Herder embarked on a voyage at sea to France, during which according to Safranski the first truly romantic ideas germinated in his mind.

Like most German scholars, Safranski is blind to the fact that almost all these ideas had already been propounded by English writers in the first half of the eighteenth century. If there is any one person the origin of the movement can be traced back to it is the third earl of Shaftesbury, in whose essays the new view of divinized nature shows through an enlightened dressing. Shaftesbury’s influence on German writers and thinkers was so profound and long-lasting that half a century after the appearance of his famous ‘hymn to Nature’ Herder turned this piece of enthusiastic prose into verse. Safranski, strangely enough, doesn’t even mention this, nor does Shaftesbury’s name appear in his index. All the other English forerunners of romanticism – James Thomson, whose Seasons triggered the new nature poetry; Thomas Gray, whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard made the common people a worthy subject of poetry; Edward Young, whose Night Thoughts were hailed all over Europe as the expression of a new irrationality; and MacPherson, whose Ossian-fakes boosted the German craving for sublimity, which lasted throughout the nineteenth century – they all are conspicuously absent from Safranski’s book. He even ignores Bishop Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) gave Herder the idea of collecting folk songs.

This blindness to the early history of the movement is typical of how Germans understand romanticism. They see in it a reaction against the Klassik of Goethe and Schiller. But if these two had died as young as Byron and Keats, there would have been no Klassik, and then, most likely, German scholars would realize that the age of Empfindsamkeit and the Sturm und Drang were equivalent to what in English literature is called ‘preromanticism’ and ‘early romanticism’. They would also realize that long before German philosophers and musicians enriched the world with their creations, England had already delivered a contribution to the movement certainly not less romantic, which in Germany goes by the name Englischer Garten. Of course, the difference between Capability Brown’s landscape gardens and Wagner’s operas is so great that one hesitates to see the two as expressions of one and the same set of ideas and ideals. But the hesitation is due to a shortsighted view of the whole movement. Romanticism was not, as Germans commonly believe, a reaction against the rationality of the Enlightenment, it was from the beginning of the eighteenth century a concurrent ideological alternative to the ideas prevalent at the time.

When, after the Glorious Revolution, the English middle classes began their social and political ascent, they needed an ideologeme that would legitimize their breaking away from the traditional order. The Enlightenment offered them a set of values based on reason. Reason operates on the same principles in every human mind. Thus, it justifies the claim for equality. But reason needs schooling, learning, and cultivation, which only the well-to-do could afford. Therefore, the set of neo-classicist key values such as reason, judgment, learning, taste and beauty would only appeal to the upper middle class. For those who had no access to academia – either for financial or religious reasons – a value system based on nature was far more appealing. Nature gives to each human being individuality, originality, feelings, intuition, imagination, and in exceptional cases, genius. These were the key concepts that began to seep into the intellectual discourse in Britain from 1700 onward, until at last they surfaced as full-fledged romanticism.

The social and economic dynamics that fed the romantic movement are hardly ever mentioned, let alone discussed in Safranski’s book. His is the traditional German approach that used to be called geistesgeschichtlich. Had he gone back to the first dawn of romantic ideas in England he would have been faced with the challenging question why German romanticism went ‘over the top’, as it were, whereas its English counterpart stayed on the ground. The two parted company already in the eighteenth century, when the English refused to opt for either the beautiful or the sublime and instead chose the picturesque for their aesthetic ideal. Picturesque is something that consists of individual elements that are neither fused into a sublime whole nor shaped into beautiful harmony, but are left to please by their disparity. German culture in the nineteenth century opted for awe-inspiring sublimity, which found its most conspicuous expression in speculative philosophy and in the music of Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner.

The social and political reasons for this are obvious. The English insisted on individual freedom because, as dwellers on a sheltered island “set in the silver sea” and armed with political power, they could afford to do so. The Germans, on the other hand, were yearning for political unity and for a powerful state to protect them. Not individual freedom, but collective security was their first priority. The key concept that haunted the minds not only of their romantic poets, but those of the whole nation, goes by the untranslatable word ‘Geborgenheit’. The word evokes the feeling of a pristine state of complete and utter security. The yearning for metaphysical totality, for political unity and for ethnic wholeness and haleness was the driving force of the development Safranski describes so well without ever discussing the reason why. His book, though fascinating in its own way, exhibits the kind of cultural parochialism that for generations has given German ‘Germanistik’ a peculiarly provincial flavour. On the other hand, it is the combination of provincialism and cosmopolitanism at the expense of an undeveloped urbanity which fascinates foreign observers in German culture and appears to them as an exotic otherness. In this respect, Safranski’s book is an excellent travel guide into Germany’s heart of darkness.

Rüdiger Safranski: Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre
Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2007
ISBN-10 3446209441
ISBN-13 9783446209442
Hardcover, 416 pages, EUR 24.90

Hans-Dieter Gelfert was Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Free University of Berlin until 2000, and, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is ‘one of the most prolific and most widely read Anglicists in Germany’. His most recent book, on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, is published by C.H. Beck (Munich).

Sonja Neef, a lecturer in European media and culture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, devotes her study ‘Imprint and Trace’ to the topic of ‘Handwriting in the Age of its Technical Reproduction’. In much the same way that Walter Benjamin, to whom the subtitle obviously alludes, did not object to photography as such, but only to the photographic reproduction of original works of art, so Sonja Neef does not lament the disappearance of handwriting. Whether the practice of handwriting will indeed ever disappear completely is, of course, an open question. If today’s continued presence of, say, vinyl albums – hastily written off as outmoded by many a commentator only a few years ago – is anything to go by, then there would seem to be little reason to be pessimistic about the future of handwriting. (After all, he who writes by hand may be said to demonstrate character, in that he writes against the tide of the zeitgeist.) On the contrary, what Neef sets out to show is that our current standardised typographies and digital substitute worlds remain indebted to handwriting as their ancestral predecessor. Cultural techniques may be everchanging, but they remain latently ever-present. Even the latest flat-screen technology is not left untouched by the history of handwriting. Neef makes it clear that traces of handwriting are to be found everywhere. What is important is ‘to contemplate the Manual within the Digital: the fingerprint on the touchscreen, the stylus on the writing pad of a tablet PC; in short, to consider handwriting from [the perspective of the] screen’ (p. 29).

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Neef’s observations are informed by the conceptual vocabulary of such figures as Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Kittler, and consequently the study as a whole accentuates the cultural-philosophical more than media-theoretic aspects. To be sure, dogmatic adherence to any particular methodology – what Paul Feyerabend used to call ‘Methodenzwang’ – is not something one accuse the author of. What one might wish to criticise is the overambitious scope of the historical trajectory, which the author sets out to chart: Neef’s observations concerning the development, the significance, and the destiny of the technique(s) of handwriting go all the way back to the evolutionary origins of hand-like extremities “from fish to homo sapiens”, and span the whole breadth of cultural evolution, from human prehistory to the ancient world, the medieval period, the modern age and digital postmodernity. Thus, the author takes her readers on a tour de force from hieroglyphics to screen-savers, from cuneiforms to corrective fluid.

Neef, however, sees no difficulty in going back in history – or, for that matter, in extrapolating into the future. Her goal is to subvert the seemingly clear-cut distinction between the techniques of handwriting and the printing press: ‘My thesis is that there is no final dichotomy […] between, on the one hand, printing as a mechanical, technical, or digital way of writing and, on the other hand, handwriting as an individual, unique, and singular trace; instead, the two principles of “imprint” and “trace” are always already intertwined, both historically as well as systematically’ (p. 25). In other words, whatever the future may bring, handwriting survives safe and sound.

The individual chapters of the book span a wide range of topics and are refreshingly brief; in general, Neef writes succinctly and avoids long-winded sentences. As a result, her writing tends to be more intelligible than that of her theoretical role models. Nevertheless, it seems that writing in an accessible manner continues to be a professional risk within German-language academia. At the level of terminology, Neef pays heed to the expectations of her academic peers: The average reader will likely need a dictionary in order to make sense of such learned chapter headings and phrases as ‘Manus ex machina’, ‘Exergum’, ‘Dactylography’, ‘Currere’, ‘Ceci tuera cela’, ‘Infra-mince’, and the good old ‘Paralipomena’ (especially given that classics scholars are presumably not the main target group of the book).

Texts in the humanities, especially when they are (as in this case) reworked versions of an earlier PhD or Habilitation thesis, are often meant to demonstrate the author’s originality and independence. However, there is such a thing as too much originality – as Walter Benjamin found out the hard way when his Habilitation was at first rejected by the University of Frankfurt. Perhaps in order to avoid such a painful experience, Neef also dutifully goes over much secondary material. What emerges from this is a thoughtful and plausible assortment of important thinkers (Heidegger, Derrida, various anthropologists), who pondered the significance of hands and hand-writing. In outlining their views, Neef often develops her own theoretical positions, forges new connections, and delineates her argument from the views of others. As a result, the reader is spared the déja-vu experience of thinking that somewhere, somehow, one has read all this before.

Neef’s intellectual tour de force from antiquity to the present comes to a stop already half-way through the book. The remaining chapters are for the most part revised versions of previously published papers on such varied topics as graffiti, Anne Frank’s diary, and tattooing. While these chapters are nicely illustrated with photos and graphic images, thus inviting the reader to browse among them, they do not, as a whole, fit very well with the first half of the book. Towards the end, the book reads more like a collection of essays. All in all, however, Neef’s book not only conveys valuable insights into the cultural-philosophical significance of the ‘old’ medium of handwriting, but also whets the reader’s appetite to dig out that old fountain pen again – irrespective of whether one intends to draw precise block letters on a page or indulge in the magnificent swirls of ornate calligraphy.

Sonja Neef: Abdruck und Spur. Handschrift im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2008
ISBN-13: 978-3865990372
Softcover, 360 pages, EUR 24.90

Frank Berzbach teaches psychology and social sciences at the Ecosign Academy of Design, Cologne University of Applied Sciences (FH Köln).