Correspondence An International Review of Culture and Society

Issue No. 6 Spring/Summer 2000

An International Project of the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence
Published by the Counci l on Foreign Relations

The Double Bind of the World Press

I n 1793, while hiding in a Parisian garret from Robespierre’s police, the emi-
nent French mathematician and Enlightenment philosopher the Marquis de
Condorcet wrote the remarkable Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès
de l’esprit humain. In that sketch, Condorcet, who had invented a calculus of
probabilities that underwrote the principles of insurance, declared that with the
discovery of printing and the diffusion of scientific knowledge, an enlightened
public opinion must ultimately win out: “It is enough for there to exist one cor-
ner of the free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves.” Condorcet,
unable to find asylum, was arrested and imprisoned at Bourg-la-Reine, and found
dead in his cell on the following day.
A free press is a condition for liberty and the test for every nation that pro-
claims itself to be free. In the United States, the foundations go back to the eigh-
In This Issue teenth century. In 1734, still under English colonial rule, a New York editor,
Peter Zenger, was arrested for seditious libel for criticizing the provincial gover-
The World Press: U.S. & Britain nor. He was acquitted on the then-revolutionary ground that truth was no libel.
But there was still the threat of government intimidation. In 1798, during the
The First Global Newspaper 3
Federalist presidency of John Adams, the Congress passed the Alien and Sedition
Journalism—Where It All Began 4 Acts, which made it a misdemeanor to speak or write against the president or
American Press: Facing the Internet 6 the Congress “with the intent to defame.” Twenty-five persons were arrested,
Who Owns the Media? 8 including a member of Congress, and several opposition Republican editors were
British Press: A Golden Age 9 silenced by heavy fines or jail sentences. Two state legislatures, in protests
drafted by Jefferson and Madison, declared the act to be unconstitutional. The
Report from Britain election of Jefferson in 1800 quashed the act. Consistently, the Supreme Court
The Devolution of the U.K. 11 has upheld the freedom of the press, most notably in recent years in Sullivan v.
Intellectuals The New York Times (1964), which held that criticism of a public official was not
in itself libelous.
Cultural Cold War—50 Years Later 12
According to the latest annual survey by the New York-based pro-democracy
Joseph Rovan 13 organization Freedom House, of 186 countries in the world, only 69 have a free
Alexandre Kojève: Russian Agent? 15 press, and these are principally in North America (the United States and Canada)
Ignazio Silone: Fascist Informant? 16 and Western Europe. More than half the press in the Middle East, Africa, and
Asia are not free. Repressive regimes crack down openly. In Serbia, newspapers
The World Press: France & Italy are shut down, journalists routinely jailed, and media outlets suddenly expro-
French Press—The Quality Remains 17 priated from their legal owners through mysterious court decisions and put into
The Italian Press 18 the hands of others more loyal to the regime. In Iran, where newspapers had
The World Press: Germany bravely led the reform movement in support of President Khatami, eight news-
papers and four weeklies were abruptly shut down by decisions of the judicial
German Press—Covering the World 20
court and several editors jailed for defamation of Islam.
Feuilleton & the Theatre of Politics 21 Freedom of the press is a perennial issue in the world, but in the past two to
Marion Dönhoff at Ninety 22 three years newspapers have faced an extraordinary technological challenge that
Reports from Russia is transforming the character of the press itself. This is why in this issue of
Correspondence we print reports on the press in eight major countries—the
The Russian Press 23
United States, England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, India, and Japan.
New Russian Theatre 24 The challenge is the Internet, one of the most astonishing and unexpected
Vladimir Putin, Cultural Maestro 26 technological developments of the century, which has revolutionized the infor-
(continued on next page) mation infrastructure of world society. To illustrate: on January 8, 1815, there
was a Battle of New Orleans in which almost all the British troops were massa-
 The World Press

(continued from previous page)

cred by American forces led by Andrew Jackson. Peace between the U.S. and
Language Britain had been signed two weeks earlier on Christmas Eve, but the news had
Spanglish—A New Vernacular 27 not reached the contending armies by that time. In 1846, during the Mexican-
A Spanglish Sampler 28 American War, for the first time news reached officials immediately, by tele-
Fear of Franglais 28 graph. Today the Internet is available in “real time” every minute.
What is more, it is selective, interactive, and immediate. When the plane of
Parlez-vous Val? 29
John F. Kennedy, Jr., went down off Martha’s Vineyard island, the Web site of
Yinglish 30 the Boston Globe that evening reported one million hits. The Boston Globe itself,
Who Speaks Romanche? 30 the next day, had nothing to add. When the prurient Starr report on the pecca-
The Internet—One Tongue or Many? 31 dillos of President Clinton was released, over six million hits were reported on
Japonica: How to Read Japanese 33 the Library of Congress Web site, and in twenty-four hours, the report was
The Death of a Language 34 downloaded 750,000 times, just as the daily press began printing its 445 pages.
(For details, see “The Digital Age Takes Off,” in our Issue No. 3).
World Literature Every major newspaper in the world has its own Web site. Paradoxically, the
African Literature: Old Voices & New 35 Web site becomes competitive with the paper itself. The New York Times, for exam-
ple, provides a twenty-four-hour continuous news service, including any break-
The Middle East ing news and updating stories first reported in the morning newspaper. More than
Christian Migration 37 that, one no longer even has to buy the print edition of the Times: an individual
The World Press: India in any part of the world can simply “plug into” the Web site and select any story
or column he or she wishes to see and even, odd as it might be, print out the entire
Press in India: Rise of Vernaculars 38
edition of the paper. A magazine such as the Weekly Standard advertises that when
Reports from Asia crucial political events have taken place after the magazine has gone to press, one
In Japan Everyone Reads the Press 39 can get an analysis of the results by its editor William Kristol on its Web site.
Cross-media alliances are taking place. MSNBC (the cable news network owned
Foreign Reporting on Japan 40
jointly by Microsoft and the NBC network, itself owned by General Electric)
Taiwan’s Knowledge Class 41 have created an alliance with the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine
Ghetto and the Japanese 42 (which the Post owns) to share Web content and reporting resources. Through
Theatre Necessary in a Graveyard? 43 such Internet alliances a new national press is developing.
Soseki Natsume & “Existence” 44 The emergence of new daily online periodicals such as Slate (owned by
Eulogy for Seizaburo Sato 45 Microsoft and edited by the savvy Michael Kinsley) and the jazzy Salon, with its
columns and news reports, in effect creates alternative national newspapers. The
Miscellany weekly paper edition of Slate provides a comprehensive set of summaries of the
Scandal in the Israeli Press 5 major magazines of the country, of the international press, movie reviews, conver-
The German Business Press 10 sations on books, first-rate political reporting by Jacob Weisberg, and punditry
Swamped by Metaphor 14 galore. One might even say that a weekly issue of Slate with the more comprehen-
sive worldwide economic and political coverage of the Economist, also available
Sartre Redivivus 22
online, may suffice for any educated reader. And if one is an expatriate from, say,
Necrology New Zealand, one can click onto a Web site which offers weekly coverage and gos-
In Passing 46 sip of all events back home — if there is any longer such a place as “back home.”◆
—Daniel Bell
Noel Annan 46
Note: For Freedom House’s full, country-by-country Annual Survey of Press
Francis Haskell 47 Freedom, cited below, see its Web site: www.freedomhouse.org.
Louis Castro 47
João Cabral 48
Emanuel R. Piore 48
Freedom of Press by Region
Edward H. Levi 48 Region Free Press Partly Free Not Free No. of Countries
C. Vann Woodward 49 Africa 6 17 30 53
Walter Jackson Bate 49 Asia 6 4 14 24
Benjamin Schwartz 50 Europe (E&W) 29 10 9 48
Zvi Grilliches 50 Latin America 17 14 2 33
Raymond Vernon 50 Middle East 1 2 11 14
Myron Weiner 51 U.S./Canada 2 0 0 2
Adam Ulam 51 Pacific 8 4 0 12

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 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

The First Global Newspaper—Which?

I nevitably, with globalization there is a race to create a

global newspaper. As is now readily apparent, the Internet
makes it possible for any newspaper to be read everywhere.
The New York Times or Le Monde can be read in Timbuktoo (if
there is a phone modem there) or by the little lady in Dubuque.
tailed statistical analysis on more than sixty countries for ready
reference. Its most ingenious innovation is a “mobile edition,”
so that anyone with a handheld device, such as a Palm Pilot,
can click into the magazine, wherever they are, and read pages
from the magazine. Increasingly, other publications are using
In speaking of a newspaper, we mean, first the physical the same system. One gets free software from a company called
print paper that one has in one’s hands. To that extent, the AvantGo, specifies which publication one wants to subscribe
first global paper has been the International Herald Tribune to, connects their personal computer to the Web site, and the
which prints in twenty different plants and circulates in 187 handheld device is synchronized with the PC.
different countries. The IHT, based principally in Paris, has But the main competition, the global duel, is between the
its own staff, but also draws heavily from its co-owners, the two behemoths, the American Wall Street Journal and the
Washington Post and the New York Times. (The Herald English Financial Times. The WSJ has by far the biggest cir-
Tribune, an original sponsor, fell by the culation in the world, totalling 2,400,000
wayside many years ago.) in its regular print editions, as against
The IHT is crisply written and merci- the FT’s 440,000. But most of the WSJ
fully short (thirty to forty pages) against circulation is in the United States, while
the elephantine bulk of its parent papers, the FT is much stronger in Europe, let
but it does cover the major political and alone in the United Kingdom, where the
cultural news, and to a lesser extent the FT sells about 190,000 copies daily.
business world. But the readership of the The Wall Street Journal has long had
IHT, by and large, is primarily among worldwide regional editions, such as the
Americans living abroad, or some of the Asian Wall Street Journal, or Wall Street
business elites in Europe who want a Journal Europe. Its strategy seems to be
quick reprise of American events, and, to expand its print editions, but to tailor
in the summertime, American travelers them more to regional considerations. In
who want a comfortable reminder of February, a redesigned Wall Street Jour-
their nationality. The IHT is now trying nal Europe, on which the company says
to enlarge its scope, and (as we report in it will spend $60 million, appeared on
our article on the German press), the the newsstands. The old WSJE looked
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germa- exactly like the American edition. The
ny’s largest newspaper, now puts out an English-language sec- new one introduces color photographs, and feature stories
tion on Germany that is folded into the IHT. The IHT has a spring out boldly across three columns in a more horizontal
new editor, David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist with “European” layout. The Wall Street Journal has special edi-
broad international experience, especially in the Middle East, tions where bannered pages from the American edition are
but also a novelist and thriller writer, and so may enliven its translated and appear in local languages in twenty-six coun-
feature reporting. tries. The Wall Street Journal Americas, a set of special edi-
The English Guardian puts out an English-language weekly tions, is translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
with translated pages from Le Monde and the Washington Post, The Financial Times, with its distinctive salmon-colored
but the pages from Le Monde are few and the pages from the pages, seems to have a different strategy. While the FT has an
Washington Post mostly its reviews, so the Guardian Weekly affiliate in France, has acquired the Economic Times of India,
remains principally a U.K. paper with international pretensions. and now puts out a complete Financial Times Deutschland, on
But it is the business press that is making the major efforts salmon-colored paper (both reported on in this issue), the
to become global, largely because business advertising is paper now, as it states, produces two versions of the Financial
global, and that is where the riches lie. Among the business Times, one available on paper, one on the Web. With a new
weeklies, the strategies differ. Business Week, the most com- technology, it has become a full global business portal, and the
prehensive of the business publications, has gone online, site has seven channels covering everything from business
allows its readers to download the magazine before the maga- news to leisure. The FT now claims a roster of two million reg-
zine comes to the mailbox, is updated every business day, and istered users and more than one million pages delivered daily.
provides detailed daily briefings on dozens of different sub- What the Financial Times is saying is that it is not a newspa-
jects (with extensive dossiers the paper edition never fea- per with a Web site attached, but a journalistic enterprise “that
tures). It is, if one so wishes, a daily business magazine. operates freely across media boundaries” and not committed
The London Economist has a Web edition, free to paid sub- to any one form of publication. Which strategy will win out is
scribers, organized thematically so that readers can quickly one of the fascinating questions in journalism today. ◆
select which stories interest them most, while providing de- —Daniel Bell

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 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

Journalism—Where It All Began

P olitical information first became a commodity in the

newsletters of the late sixteenth century. The stage was
set by the economic unification of Europe and the estab-
lishment of the first public postal systems. The sources were
the emerging state bureaucracies, not only by the communica-
Newsletter writers were as much a part of the oral as of
written culture. Far more than accredited sources, they
depended for their news gathering on rumor and hearsay.
And when they began a story by the customary diction, “it
is said that,” and variations thereof, this was exactly what
tion networks they set up, but by the political decisions and they meant. They regarded the general import of a communi-
the military events that furnished the material for news. cation as more important than specifics. If they kept any
The first peddlers of such news were not large printing notes at all, such notes more often included lists of topics
houses, but writers of the so-called avvisi, or handwritten than lists of important details. After all, details could be
newsletters serving the customers all over Europe. These mer- invented when necessary. They expected their sheets to be
chants of information included government officials and discarded after dissemination or, as often happened, recy-
ecclesiastical bureaucrats, as well as lawyers, notaries, scribes, cled; preservation in an archive (where they could be con-
literary hacks, unemployed intellectuals, and even murderers sulted) they would regard as a peculiar trick of fate.
and extortionists. Some, following Nowhere in seventeenth-cen-
the example of Pietro Aretino, tury cultural life was the concept
commanded higher prices for what of authorship as appropriation
they did not write than for what more accurate for describing how
they wrote. texts were generated than in the
Forging a new genre from the case of the newsletters. Newslet-
mix of diplomatic or commercial ters directed to the most excellent
correspondence of officials or purchasers were subsequently
businessmen, they began to circu- leased, borrowed, or stolen, and
late their newsletters on a weekly copied either word for word or in
or semi-weekly basis through combination with information
maintaining a characteristic anon- from still other newsletters or doc-
ymous format. Despite intermit- uments and then distributed to
tent persecution, they provided still other customers. As soon as a
the most mordant and incisive newsletter left the desk of its com-
commentary and criticism of their poser it became fair game for
governments. From the French legions of copyists and hacks, with
religious wars to the conclusion of no more imagination or daring
the War of the League of Augsburg than what was necessary for living
(1555) they provided an unfolding by the efforts of their neighbors.
narrative of the ceremonial en- In spite of their notorious de-
trances and exits, the ministerial fects, the newsletters filled an
scandals and royal deaths that important niche in early modern
were the extraordinary spectacle society. They were as essential for
of early modern Europe, a specta- conducting international relations
cle, glittering or shabby, that continues to this day. as they were for slaking the thirst for salacious gossip. They
What a newsletter writer said depended to a considerable were often written by immigrant writers unable to break into
extent on the interests of his purchasers, on what he was told the closed worlds of the guilds and universities. At the same
to write, or on subtle hints dropped by this or that govern- time, they offered second incomes to underpaid civil servants
ment seeking advantageous publicity. Wherever there was and scribes. And wherever rich and influential purchasers
news writing, the exercise of power and influence was never could be found, they flattered the vanity of writers by the
far away. However, news writing was a business, and for the prospect, however vague, of high connections. What was
week-to-week raw material for their sheets, newsletter writ- more, newsletters were essential for the composition of the
ers depended most of all upon what they could glean from a more public genres of official printed news. Provided that
wide variety of sources more or less close to political events. they transcribed accurately, which was not always the case,
Fortunately, ambassadorial staffs were notoriously ill-paid their accounts were only as good as their sources.
and susceptible to bribery, making the security of informa- The first great modern skeptic was Pierre Bayle, who
tion nearly impossible to protect. Information in the seven- expressed his views in his periodical the Republic of Letters.
teenth century was nobody’s property; and in one way or Reading the war of words between the late seventeenth-cen-
another newsletter writers were able to procure documents of tury Catholics and Protestants, Bayle wondered whether the
the most extraordinary kind. truth about any event described by one side or the other could

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 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

ever really be known. And when this partisanship was com- Miscellany
pounded by newspaper writers seeking fast gain by sensa-
tionalism or flattery, the unreliability was bound to increase. Scandal in the Israeli Press
When events were fast-moving and complex, the sources
could be highly difficult to interpret. “The affairs of the
Kingdom [of England] have never been as confused or in such
an unfortunate state as they are at present,” noted an apolo-
getic Théophraste Renaudot, founder of the Gazette de Paris,
T he most bizarre of the season’s scandals revolves
around Ofer Nimrodi, director of the Israel Land
Development Corporation, a company that deals in
real estate, insurance, and publishing. He is editor-in-chief
of the country’s second largest newspaper, Ma’ariv, as well.
in August 1642, at the height of the Civil War. Nimrodi, 43, is a Harvard M.B.A. who once clerked at
Writers just as often made their editorial choices simply in Israel’s Supreme Court, but his moral compass seemed to
order to flatter those in power. Indeed, to ensure good cover- have gone haywire when he took over the family company
age, governments took considerable care to keep the local jour- in the early ‘90s. Determined to save Ma’ariv from near
nalists on their side. A group of petitioners including newslet- certain extinction, he sought to take what had once been
ter writer John Pory proposed an official news book series as Israel’s biggest selling daily and remodel it on the lines of
far back as the reign of King James I. The best way to shake Yediot Acharonot, a tabloid that sells more copies than all
people out of their natural torpor and bring them under the of its competition combined.
rule of right reason, they asserted, was by “spreading among Nimrodi seemed to have become somewhat overzealous
them such reports as may best make for that matter to which in his efforts to make Ma’ariv number one. He commis-
we would have them drawn.” Finally in 1643, in the midst of sioned wiretaps of top people at Yediot, of some of his own
an explosion of hostile publications, the royal government journalists, and a variety of leading figures in Israeli soci-
began sponsoring the Mercurius Aulicus. In a similar spirit, ety. That was in 1994, and resulted in a series of court bat-
the Milanese government and that of Piedmont eventually tles. Two years ago, having exhausted all legal avenues, he
gave the official print shop exclusive rights to publish the made a plea bargain: he admitted to wiretapping and some
local newspaper. That of Piedmont gave the journalist a 1000- of the charges of tampering with justice, and was given an
lire pension; while the government of France was giving the eight-month prison sentence. That was reduced by a third
same journalist half as much. Indeed, the latter government, for good behavior and ended a year ago.
also maintaining Renaudot on the payroll, furnished battle A month later, Nimrodi remarried, and the guests in-
reports to the Gazette de Paris penned by none other than cluded Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ezer Weiz-
Louis XIII himself. man. Shortly afterward, however, he faced trouble. Rafi
Printed news was nothing new in the seventeenth century, Pridan, the private investigator Nimrodi had hired to carry
to be sure; but its volume was unprecedented. Entrepreneurs out the wiretaps, offered the Tel Aviv prosecutor material
included successful printers as well as newsletter writers, nov- incriminating his former employer in an effort to reduce his
elists as well as failed actors. After the first regular newspapers, own prison term. He claimed that his wiretapping partner,
dated 1609, began competing in Strasbourg and Wolfenbüttel Ya’acov Tsur, who had turned the state’s evidence during
with existing one-time publications like news books and hand- the first investigation, was marked for death by Nimrodi.
bills, they emerged in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Nimrodi was arrested in November 1999. The prosecut-
Genoa, Milan, Barcelona, and hundreds of smaller centers. In ing attorney declared that the eight counts of his indict-
Germany, no less than two hundred newspapers were pub- ment had “no parallel in the State of Israel.” At a Novem-
lished within the century. In England, some 350 titles of news ber hearing on Nimrodi’s continued detention, the head of
publications of all kinds appeared in the period from 1641-59 police investigation declared that the press mogul had
alone. Wide differences in literacy levels determined wide vari- tried to buy off his entire unit.
ations in diffusion. But the general impression of jurist Ahasver As if the case was not troubling enough, it has under-
Fritsch in Jena that news publications “get into the hands of lined the fact that the country’s major media outlets are
everyone” whether by reading or by listening, was exactly owned by a small group of families. Together, the Nim-
echoed by engraver Giuseppe Mitelli in Bologna and by an rodis (Ma’ariv), the Mozeses (Yediot), the Schokens
anonymous pamphleteer in Padua. (Ha’aretz), and Eliezer Fishman (a Mozes partner in
With all its contradictions and constraints, the news busi- Yediot) own not only the country’s remaining Hebrew
ness established in early modern Europe contained the basic papers, but also cable TV networks, the commercial TV
elements that would make it a feature of modern political prac- channel, book publishing, long-distance telephone ser-
tice in the centuries to come. The business raised many of the vices, and Internet access. Sometimes they do business
questions about the nature and impact of information that together, and sometimes they feud, aligning and realign-
arose within the emerging public sphere and which remain to ing themselves so that the consumer can never be sure of
be confronted today. ◆ the credibility of their coverage.
—Brendan Dooley —David B. Green
Note: This essay is drawn from the first chapters of Brendan Dooley’s Source: “Israel’s Winter of Discontent,” New Leader, March/April
The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern 2000. David B. Green is an editor of the Jerusalem Report.
Culture, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

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 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

The American Press: Facing the Internet

A few months ago, Hotaling’s closed down for good. Hotaling’s was New York’s best out-of-
town newsstand. From the 1920s on, it occupied street-level space at the uptown foot of the
Times Tower, and, like the news zipper girding that trapezoidal building, helped give cre-
dence to Times Square’s boastful claim to be the Crossroads of the World. The news zipper is still there,
though its bulletins are now provided by Dow Jones, not by the New York Times (and the building,
which the Times long ago outgrew, is a Warner Bros. souvenir deregulation, is as big a headache as running a business. And
shop topped by gigantic billboards). Hotaling‘s, in its heyday, cybernews is making each of us his or her own editor and,
was (if you love newspapers) a wildly romantic place, with increasingly, publisher.
hundreds of front pages—the San Francisco Call-Bulletin! the From the point of view of the newspaper business, the new
New Orleans Item! the Chicago Daily News! the Memphis technologies mean clammy insecurity in the present and, for
Scimitar!—clamoring for the attention of passing tourists, the future, some combination of oblivion and bonanza. The
pimps, and sailors. Toward the end of the century, Hotaling‘s present situation is inherently unstable. All that wonderful
moved to humbler quarters in a storefront on 42nd Street, and stuff that‘s free on the Internet can‘t stay free forever. Right
its inventory shifted toward foreign newspapers and maga- now, it is subsidized by the parent newspapers‘ buyers and
zines, the better to serve the immigrants and adventurers advertisers, who will eventually tire of carrying the freight.
flooding into the city from abroad. Now it‘s gone. Ways will have to be found to get Internet readers to pay up.
What killed that fabulous old newsstand was, of course, the How this will be done is as yet unknown; that it will be done
Internet. But it hasn‘t been such a bad trade. A gigantic is certain. The infrastructure of publishing—not just news-
Hotaling‘s is now at the fingertips of everyone in the world paper publishing but books and magazines too—is an absur-
who has access to a computer and a modem. The Call-Bulletin dity that sooner or later must collapse. All those trees cut
and the others mentioned above are stone dead—they and down and pulped, all that ink pumped, all those plates made,
hundreds of their brethren were swept away by an earlier tech- all those factories humming, all those trucks and ware-
nological innovation, television—but just about every news- houses—all that is ludicrously cumbersome, dangerously
paper in the world that‘s still in business is online, available slow, and unbelievably expensive. The real cost of a fifty-cent
worldwide and free of charge at the moment of publication. newspaper is several dollars a copy, most of which goes for
This is the biggest change in newspapering since Linotype manufacturing and distribution. At the newsstand, a year‘s
machines and rotary presses. Only a few of its eventual conse- worth of the New York Times costs $365—$521 if you buy the
quences are as yet visible. What‘s happening to the American national edition. On the Internet, the price is zero. The latter
press—to the press everywhere, for that matter—is a vast figure obviously requires adjustment, though it need rise to
melting, a dissolution, a liquification. Everything is dissolv- only a fraction of the former. As money, like information,
ing and reforming in ways whose ultimate course can be envi- increasingly streaks across the Internet in infinitely divisible
sioned in a fuzzy sort of way but not precisely predicted. At digital form, much of the true core cost of a “paper” like the
the moment, a number of effects—some transitory, some in all Times—the cost of its “wetware,” the editorial staff—will
likelihood permanent—are clear. eventually be borne by readers throughout the world paying
From the reader‘s point of view, there has been a staggering an affordably low price per head. Readers who still prefer
expansion of choice. News is more available—faster, cheaper, “hard copy” will simply print their own, buying their own
and in greater quantity and depth—from more sources than ink and paper and using their own “presses”—computer
ever before in human history. But this cornucopia is largely printers whose capacity and quality (though not their prices)
notional, because what is not more available, unfortunately, is rise dramatically every year. Stephen King has pointed the
time. The contemporary culture of work, paced by the new way: he sold half a million “copies” of his new novella on the
economy, is a culture of long hours and short vacations. As Internet, and he was able, while still pocketing his usual
disposable income increases, disposable time contracts. And ample royalty, to sell them for $2.50 instead of $20 apiece,
the competition for that shrinking time—not only from old because he didn‘t have to pay for trees and trucks.
favorites like books and family life but also from non-news Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the papers keep coming
electronic distractions—grows ever fiercer. out. The United States was always two countries from the
One of the less remarked-upon features of the expansion of standpoint of the news business, the mass and the elite. Slowly
choice offered by the new electronic technologies is that it has but inexorably, the newspapers are losing their hold on the
involved a huge shift of administrative labor to the individ- masses, who pay the bills—mostly indirectly, by serving as the
ual. We are all bank tellers now. We are all our own typists passive product that is sold to advertisers. The result is chronic,
and typesetters. Managing one‘s personal telephone service, low-grade panic in the business, the symptoms of which are
if one wishes to bother optimizing the supposed benefits of all too well known: the desperate search for jazzy graphics and

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 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

for “lifestyle,” celebrity, and consumer service content certi- tive and absolute, is gauged. In recent decades, the paper has
fied by focus groups alluring enough to pry the eyes of read- added “lifestyle” and consumer sections—on entertainment,
ers, especially young readers, away from their television sets; shelter, food, and so on—in order to snare readers and adver-
consolidation and editorial cost-cutting; marketing gimmicks tisers in and around its home city, and these have eaten into
of all kinds, including the use of the paper as a delivery sys- the space given to the “news hole,” the “A section” of report-
tem for preprinted advertising supplements. (For an authorita- ing and analysis of national and international affairs. The
tive, and harrowing, account of the newspaper business‘s fear change is less noticeable in the paper‘s national edition, a
and trembling, see Michael Janeway, Republic of Denial, pp. streamlined paper in which the A section material, uncon-
109-154.) The local monopoly daily remains a cash cow, but densed, bulks relatively larger. The Times is better written,
publishers‘ fears are palpable, yielding curious blends of timid- more analytical, more sharply edited, and—for better and for
ity and recklessness, stodginess and glitz. worse—more selective than it once was. But there is no getting
Local and regional papers are (on average) rather worse than around the fact that it contains considerably less raw informa-
they were a hundred years ago, tion. It no longer runs important
when Father would read aloud state papers and speeches in full,
to the family from their long and its foreign coverage is spot-
grey columns, but (on average) tier, if sometimes deeper, than
rather better than they were before. When the Soviet Union
thirty or forty years ago: was collapsing, the Times ran
blander, lighter, and as alike as many stories mentioning the
slices of Wonder Bread, but “Union Treaty” through which
more reliable and considerably Mikhail Gorbachev was trying
less slanted than they used to to hold the empire together, but
be. For elite readers, though, never got around to publishing
the great development of the the text of the treaty itself.
last quarter century has been Elections overseas used to be
the emergence of national covered on an almost daily basis;
dailies, a longtime feature of life now there is typically one story
in geographically compact Eu- before the voting and one after.
rope lately made feasible here All those speeches and docu-
by new technologies of print- ments and foreign political
ing and satellite transmission. updates are still readily avail-
There are three fully-fledged able, of course—on the Internet,
nationals: the Wall Street Jour- for readers who have the time,
nal, the New York Times, and the inclination, and the surfing
USA Today. All—including, skills to find them.
surprisingly, the last-named— Ah, the Internet—the Alpha
are of high quality. (Down-mar- and, especially, the Omega of
ket national papers like Britain‘s Sun and Germany‘s Bild have any survey of the contemporary news business. A decade and
no direct American equivalents: high distribution costs mean a half or so ago, the Washington Post quite consciously
that national papers here must sell to affluent readers at pre- decided to forego the opportunity, created by its Watergate
mium prices. Celebrity magazines, weekly supermarket glory and the growing importance of the capital, to remake
tabloids, and trash television fill the gutter gap.) The three itself into a national paper. Instead, it turned inward,
U.S. nationals have tiny circulations, relatively speaking— focussing on building its impregnability in its local market.
some four million copies a day altogether, about the same Its prosperity is now unrivaled, at the cost of greatness. But
absolute number as Britain‘s four national daily broadsheets, the potential remains. As the New Yorker cartoonist Peter
which serve an overall population a fifth the size of ours. But Steiner once pointed out, “On the Internet nobody knows
their audience dominates the political and economic life of you‘re a dog.” On the Internet every paper is a national,
the country. indeed a global, paper; for that matter, every high school kid‘s
The New York Times plays a special role. It is read more care- homemade Web site has global reach. But the prizes, one day,
fully than the others, and by a wider range of elites; the Journal will belong to the papers (and the high school kids) best able
eclipses it in the business community, but among cultural, to provide the “content” that turns reach into grasp. The Post
political, and “media” movers and shakers, it is without peer. has quietly poured tens of millions into its Web presence. It
It is a kind of public utility; its excellence is so taken for may yet have something like the last laugh. Or it may resur-
granted as to be hardly noticed except when it falters. Its face in some as yet unanticipated form, as newspapers, maga-
authority is ontological: it defines public reality. Its exquis- zines, books, and Web sites merge and flow into each other.
itely calibrated front page constitutes a system of weights and No one knows. All that is solid melts into pixels. ◆
measures by which, willy-nilly, the importance of events, rela- —Hendrik Hertzberg

7
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

Who Owns the Media?

T raditionally, newspapers in the United States were fam-

ily-owned. The major examples are still the New York
Times, owned by the Ochs/Sulzberger family since
1896, and the Washington Post, bought by Eugene Meyer in
1933 and since then run by his daughter Katherine Graham,
Tribune Company is a conglomerate of eleven newspapers
(including the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and New
York Newsday) twenty-two television properties, Internet inter-
ests, and radio stations. The combined Tribune and Times
Mirror company is able to offer advertisers audiences in all these
and now her son Donald. There was also the Chandler family media, plus 3.4 million visitors to its Web sites that is well ahead
of the Los Angeles Times; the McCormick family of the Chicago of any other newspaper combination in the country.
Tribune; Field of the Chicago Sun; Patterson of the New York What troubles thoughtful observers of the newspaper
Daily News; Bingham of the Louisville scene, such as Bill Kovach, the retir-
Courier-Journal, and the Schiff family ing curator of the Nieman Foun-
of the New York Post. dation at Harvard, is the crumbling
All those are no more. There were wall between newspaper and adver-
newspaper chains started by individ- tising copy, which is already happen-
uals: the Hearst press, Scripps- ing online.
Howard (created by Roy Howard), And beyond the borders are the
the Gannett chain, and the Newhouse nine global media groups such as
newspapers. The first two had news- Rupert Murdoch’s news corporation,
papers in major American cities, the the largest English-language newspa-
Gannett chain concentrated on per producer in the world; Time
regional papers, and the Newhouse Warner with over two hundred sub-
on marginal papers where the penny- sidiaries in every media market in the
pinching could squeeze out some world; A.T.&T. which with Liberty
profits. The chains remain, but other Media has large holdings in South
than the Newhouse family, they are America and Asia; Sony, whose major
primarily corporate entities. The holdings are outside Japan; and
Dow-Jones company, which owns the Bertelsmann, the German company
Wall Street Journal, as well as many which is probably the largest book
other interests, is family-owned, but not family-managed. publisher in the world, along with its TV and music interests,
Does it make a difference? As Katherine Graham wrote in the which dominate the world markets.
Wall Street Journal of March 20, 2000, it does. The families have Reports such as these may conjure up images of octopi
been rooted in the cities where they publish, have a strong spreading their tentacles around the world. And there are dan-
sense of responsibility for quality, and have pride in their name, gers, as when Rupert Murdoch uses his New York Post to ham-
while faceless managers can move from paper to paper. mer away at Hillary Clinton, calling her the sixth most evil per-
The change in the ownership of American newspapers is son of the millennium! Yet most nations are too large for the
striking. At the beginning of the century, 99 percent of the Orwellian image of Big Brother to become the single screen of
daily newspapers in the United States were individually owned. the society. And one should not forget the “subversive” role
By the mid-1980s more than 70 percent belonged to a newspa- of technology which not only created the Internet but also
per chain. Today, of the roughly 1320 daily newspapers in the allows alternative voices and alternative conduits and formats
United States, fewer than 20 percent, or about 265 papers, are to slither between the cracks, and sometimes widen them. ◆
independent, and they are principally in small towns. —Daniel Bell
But perhaps the more important developments for the future
are the number of mergers and the creation of multi-media con-
glomerates in which newspapers are submerged. To under- The March of a Moloch
stand what is happening, one has to observe the distinction 1990: Time Inc., and Warner Communications complete
between conduits, formats, and content. The internet or cable a $14.1 billion merger, creating the world’s biggest media
or telephone are conduits through which information or data conglomerate.
or entertainment flows. A newspaper or magazine or television 1995: Time Warner and the Turner Broadcasting System
screen are formats, ways of organizing the information flow. complete a $7.6 billion merger with CNN, the world’s
Content is the articles or news which goes through the conduits biggest TV news channel, broadcasting to more than 200
and is expressed in the formats. What is happening today is nations coming into the conglomerate.
the blurring of all these channels by the media conglomerates. 2000: America Online agrees to buy Time Warner for
Take the $8 billion merger of the Tribune group and the $183 billion, joining the Internet conduit with Time-
Chandler-owned Los Angeles Times Mirror Co., the third largest Warner formats in the largest media deal in history. So far.
newspaper in the country, which took place in March. The

8
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

The British Press: A Golden Age

T his is the golden age of the quality British press. There

has never been so much of it. Helped by the destruc-
tion of the old overmighty print unions, over the past
forty years, one new national daily quality paper, the Indepen-
dent, has been born (making, with the Times, the Guardian,
alleged lurch downmarket when Rupert Murdoch took over
the Times in the 1980s; an alleged further lurch when he made
Charles Wilson, a rough Scot, editor; a further alleged lurch
when Mr Jenkins was replaced as editor by Peter Stothard
some seven years ago; and so on.
and the Daily Telegraph, four). We have two new quality daily Britain of course is congenitally inclined to prefer its past
Sundays, the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph (as reinterpreted through sepia-tinted spectacles) to its pre-
(which in March won the British Press Award for newspaper sent. The bien pensant view of newspapers reflects that of the
of the year), making (with the Sunday Observer) five. character in Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play Night and Day: “I’m
Each daily paper has vastly more material in it: for example, with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”
the Times in 1959 averaged 1.5 pages of foreign news each day The general assumption, so common as almost to be accepted
compared with six pages in 1999. And this is not, as critics com- without question, is that newspapers have “dumbed down”
plain, mere lifestyle froth: for example, to a mid-Atlantic cultural pap.
the Times now devotes an average of four And of course there is plenty to be said
pages a day to the arts compared with half in support of this view, too. No one for
a page in 1959. Partly in consequence of example could think this is the golden
all this, and despite competition from age of the popular press. Essentially, the
television and new media, sales are rising, popular press has moved toward being
up from 2.6 million copies a day in the an entertainment medium rather than
first half of 1989, to 2.8 million today. anything more elevated. The appearance
Equally, there has never been so much of page-three girls uncovered from the
worth reading. Take for example the waist in the Sun is taken as the symbol of
quality of political commentary: from the change, though in fact the Sun has
their different perspectives Hugo Young been cutting back on tits, as readers have
(of the Guardian), Donald Macintyre (of gotten bored with them.
the Independent) and Andrew Rawnsley The chattering classes worry greatly
(of the Observer) combine knowledge of about the political influence of the popu-
politics with strong progressive views. It lar newspapers. The Daily Mail touts a
may be doubtful if there has ever been a xenophobic populist agenda. Rupert
political writer who walks the tricky path between closeness Murdoch’s Sun is credited with evil powers on behalf of the
to politicians and sycophancy more skillfully than Peter political right, culminating in its headline on the day of the
Riddell (of the Times). Those who do not read Riddell do not 1992 general election which featured a picture of Neil Kinnock,
know what is going on. Jonathan Freedland, the Amerophile the Labour leader, with his head represented as a light bulb
new kid on the block in the Guardian, bids fair to challenge and the headline: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person
their supremacy. The work of Michael White, the Guardian’s to leave Britain please turn the lights out.”
political editor, and Matthew Parris and Simon Jenkins, In fact, the effect of this is doubtful. Professor John Curtice, a
mostly-political writers on the Times, has not been surpassed leading psephologist, has found that newspapers do not strong-
since and bear comparison in their prose with the journalism ly affect voting behavior. However, power, as the American
of Hazlitt and Orwell. And that is just political commentary, columnist Jimmy Breslin once pointed out, is being believed
on which I am best qualified to comment. A similar list could to have power. It matters less whether the popular press actu-
be compiled by those qualified to comment for example on ally affects voting, than that politicians think it affects voting.
business reporting, the arts, and, certainly, sport. The government’s recent decision not to introduce an extra
Any visitor to these shores, however, should beware of recy- BBC license fee for those who bought digital televisions for fear
cling this opinion at respectable dinner tables. Brian Mac- of upsetting Mr Murdoch shows that it has that power.
Arthur, a senior editor on the Times, and leading commenta- Perhaps more damaging than its political influence is the
tor on the media, points out that the paper has been accused social influence of the popular press. Unable to compete in
of dumbing down ever since he joined it in 1969. Retired real news with broadcasting, it has taken to a kind of pseudo-
colonels spluttered into their gin-and-tonics when advertise- news: breaking, for example, “news” of forthcoming devel-
ments were replaced on the front page by news in 1966. opments in popular soap operas. Moreover, there is an increas-
William (now Lord) Rees-Mogg, now regarded as the last ing tendency, where there is no news, to make it up with tales
patrician editor of the Times ran into a hail of criticism when of the sexual and personal habits not only of the famous but
he wrote a leader supporting Mick Jagger after he had been of ordinary people. Any relationship between such tales and
convicted of a drug offense, a leader famously entitled “Who the truth is purely accidental. Yet, in a country where suing
breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” And so it has gone on: the for libel is both expensive and hazardous, only the rich can

9
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain

afford to do so. Such tales destroy the life of individuals, but Miscellany
it is also corrosive of social capital such as trust. For this rea-
son, there is a strong case for a proper privacy law in Britain. The German Business Press
Short of that, the best hope of reining in the excesses of the
popular press lies in readers. And there is some sign that this
is happening. Sales of the Sun for example slumped when they
sought to portray the Liverpool fans who fell victims of the
Hillsborough stadium soccer disaster, as thugs. Under reader
T he announcement of a new German business daily
met with disbelief and skepticism. Not that its own-
ers, the British Pearson group and the German
Gruner+Jahr, do not have enough experience and resources
to launch a new daily—but the Financial Times in another
pressure, the Mirror has begun to reintroduce serious stories. language? On February 21, the first issue appeared. The
Most encouraging, sales overall of the popular press are Hamburg-based Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) is not a
falling, down from some 12.2 million in 1989 to 10.2 million translation of the British edition, but a newspaper of its
in 1999. That could of course be due to the rise of competitive own, although the salmon-colored paper clearly indicates
media. It could also just be that the legendary tabloid editors its famous parent. Its editor-in-chief, Andrew Gowers,
have done what has long been regarded as impossible in news- explains that its reporting focuses on Europe, not Germany.
papers, and lost sales by underestimating their readers. After its competitors decided to take the announcement
Beyond this, however, lies a broader issue as to the extent seriously, they started to prepare for tougher competition.
that newspapers are creators and shapers of society, or reflec- There is only one widely distributed German daily with a
tions of it. It is almost too obvious to say that technological clear focus on business and finance news, the Handels-
change has changed the nature of the beast. With the rise of blatt. The Düsseldorf-based paper decided it should face
radio, then television and now the Internet, being first with the challenge by extending its scope of coverage beyond
the news is no longer an attainable objective for newspapers. markets and finance. In October 1999, the Handelsblatt
Their comparative advantage lies elsewhere. A bad effect of launched a new design to underscore the change. It is too
that is the rise of pseudo-news of the type described above, early to tell whether the FTD will take readers away from
which is largely unavailable on television in Britain because the Handelsblatt.
its content remains subject to outside regulation. A good effect The FTD hired almost 120 journalists, which led to a
is an increasing emphasis on analysis, accompanied by help- huge reshuffle in many papers. The Handelsblatt, for exam-
ful graphics and useful Web-links, which helps make some ple, lost staff not only to the FTD, but also to the business
sense of the kaleidoscope of the postmodern world. section of the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, now
But social change has had enormous effects too. British headed by Marc Beise and Nikolaus Piper, who used to be
newspapers used to be largely class newspapers: the Telegraph with the German weekly Die Zeit. These changes testify to
the voice of Colonel Blimp, the Express of Pooter Britain, the the permeability of the German business press. Ideological
Mirror of the working classes and so on. But class and its differences have become less important, with the possible
attributes are fracturing, even if more slowly than the trendier exception of Die Zeit, with its constant skepticism toward
members of New Labour believe. For example, the most down- globalization. Nevertheless, German business press sets the
market of recent British newspapers, the near-pornographic stage for important debates, such as the controversy over
Sport, attracts a laddish but relatively upwardly-mobile audi- the introduction of the euro.
ence. The business-oriented Financial Times has expanded its Germany’s most important economics and business sec-
general news and culture for its expanded readership, though tion is clearly that of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
it still resists sport. Newspapers are by no means alone in feel- (FAZ), Hans Barbier being the doyen of German econom-
ing adrift in these swirling currents, and by no means alone ics journalism. Over the last few years, its business and
in their uncertainty of how to react. finance reporting has expanded considerably. With the
Will newspapers disappear? Despite difficult challenges, of increasing number and importance of joint-stock compa-
which the loss of classified advertising revenue to the Internet nies and the increasing number of mergers, the FAZ some-
is probably the gravest, it seems unlikely—certainly absent times even has two economics and markets sections. Its
someone inventing a laptop that you can use in the bath. The style is very sober, at times even boring. Journalists rigor-
worst future almost certainly lies ahead for the worst newspa- ously adhere to the professional principle of distinguish-
pers, those pandering to popular prejudice and touting titilla- ing between news and comments. The FAZ’s answer to the
tion: their natural audience is declining, and increasingly challenge of FTD was to cooperate with the International
finds other entertainments more beguiling. The brighter Herald Tribune. Soon, the IHT will carry an eight-page
future almost certainly lies ahead for the best newspapers, summary of the FAZ.
including The Economist which styles itself a newspaper: that The German reader who is interested in an assessment
is to say with journals that seek to interpret the world and its from outside but wants to read a paper in his own language,
complexities and act as trusted guides to its ways. They also can turn to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Here, it is a principle
have the advantage of appealing to the better-off members of not to separate news and comments. The NZZ often has a
society, whose numbers are growing. This may be a golden age fresh perspective, though a sometimes didactic style.
for quality newspapers but the best may yet be to come. ◆ —Stefan Voigt
—David Lipsey

10
 Report from Britain

The Devolution of the U.K.

A mong the many unfortunate symbols suggested by the

London Millennium Dome, the greatest perhaps is the
thinness of the constitutional shell that covers the
United Kingdom. On the face of it, pressures for a break-up of
the U.K. have been headed off by devolution. Scotland has its
These have included one, The English, by Jeremy Paxman,
anchorman of the BBC’s Newsnight current affairs program,
and another by a respected journalist and political thinker,
Andrew Marr. The title—The Day Britain Died—reflects its
mood. Were it not that the country is enjoying a sustained
Parliament and Wales has its Assembly, as has Northern Ireland. period of prosperity and continues to show confidence in
But if this is seen by the Labour Government as a grand settle- Tony Blair’s administration, the introspection and self-doubt
ment of the constitutional question, it may be a precarious one. would no doubt be worse.
There have been ructions in Wales as the Welsh rejected a first Marr (a Scot as it happens) is on the center-left, and is seen as
secretary imposed by the government and began doing what something of a pivotal figure in political journalism. The main
all devolved bodies do, which is to ask for more money. The interest of his book lies in its openness to radical change. He is
Northern Ireland executive has been suspended since Sinn opposed to Scottish independence, but he does not believe that
Fein/IRA insist on sitting in the Assembly while retaining their the U.K. can survive for long as it is. His solution is to convert
weapons. But the real Achilles heel of the U.K. is Scotland. Westminster into a purely English Parliament, and transform
The Scottish National Party got 20 percent of the initial vote, the House of Lords,
rising to 29 percent in a recent by-election. If Scotland were currently under re-
to swing in favor of independence, the U.K. would be im- form, into a United A mood of self-
mersed in a major constitutional crisis. Defense, oil and gas Kingdom Assembly.
wealth, relations with Brussels (at present handled by the U.K. For good measure he doubt, or ontological
Government) would instantly be up for grabs. The impact on shows himself ready
national confidence, as the Government became immersed in for membership in the self-interrogation,
what would no doubt be a long drawn-out negotiation with euro at a suitable mo-
the Scots, as well as the psychological effects of the shrinkage ment, and for a refer- has begun to grip
of the country, would be immense. The run of luck the New endum on the monar-
Labour government has enjoyed (especially economic) may not chy in which he the nation
hold forever, and though influential Scottish voices warn himself would vote for
against the nationalist lure, sentiment north of the border abolition. These last
could still change at some point in the future. two predilections put him way ahead of public opinion, whose
The biggest current constitutional problem, paradoxically, attachment to their coins and their queen is all the stronger
lies in England. Three times since the war a Labour govern- since these are literally attached. Yet Marr’s thinking is signifi-
ment has been kept in power in Westminster by its majority cant, since it illustrates how considerations of the future of the
of Scottish seats. But what was accepted in the past would not United Kingdom quickly become bound up with other issues.
be accepted today, under devolution. The simple point is that The appearance of Marr’s book coincided with yet another
the English are finding it ever harder to tolerate a situation tome on the theme, this one by Tom Nairn, a romantic left-
where Scottish MPs at Westminster have a say in every aspect winger whose colorfully and powerfully written work, After
of English lives—education, for instance—a prerogative that Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, predicts the
is not reciprocated north of the border. breaking of the U.K. on the anvil of Scottish nationalism. For
Some parliamentarians think of a separate English Parlia- him the United Kingdom is a dried-out husk, a pointless relic,
ment to deal with specifically English legislation. But the cre- meaningless without Empire. He calls the U.K. Ukania, a pun
ation of yet another layer of MPs in a country already seen as on Kakania, the nickname for Austro-Hungary (the k. und k.,
having too many, would be a heavy bureaucratic price to pay. or kaiserlich und königlich realm) in Robert Musil’s classic
Douglas Hurd, the former Conservative Foreign Secretary, novel The Man Without Qualities. While the Great War that
who has been musing on these matters, suggests that it would would bring down the Austrian Empire was looming, Musil
be easier to come to one of those pragmatic English arrange- in his novel has Kakania’s elites busy planning a gigantic cel-
ments whereby the parliamentary speaker ensured that only ebration. Celebration of what exactly they find it hard to con-
English MPs were present and voted when strictly English ceive or to explain.
matters were under discussion. Which would seem to bring us back to the Dome, our latest
The problem about the future England is not confined to national symbol. Its hugely embarrassing failure does not nec-
technical political questions. In response to the assertiveness essarily presage the demise of the United Kingdom. But the fact
of their one-time tributaries, a mood of self-doubt, or better that a young Frenchman experienced in the ways of French
perhaps, ontological self-interrogation, has begun to grip the Disneyland, M. Gerbeau, had to be imported to sort things out
nation. The English have taken to asking themselves, in a way and bump up attendance has done nothing to answer the ques-
they have never quite done till now, who they are and what tion of who the British are and what they are for. ◆
they are for. Books on the theme have poured from the press. —George Walden

11
 Intellectuals

The Cultural Cold War—Fifty Years Later

W ith the opening of some of the Soviet and the East German archives, more is now known
about the history of the Cold War than ever before: whether there was a real chance to
end West/East conflict in 1953, the background of the Korean War, the extent of Soviet
infiltration into the West, and other topics. Harvard’s new Journal of Cold War Studies publishes arti-
cles based on this documentation, an institute at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center has produced
learned monographs along similar lines, and the Gauck- guage history of the Congress’s first decade (Mundo Nuevo), and
Behörde in Germany is doing the same with the Stasi papers. the Congress figures prominently in David Cesarani’s recent
Public interest in these publications has been limited, how- biography of Arthur Koestler, who was initially one of its lead-
ever, for reasons that remain to be explored. But public indif- ing figures but soon dropped out when it failed to be militant
ference need not be permanent, for such lags are normal. and radical enough for his taste. In Gdansk, Poland, a political-
Interest in World War II (and the Holocaust), for instance, was cultural magazine appeared that was modelled on the old
far more intense in the 1970s and ‘80s than in the immediate Encounter and reprinted some of the old texts.
postwar period. The Congress, during the first and most important period
And already there are exceptions to this indifference; cer- of its existence, was financed by the CIA, a fact bound to
tain aspects of the Cold War era have attracted a great deal of reverberate once it became known in the late 1960s. Given the
attention and debate over the last year or two. This is certainly situation in Washington, a less controversial way of financing
the case with regard to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, could scarcely have been found in the early postwar period.
founded in Berlin in June 1950, the same week the Korean War But this argument did not cut much ice once the immediate
broke out. Though based in Paris, the Congress published a postwar crisis was over. Some circles believed, in fact, that
number of journals in other major cities; the best-known and this crisis never existed: it was a figment of the imagination,
most widely quoted of these were Encounter (London) and Der cultural freedom was a sham, and criticism of Soviet politics a
Monat (Berlin). It also ran conferences and seminars which priori reactionary. This belief, which was prevalent in the late
were influential in shaping the Zeitgeist; had its impact been sixties, is shared now by Miss Saunders, who therefore focuses
less it would now be forgotten. on the scandal of the Congress’s financial sources, offering lit-
The history of the Congress—whose activities, under a tle sense of its political and cultural significance.
slightly different name, stretched to 1975 (Encounter was pub- What is disturbing about Miss Saunders’s book is the lack
lished up to 1991)—has been provided in The Liberal Conspi- of any historical memory. For her, the Cold War was a “fabri-
racy by Peter Coleman, an Australian politician and intellec- cated reality,” fashioned by George Kennan, as director of the
tual, and more recently in L’Intelligence de l’Anticommunisme Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, “to oversee the
by Pierre Gremion, a French historian. The former, though not ideological-political containment of Europe” (not of Russia,
uncritical, was semi-official in character; the latter focused on mind you, but Europe), in order to “design the Pax Ameri-
the Paris headquarter’s activities. cana.” As Josef Joffe wrote in a critical review in the New York
Following the breakup of the Soviet empire and the declas- Times Book Review of April 23, 2000 “Saunders deftly isolates
sification of various archives, including the CIA’s, a new liter- from its [historical] context what she sees as a heinous intelli-
ature has sprung up, ranging from muckraking, in television gence plot so that she can drench it all the better in self-right-
producer Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper (Lon- eous ahistorical wrath. But if the war was make-believe what
don; but titled The Cultural Cold War in the New York edi- were the Soviets doing when they tried to bring Communism
tion), to near-hagiography in the seventy-page portrait of to power in France and Italy…when they financed antidemo-
Leopold Labedz, the legendary editor of the London Soviet- cratic forces everywhere?”
affairs magazine Survey. In the final analysis such hostile attitudes may indeed be
Several academic studies have appeared in Germany that fall little more than a new manifestation of the old antagonism the
between these extremes, including Anselm Doering Manteuffel Congress had to face in Britain from the outset; they were
on the Westernization of Germany after World War II (“Wie rooted not so much in radical politics as in traditional anti-
westlich sind die Deutschen? [How Western are the Germans?] Americanism.
1999) and Michael Hochgeschwender on the Congress’s activi- The debate about the historical role of the Congress for
ties in Germany (“Freiheit in der Offensive” [Freedom on the Cultural Freedom will in all likelihood continue; for all one
Offense] 1999). Specialized articles have appeared, including knows, it may just be starting. But two striking facts have
those by Giles Scott Smith on the early days of the Congress (in already emerged: the burial of the Congress in the 1970s was
the Journal of Contemporary History and in Studies in Intel- clearly premature, and it continues to preoccupy friends and
ligence). This summer a public conference on the Congress is to foes alike. The ideas emanating from its seminars and periodi-
take place in Berlin. Maria Mudrovic has written a Spanish-lan- cals continue to attract as much interest as ever.

12
 Intellectuals

This and the great interest shown by a young generation of

historians has gratified the well-wishers of the Congress and Joseph Rovan: The Last
greatly annoyed its enemies. But how to explain, fifty years
after the event, the sharply divergent views, almost as hostile European Intellectual
as the clashes between fellow-travelers and liberal anti-com- Who is Joseph Rovan? By conventional standards he is the
munists in the 1950s? Why is it that Preuves (the Congress’s author of eighteen books before this one with the puzzling title:
French-language publication) has been reprinted in Paris Mémoires d’un Français qui se souvient d’avoir été Allemand [The
many years after it went out of business, and a huge selection Memoirs of a Frenchman who remembers having been German]
of essays from Der Monat has just appeared in Germany? (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999). But the life as laid out in these
How to explain, in other words, that the verdict on the his- memoirs is a template of the twentieth century: of Jewish origin
torical role of the Congress has been so positive in Western yet raised in the Christian faith, a refugee, Resistance hero, con-
and particularly in Eastern Europe but that this revival of centration camp inmate, a political activist, yet neither left nor
interest has provoked such angry responses in some circles in right, a remarkably decent man who may be regarded now as the
Britain and the United States? It may have to do with the fact last of the independent European intellectuals.
that whereas the money and the logistic support for Congress
came from the U.S. and to a lesser degree from Britain, these
countries were not in the frontline of the ideological cold war
and that the understanding of the issues involved was much
less developed there. No sane German would have argued (as
does Miss Saunders) that the Cold War was not a reality.
B orn Joseph Rosenthal in Bavaria in 1918, he belonged to
a family of well-to-do businessmen and professionals
long established in and around Munich, Berlin, and
Vienna, almost all Jews, and for many generations unquestion-
ing Germans. His parents and grandparents, as well as himself,
Radical chic as it manifested itself in the late 1960s is no were educated in the Lutheran religion, like the good Germans
longer an issue, but the impulses underlying it have found they felt they were. Until the time, as Rovan puts it, Hitler
other outlets inside and outside the academic world. There “appointed them Jews,” none of them doubted their German
has been no intellectual sea change in London and New York destiny—a destiny which, for those of Rovan’s kin who did not
comparable to the one that took place in Paris twenty years leave their country early enough, eventually meant murder.
ago when the ‘68 generation shocked itself to discover the hor- Young Joseph and his parents did leave early enough, com-
ror of the Gulags. To a certain extent this divergence of views ing to Paris in 1934. Fifteen, and an excellent humanities stu-
might be a generational problem But this cannot possibly dent in his Berlin Gymnasium, he easily became an excellent
explain the bitterness of those unwilling to accept the out- humanities student at a Paris lycée. At the time of the German
come of battles fought decades ago. One may have to wait for invasion, he had graduated from the Sorbonne and the École
the end of the debate, or at least a major lull, to find a more or des Sciences Politiques, traveled extensively in France and
less satisfactory explanation. ◆ Italy, and apparently met every interesting person he could.
—Walter Laqueur In the summer of 1940, he refused an American friend’s offer
of an affidavit which would have allowed him to come to the
U.S., a priceless privilege then. He writes that he had grown
too many roots in France and his duty was to stay.
His years there, 1941-1944, were both intensely formative
and dangerously militant. The formative side included eager
reading of Marx and Heidegger and joining a remarkable
intellectual group attempting to make sense of the country’s
chaos, shame, and helplessness, and to envision a better future
for it. The dangerous side came with Rovan’s participation in
the Resistance, running the manufacture and distribution of
forged documents for all non-Communist Resistance members.
It was in that capacity, not as a Jew, that the Nazi police
finally caught him in February 1944 in Paris. In jail he writes
soberly, “I experienced the bathtub torture (the Gestapo’s
usual practice of repeatedly half-drowning its captives), and
beatings, but was not tested beyond my forces”—a choice of
words typical of the man’s steely character.
In this four-month imprisonment he also felt what he
describes as a quiet attraction to the Roman Catholic faith, and
was christened by a fellow-inmate priest. In the few mentions
of his religious beliefs in his book, Rovan always gives the
impression of having an intense trust in God’s wisdom, though
never feeling obliged to follow the Church’s earthly preferences.
In July 1944, Rovan was put in a freight train with 2500

13
 Intellectuals

other prisoners, and sent to the concentration camp of Miscellany

Dachau, where nine hundred of the passengers arrived dead.
At the camp, he took advantage of his command of German Swamped by Metaphor
and managed to be assigned to Central Records. In that posi-
tion and as chief assistant to the de facto spokesman for the
French inmates, Edmond Michelet, he played a major role in
resistance activities and in the orderly disbanding of prison-
ers, after a terrible typhus epidemic and the liberation of sur-
I n his first issue of Die Fackel [The Torch] in April 1899,
the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936) stated the
magazine’s aim: to attempt to drain “the swamp of
metaphor” [“den Phrasensumpf ”]. By Phrasen Kraus
meant those idioms which, having degenerated into
vivors by American troops. He describes all that, and the clichés, elicited stock responses. Die Fackel’s 922 issues
workings of the complex society living and dying in the camp, appeared sporadically until Kraus’s death in 1936; after
with a matter-of-fact detachment that gives way to emotion 1912, he became its sole contributor.
only when he mentions the friends he made and admired, and In time for the Fackel centenary, scholars using micro-
whose wretched deaths he witnessed too often. chip technology have produced a chronological selection
Returning to Paris in the summer of 1945, the twenty-seven- of the abused expressions Kraus cited as evidence of the
year-old Rovan began a career as activist, writer, teacher, press’s corruption of public discourse. Sifting through
adviser to the powerful, and advocate for the weak that con- 22,586 pages (some six million words), the makers of this
tinues to this day, fifty-five tireless years later. He has always large “Dictionary of Idiomatic Expressions” focus on 144
held at least three more or less full-time jobs. From 1946 to key idioms. Passages from Kraus are printed mid-page,
‘51, he was an official in the French Military Government flanked by lexicographical and editorial commentaries.
(later High Commission) in Germany, dealing with youth orga- As a critic of debased figurative language, Kraus chose
nizations, adult education, and other cultural contacts, in his “torch” metaphor well: sleeping by day, he devoted his
friendly cooperation with emerging new German leaders. nights to writing but also to giving solo recitals both of his
From 1945 to this day, he has been a journalist, debuting own works and of the literary classics he administered to
with a still-remembered article in the October 1945 Esprit, the public as antidotes to their journalistic poisoning. He
under the self-explanatory title, “The Germany We Shall decried the newspaper’s role as “covert mouthpiece of the
Deserve.” He became a daily correspondent on French affairs regime” and of corrupt industrial interests. He especially
for several German publications, and a frequent contributor scorned the aestheticizing feuilleton (see page 21), which
to various French journals and papers on German affairs. Add in its casual blurring of fact and opinion, cramped the
to this half a dozen short books written to steer French public writer’s own imagination by making him dependent on
opinion away from misperceptions of present-day Germany or outer circumstances he in turn distorted.
the necessary prospects for Europe. In World War I, Kraus, who had analyzed propagandistic
From 1946 to ‘78, he held various key posts at “Peuple et press coverage in the Balkan Wars, relentlessly lampooned
Culture,” an organization dedicated to improving the school and the brutality of militaristic euphemism (e.g., the “cleaning
university systems and training better citizens, for which out” of enemy trenches). A journalist claimed that “the peo-
Rovan wrote in 1962 a short yet seminal book entitled A New ple are hungering after the results” of a particular peace
Idea: Democracy. From 1968 to ‘86, as professor of German Stu- conference; after this conference, wrote Kraus, which would
dies at two Paris universities, Rovan gathered material for a prolong war, people really would be hungering.
thousand-page history of Germany, published in France and Whereas civilized discourse sublimates violence through
Germany in the early nineties. This monumental work was pre- figures of speech—we “cudgel our brains” and wield “the
ceded by two other scholarly works, one on the history of polit- lash of satire”—Nazism, as it spread, revealed its savagery to
ical Catholicism in Germany and the other a history of social Kraus by linguistic devolution: the cudgels and lashes grew
democracy, as well as a highly attractive book on Bavaria, its quite real. The Dictionary charts this through the German
history, politics, landscapes, monuments, customs, and food. idiom “ein Kampf bis aufs Messer” [being at daggers drawn].
Rovan was never to join a political party or to seek election. A metaphor now literalized daily on the street had, around
His reputation and direct influence seldom extended beyond 1900, been a hollow threat; in WWI it had cloaked new mili-
specialists and leaders in either country. He firmly takes sides tary technology in an antiquated romanticism.
for his basic values: peace in Europe through a genuinely demo- A year before launching Die Fackel, Kraus turned down
cratic Germany’s tie to France; a federated Europe; respect for the satirist’s post at Vienna’sNeue Freie Presse—and ever
human rights; devotion to rational knowledge, whether its dis- after scoured it for proof of the “free press”’s prostitution.
course be threatened by totalitarianism or the spectres of radi- Blessed, or cursed, with a photographic memory, he would
cal revolutionaries. Last but not least, a taste for the good life, have little use for microchip glossaries; but as an enemy of
which surfaces in many a passage of these memoirs, where the nationalistic cant, he might relish state-sponsored study of
style mellows from factual objectivity into an expression of ten- his jeremiads in this heyday of an Austrian “Freedom Party.”
der feelings for his wife and sons, his friends and his houses in —David Jacobson
Auvergne and Provence, a good meal, a good bottle—not to Source: Edward Timms, “Draining the Swamp,” Times Literary
mention nine pages in praise of his dachshunds. ◆ Supplement, February 4, 2000.
—Paul Lemerle

14
 Intellectuals

Alexandre Kojève: Russian Agent?

T he publication last year of Christopher Andrew’s The

Mitrokhin Archive, which uses the notes of a former
KGB archivist, Vassily Mitrokhin, to develop an
account of Russian spy activity during the Cold War, contin-
ues to send ripples through political and intellectual circles in
was the first modern philosopher to have understood that
world history is the theatre in which a single drama is played
out (what he called the “master-slave” dialectic), and that this
drama had reached an effective end with the Napoleonic con-
quests and the beginning of what we now call the “globaliza-
Western Europe. Although Mitrokin’s notes are maddeningly tion” of modern life. With Napoleon the end of history had
vague at times, they do clearly document a wide web of KGB begun and was determining all the fundamental dynamics of
infiltration of ministries, major newspapers, and political par- modern politics. Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel may have
ties across the Continent. In France the book has had a large been idiosyncratic but to French intellectuals watching the
echo because it was published about the time that someone decline of Europe in the thirties, and to French politicians who
leaked a secret government report, written in 1982-3 in the felt themselves squeezed between the empires of the United
early years of François Mitterrand’s first presidential term States and the Soviet Union in the postwar decades, he
(and apparently at his request), titled “East-Bloc Espionage appeared to be a prophet. And to those concerned about the
and the French Left.” As Le Monde reported (September 16, increasing pace of globalization in the post-’89 world, he still
1999), among those named as having relations with the KGB is. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
was Claude Estier, a high-ranking Socialist currently in the was explicitly inspired by Kojève’s theories, and many lesser
French Senate who was mysteriously kept from occupying books and articles have been, implicitly. For example, it was
ministerial office during Mitterrand’s reign. (Mr. Estier has Allan Bloom, the subject of Saul Bellow’s new novel Ravelstein
vehemently denied the charges.) and Fukuyama’s teacher, who arranged the publication of
But certainly the strangest, and most widely discussed, Kojève’s Hegel book in English, and whose bestseller, The
aspect of the French report was its assertion that one of France’s Closing of the American Mind, might be read as a protest
premier philosophers of this century, Alexandre Kojève, was against the triumph of the “last man” Kojève saw.
also mixed up with the KGB. Who was Kojève? His given name There was, however, a political slant to Kojève’s ideas that
was Alexander Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov, and he was born in made him more than philosopher of history, and gives some
1902 into a wealthy Moscow family that lost everything in the plausibility to the suspicions of the French espionage agen-
Revolution. Young Alexander was arrested for black market cies. While Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of Western-
activities and was nearly executed but made his way abroad, style democracy after 1989, Kojève was first inspired by the
first to Poland, then to Germany where he earned his doctor- global aspirations of the communism, for which he never lost
ate, and finally to France in the twenties. There he lived the life his nostalgia. He was a great believer in what came to be called
of an obscure émigré until he was asked by the great historian the “moral equivalence” between East and West, since, from
of science, Alexandre Koyré, to teach a course on the philoso- his world-historical perch, they both seemed to be working
phy of the nineteenth-century German idealist, G. W. F. Hegel. toward the same end: social egalitarianism, the leveling of
This course, which ran from 1933-39, was one of the most human aspiration, the economization of all aspects of life, the
important events in twentieth-century French intellectual his- bureaucratization and juridification of politics. He appeared
tory. Many of the most significant figures in French letters and indifferent as to whether the Soviet Union or the United States
thought attended the course—philosopher Maurice Merleau- won the Cold War since, in his view, the world would even-
Ponty, political thinker Raymond Aron, surrealist poet André tually look the same in either case. He joked that Henry Ford
Breton, writer Raymond Queneau, psychoanalyst Jacques had been “the only great authentic Marxist of the twentieth
Lacan—and through them Kojève’s influence was enormous. century” and that he himself was “the conscience of Stalin.”
And it was not limited to intellectuals. After the war, which But was Kojève a spy? The truth is we will never know. As
he passed in Marseille, Kojève returned to Paris and joined the a left-wing Russian émigré he was always under suspicion,
foreign-economic-relations bureau of the French Finance and there is circumstantial evidence that his officemate in the
Ministry, where he remained until his death in 1968. There ministry, Charles Hernu, who later served as Mitterrand’s de-
Kojève worked tirelessly for the economic integration of fense minister, had been a spy for the Bulgarians, Romanians,
Europe and made disciples of important political figures like and Russians. There is, however, no smoking gun, and even if
future prime minister Raymond Barre and future president there were, Kojève’s contemporary acolytes have suggested,
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. He played a crucial role in reaching he may have been trying to use the Soviets to his own ends,
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) accords, and not the other way round. The joke, in other words, would
and today the French consider him one of the architects of the have been on the Soviets, who now find themselves living in
European Union. a global economy designed by the bespeckled philosopher
What connection is there between Hegel and the EU? they so rudely treated during the Revolution. ◆
According to Kojève and his students, there is a close one. In —Mark Lilla
the book put together by Queneau from Kojève’s lectures, Source: A good English-language summary of the Kojève dispute
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève argued that Hegel is in “The Spy Who Loved Hegel,” Lingua Franca, March 2000.

15
 Intellectuals

Ignazio Silone: Fascist Informant?

A few years ago, fragmentary evidence began emerging

indicating that Ignazio Silone, one of the preeminent
writers of Italian anti-fascism, had collaborated with
the Fascist secret police. Initially based on a handful of docu-
ments, these claims were greeted, at first, with a mixture of
security apparatus,” the historian Alexander De Grand writes
in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Some Silone defenders
hypothesize that Silone had entered into dialogue with Bellone
after Silone’s brother, Romolo Tranquilli, was arrested in 1928
on suspicion of taking part in a terrorist bombing in Milan that
outrage and incredulity. Silone, after all, had been a moral bea- year. Silone, according to the defense, was negotiating to free
con to more than one generation of readers. His early novels, his brother, who later died in a Fascist prison.
Fontamara and Bread and Wine—descriptions of peasant life This line of defense appears, however, to be crumbling. Re-
under fascism in Silone’s native Abruzzi—electrified a wide searchers Biocca and Canali have found archival documents
public and were hailed as being among the great political nov- attributed to the informant “Silvestri,” dating back to 1924,
els of the twentieth century. After World War II, Silone made long before the arrest of Silone’s brother. Silvestri describes
an equally strong impression with his essay in The God That the inner workings of the Italian Communist Party and the
Failed, which documented the romance and disillusionment Comintern, in which Silone played an active role and the
with communism on the part of such writers as Arthur reports seem to follow Silone’s movements through different
Koestler, André Gide, and Richard Wright. Silone had actually parts of Europe. One police report goes on to discuss in some
been a youthful leader of the Italian Communist Party, served detail personal vicissitudes of Silvestri, which coincide closely
on its central committee and witnessed first-hand the gradual with those of Ignazio Silone during that same period.
ascendancy of Stalinism during the 1920s. Silone had the fore- As disturbing as these revelations are, they in no way detract
sight and courage to break with the Communist Party in 1930, from the force and importance of Silone’s novels, all of which
before the major show trials in Moscow. were written after his apparent break with the Fascist police in
As a figure who had opposed fascism from the beginning 1930. If anything, the letter with which he severs his relations
and broke with communism early on, Silone was widely seems to contain much of the powerful fire that fuels his work:
revered as a figure of rare intellectual and moral courage. “A sense of morality, which has always been strong in me, now
Thus, the accusations of spying for the Fascist police were dis- overwhelms me completely; it does not permit me to sleep, eat,
missed as a revisionist attempt to blacken the name of another or have a minute’s rest. I am at a crossroads in my life, and there
prominent anti-fascist. In recent years, much press has been is only on way out: I must abandon militant politics com-
given to compromises by various anti-fascist intellectuals such pletely…. It was impossible for me to live such a troubled exis-
as a letter written by novelist Alberto Moravia to Mussolini tence…firstly, I will rid my life of all falsehood, deceit and
asking for relief from censorship for his books, or youthful secrecy; secondly, I will begin a new life…to seek redemption,
pro-fascist sentiments by the philosopher Noberto Bobbio. to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am bound with
However, as research on Silone has continued, his ties with every fiber in my body), and my country.”
the Fascist regime appear to be far more substantial and wor- What remains mysterious is Silone’s motivation for informing
thy of serious consideration. The first important document to in the first place. He may, however, have left us some clues in
emerge was a letter from April 1930 apparently in Silone’s his novel Bread and Wine. One chapter toward the end of the
handwriting to a police official in Rome named Guido Bellone. book contains the confession of a young Communist who acted
The letter is clearly that of an informant to his police handler, as a police informant. After being arrested and beaten by the
announcing that he is breaking off his relationship of collabo- police, the young man, Luigi Murica, is approached by a kindly
ration. It is signed with the code-name “Silvestri,” but the let- police officer who offers to help him in exchange for a little
ter was stamped and placed by Fascist bureaucrats in Silone’s information. Initially, he provides only generic reports, but then
personal file, or rather in the file of Secondino Tranquilli, his is pressured by police to give more detailed information. He
actual given name before he adopted the pen name Ignazio compensates for his betrayal by working harder than ever,
Silone. Further research by historians Dario Biocca and Mauro allowing him, temporarily, to function on two levels at the same
Canali has bolstered the connection between Silone, the infor- time. “An insuperable abyss opened up between my apparent
mant Silvestri, and the police commissioner Bellone. A signed and my secret life,” the young man says. Explaining his deci-
letter from 1928 by the chief of the secret police to Mussolini sion not to confess to his comrades, Murica says that “fear of
himself states that “The Inspector General of Public Security being discovered was stronger in me than remorse....I feared for
Commissioner Guido Bellone has received a telegram from my threatened reputation, not for the wrong that I was doing.”
Basel from Tranquilli Secondino—one of the Communist lead- But, like Silone, the character overcomes his remorse by regain-
ers—giving notice of his arrival in Italy. The conversation ing his religious faith, telling himself that “good is often born
with him could be interesting.” of evil and that I would not have become a man without having
Silone’s defenders have been forced to acknowledge the passed through the infamies and errors I committed.” ◆
authenticity of these documents and the existence of a relation- —Alexander Stille
ship between the writer and the Fascist police. “No one denies Note: A longer version of this essay by Alexander Stille appeared
that Silone had some disconcerting contacts with the Fascist in the New Yorker, May 15, 2000 as “The Spy Who Failed.”

16
 The World Press: France and Italy

The French Press—The Quality Remains

A s in most European countries, the situation of the press in France has been strongly shaped
by history. World War II marked a break in French press history. Newspapers that went on
being published during the Occupation were replaced by others born out of the Resistance.
New structures were created to assure the circulation of a wide spectrum of opinion. Thus in Paris, the
Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne [New Distributors of the Paris Press] (half owned by the
Hachette corporation and half by the set of newspapers they Giesbert, a sensible and open-minded journalist who spent
serve) have a monopoly on distribution. Furthermore, the his early career at the Nouvel Observateur, a fashionable
eight “professions du Livre,” representing workers in pub- weekly that is traditionally a preserve of the non-Communist
lishing, from rotary-press operators to proofreaders, have a left. The newspaper has several different supplements, includ-
closed shop which has exclusive rights to staff replacement— ing two full-color weeklies, Figaro Magazine, which used to
a situation that has driven up production costs and led to be further to the right than the daily, and Figaro Madame,
rather slack circulation policies. which focuses on fashion and home design.
Like those in other countries, French newspapers have, of Le Monde was created in 1944 by Hubert Beuve-Mery. It
course, undergone many changes: the replaced the major prewar Le Temps, tak-
disappearance of newspapers created in ing over its typography, but by no means
the country’s postwar revival (Combat, its political orientation. Left-leaning,
Ce Soir, etc.), the steady elimination of though free of party affiliations, strongly
subregional dailies (those of the départe- committed to international coverage,
ments), the mergers of regional dailies, though not at the expense of reporting
adaptation to new technology (hampered domestic political developments, it
by the Book Union’s resistance). quickly became the daily paper for high-
The dominance of Paris has divided the level businessmen and civil servants,
daily press into two categories: those with intellectuals and teachers. The newspaper
national and international circulation, has gone through several crises—organi-
and those with largely regional reader- zational and financial—but, crucially, a
ship. In the first category, there are three society to which all the journalists belong
unequal groups: the three major national owns 32 percent of the shares and has the
daily papers, then the business dailies, right to propose to the other share-hold-
and finally, what I would call the “idea” ers—on a 60-percent majority vote—the
dailies. We should add to this list L’Équipe, candidate for the editorship. Its current
the country’s lone daily sports paper. director, Jean-Marie Colombani, a shrewd
Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Libération domestic-policy journalist, is legally pres-
form the core of the French quality press. The first two sell ident of a three-member board of directors. Among the daily’s
between 400,000 and 500,000 copies daily, giving them a read- more specialized satellite publications are Le Monde diploma-
ership of nearly two million; the third has roughly half the tique and Le Monde de l’éducation.
circulation of the first two. All three papers have quite dis- Libération is the newest of the major Paris dailies. A product
tinct personalities and histories. Only Le Figaro predates of 1968, it appealed from the outset to young readers who
World War II. Shut down voluntarily in 1940, it reappeared found Le Figaro too conservative and Le Monde too institu-
during the liberation under its own name. It is a center-right tional, and who wanted a more anti-establishment paper, a
newspaper offering news to readers who are older, wealthier, more modern, casual idiom, and greater openness to the avant-
and somewhat further to the right than average voters. In the gardes. The head of this venture was Serge July, a highly ener-
1970s it was taken over by Robert Hersant, who also owned getic, outgoing man who was able to maneuver an organiza-
regional dailies and a popular national daily, France-Soir, tion whose journalists had virtual self-management. Five years
which had its heyday in the 1950s and ‘60s. Yves de la Chasse- ago the newspaper attempted major changes to cover a broader
Martin took it over at Hersant’s death, but his main role was field of information. The failure of this operation forced the
to reorganize it after bad mismanagement during the financial journalists to accept participation by private capital and a
crisis of the 1990s. In the last decades two great names return to their earlier set-up. Among the three current acting
brought distinction to Le Figaro: Raymond Aron, and the editors-in-chief is Jacques Amalrie, a forceful personality and
recently deceased Alain Peyrefitte, a former minister of de former head of Le Monde’s foreign news desk.
Gaulle’s, and a member of the Académie Française. Until For a long time the French press handled economic questions
recently, the paper’s editor-in-chief was Franz-Olivier quite badly. In the postwar years economic journalists were

17
 The World Press: France and Italy

distinctly mediocre. Through the efforts of Le Monde and the

magazines L’Expansion and L’Entreprise, however, the level The Italian Press
eventually rose, and today the French press boasts two highly
competent economic dailies: Les Echos, a paper which, though
geared to small- and medium-sized businesses, has become a
broadly informative newspaper with fine editorialists such as
Paul Fabra and Eric Izraelevitch. The paper is now an affiliate
A t first glance, the Italian daily press seems a lively
and diverse forum of national debate. There are sev-
eral genuinely national newspapers that are available
from Trento to Taranto. They span the ideological spectrum
from the avowedly right-wing Il Giornale (published in Milan)
of the Financial Times, though it has kept its own personality. to the neo-communist Il Manifesto, based in Rome, with sev-
Its alter ego, La Tribune, first served the interests of big busi- eral smaller party newspapers in addition. The openly politi-
ness, but today the contents of the two papers are quite close. cal quality of the papers—which print their editorials on the
And, last in this triptych, there are the daily “papers of front and not the back page—can seem refreshing compared
ideas,” the “quotidiens de pensée”: La Croix, which, as its to the blander style of the Anglo-Saxon press. Leading intel-
name suggests, is published by a Catholic press corporation, lectuals and writers—from the philosophers Gianni Vattimo
and L’Humanité, the old pre-World War I socialist newspaper, and Lucio Colletti to writers such as Antonio Tabucchi and
which became the voice of the Communist Party in the 1920s. Enzo Siciliano—also appear regularly in their pages.
The former now has a circulation close to 100,000 copies and But on closer inspection and prolonged exposure, the Italian
the latter around 50,000. The editor-in-chief of La Croix is press is in an extremely unhealthy state and, underneath the
Bruno Frappat, an excellent editorialist with a keen sensitiv- ideological diversity, the different papers have common symp-
ity to ethical questions. The latter is run by Richard Benninger toms that make the Italian journalistic scene one of depress-
and Pierre Zarca; now that Party dogmatism has abated, it is ing monotony. Despite its reputation as a highly political
known particularly for the quality of its literary criticism. nation of avid newspaper readers, Italy is one of the nations
This survey would be incomplete without a few words about in Europe where people read the least and buy the fewest
the foreign daily press in France, which is almost exclusively newspapers. There are fewer than seven million newspapers
English-language. The Herald Tribune is valued for its coverage, sold in Italy—a country of about sixty million people—and a
at once broad and concise, of world events. The economic world substantial chunk of those are accounted for by the daily
reads the Financial Times, considered more multinational and sports newspapers, which are among the nation’s biggest sell-
more thorough than domestic economics dailies, and reflective ers. The largest quality newspapers—the Corriere della Sera
too of Anglo-Saxon opinion. The Wall Street Journal Europe, a of Milan and La Repubblica of Rome—have circulations just
newer arrival, strikes French readers as more “parochial”—even over 600,000 copies, despite being in cities of over three mil-
if the parish in question is the American empire. lion people and being able to reach the entire national reader-
Despite the advance of television news, the national daily ship. Moreover, most of the major papers have either lost read-
press still dominates the debates of opinion. It is still in the ers or had to spend mightily to maintain them: giving away
columns of newspapers that politicians, business and social gadgets, movie videos and music CD’s along with their papers.
leaders, and intellectuals hold forth. The issues launched in Although the political spin of the newspapers differs, the
the newspapers are only then taken up by the TV stations. subject matter of the five or six stories covered on the front
Print journalists often participate, broadening their influence pages of the five or six leading dailies is almost always identi-
in the process. Yet, unlike the postwar decades, there are no cal: the latest sayings and doings of the principal political
longer running editorial exchanges between well-known writ- leaders in Rome. Part of the inability of the Italian papers to
ers in one paper and another—no one with quite the impor- reach out beyond a relatively small number of hard-core read-
tance of Raymond Aron or François Mauriac in their day. ers is their strange symbiotic relationship with the political
The Internet, long a minor phenomenon in France, finally class. Rather than practicing enterprising journalism, going
reached the national dailies two years ago. The Web site for and finding out what is happening in the communities they
Les Echos receives the most hits. Le Monde also has a Web site cover, a large number of journalists stand on the steps of the
at last, and a special subsidiary, Le Monde interactif, only Italian parliament building waiting for the party leaders to
recently assumed its own advertising direction. Libération has emerge and make their declarations for the day. The principal
a site. Le Figaro, after lagging slightly behind, is announcing stories then consist of the ping-pong game that ensues
ambitious plans of its own. Circulation for the print press between the various political leaders. Other stories are also
stagnated in 1999. Some attribute this to the development of reactive, responses to various kinds of government actions:
the Net, but advertising revenue remains high, and efforts the issuing of a court sentence, the arrest of several criminal
continue to cut production and distribution costs. defendants, or the publication of a major report.
Perhaps we should add a finishing touch—a touch of This intense focus on the political arena may stem from a
brightness—to this rather subdued panorama of France’s time when Italy was a major battleground of the Cold War, in
national dailies, by underscoring their sheer quality. Well- which the ideological shifts of the main political parties was a
written, well-informed, produced with a deep respect for pro- matter of international importance. But now, the stakes of the
fessional ethics, they are a credit to their country. ◆ game are often little more than personal power; journalistic
—Jacques Lesourne skills appear to have atrophied, and the newspapers spend
much of their time recycling the same hot air.

18
 The World Press: France and Italy

The symbiosis between newspapers and politicians may northern Italian moderate-liberal bourgeoisie and both have a
derive, in part, from the close relations between the owners long tradition of journalistic excellence. But the ownership’s
of the major media outlets and the Italian political class in gen- considerable business interests have made them journalisti-
eral. The importance of government regulation and the cally tame and cautious. For example, the Fiat car company
omnipresence of the political parties in Italy has placed many recently built a major new factory in southern Italy, which
Italian businesses in a position of considerable dependence. benefitted enormously from sizeable government subsidies
One recent owner of the Rome daily paper Il Messaggero was meant to encourage development in economically depressed
quoted as saying that in order to be a major economic player areas. Moreover, for a time, there was considerable apprehen-
you need a newspaper. Pleasing and influencing the political sion that long-time Fiat chairman Cesare Romiti might be
parties may be an important reason for owning a paper. arrested for his alleged involvement in the bribery scandal.
On a national scale, there are three principal media groups: This has meant that the Fiat-controlled papers have tried hard
the Agnelli group, tied to the Fiat automobile fortune, which to maintain favorable relations with both left and right. The
controls the Corriere della Sera, the largest newspaper in the paper’s main editorial voices—Ernesto Galli della Loggia,
country, and La Stampa, published in Turin, which has gen- Sergio Romano, and Angelo Panebianco—have dedicated
erally been the third or fourth largest paper. The second is the numerous pieces to denouncing the excesses of judicial power
group controlled by television magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who in Italy and attacking the anti-corruption magistrates.
owns, along with the three main private TV networks, two The L’Espresso-La Repubblica group is tied to its owner,
openly conservative daily newspapers, Il Giornale, and Il Carlo De Benedetti, who, like his main competitors, has had
Foglio, as well as the largest newsweekly, Panorama, and the his own close encounters with the Italian law. To his credit,
Mondadori publishing empire, the biggest publisher of books De Benedetti has not interfered with his papers’ support of
and magazines. The third and smallest group is L’Espresso-La the magistrates who have investigated his own business deal-
Repubblica, whose chief holdings are the newsweekly ings. However, it is also true that his papers’ close ties to the
L’Espresso and the Rome daily paper La Repubblica. Both are center-left coalition have almost certainly given him highly
traditionally left-of-center publications and their largest useful political influence. The journalists at both La Repub-
shareholder is Carlo De Benedetti, the former head of the blica and L’Espresso have not hesitated at times to demonstrate
Olivetti typewriter and computer company, which has now their own independence from the leaders of the center-left, but
become a leader in Italy’s cellular phone industry. All three the widely shared perception of partisanship has limited their
groups have depended on government favor while having national influence. Although of a much higher quality journal-
much to fear from the massive bribery investigation that has istically than Il Giornale and Il Foglio, the De Benedetti papers
shaken Italy in recent years. are seen as representing the left much as Berlusconi’s papers
The deleterious effect of close ties to the political system is represent the right. Thus each tends to cancel the other out.
especially obvious in the case of the Berlusconi group. In early The chief financial paper, Il Sole 24 Ore, is refreshingly con-
1994, Silvio Berlusconi decided to enter politics and founded crete and replete with news, compared to some of the other
his own political party, addressing the nation live on all three dailies. But it, too, is closely tied to a major economic player
of his national TV networks. Since then, his myriad media hold- with a strong stake in the political game: it is owned by the
ings have acted as an extension of the party press office and Confederation of Italian Industry, the principal business asso-
have attacked his political enemies with extraordinary ferocity. ciation in Italy, which sits opposite the labor unions in the
Berlusconi’s main daily newspaper, Il Giornale, was founded negotiation of virtually all major national labor contracts.
and edited by Indro Montanelli, a major figure in Italian jour- The Balkanization of Italian journalism may be due in part
nalism stretching back to the fascist era. Montanelli, while to the lack of strong reporting at any of the papers—some-
sharing some of Berlusconi’s conservative politics, insisted thing which might attract readers across ideological lines. It
on having editorial autonomy and refused to endorse has generally been true that Italian journalism has distin-
Berlusconi’s decision to enter politics. As a result, Montanelli guished itself more for the quality of its analysis and commen-
was forced out of the newspaper he had founded in a brutal tary than for reporters who wore out their shoe-leather track-
and humiliating fashion, and a more pliant editor was hired. ing down stories. This appears to be more true than ever. It is
Similarly, the head of the newsweekly Panorama, Andrea revealing, however, that many of Italian journalism’s biggest
Monti, was replaced for being politically suspect. No danger names (Galli della Loggia, Panebianco, Romano) have no jour-
of that with Berlusconi’s other newspaper, Il Foglio. It is run nalistic background at all (the first two are academics, the
by Berlusconi’s own speechwriter, Giuliano Ferraro, who was third a former diplomat). It is sad to say that the Corriere’s best
the chief government spokesman during the several months journalist may be Montanelli, who rejoined the paper after
he was prime minister in 1994. Since Berlusconi has been resigning from the editorship of Berlusconi’s Il Giornale and
under investigation and on trial in various cases of political is now in his nineties. Similarly, La Repubblica’s best may be
corruption, his newspapers have kept up a relentless attack Giorgio Bocca, who is close to eighty. The best commentators
on the magistrates, calling them “red robes,” agents in a on foreign affairs—Barbara Spinelli (La Repubblica), Arrigo
Communist plot to destroy Berlusconi. Levi, and Enzo Bettiza (both with La Stampa)—have been at
The two main newspapers of the Agnelli group, Il Corriere their jobs for decades. ◆
della Sera and La Stampa, have long been the voices of the —Alexander Stille

19
 The World Press: Germany

The German Press—Covering the World

G ermany today has about four hundred daily newspapers with a combined circulation of twenty-
five million copies in a population of over eighty-two million persons. Four out of five adults
are regular newspaper readers. Each region has its own predominant paper, with the excep-
tion of metropolitan Berlin where no single paper dominates. Today a few dailies make up “the national
press.” The Hamburg tabloid Bild is the largest, with a circulation of more than four million, while the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (known commonly as the FAZ), tural pages, one of the main yardsticks for rating a paper, the
Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), and Hamburg’s weekly Die Frankfurter Allgemeine is Germany’s leading newspaper, if not
Zeit each have circulations of between four to five hundred one of the best in the world. What is remarkable is its network
thousand copies: Die Welt (also published in Hamburg) has a of foreign correspondents, not only the largest in Germany, but
circulation of more than two hundred probably in the world as well, at a
thousand, and the Frankfurter Rund- time when almost all newspapers in
schau (FR) under two hundred thou- the major countries are reducing their
sand. The weekly Der Spiegel (mod- foreign reporting.
eled originally on Time, but much The distinctive feature of many
superior in its writing and “bite”), German newspapers is the strength
has over a million circulation, while of their feuilletons; another is their
its competitor, Focus, founded only regular reports on the foreign peri-
in 1993, but oriented to the business odicals. In the “Berliner Seiten,” the
world, sells about eight hundred Berlin pages of the FAZ, one can
thousand copies. learn that the Turks in Berlin are
The FAZ and Die Welt have tradi- reading Hurriyet or Sabah (each of
tionally been conservative. The Süd- which has a circulation in Berlin of
deutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit are lib- between seven and nine thousand
eral (in the American left-center copies), or how Russkij Berlin, with
sense), and the Frankfurter Rundschau a circulation of fifty thousand, re-
is slightly left of them. Berlin’s Tages- ports on developments in Russia. Yet
zeitung (Taz), an offspring of 1968, despite the strength of the feuil-
once brought a freshness to German letons within the national newspa-
journalism, but seems to have lost its pers, there are few German cultural
bearings. But such rough political classifications do not do periodicals of any scope, or comparable to the TLS or the New
justice to the distinctions, for within each paper there is often York Review of Books.
a spectrum of opinions, especially as between the political The most recent effort to “internationalize” the German
columns and the feuilletons, the free-wheeling literary essays newspaper is the creation of a short English version of the FAZ,
(see the following essay by Wolf Lepenies). which is inserted as a supplement in the International Herald
German unification added a number of regional newspapers Tribune in Germany, and which will soon become available on
to the total list, but none of the papers in “the East” have a the latter’s Web site. The difficulty is that this shortened ver-
national circulation, or even a super-regional circulation in the sion lacks the most attractive feature of the FAZ—its breadth
“new German states.” In Berlin, the quality papers, i.e. Der of content and its stylistic brilliance. This may be overcome as
Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Zeitung, are read chiefly within the editorial staff gains expertise, or if instead of translating
their region and have not, as yet, profited from the govern- articles from the FAZ, the staff is allowed to write its own arti-
ment’s move there. Of the national press of neighboring Switz- cles based on the contents of the German edition. But the cru-
erland, only the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) deserves mention cial point is the beginning of a process of internationalization
for its high quality and accessibility through the Internet, but in order to widen the foundations of newspapers.
it remains largely confined to its Swiss readership. Looking ahead, does the German press have secure founda-
All of the national quality newspapers have different tions or do they face a precarious future? Television, the
strengths. Some buy the Süddeutsche Zeitung for the articles by Internet, and the concentration in the media markets by the
Leyendecker or Stiller, for their political muckraking, or for growth of the two media giants Bertelsmann and Holzbrink
the distinctiveness of the music criticism. The special attrac- all pose threats to the national press.
tion of the Frankfurter Rundschau is its left-liberal appeal, its In television, there has been an increase in the number of
extensive coverage of third-world countries, and its bi-weekly political and other talk shows (as in the United States), but also
section on the humanities. In the quality and breadth of its cul- the start of two news channels, N-tv and Phoenix. N-tv spe-

20
 The World Press: Germany

cializes in short news reports. Phoenix gained a wide audience pages and the feuilleton, has been turned upside down quite
by its detailed reporting on the finance scandals of Helmut regularly. Political commentaries sometimes respond to argu-
Kohl and the CDU (Christian Democratic Union). Those broad- ments previously published on the cultural pages; they are
casts have affected German politics by increasing the number sometimes written in the somewhat mocking style formerly
of individuals who spend their time watching parliamentary reserved for the feuilleton. The latter’s writers are, as a rule,
debates on TV. While this may have affected competition very young. Most of them could not care less about the usual
between channels, it does not seem to have affected the read- “copyrights and copywrongs” (Carlyle). These authors exhibit
ing habits of the German population. a very un-German wit, a willingness to do anything except
Newspapers have lived with TV for half a century. The succumb to boredom, and a healthy antipathy toward politi-
Internet is a more recent challenge. The global population of cal correctness.
Internet users is estimated to reach more than 500 million per- There is only one paper that is even funnier and even less
sons in the year 2003. But its use in Germany is more limited politically correct than the feuilleton of the FAZ—the same
than in the U.S. Germany has about five million users, in large paper’s “Berlin pages.” Like all other major German dailies,
part because Internet costs (including charges for local phone the Frankfurter Allgemeine competes intensely for the atten-
service) are still prohibitive in comparison to the U.S. The tion of the readership in the German capital. Even without a
Internet, however, has led the German national papers to single new newspaper on the market, the publishing scene
establish their own presence, but practices and policies differ. in the German capital has changed dramatically since all
Newspapers and magazines such as Die Zeit, the SZ, Der national papers began carrying a Berlin metropolitan section.
Spiegel, the NZZ, have their own Web sites. Some offer only The leader of the pack, again, is the FAZ—its “Berlin pages”
the day’s news, commentary, and reviews with or without have made a trademark of not distinguishing between cul-
access to their archives. Some offer these free, or with a ture and politics.
charge. Some offer additional material produced especially for The Berlin pages have profited from the fact that culture and
the Web site on specific themes such as Kosovo, the CDU scan- politics have become blurred genres in the Berlin Republic.
dal, pension reform, dual citizenship, etc. Some believe that Some of the most important political debates, for instance,
cost-free online additions will increase the sale of their print have been transformed into aesthetic quarrels with architec-
editions; some regard the service as a source of additional ture playing the leading role. The three most conspicuous
income either for the additional news or for advertising. examples are the Reichstag (the seat of the German parliament,
So far, no newspaper has made a list of its most frequently which was imbued with considerable cultural sympathy and
used services or topics online. Nor would putting the English political legitimacy by Christo’s wrapping and by Norman
FAZ in the shorter English version on the Internet enable Foster’s glass dome), the Jewish Museum (which the erratic
English readers to appreciate its quality. The process of defin- genius of Daniel Libeskind turned into a memorial that should
ing the specific relation between the print edition of a news- not be used as a museum at all), and finally the Holocaust
paper and the online edition is only now beginning. ◆ Memorial (where Peter Eisenman’s project provoked another
—Michael Becker debate on the German past that seemed to have been settled
quite a while ago). Writing about the Reichstag building, the
The Feuilleton and Jewish Museum, and the Holocaust Memorial does not only
mean engaging in a cultural discourse but also includes tak-
the Theatre of Politics ing sides in hot political controversies.
Finally, the genres of culture and politics have also become

T he tension between politics and culture is more char-

acteristic of newspapers in Germany than in any other
country. The German political columnist often does
not realize that, only a few pages ahead, the cultural critic will
vehemently contradict him. It is as if both wrote for a paper
blurred in Berlin because the recent scandals over the CDU’s
financing schemes have turned the political arena into a stage
where politicians such as Helmut Kohl have suddenly turned
into actors in a tragicomedy that is not likely to end soon.
While almost all the theatres in Berlin promote political agen-
they don’t read. In Germany, the feuilleton has always been a das that do not make for exciting productions, the more excit-
playground where ideas could be hatched and ideologies pro- ing, or at least less cumbersome, Berlin Republic increasingly
moted that would never have been accepted on the political resembles a theatre-state, to borrow anthropologist Clifford
pages of the same paper. In recent years, however, the balance Geertz’s notion. True, most of our favorite actors do not dis-
seems to have shifted toward culture. The most conspicuous play nearly the precision and elegance of the Balinese whom
example of this change is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Geertz was studying. But to a considerable degree, they are
(FAZ), arguably the most important German daily newspaper transforming German political life into drama and play. The
with a circulation of more than 400,000 copies during the ordinary citizen must learn to become a critic if he wants to
week and more than 500,000 copies for the weekend edition. understand what is happening on the political stage. Once
Its feuilleton has become more and more politicized. Where more, cultural competence is a prerequisite for understand-
its front page justified the war against Milosevic, the feuil- ing German politics.
leton often presented scathing criticism. The feuilleton is everywhere—in the papers and in politics.◆
The relation between politics and culture, between the front —Wolf Lepenies

21
 The World Press: Germany

Marion Dönhoff at Ninety

S he came from another world, yet helped shape ours:

born and bred at Castle Friedrichstein in East Prussia,
close to nature, with her roots in a now-vanished world
her descriptive gifts conjure up for us in her book Before the
Storm (1990) as a unique and extraordinary home—one Hitler’s
its free-market idolatry. Civilize Capitalism [Zivilisiert den
Kapitalismus] is the title of one of her last books. In an age of
overwhelming globalism and greed that is technologically novel
but ethically primitive, she calls for reforms in keeping with
her tireless urge to understand and improve the res publica.
war robbed her of. With her famous ride west in early 1945 she Marion Dönhoff has been honored throughout the world. In
began a new life amid devastation, yet she has always kept faith 1971 she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
with her origins. This year, in the span of a few weeks, she was made an hon-
The best of old Prussia moulded her. The experience of July orary citizen of Hamburg and an honorary doctor of the uni-
20, 1944, that day in which many of her friends gave their versity of Königsberg (Kaliningrad), a first political and human
lives to free Germany of Hitler, indelibly marked her second gesture from her old neighbors. But perhaps the greatest honor
start. She has remained true to this legacy: necessarily blend- has been the love so many people the world over bear toward
ing the moral with the possible in her commitment to decency a woman who simply radiates decency, native good sense, and
in politics. so much quiet goodness. She has turned her private loss into
In 1946, as the country was commencing its own reconstruc- priceless gain for others. We feel gratitude for the past, hope
tion, Marion Dönhoff began a completely new life— for future achievements, further encouragement to be better.◆
though one prepared by a university study unusual enough at —Fritz Stern
the time for a woman of her station. By chance she landed a Source: A longer version of this essay appeared in Tageszanzeiger
job at a new weekly paper, Die Zeit—a paper her tone and style (Zurich), December 2, 1999.
has shaped for decades—for even in those earliest years she
possessed a moral authority arising not from her position but Miscellany
from her very character, which combined absolute integrity,
brilliance of writing, and political judgment, with utter charm. Sartre Redivivus
Her voice as editor and then publisher of Die Zeit helped steer
the new Federal Republic on a liberal course.
She was an early advocate of reconciliation with former ene-
mies, the very Poles and Russians who had seized her home-
land. She called for an opening to the East at a time when Cold
J ean-Paul Sartre has risen from what the French call his
purgatoire, the period of indifference, even aversion.
Chief among rehabilitations is the bestseller Le Siècle
de Sartre [Sartre’s century] (Grasset, 1999) by Bernard-Henri
Lévy, the “New Philosopher” Sartre once denounced as a
War policy favored hostile distance. She paved the way toward CIA agent. Repenting past injustice, Lévy praises Sartre’s
Ostpolitik, a “policy toward the East” which she conducted in philosophical and literary writings without concealing the
public and in private, in direct contact with Russians and wrongheadedness of his political stances, his political
Poles, the major dissidents as well as those in power. Here too “schizophrenia” as anarchistic individualist and Stalinist,
older tradition spurred new actions: she knew the east, as her philosopher of freedom and ideological dogmatist.
family had known it—without illusions, but also without George Steiner (TLS, May 19, 2000) describes Lévy’s book
arrogance. She knew what Poles and Russians had suffered at as “at its core, autobiography,” noting how Lévy’s career as
the hands of Germans. a public intellectual has “mimed” Sartre’s. Similar worldly
Reconciliation was her hope and mission in other places, too. success may have blinded him to “the core of self-hatred” in
Through her knowledge of South Africa she strove to achieve a Sartre, who knew himself to be “the quintessential exempli-
seemingly impossible peaceful end to apartheid, as evidenced fication of the bourgeois, mandarin ideals and rewards
by her support of Bishop Desmond Tutu. Her globe-trotting and which, indefatigably, he pronounced to be anathema to him.”
her worldwide network of friends were the product of a well- Like Steiner, Jürg Altwegg (FAZ, Feb. 5, 2000) reads
focused curiosity: all that was human, and political, has inter- Lévy’s vindication as a national exoneration of “the intellec-
ested and enthralled her. And she has reported on it all—in a tual” as such, whose death has lately been proclaimed “as
clear, penetrating style —in countless articles, and many books. often as Sartre announced the death of literature.” Steiner,
I first met the countess at the end of the 1960s at a German- searching for some part of Sartre’s great, flawed achievement
American forum. An article I had written on the 1968 student that signals “ a beginning rather than an epilogue,” ulti-
unrest had been circulated, and this led to her first pencilled mately proposes the philosopher’s “domestication of the
note to me, which I have kept: “Shall we have lunch at noon?” ‘Godless,’” his “rigourously immanent,” Nietzsche-inspired
She questioned me, criticized my conservative stance toward ontology and morality. Meanwhile, the apotheosis contin-
the movement. Hers was the more balanced view. Looking ues, in bookstores, conferences, talk shows. And the for-
back, I would say her conservative principles were firm enough merly nameless intersection opposite the Café des Deux
to allow her to entertain new ideas open-mindedly and liber- Magots is now called Place Sartre-de Beauvoir.
ally. She remains an open-minded conservative and a realistic —David Jacobson
liberal: so different from today’s prevailing neo-liberalism with

22
 The World Press: Russia

The Russian Press

A t the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev’s glasnost policy stimulated enormous growth in Russian
society’s interest in historical and political topics taboo until then. Some print media in Russia
reached record circulations of several million, and the popular weekly Argumenty i fakty
made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with a print run of 33.5 million. That made the decline
of the press market all the more dramatic when, in 1992, the removal of price controls, the collapse of
distribution networks, and the impoverishment of the popu- traveled in the combat zones and refugee camps and work for
lation brought the national newspapers to the brink of ruin. the war’s victims with unparalleled selflessness. In March,
Today there is next to no national press anymore. Moscow’s hackers destroyed a ready-to-print edition in the NG’s com-
papers are hardly read in the provinces, puter system. The secret service (FSB) is
partly because of the continuing process suspected to be behind this. If the FSB
of decentralization. The local press, fi- increases its control over the media, the
nanced by and manipulated in the inter- NG could be one of the first victims.
ests of local governments, is a vest- These two newspapers are printed in
pocket press that illuminates the black and white on cheap newsprint,
country’s political events from the view- while the weekly magazine Itogi main-
point of the governors and the financial tains the same quality standards as its
actors behind them. It exerts a much joint venture partner, Newsweek. Not
greater influence in the respective only its outstanding color photos, but also
regions than the central press does. In the high quality of its analyses make Itogi
Moscow, most print media belong to and one of the best current periodicals. Its
are zealous lobbyists for the interests of managing editor Masha Gessen, a re-emi-
rival financial/industrial groups, for grant from the U.S.A., would be a jewel in
example those of Boris Berezovsky, the crown of any high-quality magazine.
Vladimir Gusinsky, or the energy For the average consumer, however, Itogi
monopoly created by Viktor Cherno- is affordable only in Moscow.
myrdin, Gazprom. They have degener- Periodicals like Kommersant and Nesa-
ated into a rumor mill and a political vissimaya Gaseta [Independent News-
market, giving the task of providing information only sec- paper] were founded at the zenith of perestroika with the
ondary priority. Their target audience is the political and busi- intent of ushering in a new era of liberal media. Kommersant
ness elite that is involved in the power struggles. was also the only paper to fashion itself as a Russian Financial
There are exceptions to the rule. For example, the weekly Times. It introduced a fresh, aggressive language that was
newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti [Moscow News] (MN) is still much imitated by other media, and it has an outstanding cul-
independent and a beacon of political continuity and journal- tural department with the respected art critic Katya Degot.
istic integrity. Its editor-in-chief Viktor Loshak has not only But even before Kommersant was sold to Berezovsky last year,
managed to retain his writers in the face of the wealthy com- it had lost some of its élan, due to the 1998 financial crisis and
petition’s recruiting efforts, but also to develop an immunity the staff’s “defection” to Vladimir Gusinsky’s daily Segodnya
to the society’s cynicism. Moskovskiye Novosti is almost the [Today]. Kommersant was and is the newspaper for Moscow’s
only newspaper that keeps its distance from the arrogant, sex- high finance.
ist language tinged with underworld jargon found in most of A different fate awaited Nesavissimaya Gaseta, which
the media. The MN is characterized by Leonid Nikitinsky’s Berezovsky rescued from bankruptcy in 1993. On the one
excellent research on corruption, objective reporting on the hand, with its many monthly supplements on various social
war in Chechnya, and good criticism of society and culture. topics such as religion, literature, the military, or science, it
The latter takes up half of the twenty-eight-page periodical. has contributed much to public debate. The paper has been
The MN remains the paper of choice for Moscow’s liberal intel- corrupted by its editor-in-chief, Vitali Tretyakov, a loyal vas-
ligentsia and finds substantial resonance among Russian émi- sal of Berezovsky. In particular, its censored reporting and lies
grés in the fifty-six foreign countries in which it is distributed. about the Chechnya war, its rabble-rousing against human
Another independent newspaper is the bi-weekly Novaja rights activists, and the Great Power airs it puts on make it
Gazeta [New Newspaper] (NG), which has a circulation of seem the mouthpiece of the regime. Cynicism, inhumanity,
80,000. The NG is one of the few papers that reports in depth and nihilism – this message from the postcommunist elite to
on the suffering of the civilian population in Chechnya. The the underprivileged masses appears especially nakedly in
journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Elvira Goryuchina have Tretyakov’s newspaper. And yet it does not always take a

23
 Reports from Russia

“party line,” but publishes articles with liberal-democratic

views, for example criticism of Putin. But this pluralism seems New Russian Theatre:
to reflect a transitional situation. The impulse of media free-
dom is still strong, but the future is highly uncertain. The Moscow Scene
The Moscow papers that have been privatized by the oli-
garchs have one thing in common, whether they are black and
white or boast a modern, color layout: they are media for the
political debate and power intrigues of Moscow’s elites, an
exclusive club of the winners in Yeltsin’s market reforms.
I n 1919 Lenin nationalized the theatres, hampering artis-
tic expression, but also guaranteeing state support and
cheap tickets. Under the Soviets, Russians came to look
on inexpensive admission to the theatre as an inalienable
right. But over the past decade, the Russian government has
The numerous divisions in editorial staffs and the recruit- cut state subsidies, resulting in heftier ticket prices. Some
ing of personnel by financially powerful media, as well as con- tickets to productions in this year’s sixth annual Golden Mask
flicts with owners, have reduced the stature of most of the Theatre Festival, a celebration of national ballet, drama, ope-
respected journalists. For example, when Izvestiya was ra, and puppetry, sold for forty dollars—a bargain on Broad-
acquired by Gazprom, the paper’s long-time editor-in-chief way but to most Russians a rip-off.
Tankred Golembiovsky founded Novye Izvestiya; but it never Increased ticket prices have not kept Muscovites from
measured up to its predecessor. attending the theatre. But the theatre scene has changed over
Many younger journalists abandoned the field to work on the last ten years. Audience demographics have shifted. Rich
Internet periodicals, and the best pro-Western journalists, New Russians in swank outfits now flock to the theatres to
including Yevgenya Albaz, Andrey Piotrovsky, and Pavel Fel- begin a night on the town. Right before the curtain rises,
genhauer, are now on the staffs of English-language newspa- many theatres make an announcement reminding affluent
pers such as the Russia Journal or the Moscow Times. For writ- audience members to turn off their cell-phones. In response
ers at this level, that is the equivalent of an inner emigration. to new audience tastes, the repertory is changing. The emer-
The English-language papers, including The Moscow Tribune, gence of commercial theatre, both imported and domestic,
are of a high calibre. The Moscow Times columnist John Helmer now provides an alternative to classical drama. Profit-making
is one of the best analysts of Russian conditions. But these news- West End and Broadway spectacles such as Tomorrowland and
papers are read primarily by the expatriate community and Metro make guest appearances in Moscow’s opera houses, rid-
exert little significant influence on public opinion in Russia. ing the tide of popular consumerism flooding Russia.
The oligarchs have managed to split the journalists into two The freedom of the post-communist era, however, has ush-
camps: a well-paid, bought minority and a poorly-paid major- ered in more than expensive sensationalism. Directors now
ity. This undermines solidarity within the profession and the tackle scripts which communist censors would have quickly
possibility of promoting common interests. Journalistic pro- banned, such as Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, a new
fessional ethics were the first victim sacrificed to Mammon. British play that grapples with issues of homosexuality, maso-
The general population is alienated from the Moscow elite chism, and consumerism. Directors are also staging adapta-
and has no trust in the powers that be. The broad masses con- tions of older works that the Soviet regime kept under lock
centrate on everyday survival. A newspaper devoted to the and key. Yuri Liubimov began this trend in 1977 with his stag-
simple things of life and to entertainment, like Argumenty i ing of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a pro-
fakty with its regional supplements, thus also finds a market duction that the communists refused to fund but tolerated
outside the capital. With a little politics, a lot of gossip, and with disapproving silence. A decade later, Geta Yanovskaya
useful medical and household advice, it reaches a circulation pioneered the spirit of perestroika with an adaptation of
of more than two million, while the equally supraregional Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, a title the regime had forbidden
Izvestiya, which lost its best journalists during privatization, even mentioning. (Both productions remain in repertory as
has therefore lost attractiveness. The tabloid Moskovskii historical landmarks.) This year, Lev Dodin, the artistic direc-
Komsomolets, with a circulation of one million, is a special phe- tor of the St. Petersburg Maly Theatre, won the Golden Mask
nomenon. Its mixture of dubious scandal mongering and Best Director Award for his adaptation of Andrei Platonov’s
youth culture reporting appeals to the young, apolitical gener- novel, Chevengur. Written in 1928, the novel was accused of
ation, even outside Moscow. Its long-time editor-in-chief Pavel presenting “an incorrect portrayal of the Revolution” and
Gusev cultivates close ties to Moscow’s mayor Yuri Lushkov. thus appeared in only edited fragments in Russia until the
Whatever its political direction and quality, no newspaper’s Gorbachev era. Dodin staged Platonov’s critique of the Civil
influence even begins to approach that of the television chan- War and the Great Utopia as a poetic meditation on Russia’s
nels, such as ORT (Public Russian Television, half private, half vicious cycle of hope and disillusionment.
government-owned, and largely controlled by its main in- The tumultuous past decade, punctuated by the August
vestor Berezovsky), which manipulates the public for elec- 1998 economic crisis and the second war in Chechnya, has
tions, propagates the war in Chechnya, and stirs up anti- delayed production premiers and thwarted plans to open new
Western resentment among the masses. The print media’s theatres. The fluctuating exchange rate, paraded on the street
greatest hope for a measure of freedom of expression under by men in sandwich boards, makes it difficult to launch new
Putin may lie paradoxically in their lack of influence. ◆ projects. But most repertory theatres have managed to survive
—Sonja Margolina (translated by Mitch Cohen) the shock and rejuvenate their repertories. Directors invited

24
 Reports from Russia

from the similarly troubled ex-Soviet republics and satellite two of the most celebrated shows in the Moscow repertory.
states have chosen Shakespeare, a standard in the Russian Fomenko’s treatment of nineteenth-century country life cap-
repertory thanks to the translations of such poets as Boris tures a national spirit that enchants audiences.
Pasternak, to express the trials and misfortunes of contempo- With the opening up of former Soviet borders, many Rus-
rary life. At Moscow’s Satirikon Theatre, the Georgian direc- sian directors have begun working in the West. Most pass
tor Robert Stouroua recently staged a confrontational, mafioso through while touring their productions, but some have stayed
Hamlet designed to catch the consciences of the New Russian longer to teach and direct. Last fall, Yuri Yeremin, the artistic
kings. In St. Petersburg, Bulgarian Alexandr Morfov directed director of the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow, staged Chekhov’s
a production of The Tempest that parodied, through improvi- Ivanov at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge,
sational acting, the characters’ island freedom. The playful set Massachusetts. The production, a first glimpse of Russian the-
of swinging, wooden beams won Emil Kapulyosh this year’s atre for many audience members, alternated between moments
Golden Mask Award for Best Scenic Design. Lithuanian direc- of bold expressionism and detailed naturalism. After the suc-
tor Eimuntas Niakroshius cess of this show, Yeremin was
won the Best Foreign Pro- invited back to Cambridge to
duction Presented in Russia direct three of Chekhov’s
Award for his expressionis- vaudevilles next fall.
tic Macbeth, a relatively An adherent of the
speechless production that Stanislavsky System of act-
conjured haunting images of ing, Yeremin also teaches at
axe-murder, shrieking, blonde the ART Institute for Ad-
Baltic witches, and shattered vanced Theatre Training.
mirrors to portray a nation Two years ago, ART Insti-
plagued by insecure, incom- tute students began study-
petent leadership. ing with Russian directing,
Russian directors, too, acting, movement, and dra-
have used the unstable polit- maturgy professors from the
ical atmosphere and volatile Moscow Art Theatre School.
economy as a source of The United States has inher-
drama. At the tiny Helikon ited the Russian theatrical
Opera, Dmitry Bertman has tradition primarily through
injected a political critique Lee Strasberg and Stella
into his staging of Rimsky- Adler’s conflicting interpre-
Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, an operatic adaptation of tations of Stanislavsky’s system. Yet as the Golden Mask win-
Pushkin’s short story. Directors often stage this opera as an ners demonstrated, contemporary Russian theatre draws not
innocuous fairy tale. In Bertman’s Brechtian production, only on Stanislavskian naturalism, but also on the avant-
however, a chorus of Moscow’s ubiquitous beggars and hag- garde innovations of practitioners such as Vsevolod
gling babushkas surround a bumbling, intoxicated ruler who Meyerhold and Yevgeny Vakhtangov, to name two. The recent
relies on a magic cockerel to protect him from danger instead collaboration between The American Repertory Theatre and
of resolving his kingdom’s problems. The Moscow Art Theatre has dispelled myths about the
Kama Ginkas, who had three shows in this year’s festival, Stanislavsky system and expanded understanding of Russia’s
directed his own adaptation of The Golden Cockerel at the theatrical past and present. Russians, too, seem eager to learn
Theatre of the Young Spectator. Like many children’s shows in about Western theories and styles. Foreigners now frequently
Moscow, Ginkas’s Cockerel captivates both the young and old. work in Russia and the former Soviet Republics. The German
His bloody production presents a nightmare of violence culti- director Peter Stein recently staged The Oresteia and Hamlet
vated by faulty leadership. A mastermind at manipulating with casts of Russian actors from various Moscow companies.
audience emotion by combining naturalistic acting with Last year, British director Declan Donnellan and actors from
Brechtian breaks in the fourth wall, Ginkas won this year’s Best Lev Dodin’s Maly Theatre (which recently joined the presti-
Production Award for The Room of Laughter, a play in which gious European Union of Theatres) won the top Golden Mask
Russia’s stalwart actor Oleg Tabakov portrays a neglected old prize for their joint production of The Winter’s Tale. And this
man suffocating in a dilapidated, Soviet-bloc apartment. March, in the middle of the Golden Mask Festival, ART
Tabakov shared the spotlight this year with Yevgeny Institute students premiered François Rochaix’s English-lan-
Grishkovets, a writer/director/actor from Kaliningrad whose guage production of Goldoni’s Holiday Trilogy at the Moscow
mesmerizing monologue How I Ate A Dog, about daily life in Art Theatre. These exchanges and the international audience
the Russian navy won him the prize for innovation. In spite of at this year’s festival signal the beginning of an era when
increasingly cosmopolitan attitudes, such drama of provincial world theatre is enriched through interaction rather than
Russian life moves Muscovites. Pyotr Fomenko’s productions diminished through isolation. ◆
of Ostrovsky’s Guilty Without Guilt and Wolves and Sheep are —Ryan McKittrick

25
 Reports from Russia

Vladmir Putin, Cultural Maestro

R ussian leaders have always been keen to have artists

on their side, and the artists, in turn, have usually
bowed to power. Pushkin announced: “No, I am not a
flatterer when I sing praises to my Tsar.” Dostoyevsky offered
as justification for Russia’s national uniqueness: “We are prob-
Yet Putin can be harsh. Although now it is the media who
suffers most. In February the acting president allegedly ordered
the arrest of Radio Free Europe’s correspondent in Chechnya,
Andrei Babitsky, and then ordered his release in order to show
journalists that they should not contradict the official line. In
ably backwards, but we have souls.” Even Mandelstam sub- early May various outlets printed a Kremlin “working paper”
mitted and once wrote an Ode to Stalin. that proposed the intervention of the security services into the
Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev—all staked their reporting of opposition media. In mid-May this “paper draft”
ideas of Russian culture on what they called socialist realism was tested in practice. Now as president, Putin justified the FSB
to be propagated by the Russian intelligentsia. Yeltsin, pro- (Federal Service Bureau) search raid of the Moscow MOST-
moting democracy, then chose comfort over culture and group, whose media outlets have been critical of the Kremlin.
shifted his attention toward money and media. Culture was But while the press is being punished, with culture it is flat-
left to drift on its own with no relation to the state’s agenda. tery that rules. Putin’s benevolent gestures toward mastera
Not president Putin. In his effort to revive the moral fiber cultury (maestros of culture) are now cynically accepted by
of the Russian people, their glory and international respect, the current mastera. Valery Gergiev, the famous conductor of
he has turned back to culture. After all, if figures such as the Marinsky Opera in St. Petersburg, who regularly performs
Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov helped to bring down the legiti- classics such as Eugene Onegin, was pleased by the President’s
macy of the Soviet regime, the process might be reversed by interest in his new production of War and Peace, the
new cultural figures. In the months as acting and now as the Prokofiev operatic adaptation of Tolstoy, as was Nani
elected president, Vladimir Putin has established himself as a Bregvadze, the legendary Georgian singer, whom Putin
fan of Russian culture in all its aspects—film, literature, begged on his knees to sing for him personally after he missed
music, architecture, etc. He meets with scientists and teachers her concert at the Moscow Conservatory.
seeking to convince them that they, no less than the military, During presidential elections, special correspondents spent
are Russia’s hope for the future. While he shakes one hand the entire day at the polls where members of the intelligentsia
with Madeleine Albright to steady Russia’s relations with the were voting. Thus the whole nation learned that most of them
U.S., he writes letters to Brigitte Bardot with another. He goes were great Putin supporters. If Bella Akhmadulina (prominent
to the theatre almost every week and pays friendly visits to Russian poet)or Vladimir Spivakov (famous conductor of the
the homes of various members of the intelligentsia. Moscow Virtuosi orchestra) vote for Vladimir Putin, there
History repeats itself. Josef Stalin, too, was the “friend” of must be something to him.
writers, composers, poets, and artists. “Gogol, Dostoevsky, Power knows that in a country like Russia it is important to
Tolstoy…” he mused, “those names sound as loud as cannons.” make culture its ally: “art belongs to the people” was a great
Osip Mandelstam is probably still shivering in his grave, slogan of Lenin and Stalin. Putin recently confirmed this idea
remembering Stalin’s “friendship.” As are Bulgakov, Pasternak, with his signature pragmatism by telling artists, “Your works
and Shostakovich. Josef Vissarionovich would telephone are of great socio-political importance. Many of you are not
Bulgakov after repeated viewings of The White Guard, in his simply loved but worshipped.”
favorite Moscow Art Theatre, to express his admiration: So far Putin’s calculations have proved right. Nikita Mik-
“Mikhail Afanasievich, Stalin speaking,” and the author would halkov, the famous director of the Oscar-winning Burnt by the
freeze, speechless and stunned. And Stalin would find time to Sun, the Russian Art Academy President pianist, Nikolai Petrov,
discuss with Dmitri Shostakovich the necessity of writing songs and the singer and composer Alexander Gradsky during the
rather than symphonies—and how lovely Shostakovich’s songs last few months, addressing various Moscow and international
for movies were: live-affirming and cheerful. forums, expressed their concern over the media’s disservice to
Vladimir Putin has his own appreciations. The First Person, the new leadership: the negative coverage of Chechnya creates
Conversations with Vladimir Putin, a book of biographical inter- an unfavorable impression of the Putin regime and seriously
views with Putin, his family and friends (incidentally, written damages Russia’s image both in Russia and abroad. They have
in the best of traditions of the cheerfully enthusiastic pioneer been calling for the agreement with the presidential spokes-
stories of Arkady Gaidar, famous Soviet children’s writer and man’s directive: “When the nation mobilizes its forces to
grandfather of a reformer Yegot Gaidar), Putin’s character is achieve some task, that imposes obligations on everyone,
largely seen through the eyes of his very best friend—an artist, including the media.” Nikita Mikhalkov went even further to
a musician. Putin says he enjoys performances. On the inau- suggest at the celebration of the World War II May Day vic-
gural day as Prime Minister (in September 1999), he went to the tory at Volgograd where the 1943 battle against the Nazis took
Satirikon Theatre’s anniversary. Apparently, it was a sentimen- place the city should be given back its old name of Stalingrad.
tal occasion, for Putin had met his wife at a performance by This was the time of Russia’s glory and its strength. And cul-
Arkady Raikin, an official Soviet stand-up comedian, whose ture was then at the front line in the battle for Great Russia. ◆
son Konstantin is the Satirikon’s artistic director. —Nina Khrushcheva

26
 Language

Spanglish—A New Vernacular

The Census Bureau has declared that by 2020 Latinos will be the largest minority group in the United States, surpassing blacks
and Asians and numbering more than seventy million. One of every four Americans will be of Hispanic descent. This population
explosion may transform every aspect of culture and society in the United States, not least the linguistic. In fact, a verbal metamor-
phosis is already taking place. Spanish, spoken in present-day Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in
the last few decades. The nation’s unofficial second language, it is much in evidence on two twenty-four-hour TV networks and more
than 275 radio stations. Bilingual education has expanded knowledge of Spanish in schools nationwide. Spanish is used in 70 percent
of Latino households, and on campuses across the country, it is the most studied and sought-after “foreign tongue.”
Yet the Spanish that is spoken so ubiquitously in the United States increasingly begins to sound different from the Spanish spoken
in Spain, and even in Mexico. The editors of Hopscotch, a new English-language magazine devoted to Latin American culture,
have reported recently on this so-called Spanglish. We continue with the account of this phenomenon by Ilan Stavans, the editor of
the new journal.

O ne sign of the “Latin fever” that has been sweeping

over the United States since the mid-1980s is the
astonishingly creative amalgam spoken by people of
Hispanic descent not only in major cities but in rural areas as
well: neither Spanish nor English but a hybrid known as
metabolism. Yet their similarities are striking. Latinos are
already a prominent part of the American social quilt. For
ivory-tower intellectuals to condemn their tongue as illegiti-
mate seems preposterous to me. It signals the awkwardness of
scholars and academics.
Spanglish. The term is controversial, and so is its impact: Has Protecting Castillian Spanish from the barbarians in the
Spanish irrevocably lost its purity as a result of it? Is English ghettoes of East Los Angeles and Spanish Harlem is futile, for
becoming less “Anglicized” on the tongues of Latinos? Is Spanglish is here to stay, and it is time for the nation’s intelli-
Spanglish a legitimate language? Should it be endorsed by the gentsia to acknowledge it. Language, after all, changes con-
intellectual and political establishment? Who uses it, and why? stantly. Borges wrote in an Anglicized Spanish, and Julio
As one might expect, these questions have contributed to Cortázar made his fiction come alive by writing in Spanish
an atmosphere of anxiety and fear in non-Hispanic enclaves. with a French twist. Both were condemned at various times
Are we witnessing the Latinization of America? Is the nation in their careers for “polluting” the language. But who would
at risk of adopting a new tongue? Is it losing its collective dare to invoke Cervantes’s tradition now without them?
identity? On the other side, purists within the fractured Writers are, among many other things, harbingers of change.
Hispanic intelligentsia refuse to endorse Spanglish as a vehi- They turn it into a testimony of their era. And rapid change
cle of communication. They claim that it lacks dignity and an is what we are witnessing in the United States today—social,
essence of its own. This stand is una equivocación, though. It political, religious, but primarily verbal change. Immigrant
regards speech as stagnant, when in truth it undergoes eter- lives are brewing in new grammatical and syntactic pots,
nal renovation. For the eight million Hispanics north of the incredible blends of inventiveness and amor a la vida. In
border, Spanish is the connection to a collective past and them binationalism, biculturalism, and bilingualism go hand
English the ticket to success. But Spanglish is la fuerza del des- in hand.
tino, a signature of uniqueness. It is not taught in the schools, What is at stake here is not the future of Spanglish, already
but children and adolescents from coast to coast learn it on a solid and commanding, but broad acceptance of it. English is
daily basis at the best university available: life itself. and no doubt should be the nation’s sole official language. But
One need only think of Yiddish, used by Eastern European that does not mean that other tongues should not live side by
Jews from the thirteenth century on, to realize the potential side, as they have done since the arrival of the Mayflower.
of Spanglish. Yiddish was born of the disparities between Nothing has ever been pure in this land, especially not the
high- and lowbrow segments of Jewish society in and outside idea of home. Unlike other immigrant groups, Latinos find
the ghetto. It originated in an attempt to separate the sacred that their ethnic language has remained alive and well here,
from the secular, the intellectual from the worldly. Its linguis- 150 years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which
tic sources were Hebrew, German, and Russian, Polish and brought an end to the war commonly known as the “trauma
other Slavic languages, and the mix was later reinvigorated of encounter.” Other immigrant tongues—German, Italian,
by other linguistic additives, including Spanish in Buenos even Yiddish—have vanished as popular channels of commu-
Aires, Havana, and Mexico City, and Portuguese in São Paulo. nication, but not Spanish. In fact, its stamina at this fin de siglo
At first rabbis and scholars rejected Yiddish as illegitimate. is more apparent than ever: on the radio and TV, in music, in
Long centuries passed before it was championed by masters the printed word, and especially en la calle, on the street. It
like Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Leib Peretz, S. Ansky, and even isn’t the Spanish used in the country of origin, nor is it
Marc Chagall, whose pictorial images are but translations of English. Latinos will leave a mark on America in their own
his shtetl background. tongue. By doing so, they not only will invite the rest of the
Obviously, the differences between Yiddish and Spanglish society to join their verbal celebration but, even more attrac-
are many, and we are not suggesting that they have the same tively, will change the way it uses its own language.

27
 Language

So the emergence of Spanglish is neither sudden nor new.

In one way or another it has been around for decades, even Fear of Franglais
centuries, although since the mid-1980s it has gained not
only national attention but a sense of urgency, making its
presence felt in rap and rock music, art, and literature. But
even though poets and singers are beginning to pen it down,
and sections such as the classified ads in newspapers and
B ack in the seventeenth century, French linguists liked
to recount how the emperor Tiberius had attempted to
introduce new words into the Latin language by fiat,
and had failed, miserably. The story was both a not-so-subtle
means of pointing out the limits of even the most absolute
music and sports magazines can’t avoid it, it remains, for the political power (such as that claimed by their own kings), and
most part, an oral code of communication, free in spirit and also an illustration of a point dear to them: that the ultimate
defying standardization. ◆ arbiter of language was not the state, but actual usage.
—Ilan Stavans France’s kings did not entirely accept this point. They tried to
Source: Ilan Stavans, Hopscotch, Volume 1, Number 1, 1999, Duke regulate and codify usage, notably through the creation of the
University Press. Académie Française in 1640. But neither did they ever dare to
follow Tiberius’ example.
The modern French civil service, on the other hand, has in
A Spanglish Sampler recent years displayed not merely a Louisquatorzien, but a
positively Tiberian arrogance when it comes to matters lin-

T he selected lexicon Hopscotch presents from a

“pool of over six thousand words” identifies
entries, wherever possible, as Cubanism, Mexi-
canism, Chicanism (Mexican-Americanism), Iberianism,
Puerto Ricanism, Nyuorricanism (New York Puerto Ri-
guistic. They incessantly legislate, regulate, reform and purge,
and woe to the French businessman who has the temerity to
advertise “un computer muni du dernier software e-mail” (a
computer loaded with the most recent e-mail software). Sacré
bleu! Unless he immediately does away with the offending
can), or Cyber-Spanglish; and it traces their coinage to English words and puts up a new sign advertising “un ordina-
East Los Angeles, the Northeast, the Southwest, etc. teur muni du dernier logiciel pour la messagerie électronique,”
Many of these words remain close if not identical in he will face ruinous fines.
meaning to the “Anglicisms and U.S. pop culture terms” In the past few months, the French language police have
they adapt phonetically, but the borrowed terms are not attempted to banish such words as le start-up, which they
solely English: a bom, denoting a “homeless person” insist, ludicrously, must be replaced with la jeune pousse (lit-
(from the English slang bum), must not to be confused erally, the young plant). What the French fear of course is
with a bum, or “explosion” (English boom); whereas el franglais, the incursion of English words into the language,
hood (or hud) denotes “the ‘hood” (a slang abbreviation such as le weekend, which the French now enjoy for two days
for one’s “neighborhood” that has entered white Ameri- every week, at la fin de semaine. The language bureaucrats
cans’ slang), la hooda, a Chicanism for “the police,” de- have managed to rack up a few successes: notably ordinateur
rives from the Spanish judicial. (computer) and logiciel (software). But the invasion of Fran-
Certain easy, common expressions that revel in their glais has barely slowed. The bureaucrats made a brave effort
mix of languages—dirìsimo, the sweet superlative of to impose la télécopie, but le fax won out, along with the verb
“dear,” culìsimo, an interjection for what is “very faxer. La messagerie électronique looks no more likely to beat
cool”—may well soon prove irresistible to English- out le mail. And the changes go well beyond technological
speaking Americans with little or no Spanish. They neologisms. Whereas twenty years ago le trafic referred only
could learn much about recent U.S. Hispanic history to trafficking, now it means what it means in Los Angeles.
browsing a lexicon in which the secondary meaning of Franglais, it could be said, takes advantage of every possible
the familiar nacho (a “thick tortilla chip”) is “a disloyal opportunité (yet another coinage). In matters linguistic, the
Chicano”—or the term for a “traitor” is the Cubanism French now follow le leader. And the Internet has only accel-
kenedito (“from English John F. Kennedy”). erated things. As un webmaster might well declare, “Vive le
For the Hispanic reader, of course, whether from Istlos hit-parade des sites cools du web!”
(East Los Angeles), Mallamibbish (Miami Beach), or that It is indeed unfortunate that the French language is relent-
one-time cradle of Yinglish, the Loisaida (the Lower East lessly losing ground around the world. Fewer and fewer for-
Side of New York—even, in fact, for a Mexkimo, or “Mexi- eigners learn it as a second language, and it has almost entirely
can residing in Alaska”—this record of a vernacular in lost its status as the international language of diplomacy and
progress will confirm how linguistically fertile it is to be fine art. But it is hard to see how passing laws against le start-up
in that state Northeast Spanglish speakers first defined as is going to change matters. By far the most effective means of
haifenado: half-and-half, “having a divided identity.” stirring new interest in the French language would be for
—David Jacobson French novelists and poets to begin producing literary works
Note: Basic Books will publish Ilan Stavans’s lexicon The that stir even five percent of the excitement that their great nine-
Sounds of Spanglish in 2001. teenth-century predecessors did. But even French bureaucrats
cannot legislate literary excellence, much as they might like to.◆
—David A. Bell

28
 Language

Parlez-vous Val?

W hen was the last time you heard a good European

conversation in Sami? How about Tundra Nenets,
Istriot, Friulian, or Walloon? If you have done so
recently, count yourself fortunate. For these and dozens of
other minority languages across Europe are in peril of extinc-
such as Val (used by only a few hundred), the charter, in turn,
takes steps to promote the use of these languages in education,
the media, administrative, and judicial settings.
Fine in theory, but putting the directive into practice has
proved another matter. To date, only eight countries (Finland,
tion—a problem by no means confined to the continent. In a Liechtenstein, Norway, Hungary, the Netherlands, Croatia,
recent article in the British journal Prospect (“The Death of Switzerland and Germany) have ratified the treaty, and others
Language,” November1999), the linguist David Crystal esti- have signed it (France, Austria, Denmark, Spain, and Lux-
mates that of the world’s approximately 6,000 living lan- embourg), yet the experience of France suggests that moving
guages, roughly half will be extinct by the end of the twenty- from concept to custom will not be easy. When the
first century—an average of a language death (defined as the Constitutional Council decreed this summer that acceptance
death of the last living speaker ) would require changes in
every fifteen days. France’s constitution, President
Such numbers are disturbing. Chirac and others balked, reject-
Yet it is also true that the extinc- ing the charter as a threat to
tion of language is as much a fact France, and touching off a bitter
of history as the extinction of debate about the alleged dangers
species. Norn, Gothic, Dalma- it posed to French hegemony
tian, Cornish, and Manx—all and the sanctity of the mother
European languages that have tongue. To this day, the charter
perished in recent memory—are remains unratified in France.
simply newer additions to what Elsewhere, in Sweden and
is in fact a very old fossil record. Spain, for example, independent
Is this just part of a “natural” efforts to protect minority lan-
evolutionary process? guages have proved controver-
Perhaps. But as Crystal and sial. More than a few Swedes
others are quick to point out, the wonder whether passage of a law
great predator that threatens lin- protecting meän kieli, a Finnish
guistic diversity today is man language spoken by a mere
himself. Beginning with the first 30,000 people in the North of the
wave of European colonization country, should confer the right
in the sixteenth century, and continuing, in more benign to use the tongue on the floor of parliament, or merit obliga-
form, perhaps with contemporary globalization, men and tory instruction in public schools. In Spain, too, legislation
women have wagged their tongues with tremendous force, mandating that silbo gomero should be taught in some of the
resulting in a steady reduction in the number of living lan- Canary Islands has summoned shrill response; of African ori-
guages, and posing ever greater challenges to linguistic sur- gin, this pre-Hispanic “language” consists entirely of whistles.
vival. The question is, can anything—should anything—be Yet for all this skeptical pursing of lips, real gains have
done to stop this process? been made. Proponents point to the resuscitation of Welsh,
Crystal would answer a sober, if resolute, yes to both ques- Irish Gaelic, and Catalan as model cases, and they argue that
tions. He is certainly not alone. Many Europeans, in fact, share with some 50 million speakers of various minority languages
his view that linguistic diversity, like bio-diversity, is inher- in the EU alone, the numbers justify protective measures.
ently good for the social environment. For some time they have Italy, for its part, has just underscored this logic, passing leg-
been taking steps to ensure it. islation which allocates over 20 billion lire to protect the
One such measure is the European Charter for Regional or country’s eleven minority languages. Linguistic defenders
Minority Languages, drafted by the forty-member Council of hope others will follow suit. As Crystal observes, if, at the
Europe in the early 1980s, but which went into effect only on very least, measures are taken to ensure that native speakers
March 1, 1998. Aimed at protecting linguistic diversity, the live to tell their stories, then future generations will have the
charter decrees the “inalienable right” to “use a regional or option to decide whether they, too, would like to speak
minority language in private and public life,” defining regional them, or forever hold their peace. ◆
and minority languages broadly as those “traditionally used — Darrin McMahon
within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State Sources: Courrier International, No. 486 (February 24 - March 1,
who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the 2000).
State’s population.” Thus lumping together a language such as The European Charter is online at http://www.coe.fr/eng/
Catalan (spoken by over seven million people) with a language legaltxt/148e.htm

29
 Language

Who Speaks Romanche?

Yinglish

Y inglish—the use of Yiddish words when no

other can do—is an argot developed by New
York intellectuals but stolen by Hollywood
insiders as a status badge in the competitive game of
S witzerland is multilingual, but the Swiss are not. Playing
on the double meaning of entendre, a (rare) Swiss witticism
has it that the Swiss get along because they do not under-
stand one another. The persistence of that truth resonates
throughout a new annual, Feuxcroisés, that seeks to build bridges
one-upmanship. among the Swiss even as it laments the hopelessness of the task.
Yiddish is a fruity language, like Elizabethan English, The paralyzing effect of the Swiss “Sonderfall” (special case)
in which there are few distinctions between high and haunts the contributors. “I don’t think a Swiss literature exists
low, and thus one can be caustic without being coarse, but I hope that there is a Swiss literary consciousness,” writes
as would be the case in polite language. S. J. Perelman, Hugo Loetcher wistfully. The Swiss literary capitals are Paris,
the noted humorist, was once asked in an interview in Milan, and sundry spots in Germany. Swiss-German writers
The Paris Review why he used so many Yiddish expres- must make a detour abroad before being discovered in the
sions in his writing, and Perelman replied, “In what Romandie (French Switzerland). And how do French- or
other language do you have sixteen different ways to Italian-speaking Swiss authors ever find their way to Zurich?
smack a man in the face?” The most notable Yiddish No wonder that translators are the heroes of Feuxcroisés
writer was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel [Crossfires]. They are the passeurs—a term evoking Alpine
Prize, and one of whose early stories, “Gimpel the Fool,” smugglers of goods or men—who bring literary works across
was translated into English by Saul Bellow, also a Nobel the barriers of language. The noblest of these language smug-
laureate, in Partisan Review. Yiddish is onomatopoeic, glers are those who translate from Romanche, the ancient
which like the bouquet of a good wine, provides a breath latinized language of the most remote mountain valleys. This is
far beyond the literal meaning of a word. Yinglish is where the search for Swiss authenticity leads. Beyond the cloy-
always ironic, and sentences are often uttered in a rising ing legend of the Helvetic pastoral paradise lies the myth of the
inflection. Here are a few instances of Yinglish and their only authentic Swiss tongue. Feuxcroisés celebrates a love affair
meaning (informed readers can provide their own words with Romanche: a reverential rendering of the Romanche poet,
and add to the list): Luisa Famos, who died twenty-five years ago; the epiphanic dis-
covery of Romanche by Gabriel Mützenberg who has given his
chutzpah—unmitigated gall, e.g. the man who shoots life to its study and avows that he does not really speak it.
both parents and then pleads for clemency on the ground Since there are five Romanche variants, each with its own
that he is an orphan “genius,” the contributors agree that government-sponsored
schlemiel—the man who always butters the wrong side attempts at inventing a single Romanche koiné (the common
of the bread literary language of the ancient Greeks)—if only to be able to
schnorrer—an impudent scrounger put together a Romanche dictionary—are ill-inspired and will
schmattes—the rag trade, i.e. fashion end up killing Romanche instead of preserving it.
maven—the man who knows it all, and tells you The fear pervading this collection is that not only the
macher—the big shot, with a pop gun Romanche tongue(s) but Swiss multilingualism is mortally
nebbish—Woody Allen, in person threatened. This French-language volume sees two enemies:
tchochtkes—trinkets, baubles, and bibelots English and Swiss-German dialects. A recent Zurich school pol-
yenta—a female gossip, without taste icy introducing English before (and, eventually, instead of) a
kvetch—to groan endlessly in a minor key “national language,” i.e., German or Italian, has provoked
kvell—to express joy in a major key Cassandra-like cries throughout the country. This surrender to
nudnick—the man who clutches your lapel and bores globalization—inevitably dubbed “macdonaldisation”—
you to death with his talk parallels an opposite but equally powerful trend among Swiss-
Phudnick—a nudnick with a PhD. Germans: to forsake standard German in favor of micro-dialects,
equally impermeable to their German neighbors and to their
Many years ago, Malcolm Muggeridge remarked that French- or Italian-speaking compatriots.
when the London Times dropped the quotation marks Those used to seeing the Swiss as a smug people will be sur-
around the word “General” for Evangeline Booth of the prised to discover the anguish that runs throughout this vol-
Salvation Army, she had become legitimate. By the same ume. This too may be part of the Swiss identity. The most
token, when Yinglish words now appear without italics famous French-language Swiss writer, C. F. Ramuz, wrote over
in The New York Times, they have passed into the style sixty years ago that soon the Swiss would have only the uni-
book of the language. form of their postmen in common. Apparently, the Swiss are
—Daniel Bell still worrying about this, even as they hope that the postman
will be as reliable as he has always been. ◆
—André Liebich
Source: Feuxcroisés, Lausanne: Service de Presse Suisse, 1999.

30
 Language

The Internet—One Tongue or Many?

T he Internet was basically an American development, and it naturally spread most rapidly
among the other countries of the English-speaking world. Right now, for example, there are
roughly as many Internet users in Australia as in either France or Italy, and the English-speak-
ing world as a whole accounts for over 80 percent of top-level Internet hosts and generates close to 80
percent of Internet traffic. It isn’t surprising, then, that the Web is dominated by English. Two years
ago my colleague Hinrich Schütze and I used an automatic lan- languages are in competition for finite communicative re-
guage identification procedure to survey about 2.5 million sources. A French movie theatre has to choose between show-
Web pages and found that about 85 percent of the text was in ing Steven Spielberg or Eric Rohmer, and a print medical jour-
English. The overall proportion of English may have dimin- nal cannot print multilingual versions without substantially
ished since then—a 1999 survey of several hundred million increasing its costs. But on the Internet, the diffusion of infor-
pages done at ExciteHome showed English with 72 percent, mation is not a zero-sum game. The economics of distribution
followed by Japanese with 7 percent and German with 5 per- make multilingual publication on the Web much more feasi-
cent, and then by French, Chinese, and Spanish, all with ble than it is in print, which is why a large number of com-
between 1 and 2 percent. mercial and govern-
To a lot of observers, all of this suggests that the Internet is ment sites in Europe
just one more route along which English will march on an and Asia (and even, Choice of language is
ineluctable course of world conquest. It is not surprising then increasingly, in the
that speakers of other languages view the prospect of an United States) are chiefly dependent on
English-dominated Web with alarm. The director of a Russian making their content
Internet service provider recently described the Web as “the available in two or the purpose of com-
ultimate act of intellectual colonialism.” And French President more languages.
Jacques Chirac was even more apocalyptic, describing the Then, too, there are munication rather
prevalence of English on the Internet as a “major risk for strong forces militat-
humanity,” which threatens to impose linguistic and cultural ing for the use of local than on economics or
uniformity on the world—a perception that led the French languages on the Web.
government to mandate that all Web sites in France must pro- An increasing propor- geography
vide their content in French. tion of new users who
On the face of things, the concern is understandable. It isn’t are coming online in
just that English is statistically predominant on the Web. places such as France or Italy are individuals and small busi-
There is also the heightened impression of English dominance nesses who are chiefly interested in using the Net for local com-
that is created by the ubiquitous accessibility of Web docu- munication, unlike the large firms or public institutions who
ments. If you do an AltaVista search on “Roland Barthes,” for have made up the first wave of adopters. An airline company or
example, you’ll find about nine times as many documents in research center in Germany may have an incentive to post its
English as in French. That may or may not be wildly dispro- Web pages in English, but a singles club or apartment rental
portionate to the rate of print publication about Barthes, but agency does not. And as more people in a language community
it is bound to be disconcerting to a Parisian who is used to come online, content and service providers have a strong inter-
browsing the reassuringly Francophone shelves of bookstores est in accommodating them in their own language. Yahoo! has
and libraries. put up localized versions in French, Spanish, German, Danish,
Sometimes English is an obvious practical choice, for exam- Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese,
ple in nations such as Egypt, Latvia, and Turkey, where few and in all of these markets it is facing competition from other
speakers of the local language are online and the Internet is still portals, both American and local. By limiting search engines
thought of chiefly as a tool for international communication. and portals to resources in their own language, users can choose
But the tendency to use English does not disappear even when to ignore the sea of English content on the Web—and they are
a lot of speakers of the local language have Internet access. Since not likely to miss it much.
the Web turns every document into a potentially “interna- This is not to say that the Internet will not have important
tional” publication, there is often an incentive for publishing linguistic effects. Ultimately it could be comparable to the
Web sites in English that would not exist with print documents importance of print, which first created standardized national
that don’t ordinarily circulate outside national borders. languages and then helped to create a sense of national com-
Still, it is a mistake to assume that any gains English makes munity around them. The mistake is to assume that the effects
on the Internet will have to come at the expense of other lan- will be measurable in raw percentages of global language use.
guages. The Internet is not like print or other media, where The “how many speakers?” games that language chauvinists

31
 Language

like to play have always been one of the sillier manifestations lion in Hispanophone Latin America. And while the Net is
of cultural rivalries—like Olympic gold medal counts, only a growing rapidly in most of these nations, severe barriers must
lot more inexact. What matters is not simply how widely a be overcome. There are only ten telephones per hundred peo-
language is used, but why and when people use it and how it ple in Latin America, for example, and only two per hundred
figures into their sense of social identity. in India, and while there are ambitious plans for extending
This is where the distinctive properties of the Net come into the Internet via wireless communication, these face daunting
play. Notably, electronic communication does not require large technical and economic difficulties.
capital concentrations to produce and distribute content, so Yet the Internet may have important linguistic effects even
it needn’t entail the centralization that print and broadcast on communities by altering the kind of language that matters
do. And also unlike print, the cost of diffusion of electronic in public life. Since the eighteenth century, most developed
documents does not increase proportionately with the dis- societies have recognized a distinction between two varieties
tance or dispersion of the audience. And it is far more effi- of language. The first is the informal, rapidly changing variety
cient than print or broadcast in reaching small or geographi- that you learn in the normal course of socialization, which is
cally dispersed audiences, whether we are thinking of the adapted to private communication between individuals with a
markets for scholarly books or medieval music or of the lot of background in common. The second is a conservative
Welsh-speaking community. and relatively formal variety used in published writing and
One important consequence of all this is to make the choice broadcasting—a variety that requires explicit instruction and
of language chiefly dependent on the purpose of communica- that is designed to communicate to an anonymous audience
tion rather than on economics or geography. Take the diffu- who can’t be presumed to know much about the writer’s cir-
sion of news. In the worlds of print and broadcast, it is only cumstances or background. This variety may be loosely based
the English-language media—more specifically, the American on middle-class speech, but it aims at being a neutral and uni-
media—that have been able to achieve anything like genuine versal medium, and tends to be less susceptible to regional and
worldwide news distribution. You can sometimes find a national variation (The Economist is a lot easier for Americans
French television news program on cable in big cities in the to follow than a conversation in a London pub). Traditionally,
United States or a three-day-old copy of Le Figaro at an inter- this is the form of language that we look to dictionaries to
national news dealer, but they aren’t available in every hotel record and that attracts most of our critical concerns about the
room and at every street corner the way CNN and the state of the language and its consequences for public life.
International Herald Tribune are in France. But the Internet blurs this distinction, even as it blurs the dis-
With the Web, this all changes. French speakers in non- tinction between “public” and “private” communication. The
Francophone regions have access to the online versions of language of the innumerable discussion groups and bulletin
twenty or thirty French-language newspapers and to as many boards of the Net has much of the tone of private communica-
direct radio transmissions, and Web transmission of TV pro- tion—it’s informal, elliptical, and allusive. But it is conversation
gramming will become routine as bandwidth increases. The filtered by a battery of conventions adapted to its new function.
speakers of less widely used languages are nearly as well There is a troubling paradox in all this. The forums of the
served—Yahoo! lists electronic versions of newspapers from Internet undoubtedly create the opportunity for a wider and
Malaysia, Indonesia, Colombia, Turkey, Qatar, and about sev- more participatory public discourse than has ever before been
enty or eighty other nations. possible. True, we may want to be a little skeptical of the
No less important, the Net creates new forums for informal visionaries’ picture of these interactive forums as the nuclei
exchanges among the members of geographically dispersed of a new “electronic commons” that will wind up displacing
communities. At present there are discussion groups in more traditional political institutions with a direct democracy—it
than a hundred languages, including not just major national is in their nature to be too chaotic, too fragmented, and too
languages but Basque, Breton, Cambodian, Catalan, Gaelic, unreliable to bear all the burden. But they have already
Hmong, Macedonian, Navaho, Swahili, Welsh, and Yoruba, become important secondary media for transacting political
among others. life, both as places where the news is critically interpreted and
These efficiencies of distribution work to the advantage of as sources of information (sometimes correct) that the press
dispersed language communities—whether linguistic diaspo- has not adequately reported.
ras like the Indonesians, Russians, or Greeks living abroad or Yet even as they open up the discourse, these forums can also
postcolonial populations that have up to now existed in the lin- restrict and circumscribe participation in it, as the neutral lan-
guistic penumbra of the metropolis. People in the Francophone guage of the traditional op-ed page yields to something that has
Caribbean or the Maghreb, for example, can have much quicker more of the tone of conversation in a Palo Alto coffee bar. This
and more extensive access to French-language content pro- may ultimately be the most important linguistic issue raised by
duced in other regions than with print or broadcast. the technology. What does it matter how widely English or any
All of this presupposes, of course, that sufficient numbers other language is used on the Internet if the language used there
of people in the community will have Internet access, which has become less of a common medium for its speakers? ◆
will be a long time coming in many parts of the world. Right —Geoffrey Nunberg
now, for example, China and India each have around two mil- Source: Abridged from “Will the Internet Always speak English?”
lion Internet users, and there are between three and four mil- The American Prospect, March 27-April 10, 2000.

32
 Language

Japonica: How to Read the Japanese Language

If You Know the English Source Code

F rom the Asuka period (552-645) through the late Heian

(end of the twelfth century), the Chinese language com-
pletely penetrated Japanese. Writing at the end of the
nineteenth century, Basil Hall Chamberlain, the pioneer for-
eign scholar of the Japanese language, was able to say that
Today, because of the enormous increase in the velocity of
communications and the diffusion of literacy, the assimilation
of foreign languages requires mere decades, or even years,
rather than centuries. There are several fairly distinguishable
stages in this process. In the first, foreign words are taken in
written Japanese prose had scarcely anything Japanese about whole and used passively. Substantive nouns, technical terms,
it save for a few particles, auxiliaries, and such elements as are and words without Japanese counterparts will be most promi-
necessary to provide the structure of the Japanese sentence. nent. Verbs are created by taking the English verb + suru [to
Most of the vocabulary was Chinese. do] in Japanese (which is exactly the way
This generalization can probably be verbs were created from Chinese). A
extended to the spoken language: about trendy recent example is gettosuru, (get
60 percent of the vocabulary was Chinese + suru), [to find a boyfriend].
or of Chinese origin. (Nowadays, it is But once these words are domesti-
perhaps 40 percent.) cated, they immediately open up a new
The same thing, I would suggest, is stage in which they take on a life of their
happening today with English. English own. They are used in ways that may not
is in the process of being completely be instantly understandable to the
absorbed, and its entire vocabulary is speakers of the original language.
becoming available for use in Japanese. “Mansion,” for example, (pronounced
Today, when new words are made up, manshon in Japanese), which usually
they will come from English (or, to a suggests to modern Western minds a
lesser extent, from some European lan- large, residential estate, like that of the
guage), no longer from Chinese. (But titled aristocracy or the wealthy, is com-
they are just as hard for English speak- monly used in Japan to mean a pricey
ers to understand as, I suspect, Sino- apartment. The phrase, “He has sense”
Japanese was for Chinese speakers.) (sensu), refers to “taste,” or “judgment,”
It is hard to imagine modern Japan rather than, say, “common sense.”
without English. Right now, I am sitting The next step is essential for Japanese:
at my desuku [desk], or tēburu [table] with the rampu [lamp]on, abbreviation. European words are often multi-syllabic, and
holding my kompyuta [computer], taipingu [typing], making allowing for Japanese pronunciation patterns, they are usu-
occasional notes with a boru-pen [ball-pen]. Since it is warm ally even longer. “Strike,” for example, is a single syllable in
today, in spite of the ea-kon (abbreviation of “air-condi- English, but five in Japanese: su-to-ra-i-ki. As a result, there
tioner”), I am sitting in a “T-shirt.” This term, by the way, pre- are now thousands of abbreviated English words used by
sents a special problem: most younger Japanese are indeed Japanese that, without explanation, usually cannot be under-
able to pronounce the tee sound, but since there is no symbol stood by English speakers. A few examples: “register”
for it in Japanese script, it has to be written as teshatsu. The becomes reji, “negative,” nega, “handicap,” hande, “repor-
usual solution, in newspapers or magazines, is to transcribe it tage,” rupo, “permanent wave,” pama.
as T-shatsu. In this kind of warm weather, I hate to wear a Hundreds, or even thousands, of foreign compounds are
nekutai, [necktie.] I sip some kohi [coffee] from a gurasu [glass]. taken over with virtually no change (except pronunciation):
When I need a break, I move to the sofua [sofa], lean against “golf-bag” [gorufu-baggu], “software” [sofutouea], “room-
the kusshon [cushion], and read the nyusu [news] about the lat- cooler” [rumukuru], “after-care” [afuta-kea], “mass-media”
est sekuhara [sexual harassment] incident. I then turn to the [masumejia], and so on.
puroguramu [program] on the karar-terebi [color television] Many, however, even though close to the original meaning,
and watch a homudorama [home-drama]. are abbreviated, and once this happens they begin to look a
There is no “l” sound in Japanese so that all foreign words little different and usually cannot be understood by English
with “l” are pronounced with an “r.” “Flight” becomes fright, speakers. A classic example—by now, hardly used—is the
or more exactly, furaito. A further pronunciation problem is post-World War I moga (from modan garu, “modern girl”). Or
that Japanese syllables all end in vowel sounds, except when zenesuto—from abbreviated “general” (zeneraru) and “strike”
there is an “n.” “Book” becomes bukku, “size” becomes saizu, (suto)—is another revealing example. No native speaker of
“pencil” becomes penshiru. When the syllabic ending is “n,” English would recognize that it comes from his own language.
“pen” remains pen, “downtown” is dauntaun, a “can of beer” (Compounds created in the same manner as the English “info-
becomes kan-biru. tainment”—making allowance for pronunciation characteris-

33
 Language

tics—are instantly understandable.) high point in this linguistic innovation may be seen in words
At the next stage, foreign words in full or abbreviated form such as the old-fashioned ero-guro [abbreviated “erotic +
are combined with Japanese words (including completely grotesque”] and the new-fashioned gurokawa [abbreviated
assimilated Chinese words as well) to make new compounds. “grotesque” + kawaii, “cute”].
An archetypal example is the by now rather old tonkatsu, All languages take in foreign loanwords. In Japan, Chinese
[pork cutlet] made up of the Chinese ton, “pork,” and katsu, was the first major penetration, and because it brought a writ-
the abbreviation of “cutlet” (that is, katsu-retsu). ing system along with new ideas, concepts, technology, and
Just as Japanese used to create new words out of Chinese methods, its impact was overwhelming. Fourteen hundred
freely and autonomously, so now it is beginning to create a years later, something similar seems to be happening with
home-made English. When I gave up smoking at my doctor’s English. In the centuries in between, Korean, Dutch, and Por-
orders, this was a dokutu-sutoppu [doctor-stop], an example of tuguese made significant, though lesser, contributions as well.
what I would consider brilliant new English. One of my English itself developed in a similar way. Shaped from
favorites (which happens not to be English) is aru-saro. If we Germanic, then invaded by Norman French, its intellectual,
spell it out fully, it is “arbeit-salon,” that is, the German legal, scientific, and religious vocabularies were also deeply
“arbeit” plus the French “salon,” both abbreviated for conve- influenced by Latin. For many centuries, Latin was the lingua
nience in handling and pronounced Japanese-style. In this franca of educated England and Europe. Today, English con-
form, no foreigner would recognize the phrase. If we tinues to take in new language from Anglo-Indian, Caribbean,
explained its composition and then asked him to guess its South-African, Irish, Scottish, Australian, Yiddish, and count-
meaning, he would likely say that it means a work place, per- less others. Words are abbreviated and new compounds are
haps a working studio. In fact, it means a nightclub where the constantly being formed.
hostesses work part-time. The word “arbeit” in Japan is used Japanese, therefore, is not unique in this process. However,
only for part-time, or for side work. we may come to rate the relative penetrability of languages—
Other examples abound—phrases that are invented by and it is debatable, say, whether English, Japanese, Turkish,
Japanese from English but are incomprehensible (without full or Uzbek is more “open” to foreign linguistic influence. The
explication) by English speakers. I like bea, from besu-appu process of English-absorption that is going on before our eyes
“base-up,” that is, a rise in the base wage from which other in Japan today is awesomely inventive. ◆
calculations for the total wage are made. The standard —Herbert Passin
Kadokawa Loanword Dictionary carries 25,000 words in daily Note: I would like to express my gratitude to writer and poet
use. If one were to include all the specialized technical vocab- Hiroaki Sato for his many helpful comments on linguistic matters.
ularies of science, the social sciences, economics, fashion,
sports, clothing, business transactions, and diplomacy, there
is no telling how many words we would find.
The penultimate stage comes when people are no longer
The Death of a Language
aware that the word is not native. Pan [bread] is from six-
teenth or seventeenth century Portuguese. But it is so deeply
rooted in Japanese that we now find the baffling compound
A language dies only when the last person who
speaks it dies. One day it is there; the next it is
gone. In late 1995, a linguist, Bruce Connell, was doing
bureddo-pan [bread-pan]. field work in the Mambila region of Cameroon. He found
In the final stage, the foreign word is completely assimilated a language called Kasabe, which no Westerner had stud-
to the grammatical form of Japanese. Normally, foreign words ied before. It had just one speaker left, a man called
(including Chinese) are formed into verbs by adding suru [to Bogon. Connell had no time on that visit to find out
do], into adjectives by adding na, and into adverbs by adding much about the language, so he decided to return to
ni. Surprisingly, although very few Chinese words have been Cameroon a year later. He arrived in mid-November,
completely absorbed and given Japanese verb form, English only to learn that Bogon had died on 5th November, tak-
has many cases. A good example is the old standby saboru. ing Kasabe with him.
Originally, it came from the abbreviated “sabotage”, sabo, but A survey published in February 1999 by the Summer
it has become completely Japanified by adding the Japanese Institute of Linguistics established that there were fifty-
verb form ru and then taken on a somewhat divergent mean- one languages with only one speaker left—twenty-eight
ing: to play truant, to evade doing something one does not of them in Australia alone. There are almost 500 lan-
want to do, not to do one’s part. An English speaker would guages in the world with fewer than 100 speakers; 1,500
not recognize the word. with fewer than 1,000 speakers; more than 3,000 with
More recent examples of this creative innovation are proba- fewer than 10,000 speakers; and a staggering 5,000 lan-
bly completely incomprehensible to English speakers: makuru guages with fewer than 100,000 speakers. In fact, 96 per-
[to eat at McDonald’s], saburu [to eat while riding a subway cent of the world’s languages are spoken by only four
car—from sabuue “subway”], sekuru [to harass sexually— percent of its people. No wonder so many are in danger.
condensing the previously mentioned sekuhara, then turning Source: David Crystal, The Guardian (London), Oct. 25, 1999
it into a verb], bakappuru [baka + “couple” = “foolish cou-
pling” or “a couple that behaves amorously in public”]. A

34
 World Literature

African Literature: Old Voices and New

I grew up with modern African literature…or, at least, so I

am inclined to say. For the central core of modern African
literature, outside the Arab world, is in what were once
the colonial languages. You will find audiences for writing in
many languages that were born in Africa: Swahili, Yoruba,
best-known Francophone African novel, best-known because
it is widely read in English translation, is probably Camara
Laye’s L’Enfant Noir [The Dark Child].)
But these are the African authors that everyone now knows:
along with Mahfouz from Egypt, Gordimer from South Africa,
Wolof, and Twi. These languages, however, are tied to partic- and, perhaps, Nurrudin Farah from Somalia, to whom I will
ular territories, to parts (sometimes large parts) of the conti- return. These are the writers that educated cosmopolitans—in
nent, whereas the literature that the continent shares, the lit- Africa, in Europe, in the Americas, in Japan—would be likely
erature with audiences all over the continent and into the to find themselves embarrassed at not knowing. (Despite the
diaspora, was written largely in English and French. Yes, mod- mention of Mahfouz, I will now beg forgiveness for continu-
ern Arabic literature and some works in other African lan- ing the custom of treating the Arabic-language writers of
guages are known a little in the rest of Africa through transla- North Africa as a different case: by and large, their literary
tion; and a little Lusophone (Portuguese) African literature frame and influences are those of the Arab world, not just of
has found its way around as well. But if African literature is the Maghreb but also of the non-African Middle East. Of writ-
African in the way in which Thomas Mann is European and ers of fiction in Arabic, only Tayeb Salih, who experimented
Kingsley Amis is merely English, then it is in large measure with a demotic Arab from his natal Sudan, and was early and
Anglophone and Francophone. ably translated into English, is well known in the rest of the
Modern African literature in French began, strictly speak- continent, perhaps because he wrote both of a village life that
ing, in the thirties with the extraordinary poetic vision of seemed somehow familiar to Africans further south, and be-
Léopold Senghor. His is undoubtedly the first substantial cor- cause he dealt with Senghor’s problem: forgetting Europe.
pus of African literary work in that language. But I can feel Still, these are just excuses: on another occasion, I could rail
that I grew up with him because his Poèmes arrived in our against the absurdity of leaving out so much of the continent.)
house when I was a teenager, and I fell upon them—some So what has happened since Senghor and Laye, Achebe and
already more than twice my age—with enormous enthusiasm Soyinka, the first generation, the generation of independence?
and pleasure. (They came—in the fifth edition of 1971, “exem- Well, first, Achebe and Soyinka, who were born in the early
plaire N˚ 10718,” seven years after this collection first appeared thirties, are, of course, still writing. But it is important also to
in Paris—as a gift from the poet; and so, when I translated a observe where they are writing: for both of these Nigerian
few of them, my proud mother sent these translations to him writers moved their base of operations out of their countries
and he received them courteously.) And, in fact, the major col- and, then, their continents. Achebe is now a professor at Bard
lections anthologized are all post-Second World War: Chants College (New York State); Soyinka at Emory University
D’Ombre, the earliest of them, was published in 1945. In “Tout (Atlanta, Georgia). For a period, under the military dictator-
le long du jour,” Senghor wrote as a poet “cherchant l’oubli de ships that have dominated Nigeria’s life as a post-colonial
l’Europe au coeur pastorale du Sine” [seeking to forget Europe nation, Soyinka has been in exile, at risk, if he returned, of
at the pastoral heart of the Sine] where he was born. The strug- his life. Nigeria’s universities, like Nsukka, in Eastern Nigeria,
gle to forget Europe while writing in European languages has where Achebe taught for a while, have been in decline for
remained an element of Africa’s literary condition. much of the last two decades: they have not been (to put it
In English, the first great corpus of writing is in the novel: gently) the best places to teach or learn or write. And since
it is Chinua Achebe’s brilliant trilogy, Things Fall Apart, the university was one of the few places in Africa where seri-
Arrow of God, No Longer At Ease. These elegant and incisive ous writers could work and earn a living, the dispersal of some
fictions were published in the late fifties and early sixties, of the best-known figures of the African intelligentsia epito-
around the time of the great wave of African independences mizes a wider condition. Of the Anglophone writers one
(and, more importantly, for these egocentric purposes, after I would be bound to mention as having come to prominence
was born). And the drama of Wole Soyinka, which catapulted after the generation of the founding fathers, many are in exile
Black African literature onto the Nobel stage in the mid-eight- of one kind or another.
ies, began first to appear a little after Achebe’s novels, with A Take Farah, who can represent what is finest among the writ-
Dance of the Forests, his first major work, presented in 1960 ers who came to prominence in the 1970s. He was born in
in his own production with Masks, his own theatre company. Baidoa, Somalia, in 1945, but his family moved when he was
I met first Soyinka when I was an undergraduate at one, to what was then the British-administered Ogaden. When
Cambridge, England, and then Achebe when I was a graduate the British left the Ogaden, they left its many Somali inhabi-
student in the same place: I was astonished, because I had tants to the Ethiopians, creating a region of conflict that was to
grown up with their words, to find myself in their physical smolder always and burst, from time to time, into the flames of
presence. It did not seem quite right that these novels and Somali-Ethiopian warfare over the next four decades. In 1963,
plays could have been produced by actual people, men who his family moved to Mogadiscio during one of these wars, one
awed me, I will admit, with the charisma of authorship. (The family among a million refugees over the years driven by these

35
 World Literature

conflicts from the Ogaden. He went to university in Chandigarh either Soyinka or Achebe, achieved voice and recognition
in India (choosing it over an offer from the University of (though only in the last years of her life) with the brilliant
Wisconsin) and published a first novel From a Crooked Rib in epistolary novel, Une si longue lettre (1979). Just as Dangarem-
London in 1970, at the age of 25, becoming, with that work, the bga’s Tambu is drawn between a village life and a life shaped
first Somali novelist. (As he would be the first to insist, how- by a wider world connected to Europe—at one moment it is
ever, he is not Somalia’s first great literary figure: for he was her reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that defines her rebel-
raised, like Achebe and Soyinka, within a tradition of oral lit- lion!—so, in Mariama Ba’s novel, the protagonist has defined
erature, one that is among the richest in the world.) an identity in Europe that makes her husband’s decision to
Farah has lived in many parts of Africa—Gambia, Uganda, take a second wife in the “traditional” Moslem fashion hard
now in South Africa — as well as in various parts of Europe to bear, that is, even though she herself is a devout Moslem.
and in the Americas; but for twenty-two years, from 1974 to Senghor’s theme, “forgetting Europe,” lived on.
1996, he was out of his homeland, kept away by the Somali dic- In the 1990s the great new Anglophone African voice, so it
tator Siad Barre. (When he planned to return home in the lat- seems to me, was Ben Okri (though he, too, is a Nigerian who
ter part of the seventies, he was does not live in Nigeria). In The
informed that Barre had not cared Famished Road—five hundred
for his 1976 novel, The Naked wonderful pages with only the
Needle: given what Barre had done barest semblance of a plot—the
to others whose doings he disap- protagonist is Azaro, an abiku or
proved of, staying away was prob- spirit-child, who, according to a
ably wise.) In his extraordinary Yoruba tradition, is born and re-
trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), born, only to die each time in
Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame infancy, so that he can return to
(1983) he indicts not only dictator- the joyful play of the spirit world.
ship—Siad Barre must surely have Sometimes, however, an abiku is
wished that he had kept Farah persuaded to stay on: Azaro de-
closer at hand—but also the cides at some point to cease his
oppression of women, and the par- “coming and going.” He does not
ticular forms it takes in Somalia; settle on one story of why he
and at the same time the works cel- stayed. But he tells us: “I some-
ebrate the ways in which women times think it was a face that made
can structure both public and pri- me want to stay. I wanted to make
vate lives despite their oppression. happy the bruised face of the
Or take Tsitsi Dangarembga, woman who would become my
author of one marvelous novel, mother.”
Nervous Conditions (1988), and a play, She No Longer Weeps The narrative yokes the familiar and the miraculous in the
(1987), but also co-author and director of a film, Everyone’s language of synaesthesia (every odor has a color, every feeling
Child. Dangarembga grew up in Zimbabwe, in the seventies, a smell); the effect is richer than some palates will care for. But
when it was still Rhodesia, and that novel propelled her out Okri has received rave reviews in Britain, where the novel won
of her homeland and into film school in Germany and a life the 1991 Booker Prize; and in the praises in the United States
“outside.” Nervous Conditions is also a powerful exploration that followed, many spoke of “magical realism,” explicitly con-
of women’s lives. From its notorious first sentence—“I was necting Okri with post-colonial Latin America, another place
not sorry when my brother died”—it speaks of the differ- that has lowered our barriers to “disorders” of language and
ences in experience that gender makes, while never becom- the imagination. And, ironically, because he has lived so much
ing merely didactic. Tambu, the protagonist, growing up in in Europe, Okri does not share the earlier anxiety to forget her.
Zimbabwe (when it was still Rhodesia) struggles to integrate In the three decades since the sixties, the optimism of the
the moral order of her village upbringing with a constantly independence generation waned in literature as in reality. If
growing sense of the injustice of her position as a woman. there is a new hope created by what South Africa’s Thabo
This developing awareness is driven not only by her own Mbeki has called the “African Renaissance”—symbolized by
experience but by the lives of the women around her: her the discovery of democracy in South Africa itself, its redis-
mother, fatalistic and self-giving; her uncle’s wife, Maiguru, covery in Nigeria, the giant of West Africa, its return in
an educated woman, frustrated by her husband’s inability to Uganda, which sank once so low under Idi Amin—it has not
respect her opinions; her mother’s sister, Lucia, an adult yet taken form in the novel. If our great expectations have
woman who follows her own way, negotiating between been followed by hard times, however, that has not dimmed
Tambu’s father and her own lover, passing, in the final chap- the continent’s literary creativity: what it has done is to force
ter, her first-grade exams. Africa to express herself in the somber tonalities of writers
In the Francophone world in the eighties, Mariama Ba, who such as Farah, Dangarembga, Ba, and Okri. ◆
was born in Senegal in the generation of the founders before —K. Anthony Appiah

36
 The Middle East

Christian Migration and Arab Citizenship

T he visit of Pope John Paul II to Egypt, Jordan, the

Palestinian Authority, and Israel, has focused world
attention on the fate and dwindling number of the
Christians in the Middle East. This question has already
engaged the concerns of a growing number of Arab intellec-
The decrease of Christians in the Middle East was forth-
rightly pointed to by Ralph Ghadban, himself a migrant from
Lebanon to Germany, in a paper first presented at a Christian-
Muslim forum in Berlin, but later brought to the attention of
a larger Arab public with its publication in the influential cul-
tuals—especially Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians, and Palesti- tural weekly Mulhaq [Supplement] of the Lebanese newspaper
nians—who regard Christian migration from the Middle East an-Nahar. With the provocative headline “Will the oriental
as a cultural loss to their societies as well as a symptom of a Christians die out?” Ghadban’s paper introduced an issue of
general crisis of the states they live in. Their views are worth the supplement (January 10, 1998) entirely devoted to the
reporting outside Arab newspapers not only because they run debate on Christian migration.
counter to what one might have expected to hear from Arab This debate was continued in subsequent issues of Mulhaq
intellectuals, but also because they voice a set of concerns so an-Nahar. Prominent Arab intellectuals unanimously stressed
different from the causes for concern about migration in other that the cultural, ethnic, and religious pluralism of the Arab
parts of the world. world constitutes its richness and strength, presenting the
In the March issue of the Egyptian monthly book review exodus of the Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Coptic, Maro-
Wighat Nazar [Viewpoints], the noted journalist Muhammad nite, Latin and Syrianic Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant
Hassanain Haikal, once the spokesman of pan-Arab Nasserism, Christians from the Middle East as the symptom of a larger cri-
concluded a commentary on sectarian clashes—which led to sis of the Arab national state, Arab thought, and Arab culture.
the death of twenty Christians and one Muslim in an Upper- The Shiite religious figure Muhammad Hassan Al-Amin even
Egyptian village in early January 2000—by addressing the defined Arab societies as meeting points for countless confes-
question of Christian migration from the region. “What a great sional, religious, ethnic, and ideological minorities. He and
loss it would be,” Haikal writes,” if the Christians of the Mashriq other Muslim intellectuals like Ridwan as-Sayyid, the editor
(Middle East) were to feel, rightly or wrongly, that neither they of the prestigious Lebanese scholarly journal al-Ijtihad, writ-
nor their children could have a future here.” He calls upon “the ing from an Islamic religious perspective, have argued for a
entire Muslim community of the Arab nation” to be aware of, reform of Islamic thought to provide the necessary ground for
and to nurture, the “multicultural components of its heritage.” pluralism. Elias Khoury, an eminent writer and the editor-in-
A few demographic figures may serve as background to this chief of the Mulhaq, described the forced migration of the
and similar statements. According to Youssef Courbage and Arab Jews in the fifties as a defeat of Arab culture. Calling for
Philippe Fargues (Christians and Jews under Islam, I.B. Tauris, a renewal of the Arab idea in order to halt the Christian migra-
London and New York, 1997), the percentage of the Christian tion, he argued that Arabism, if reduced to a mere appendix
communities in the Middle East (Egypt, and the territories of to Islam, would become meaningless.
present-day Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Khoury, Ghadban, and many other contributors to the debate
the Palestinian Authority) fell from about 18 percent to 4 per- maintain that the national states in the Middle East have failed
cent during the twentieth century. In 1995 about 6.7 million to provide a liberal and secular basis for citizenship. Following
Christians were still living in the Middle East. the breakdown of the pre-World War I Ottoman Millet system
While Ottoman rule during the nineteenth century had of semi-autonomous religious communities (which gave all mil-
been favorable to the demography of non-Muslim minorities lets or officially recognized religious communities their own
in the Middle East in general, the destiny of Christianity in self-government within the general protection of the Muslim
Turkey was sealed violently within a decade of the creation of State), the national movements in the Middle East by mid-cen-
the secular republic following World War I. In the other tury had substituted the Islamic Caliphate with nation-states
Middle Eastern countries the decline of Christianity vis-à-vis based on military authoritarianism and nominal modernity. The
Islam has resulted from a slow convergence of mortality rates defeat of the short-lived Arab liberalism of the twenties and
and divergence of fertility rates, accelerated by disproportion- thirties by military regimes, wrote Ridwan as-Sayyid, was a loss
ately high migration. Over the last three decades an estimated for Arab Christians, since it blocked their emancipation as ordi-
one million Copts have left Egypt for the U.S.A., Canada, nary citizens. And the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi wants
Australia, and Europe. About as many Christians have mi- oriental Christians to accept their Arab identity and stay and
grated from Lebanon. Ten thousand Chaldeans and Assyrians participate in the cultural and political life of their homelands.
have fled hardship in Iraq since the Gulf War. In geographical However these contributors differ ideologically, they are united
Palestine Christianity has shrunk to a mere 2 percent. The in their disillusionment with “unity” as the guiding cultural
number of Christians in Jerusalem has dwindled dramatically concept of the Middle East’s authoritarian nation-states. Thus
from thirty thousand in 1948 to roughly two thousand today. the debate on the westward migration of Christians from the
The ongoing migration of Christians from the cradle of Middle East is essentially not a religious, but rather a political
Christianity has become a major concern of Middle Eastern debate on citizenship, democracy, and pluralism. ◆
churches since the late seventies. —Georges Khalil

37
 The world Press: India

The Press in India: The Rise of the Vernacular Papers

T he press in India, historically quite independent and

varied, has been undergoing rapid transformation
through the country’s increasing literacy, growing
middle-class prosperity, economic liberalization, and shifts in
political mobilization. Between 1977 and 1992 newspaper cir-
Economic liberalization has also considerably altered the
character of the English-language press. Editorial opinion in
the four leading English-language dailies remains wide-rang-
ing, with a wider left-right spectrum than the Western edito-
rial pages. The Times of India, under Dileep Padgaonkar, prob-
culation for all Indian languages tripled from 9.3 million to ably has the most ideologically diverse op-ed fare, while the
28.1 million, and the ratio of dailies per thousand doubled Hindu, under N. Ram and Harish Khare, remains the most
from fifteen to thirty-two—a continuing trend for much of intellectually serious. The Indian Express, always fiercely
the last decade, though reliable figures are not yet available. independent, maintains its prominence, under Shekhar Gupta,
With this growth in volume have come significant changes thanks to its broad distribution.
in the nature of the press. While the prominent English The quality of op-ed pages in Indian papers varies consid-
dailies, the Times of India, Indian Express, the Hindu, and the erably. Their columnists are not only journalists and a hand-
Hindustan Times remain the chief national newspapers thanks ful of academics, but increasingly, former members of the civil
to their nationwide readership, their overall influence may be service. The papers have no deep reservoirs of social-science
diminishing. The expansion of the vernacular press is spec- expertise to draw on; once-prominent government officials
tacular: while as late as 1986, 60 percent of all print advertis- such as Arjun Sengupta, K.P.S.Gill, and J.N.Dixit served as
ing expenditure went to English-language publications, by experts in their fields. Some observers have also noted a
1992 this was down to 46 percent and is still falling. Robin greater politicization of the press. Prominent Indian journal-
Jeffrey’s authoritative survey of the vernacular press clearly ists such as Swapan Dasgupta, Chadan Mitra, and Harish
demonstrates that, whether as a cause or effect, this sector of Khare now seem more openly partisan. The appointment of
the Indian media has better reflected India’s political trends one of India’s best-known journalists, Arun Shourie, as a
over the last two decades and the considerable regional vari- senior minister in the present government exemplifies this
eties of its society. In Kerala, for instance, the press and its blurring of the line between politics and journalism.
leading exemplar, Malayam Maanorama, have long reflected Almost all the country’s major newspapers are now avail-
that region’s sober social consciousness. In Tamil Nadu the able on the Internet, giving them a wide readership among
press, exemplified by Tharasu, Nakkeran, and Thanthi, abun- the Indian diaspora that has become such an important force
dantly displays the kitschy dominance of cinema on Tamil pol- within India. Heightened economic concern has raised the
itics. The Telgu newspaper Eenadu was very much behind the standards of economic reporting in newspapers, and made
rise of one of India’s most powerful regional parties, the Telgu the daily Economic Times and Business Standard central pub-
Desam. In North India, the Hindi press was the best conduit lications in India. Only security matters still rouse marked
for Hindu nationalism throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. While anti-Americanism. Like the media elsewhere, Indian newspa-
the three leading Hindi dailies, the Navbharat Times, Hindu- pers tend to rally around the flag on security issues and over-
stan, and Jansatta, are owned by proprietors of the largest whelmingly supported India’s nuclear tests. With the wisdom
English-language dailies, many influential independent Hindi of hindsight, some have softened their stance, but most
dailies like Aj, Dainik Jagaran, Amar Ujala, Rashtriya Sahara, remain security hardliners, catering to the middle-class’s
and Rajasthan Patrika have openly embraced Hindu nation- reluctance to examine their attitudes on these issues. Mean-
alism. With exceptions, these papers are considered very low- while, C. Raja Mohan of the Hindu and Shekhar Gupta of
grade; but they are better ideological barometers than the Indian Express are among the few really qualified journalists
English press. in this field.
The links between the national English press and regional Strong and vibrant as the Indian press remains, it faces
newspapers are multiple and varied. The regional conscious- major challenges. Television has spread, though its success
ness that the vernacular press has fostered has not clashed seems to affect weekly and monthly magazines rather than
with national identity at large. For one thing, most of these daily newspapers. The latter have held their own, while a host
newspapers depend on advertisements that come from com- of English and vernacular magazines of reflective opinion have
panies located elsewhere in India; hence they value access to folded. This may, paradoxically, make newspapers even more
a wider Indian market. Second, they translate and reprint important. Of course, restrictions on foreign ownership of the
many columns from the national press, and carry a number Indian press have shielded Indian owners thus far from for-
of syndicated independent columnists. One leading Andhra eign competition; so if, as is likely to happen, more foreign
daily, Andhra Jyoti, boosted circulation just by translating ownership of the Indian Press is allowed, the Indian press may
the script of the popular Hindi television serial The Mahab- yet face its most formidable challenge. What impact the possi-
harata. The success of vernacular editions of India’s leading ble advent of Rupert Murdoch, or the recent acquisition of the
English-language news magazine India Today proves that Economic Times by London’s Financial Times, could have on
regional consciousness and a desire to be part of wider Indian the contentious Indian press remains to be seen. ◆
identity can coexist. —Pratap Mehta

38
 Reports from Asia

In Japan Everyone Reads the Press

J apan can easily claim preeminence as a country for news-

papers, and its press strongly reflects the national char-
acter of the Japanese. According to 1998 statistics, the
circulations of daily newspapers totalled more than
53,670,000—or even 72,4100,000, if we add evening editions,
five years that by-lines have begun to appear, establishing a
reporter’s individual name (and accountability). In the post-
war era, the status of reporters has risen dramatically; ad-
vancement is within their company from occupying a desk to
being division head, then possibly bureau chief, but not a
which is to say 1.57 papers per household, or 577 per 1000 columnist in any sense of the word.
people. The United States, to put this in perspective, sells 56 As for the content, newspapers follow the American model
million, and China 42 million. And although Norway heads in the strong emphasis on freedom of the press. Yet members
the list of countries with 588 news- of the press seem insufficiently aware
papers per thousand people, Japan’s of late that their freedom has, in some
577 is a high figure, particularly instances, given them more sentenc-
when compared to America’s 201, ing power than the courts. Criticism
Russia’s 141, and China’s 36. has often been leveled against the
Of the 53,670,000 circulation, 51 media’s excessive and largely un-
percent are nationally distributed. checked use of “sensational” news, as
The Yomiuri Shimbun made the Guin- when it divulges a suspect’s real
ness Book of World Records when it name, with little regard to the harm
sold more than ten million copies. The that can do.
Asahi Shimbun is well known for its On an entrepreneurial level, it is
high quality. There are also the Nihon hard to find any country in the world
Keizai (Nikkei) Shimbun, the major with newspaper companies as diversi-
business daily, the Mainichi Shimbun, fied as Japan’s. They own not only
and the Sankei Shimbun. These five television stations and Internet opera-
national newspapers compete fiercely tions, but newspaper companies such
for news stories and sales. as the Yomiuri Shimbun sponsor soc-
Eighty percent of Japanese read one cer and baseball clubs. Since baseball
or more of these national papers, is Japan’s favorite sport, papers host
devoting on average 25.8 minutes a the very popular national high school
day to them. This is probably due to baseball championships in spring
the fact that almost all Japanese have (Mainichi) and summer (Asahi). The
gone through school and illiteracy is uncommon, and many sponsorship of these sports events, as well as internationally
Japanese, as in Tokyo, spend a long time commuting to work. recognized art shows and concerts, has prompted the criticism
It may be unimaginable in some countries that “taxi drivers that such activity is “drawing water to one’s own mill.”
read the same newspapers as their passengers,” but in Japan it There is little syndication or cooperation among national
is quite common for both to read the Asahi. newspapers or between national and regional newspapers,
There are 20,000 reporters in Japan who work for 108 news- though stories coming from the Kyodo News and Jiji Press agen-
paper companies, including national newspapers as well as many cies are regularly published in the newspapers. Cooperation,
regional newspapers specializing in local news and many so- however, between national and international newspapers is
called sports newspapers, usually for men, which feature both increasing, as with the Asahi and the London Times and New
sports and popular culture. More than half the reporters cover- York Times, the Yomiuri with the Washington Post, and the
ing these scenes are members of press clubs broadly affiliated Sankei and U.S.A. Today, which share reporting and columns.
with central and local government offices, the police, businesses, In Japanese journalism, magazines tend to exert even greater
and sports groups. This has prompted criticism that the stories influence than newspapers. According to the Research Institute
in all these newspapers look alike and that their sources, partic- for Publications, more than 3,300 titles and 4.8 billion copies of
ularly political and economic ones, control the information. Yet magazines were published in 1998. There were eighty-nine
even on the national level, a clear difference is emerging between weekly magazines, with 1.7 billion copies. Seventeen magazines
papers such as the Asahi and Mainichi which have followed the published by newspaper companies accounted for sales of 84
path of postwar democracy and support the current constitu- million copies, while nine magazines produced by publishing
tion, and the Yomiuri and Sankei, which have recently advocated houses accounted for 270 million copies sold. While many are
realism in matters of security and constitutional revision. all news magazines, they differ from their equivalents abroad
Although Japan’s lifelong employment system is gradually in mixing in nude photos and soft pornography along with the
crumbling, newspaper reporters still generally stay loyal to a international and domestic news.
single newspaper company, unlike their highly mobile Ame- Monthlies, however, such as Chuo Koron, Bungei Shunju,
rican colleagues. Moreover, it is only within the past four or Gendai, Seiron, Shokun, and Sekai remain as magazines of opin-

39
 Reports from Asia

ion. As with most journals of this kind, their articles are skill as a journalist; yet think how strange it would be to send
signed. Political orientations differ in some cases: Sekai is left- a reporter to cover Washington without English fluency.
progressive, Seiron and Shokun right-realist school; the others The competence in Japanese of foreign reporters has, it is
fall in between. The subject matter often ranges beyond daily true, increased markedly since the 1960s, when only a few had
newspapers’ coverage, including important scoops. Scandals any knowledge of the language. Yet since Japan has become a
about former prime ministers Kakuei Tanaka and Sosuke Uno crucial information point for international media, the commit-
(money in the former, a woman in the latter) first broke in these ment to Japan on the part of elite correspondents who, for bet-
magazines (in Bungei Shunju and Sunday Mainichi respectively), ter or worse, are rotated every few years to different points of
and led to calls for their resignation. The magazine writers do the globe, may be weakening. High-profile reporters such as
not belong to the press clubs and usually keep a greater dis- David Sanger of the New York Times and Fred Hiatt of the
tance from their subjects than the newspaper reporters. Washington Post (now the Post’s editorial page editor) moved
As elsewhere, the biggest problem facing the Japanese print on from Japan to Washington and Moscow. They are not
media, and especially newspapers, is the Internet. For all its Russian or Japanese specialists, but rather, star journalists.
alleged threat to the daily paper, television, I always felt, was a That does not mean, of course, that there are not foreign
safely different medium. The Internet is another matter: it is correspondents who live for a long time in Japan, have their
browsable for the stories one cares about, and a barrier against own unique sources of information, and develop their own
the mounting mass of stories one doesn’t. Someday the Internet analysis and view of the country. Two famous examples of this
form and contents may hardly differ from newspapers. So what would be Sam Jameson, former Japan bureau chief of the Los
is their future? Reading a paper, however, is different from Angeles Times, and Gebhard Hielscher, who recently retired
reading a screen, and if the contents can remain superior, I from the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Both are superior journalists
believe the charms and merits of newspapers have a future. who have lived in Japan since the 1960s, are fluent in Japa-
Last but not least, we should mention that flower of Japanese nese, have a rich network of contacts, and can distinguish
culture, the comic book (manga), which appears often as a sep- very well between the surface appearance and inner workings
arate, independent form. Japanese comics come in many styles of Japanese society. Some in a new generation of younger for-
and their contents vary to a degree unique in the world. eign journalists, with many of these qualities, are now carry-
Elsewhere, “the comics” conjures the image of some strangely ing on the tradition of these two pioneers.
distorted character in a small frame. Japanese comics, however, What remains the foreign press’s biggest impediment to
seek, like “serious” art, to capture every form of movement reporting in Japan are the Japanese press clubs. It is often said
and expression. They aim beyond comedy or social sarcasm, of these press clubs that only reporters from the main Japanese
dealing with history, mythology, politics, economics, science, press are given access to information from important Japanese
social problems, and literature. They represent a new branch news sources, such as government agencies and the police.
of the visual print media, giving new meaning to the “comic While criticism of the press club system comes not only from
story” (Gekiga)—and in Japan, the 280 varieties they come in foreign correspondents but also from Japanese as well, only a
account for sales of 1.3 billion copies annually. ◆ few foreign reporters argue that it has a major impact on
—Shigehiko Togo reporting for the foreign press.
With the exception, of course, of economics wire services,
How Good Is Foreign where one second can make a difference in the chase for
“scoops,” most of the news gathered at club-sponsored press
Reporting on Japan? conferences and briefings can be obtained by foreign re-
porters by other means, and most of the minutely detailed

A ccording to 1997 estimates, there are more than

eight hundred foreign press correspondents work-
ing in Japan. American and European press mem-
bers each represent roughly 40 percent of this corps, which
otherwise includes mainly East Asians (mostly Koreans and
information is of little value to the foreign press. Very often,
the foreign press simply does not have the manpower to staff
someone at the press clubs.
Since the press clubs, in fact, are actually opening a little to
the foreign press, there are those in the Japanese media who
Chinese), and a few Australians. In fact, even in many Asian remain dissatisfied that members of the foreign press do not
countries, information about Japan is obtained through Eu- even try to attend press conferences that have been opened. By
ropean and American media, which suggests that the image the same token, foreign reporters’ non-membership in the press
of Japan much of the world press receives is in large part a clubs keeps the foreign press free from the kind of collusion
product of the West. that exists between news sources and the press in Japan, and
Yet it is also true that 40 percent of those working as foreign thus can be an advantage. Foreign media have been able to
press correspondents in Japan are themselves Japanese. The obtain scoops relating to the Imperial Family—for example, the
large role the Japanese correspondents play in these bureaus engagement of Crown Prince Naruhiko and Princess Masako—
is related to the limited number of foreign correspondents who precisely because they are free from the news cartels. Moreover,
can speak, not to mention read, Japanese. Actual reporting because many Japanese realize the influence of major newspa-
requires Japanese reporters. In a choice of requirements, com- pers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, they
petency in a foreign language is probably less in demand than tend to give them privileged access to information. And since

40
 Reports from Asia

these papers, able as they are to influence American public

opinion, reflect America’s national power, some would say that Taiwan’s Knowledge Class
their reporters receive privileged treatment. The greatest barri-
ers, in fact, to information are not public or institutional, but
rather the informal, tacit rules and modes of expression in
Japanese society. It is debatable whether these problems are
exclusive to Japan, or routinely faced by serious foreign corre-
S ince the 1980s, Taiwan has entered the global era, not
just in trade, technology, and communication, but also
in ideas. The international mass media played a major
role in bringing new thought to Taiwan. But intellectuals have
been the actual “carriers” of such concepts, ever since the
spondents throughout the world. reverse brain drain of the early 1980s, when young Taiwanese
Most likely, the biggest difficulty the Euro-American press with advanced degrees from American universities came home.
faces when reporting from Japan is how to provide informa- This new “knowledge class” in Taiwan has permeated the aca-
tion of news value to the home-country market. Until now, demic, social-service, and cultural institutions—the media and
the European and American press’s attention to Japan has usu- the public sphere. They have translated into Chinese, and pub-
ally been very small, in sharp contrast to the amount of for- lished, important works in virtually all fields, thus fueling the
eign news (mostly about the United States) covered in Japan. rapid growth of Taiwan’s publishing industry since the 1980s.
In the past, Japan, in all its geographical and cultural remote- Taiwanese publishing companies old and new now issue both
ness, was simply not a subject for general attention; at best “serious” books and popular bestsellers from the West. Estab-
the image of an exotic Japan was marginally marketable. From lished publishers such as China Times, Lien-Jin, and Common-
a Cold War point of view, Japan was a member of the anti- wealth, and new houses such as Rye Field and New Century
Communist alliance—an exclusive vantage point that over- have produced translations under such imprint or series titles
looked the country’s average citizens and ordinary, daily life. as Next, New Age, Global Citizen, History and Culture, Classics,
Compared to the rest of the world, the country offered little Knowledge, and Inspirations. The public response to these
by way of large political shake-ups, street violence, civil wars, translations has been positive. The literary sections of major
or natural disasters. newspapers frequently review these works. And the quality of
As interest in Japan’s economy and doubts about the Euro- translations, long an issue, has much improved.
pean and American economies grew at the end of the Cold In addition to the greater availability of foreign thought to
War, Japan suddenly became an attractive news source. Many the general public, there has been a carry-over into fields of
instant Japanologists emerged in the press warning of the action: More than twenty new social movements have emerged
threat and challenge of Japan. Now that the U.S. economy is in Taiwanese civil society since the 1980s on the issues of
healthy again and the Japanese still in mid-recession, it has human rights, the environment, and gender equality. These
become hard to sell Japan in the news market. The 1995 Kobe new Western/global values became the guiding principles and
earthquake was a big but brief story. The ending of the Libe- frames of reference legitimating these new social causes. These
ral Democratic Party’s thirty-eight-year reign and the birth ideas have not been adopted mechanically, however, but have
of the Morihiro Hosokawa Cabinet in 1993 attracted a lot of been adapted by the grassroots organizations to local problems.
attention, but its aftermath soon grew too difficult and too The indigenous response to Western cultural ideas has also
boring for foreigners. The same media that once cried out been a staple element in literature and social science. The
about the economic threat of Japan are busy now mocking its “indigenous literature movement” starting in the mid-1970s
economic plight. Several press agencies have therefore was the deliberate effort by many of Taiwan’s young writers to
decided to leave Japan and rely on stringers. The costs of search for a native set of literary ideas and identity, and to
maintaining an office in Tokyo, as can be imagined, are break with the Western modernism that had dominated
extremely high ($250,000 a year excluding salaries, estimates Taiwan’s literature since the 1960s. This literary movement has
the Washington Post). since established “social realism” as the mainstream in Taiwan’s
In Issue No. 4 (“Japan, Made in U.S.A.”), we reported on the writing, seeking to relate literature to society.
book published in New York by Zipangu, a collective of The redirection toward “indigenization” has extended to
Japanese writers living in the U.S. that evaluated New York other cultural fields such as music, performing art, and movies.
Times Japan coverage as overly biased and insulting. Whether This indigenization was not aimed at halting learning from
this assessment is correct or not, it is clear that America’s inter- Western social science. Rather, it was argued that through
est in Japan is no longer based on foreign affairs, military mat- “indigenization,” Taiwan’s social science should reflect the
ters, or even economic problems, but rather on the homeless, dual conceptions of social science’s universality on the one
the place of women in society, family issues, and other social hand, and cultural and national relevance on the other.
problems. Which suggests that Americans’ reporting on Japan The import of the West’s new thinking since the 1980s can
has been less about Japan and more about their own society. be seen as a double process: accepting cultural globalization
No doubt this applies to foreign correspondents the world through which Taiwanese culture has participated in an “imag-
over. But since the role of the American press today is clearly ined” global culture, and adapting these ideas to a cultural
international, its internal and sometimes parochial perspec- localization, thus creating a cultural heterogeneity which
tives and criteria for news value are not truly healthy for marks Taiwan today. The interesting question is whether this
understanding the complexities of society. ◆ may be a model for mainland China tomorrow. ◆
—Masayuki Tadokoro —Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao

41
 Reports from Asia

Ghetto and the Japanese

Joshua Sobol, born in 1939, is one of Israel’s leading playwrights, having written an extraordinary number of plays (thirty-five),
which have been translated into twenty-five languages. His most famous play is Ghetto, the powerful story of the last days of the
Vilna Ghetto. At a conference organized by Jerome Chanes on “Writing the Jewish Future,” Mr. Sobol spoke of the circumstances
leading to the writing of Ghetto, and of its reception in Japan. The man who produced his play in Japan was our colleague Masakazu
Yamazaki, who is the artistic director of the Hyogo Prefecture Theatre in Japan. We are presenting the relevant portions of Mr.
Sobol’s essay (as printed in Judaism, Fall 1999), to which we asked Yamazaki-sensei to write an afterword.

I was born in Israel in 1939. I grew up in a village in the

center of the country. The village is called Tel Mond.
When I started as a child to discover the world around
me, I discovered a society of people talking a whole cocktail
of languages. I discovered people talking Yiddish and Hebrew,
atre in our society, in our situation, and in our special context.
When I heard about that ghetto theatre, I started to look for
material. A survivor from the Vilna Ghetto asked me if I had
read Kruk’s Diary. The moment I opened it, I couldn’t put it
away. Everything that happened in the ghetto, including the
German and Rumanian, Russian and Polish. We had Arab story of the theatre, is described in Kruk’s Diary with the
neighbors who used to come and sell greatest precision and the minutest
vegetables, and they would speak detail. The Diary became my bedside
Arabic—but they would also speak a book. I kept reading and re-reading it. I
kind of broken Yiddish with my grand- tell you all this because for me Kruk’s
mother or with my mother in order to Diary became almost the epitome of what
sell their merchandise. one can call Jewish writing. Let me try
I grew up as a child talking two lan- to explain.
guages simultaneously, Hebrew and Yid- Kruk was a cultural activist of the
dish, because my grandmother was a Bund in Poland between the two world
Bundist* and she refused to learn He- wars. Before the Second World War he
brew until her last day, and she spoke founded no less than four hundred
Yiddish and read Yiddish. She used to libraries and cultural centers of the Bund
receive the Yiddish press from the United throughout Poland. He wrote stories for
States from family members who lived in children, and he was a man of style. In his
Brooklyn. They used to send her the Diary, written in the Vilna Ghetto during
Zukunft [The Future] and Der Ameri- the Nazi occupation, he apologizes for
caner. When I was six years old my having abandoned his style “because,” he
grandmother taught me to read and to says, “I have no time to deal with style.”
write Yiddish. I read the Americaner. He was too concerned with recording
And I remember even what interested me precisely everything that was taking
most of all: it was “Vitzen vos Blitzen,” place in this ghetto, and he had no time
“jokes that sparkle.” I grew up with or patience to bother about style.
these two different languages in a time when it was very I’m not one to judge the quality of Kruk’s Yiddish in the
unfashionable for a youngster in Israel to know Yiddish or to Diary, but it feels like a very instrumental Yiddish, not a flour-
admit that he knew Yiddish. But these two languages, so ishing Yiddish, not a colorful one but a very precise one. I’ve
unfriendly toward one another, suited me well, and I lived in rarely read a document written with such a precision and with
peace with the two of them. such an incisive look into reality. It is written with an
Nowadays I am so grateful to my grandmother for her hav- unflinching courage in observing a horrible reality in real
ing insisted on teaching me Yiddish. The book that influenced time, and not sentimentalizing it. Just to note down every-
me most of all was a diary written in Yiddish in the Vilna thing—like the opening of a brothel in the ghetto, or the
Ghetto. It was Herman Kruk’s Diary of the Vilna Ghetto. This orgies which took place in the Judenrat together with the
book changed my writing and my career as a playwright and German officers. They are recorded with the dates and the
it changed many things in my life. It happened to me when I names of the participants.
was already over forty. I heard about a theatre that had been Reading that book revolutionized my vision of the Holo-
functioning in the Vilna Ghetto during the Second World War. caust. The diary suggests a vision of a society very busy with
I am a man of the theatre, and my life is bound with the the- living and not preparing to die. All this happened to the fif-
atre. When I heard about that ghetto theatre, I got intrigued teen to sixteen thousand Jews who were left after the mas-
and curious and stimulated. I felt that there was a secret stick- sacres, the remnant of almost eighty thousand Jews who were
ing in that story, a secret that must be important for me. I was the inhabitants of Vilna before the war. Kruk’s Diary depicts
asking myself many questions about my activity as a man of the vitality, the energy, and the will to live that inhabited
the theatre in Israel, such as: what is the sense of making the- and inspired those fifteen to sixteen thousand Jews who

42
 Reports from Asia

lived in the ghetto.

When I first read the Diary, I didn’t have the slightest idea Is a Theatre Necessary
that I was going to write a play about the theatre of the
Ghetto. I was so overwhelmed by the Diary, by this kind of in a Graveyard?
writing which I didn’t encounter in any other culture. I read
Hebrew, French, English, German, and Yiddish. I can hardly
imagine a culture and a language other than the destroyed
Yiddish one which could produce such a gaze on reality as
Hermann Kruk offers you in his Diary. It compels you to
I n the summer of 1995, Joshua Sobol and I found ourselves
seated in a theatre in the middle of the ruins following the
Great Hashin-Awaji earthquake. Even six months after that
disaster, there were daily reports of people who were narrowly
saved. On the stage of the theatre, somehow miraculously
change all your opinions and your prejudices about a reality spared, people dressed in ragged clothes were crying out, “Is a
that has been otherwise mythified. Reading Kruk was for me theatre necessary in a graveyard?” Being performed was not an
an act of demystification. impromptu play based on the tragedy of the earthquake, but,
One day my students asked me what I was writing at the rather, the Japanese version of Ghetto, one of Sobol’s master-
moment. I said I wasn’t writing anything, but that I was read- pieces about the sufferings and resistance of the Jewish people
ing about the theatre in the Vilna Ghetto. Before I knew what during World War II. As the producer, I watched the perfor-
I was doing, I found myself telling them the story of the the- mance with the playwright who, having come all the way from
atre of the ghetto. It went on for two hours, and they were sit- Israel, quietly murmured, “A theatre is indeed necessary in a
ting there looking at me with great amazement. graveyard, too.”
When I finished telling them the story, I knew that the play The match in coincidences was almost too symbolic. Ghetto
was there, that it was written before I knew it, and that I had is a story about people, a group of artists and an audience in a
become a kind of a pipe and simply had to let that story flow concentration camp, who are brought together by a theatre
through me to become a play because this is the only way I until moments before their death. The love of the theatre dur-
know to express myself. This play somehow wrote me more ing this extreme situation testifies to the strength and dignity
than I wrote it. When I wrote the play, I didn’t know where it of the human spirit. While, of course, the historic scale of the
was going to take me. tragedies is different, the people in Hyogo Prefecture also
The play has been produced almost all over the world, and found themselves in an inhuman situation as a result of the
to my great astonishment, three years ago I was invited to the earthquake. Women and senior citizens experienced great
opening night of the production of the play in Kobe, Japan. humiliation daily for a simple bucket of drinking water.
The town of Kobe had been shattered by an earthquake, and In the middle of this, I, as Artistic Director of the Hyogo Per-
the premiere took place some three months after the catastro- forming Arts Project, decided to put on a play with the finan-
phe. The city was still bearing the marks of the earthquake. cial assistance of the Prefectural government. Friends ques-
I admired the high quality of that production and the way tioned whether it might be too early to stage a play in the midst
they managed to reproduce what seems to me to be the Jewish of the suffering, advising that the money might be better spent
quintessence of that play. But what surprised me most of all for food for the victims. I myself wondered whether it was a
was the extremely warm reaction of the audience. They told good idea. What allowed me to go ahead with such a danger-
me that after the earthquake the play showed them that a soci- ous decision was the strong message that the work Ghetto left.
ety struck by a catastrophe could and should find its own sol- The performance was a great success. I will never forget a
idarity with itself and draw its power, its strength, to strug- letter left at the theatre by someone in the audience. He had
gle against calamity from that solidarity with itself. lost his family in the earthquake, and for several months after-
I realized that what the play meant to Israeli audiences it also ward had fallen into a state of emotional paralysis. He contin-
meant to foreign audiences, and that the bitter experience, the ued to be unmoved even by happy music or comedies. When
terrible, the tragic experience of the Jews of Vilna was not lost he came into contact with this intense tragedy, however, his
into a vacuum. It has not gone down the drain of humanity. sensitivity was revived through his ability to sympathize with
No, it is a precious heritage that we Jews can share with other the heroic spirit in the play. Sobol’s message, the message of
people. Probably in the future our mission as Jews is to open the Jewish people that he writes of, certainly arrived in Japan
ourselves up and to develop free dialogue with other nations, that day, fifty years later, demonstrating a clear universality.
with other people and with other cultures, be they English, Theatre people around the world, when they meet for the
Japanese, or German, and we shouldn’t shy away from any dia- first time, all remark on the same things: the non-artistic diffi-
logue. The dialogue should be inspired by the terribly tragic culties—economic and social problems—inevitably connected
experience of our people. This is maybe one of the most pre- with performances. Sobol intuitively understood these fears I
cious experiences that we are carrying with us, and which we had and the hard work I had put into making the play a suc-
should share with other peoples and cultures. ◆ cess. His understanding and his feelings of camaraderie toward
—Joshua Sobol me could be found in his hearty applause at the end of the first
[*The Bund was the Jewish working-class organization in Poland performance. I had the feeling that, for the both of us, a mutual
which was non-Zionist, and fought for rights in Poland. Its two chief friendship hard to forget was forged that day through our shar-
leaders, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, were executed by Stalin ing of staging a play in extreme circumstances. ◆
during the Nazi-Soviet pact.—ed.] —Masakazu Yamazaki

43
 Reports from Asia

Soseki Natsume and the Discovery of “Existence”

In a symposium of “Forgotten Treasures,” in the Los Angeles Times Book Review’s issue of December 26, 1999, two prominent
writers named the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki’s work as among the “forgotten classics” of twentieth-century fiction. Susan
Sontag wrote: “I’ve never understood how Soseki, the first great Japanese novelist, could be virtually unknown to English-language
readers. My favorite [is] And Then (1909)…. I can’t resist also mentioning Light and Darkness, his last, never-completed novel.”
The noted Sinologist Simon Leys nominated Soseki’s Kokoro (1914). He wrote: ”I know of no other novel written in our century that
possesses such mysterious simplicity—such subtle and heartrending purity.”
Given that statement of neglect, we asked Masakazu Yamazaki, who has written extensively on Soseki, to write about him for our readers.

W hat is particularly striking in Sontag’s and Leys’s

recommendations is their choice of three works
from Soseki’s later years, namely Kokoro [The
Heart], Sorekara [And Then], and Meian [Light and Darkness].
All three novels could be described as the richest in philosoph-
his pure, autonomous love, he cannot feel that she is the only
possible choice. He feels no spontaneous surge of elation, no
impulse to fling himself into love. He tries to exclude all pas-
sive elements from his love, as well as all conditions obstruct-
ing free choice; ironically, this very effort ends up killing the
ical thought in all of modern Japanese literature. And because passion love requires.
the Japanese novel is favored in the West for its aestheticism, To resolve this paradox, the hero of Kokoro has sought to
as epitomized by Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, I was animate himself by a rather bizarre means. By placing a male
happy to learn that Western readers were on the verge of dis- friend between himself and his fiancée, he deliberately cre-
covering Japanese literature’s intellectual and philosophical ates a love triangle. Without realizing it, he produces the emo-
dimensions. Yet this also raised a question in my mind: tion of jealousy in the place of love as a way to address his
whether, on close examination, Japanese intellect in the 1910s emotional impotence. Inflaming himself through jealousy, he
paralleled or contrasted with contemporary Western thought. eventually succeeds in marrying the woman, but his despair-
Even earlier novels, of course, by Soseki Natsume (1867- ing friend commits suicide. Our hero struggles with lifelong
1916) display a familiarity with contemporary European let- guilt, and when the Meiji Emperor passes away, he senses that
ters and allude directly to modern European aesthetic theory the era to which he belongs is now over and takes his own life.
and literature. Soseki’s fluency with such ideas was made pos- The impossibility of love was a consistent main theme for
sible by his study of English literature at Tokyo Imperial Soseki, appearing in works such as Mon [The Gate], Sorekara,
University, and was reinforced when the Japanese government and Kojin [The Wayfarer]. In all these novels, the protagonist
assigned him to study in London between 1900 and 1903. seeks a pure love he knows he cannot achieve. He ties himself
These were years of isolation and great unhappiness for the instead to the love-object by stirring other emotions—jeal-
author; but for less personal reasons too, his dissemination of ousy, pity, sympathy—so that he is eventually tormented by
Western ideas in teaching and in fiction was accompanied by an even deeper sense of guilt. Soseki, of course, is not alone
deep reservations about the “external enlightenment” Japan in world literature in confronting the tragedy of love. In Love
was undergoing through its exposure to Western values. in the Western World Denis de Rougemont chronicles the
One of Soseki’s central and personally significant themes in Western literary tradition of describing love between men and
his later years was the concept of loneliness. The middle-aged women as a paradoxical passion whose only pure realization
protagonist of Kokoro suffers from a lifelong, unexplained, and lies in death. Men and women who fear love and seek to avoid
irremediable loneliness. He acts not out of desire or a sense of it, only to find themselves hurtling into it behind the shield
mission, but simply to avoid this loneliness. Yet, in acting, he of jealousy, are a staple of European literature, as in Alfred de
realizes that the action in question is not that which he truly Musset’s On ne badine pas avec l’amour.
wished to take. The more he acts, the more he feels that he It is characteristic of Soseki and his Japanese intellectual
lacks sufficient internal motivation for his actions, which contemporaries to extend the sense of the impotence of emo-
brings him even greater loneliness. From an excess of moral tions to human life as a whole, leading them to quietism and
fastidiousness, he is unable to accept his own simple desires, skepticism toward their very existence. The central character
while his over-intellectualism forces him to recognize the lack in Meian doubts that human beings really possess immutable
of absolute value in any task. Yet denying both mission and elements such as character and will. He doubts that an ego con-
desire leaves him feeling that he lacks the spontaneous force sists of a consistent self, and is tormented at the thought that
of ego that should be the agent for action. all free will is eroded by the causality of the outside world. In
The lonely man’s best remedy is to love a woman, yet his a time which extolled freedom, the hero is irritated at being
excessive idealism about love makes this impossible. He unable to experience the self which should be the agent for
spurns his parents’ recommendation of an old-fashioned, con- these emotions. This frustration is shared by other early-twen-
ventional marriage as impure love. He instinctively rejects the tieth-century writers such as Mori Ogai and Nagai Kafu, who
desire for the rewards of marriage, and more sexual desire, as lament a sense of powerlessness that makes them unable to lose
heteronomous motivation. But when it comes to rising above themselves in any mission or be consumed by desire.
these complications by choosing one woman to whom to offer Japan in the 1910s was completing the first stages of mod-

44
 Reports from Asia

ernization. Winning the Russo-Japanese War, it was also feel- same discomfort experienced some thirty years later when the
ing the encroachment of full-scale industrialization. To intel- central figure in Sartre’s La Nausée looks at the roots of a tree.
lectuals, this was a first era of spiritual crisis. Victory in the Nevertheless, unease and loneliness are clearly different
war had deprived the country of an immediate national goal, qualities. Existence in the West is an agency of self-projection
and freed individual emotions from the ties of duty. In a soci- into something in the midst of causality (Heidegger’s entwer-
ety in which strong bonds of common emotions were loosen- fen); in Soseki’s case, an agent hoping to “become one with the
ing, individuals began to explore their own emotions, none of universe.” Virtually no comparative research has yet been con-
which induced a sufficient sense of urgency. Industrialization ducted on the essence of this difference and the different cul-
was simultaneously bringing materialism and utilitarianism to tural backgrounds which may have created it. Very few peo-
Japanese society, which intellectuals naturally opposed. ple outside Japan know anything about Soseki as a
Moreover, the Confucian education which Japanese intellec- philosophical writer, or as a thinker heavily influenced by
tuals of the time had received led them to take a more puritan- Henri Bergson and William James. The Los Angeles Times
ical stance toward various modern concepts. The same attitude questionnaire has proved a fine opportunity to point to an
which divorced sexual desire from love caused them to remove area where West and East have yet to fully meet. ◆
the desire for self-aggrandizement from individualism. For —Masakazu Yamazaki
example, they emphasized the freedom of individuals from
their families, but this was no more than the freedom to escape
their families. Unlike the heroes of Balzac or Mauriac, they had Eulogy for Seizaburo Sato
no concept of battling from within the family to acquire as
much of an inheritance as possible and expand their freedom.
They escaped from their families into freedom, but it was not
the freedom to do something. Since they slighted ambition, the
sort of freedom the protagonist of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le
I n a postwar Japanese political science long dominated by anti-
American Marxism and progressivism led by Masao Maru-
yama (1914-1996), Seizaburo Sato led a new group of pro-
American conservative thinkers. Born in 1932, Sato was raised as
a Christian but became a Marxist during the university student
Noir strives for was never a possibility. movements in the 1950s. But with further study he became dis-
For Soseki and his contemporaries, self was something to be enchanted with the schematic historical interpretations of Marx-
attained not by acquiring but by discarding. Soseki was fond ism.At the University of Tokyo, Sato distinguished himself by
of the motto: “Transcend one’s self and become one with the his intelligence and clear arguments. Along with Masataka
universe,” which reflects the Eastern philosophy of renuncia- Kosaka (1934-1996) of Kyoto University, Sato became a leader of
tion. On the other hand, it is also an extension of a Kantian view a liberal-conservative movement that provided a consistent the-
of freedom, namely, that true freedom is the autonomy that oretical foundation for Japan’s political and diplomatic policies.
allows rejection of one’s own nature (desires). Sadly enough for As a scholar, Sato’s works were wide and varied. Unlike
Soseki, his was no longer an era which could believe in the many academics, his first works were empirical studies of
divine order Kant discerned in “the starry skies above” and the modern Japanese history. Then with his colleagues Murakami
“moral law within.” Having ‘transcended himself,’ Soseki was and Kumon, Sato wrote the pathbreaking Bunmei to Shite no Ie
forced to struggle with the relative value of action. Shakai [Ie Society as a Pattern Civilization](1979). Its thesis (the
Yet taking the actual substance out of the idea of self and emphasis on lineage) became a major but controversial inter-
infinitely idealizing self as a pure agent leads back to the con- pretation of Japanese society, for it provided an alternative
cept of existence. Existence is self, but self in which all objec- view of Japan’s modernization, indeed the very nature of
tive affiliation has been renounced, including not only desire Japan’s civilization, from Western sociological theories.
and a sense of duty, but also character and social status. While Unlike most Japanese political scientists, Sato involved him-
this concept took hold in the West in the late nineteenth and self in politics, becoming a “brain” for many of Japan’s post-
early twentieth centuries, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, war leaders. In particular, Sato was close to Prime Minister
Soseki could be seen as having independently approached Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982-1987). Although it would be easy to
something extremely close to this discovery. envision Sato as a “rightist,” the fact is Sato hated authoritari-
Existence entails the realization that one exists through a anism. Because Sato boldly continued to challenge established
type of direct sensation, a “mood”(Heidegger’s Stimmung). In theories, he made scholarly enemies in Japan. However. he was
the West, this feeling is the fear of the accidental nature of one’s highly praised abroad and taught at Harvard University.
existence, a vague unease (Kierkegaard’s Angst). In Soseki’s case, In recent years, several of Japan’s leading political scientists,
the mood was one of groundless loneliness, a sense of power- who were Sato’s peers, have passed away. The deaths of conserv-
lessness which was almost impossible to heal. Becoming aware ative critic Kosaka and progressive Maruyama seemed to sym-
of existence through mood generally requires a refined sensi- bolize the end of the conservative-progressive division in Japa-
tivity which recognizes the absurdity of nature. Soseki was a nese academia. Now influential liberal-conservative scholars
writer of outstanding sensitivity, as is vividly portrayed in close to the positions of Sato and Kosaka, such as Akihiko Tanaka
Sorekara (1909). Looking at his feet in the bath, the protagonist and Shinichi Kitaoka, are beginning to assume a legitimate place
is suddenly seized by the sensation that these are strange at the University of Tokyo, which, representing Japan’s acade-
objects separate from his body, and is stunned by the ugliness mic community, had once been so dominated by progressives. ◆
of forms which have lost their meaning. This is of course the —Masayuki Tadokoro

45
 Necrology

 In Passing…  Noel Annan

The term obit, a funeral service, derives
from Latin obitus; Obitus has the medie-
ing the telephone in his office late one
evening. “Good evening, sir,” said the
N oel Annan, perhaps more than any
other major twentieth-century in-
tellectual historian, understood how
val Latin derivative obituarius, a death voice at the other end. “This is Lord
much the century of total war had
notice, hence the English noun obituary… Woodwood’s butler speaking. Lord
destroyed the Victorian world of Leslie
But how did we come to the obituary Woodwood presents his compliments to
Stephen, the subject of his first biogra-
which is the staple feature of almost every the editor of The Times and would like
phy, written when he was a young don
newspaper in the world today? In the him to know that he does not expect to
in Cambridge, but also the world of
Financial Times of London (December 18, survive the night.”
Stephen’s daughter, Virginia Woolf. Yet
1999), Malcolm Rutherford, the obituar- Euphemisms abounded. Two of the
Annan knew how much of that world
ies editor, wrote a long article on the sub- best, and least known, came not from
had survived. In his esteem for institu-
ject, ironically, shortly before his own The Times, but from the magazine of
tions—his school, Stowe; his college,
death. We excerpt here some sections: King’s College, Cambridge. “He died
King’s; his university, Cambridge; but
suddenly” was assumed by Kingsmen to
also the profession he had chosen for
O bituaries (or obits, as they were
originally called) was the term
used by friars in a monastery register-
mean that he had committed suicide.
“He died in Northampton” meant that
he had gone mad and died in the men-
himself—Noel Annan showed his true
character. His concern was always to
preserve and encourage intellectual
ing the names of their founders and tal home of that town. Most frequent,
merit and distinction.
benefactors. There was no need for an and still used by some newspapers
Though he held many responsible
accolade or an assessment of the life. today, “He died unmarried” or its vari-
administrative posts, served on innu-
The names lived on, or were supposed ant “He was a confirmed bachelor” was
merable boards, commissions, and com-
to, simply by being in the book. the way of saying he was a homosexual.
mittees, I rarely heard him speak of such
No one is quite sure when obituaries, In the mid-1960s, however, obituaries
matters, clearly believing them to be of
as we now know them as a regular fea- began to change partly because the
less importance than the ideas we were
ture in many daily newspapers, first Sunday newspapers and some weekly
discussing. In the House of Lords,
began. One attractive theory is that the magazines were running long, lively, and
where he spoke frequently on govern-
founding father was John Aubrey, a sev- often well-researched profiles of people
ment higher-education policies, which
enteenth-century eccentric who wan- still alive. The main difference between
he felt to be inadequate, he showed all
dered about the country and frequented a profile and an obituary was that the
the passion that those who knew him
the London coffee houses, making jot- obituary gave a final assessment. It did
best, recognized and appreciated. His
tings on this, that, and the other, many not have to be unduly deferential. Obits
hand-written notes were a joy to
of them about people. Unfortunately, became a little more sprightly.
receive, scarcely surprising, given the
the theory cannot be true since Au- In the next few years, obituaries are
quality of his conversation and pub-
brey’s Brief Lives was not published likely to change, particularly in the
lished works.
until 1898, well after obituaries had subjects chosen. It would be rash to
Noel Annan—Lord Annan as he be-
become a feature in daily newspapers. assume that in the twenty-first century
came—articulate, gentle, generous, and
There is much to be said in Aubrey’s more and more obituary space will nec-
witty, understood what he called “our
defense, however. Anyone writing obit- essarily be assigned to businessmen.
age,” that of the generation of men and
uaries now would do well to look at his The continued decline of deference
women ten years younger or older than
anecdotal style. He defended himself should also eliminate some of the old stal-
himself. The phrase, as he explained in
against charges of being too fond of warts and worthies. It is no longer clear
his celebrated work Our Age (1990), orig-
minutiae by saying that what seemed why a bishop deserves an obituary sim-
inated with Maurice Bowra, for Annan
minute at the time could be of great ply because he was a bishop. This is not
recognized the importance of correctly
interest to readers a hundred years on. the end of history, but it poses the ques-
estimating the achievements and failures
The Times in the nineteenth century tion: Is there life after obits? The answer
of his own times.
was the place where obituaries began to is yes, but they will have to change with
Annan, because of the positions he
develop, and it maintained its supremacy the times and a changed society.
held as provost of King’s College, Cam-
in the field for decades. As some people The ideal obituary is indeed about a
bridge, vice-chancellor of the Univer-
privately disparage the House of Lords prominent figure, and even here there is
sity of London, and one of the founders
while craving to become a member, peo- room for some reduction of reverence. A
of Channel 4, was intellectually and
ple (especially senior civil servants) hoped touch of the anecdotal in the Aubrey
socially prominent on both sides of the
they would deserve a decent obituary. manner is welcome. Above all, chronol-
Atlantic. If he was constantly chosen to
John Grigg, in the paper’s official his- ogy is not enough. In the longer obituar-
give memorial addresses for those he
tory, tells the story of Sir William Haley, ies the author must evaluate what the
had known, it was not so much for his
the editor in the 1950s and 60s, answer- subject achieved, for good or ill.
remarkable delivery, his sonorous voice,

46
 Necrology

or his magisterial appearance that he should be forgotten and then rediscov- from his background should grapple
was asked, though all were of course ered is one of Haskell’s surprising con- with fourteenth-century legal records,
important. Annan was a man who knew tentions. Much of this derives from the but in some ways still more remarkable
how to express appreciation precisely argument that it is not the “intrinsic” that he fell under the spell of the grace-
because he was incapable of feigning it. quality of a work that is foremost in the ful ironic prose of F.W. Maitland, the
Listening to him eulogize Lord Good- judgment of a work, but the critical greatest of historians of English law, who
man before a vast London congregation, interplay of patrons, collectors, inter- became a constant point of reference.
I asked Sir Isaiah Berlin whether the preters, et al., in establishing the impor- Castro returned to Venezuela and set-
speech was as impressive as I thought. tance of a work. In retrospect this would tled at the new Instituto de Estudios
“My boy,” he answered, “I have already seem to be emphasizing the sociology Avanzados. His scholarly recognition
commissioned him to give my own.” He and social history of art, but in reading brought him to such posts as Cam-
did so, some time later, brilliantly. He Haskell on the impact of a specific paint- bridge’s Simon Bolívar chair and two
was age 83 at his death.  ing, no one would ever dream of accus- periods as Tinker Professor at the Uni-
—Stephen R. Graubard ing him of “oversociologizing” art. versity of Chicago.
In his last and greatest book, History Yet his skeptical grounding in Anglo-
and Its Images (1993), Haskell reviewed Saxon thought also turned him into a
the conflict among art historians on the cultural critic, scrutinizing his coun-
Francis Haskell contrasting value of written and pictor- try’s political icons, including the great

F rancis Haskell, the most important

historian of art of his generation,
died early this year at age 71. In an auto-
ial sources, the birth of the history
museum and art museum, and the role
of such historians as Jules Michelet,
Bolívar himself. From the 1980s, he ar-
gued against a Venezuelan tradition in
which politics figured either as the
biographical sketch, he described how Jacob Burckhardt, and Jan Huizinga in realm of transcendence or a theatre of
he became an art historian at a time understanding modern culture. Though heroism. He expressed his views as a
when the discipline hardly existed in Haskell would never have dreamt of columnist for El Diario de Caracas and
England. His teachers were exiled placing himself on that lofty plane, he El Universal, reinforced by magnetic
German scholars such as Nikolaus made it impossible to write the history television appearances, where his elo-
Pevsner, who had brought the disci- of art without analyzing the compli- quence and wit were matched by charm
pline as a German specialty to England. cated network of art as an institution, and good looks.
Today, art historians “speak English,” and that in itself remains an extraordi- Castro’s unique influence in Vene-
not the least because of Francis Haskell. nary achievement.  zuelan life rested to a great extent on his
Haskell studied art history at King’s —Michael Becker style. His writing combined metaphysi-
College, Cambridge, but always kept his Source: Henning Ritter, “Enthusiast des cal meditation with everyday anec-
distance from the methodological de- Faktischen [An enthusiast for the actual],” dotes, laced with an often outrageously
bates that wracked the field. He pre- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 20, 2000. zany humor. His goal was nothing less
ferred to do empirical work, and his than the ethical education of his read-
path-breaking book, Patrons and Pain- ers. As he felt the political situation
ters: A Study of the Relations Between Luis Castro becoming increasingly grave, his writ-
Italian Art and Society in the Age of the
Baroque (1963), would seem to have
offered little chance of affecting the pro-
L uis Castro was Venezuela’s most dis-
tinctive intellectual voice, one that
emerged from a confrontation between
ing became increasingly urgent.
On the fortieth anniversary of the
birth of modern democracy in Vene-
fession profoundly, but it did in large the Latin American rhetorical register zuela in January 1998, Luis Castro be-
part because Haskell refrained from the- and the understated irony he derived came the first non-member of Congress
oretical generalization. His book was an from the English tradition. to address that assembly. His impas-
argument on the relation of patron and Castro was the son of a Venezuelan sioned speech, televised live, caused a
artist, to demonstrate the role of the army officer and a Chilean mother. He national sensation. He ringingly called
patrons in the formation of, and inter- graduated in law from Universidad Cen- the political class to a sense of its re-
nal constitution of, a work of art. tral de Venezuela in 1966, and then took sponsibilities, urging it to address the
This argument was developed more a doctorate in the philosophy of law at nation’s intractable social and economic
fully in his lectures on Rediscoveries in the Sorbonne. But from his earliest problems without succumbing to ata-
Art (1976), in which he presented a schoolboy reading, he had developed an vistic absolutism, unfettered capitalism,
striking, and original, history of taste, a idealized image of England and this, as or mere cronyism. He declared that the
theme that had been neglected in much as soberer scholarly purposes, led country’s long-term stability depended
German studies. The histories of taste, him to Cambridge in 1971 and a further on the rule of law and the alternation of
fashion, and collecting here intertwine Ph.D. on “The Notion of Fact in English parties. He went on to become an out-
to form a picture of art as an institution, Law,” a detailed study of the develop- spoken critic of the populist Hugo
a view that now predominates in the art ment of the jury in the High Middle Chávez, the leader of a failed military
museums of the world. That an artist Ages. It was remarkable that someone coup who was elected president in

47
 Necrology

December 1998. Castro’s gloomiest pre- Millions of Brazilians can recite at

dictions of the outcome of Chávez’s vic- least some of the verses of the poem. It Edward H. Levi
tory are already being borne out.
Luis Castro was 56 years old when he
died in 1999. 
was made into a play, put to music by
Chico Buarque de Hollanda, filmed in
1977, and more recently made into a
E dward H. Levi was a man who sym-
bolized, nay, restored probity to an
American political life marred by the
—Stefan Collini television drama. Watergate scandals—disgraces where
Mr. Cabral was born in January 1920 two attorneys general in the Nixon
into a distinguished family: one of his administration were convicted of felo-
João Cabral cousins was the sociologist Gilberto nies and one, John Mitchell, served time

J oão Cabral, one of the century’s most

distinguished poets in the Portu-
guese language, died in Rio de Janeiro
Freyre. Like many Latin American intel-
lectuals of his generation, unable to earn
a living as a writer, he entered the Bra-
in jail. Mr. Levi was appointed to the
post of attorney general in 1975 by
President Gerald Ford. Later, Justice
in October 1999 at age 79. zilian diplomatic service in 1945, serving Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court,
In a career that spanned more than in posts on four continents until his who had been a senior official under
fifty years, Cabral earned a reputation retirement in 1990. In the late 1940s, Mr. Mr. Levi, said that he could not have
as a cerebral, even difficult writer who, Cabral became a friend of the Catalan had a tougher job in Washington for the
in collections such as The Dog Without painter Joan Miró. The two collaborated entire executive branch was in disarray;
Feathers and Museum of Everything, de- on a book about the artist, with Cabral and that Mr. Levi “brought the depart-
monstrated an unflinching cinematic writing the text and Miró contributing ment through its worst years.”
eye but showed little patience with whimsical engravings. A complete edi- Edward Levi was one of the great legal
romanticism or sentimentality. tion of Mr. Cabral’s poems was published scholars and law teachers of his genera-
Mr. Cabral’s poetry was never widely in Rio de Janeiro in 1994.  tion. He had been Dean of the Law
known in the English-speaking world, School and then President of the
though the Wesleyan University Press in Source: Abridged from the obituary by University of Chicago. Ironically, he had
1995 published his Selected Poetry, 1937- Larry Rohter in the New York Times, not intended to be a lawyer. Edward
1990. But many American poets admired October 23, 1999. Hirsch Levi was born in Chicago on
him, including W. S. Merwin, who trans- June 26, 1911 to Gerson B. Levi, a rabbi
lated many of his poems, and Elizabeth who came to the United States from
Bishop, who lived in Brazil for many Emanuel R. Piore Scotland, and Elsa Hirsch Levi. His
years and knew Cabral well. In An An-
thology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian
Poetry, which she edited with Emanuel
I f anyone shaped U.S. government sup-
port for basic research, it was Eman-
uel Ruben Piore. As the first civilian
maternal grandfather, Rabbi Emil G.
Hirsch, was a leader of Reform Judaism
in America.
Brasil, Ms. Bishop described Mr. Cabral head of the Office of Naval Research after After graduating from the University
as Brazil’s most important poet of the World War II, he initiated the policy of of Chicago, Edward Levi began study-
postwar generation, whose work has the giving federal support to scientists, ing for a doctorate in literature, but
greatest coherency of style of any Brazil- mathematicians, and linguists, irrespec- dropped out of the program. Years later
ian poet, work “characterized by strik- tive of the relation of their work to the he explained that a friendly professor
ing visual imagery and an insistent use navy. In that role, too, he helped estab- had told him that he would never be
of concrete tactile nouns.” lish the National Science Foundation. He given a position in the humanities de-
His most popular work among his carried the philosophy over to I.B.M. partment at Chicago, or any leading
countrymen was undoubtedly The Death where he became chief scientist in 1965, institution, because he was a Jew. He
and Life of Severino, about the desolate and helped shift I.B.M. from a business recalled this in an essay in Newsweek,
existence of a peasant from the poor machine firm to computer technology. during the nation’s bicentennial cele-
northeastern region, where Mr. Cabral Dr. Piore served on the Science Ad- bration in 1976, to demonstrate how
was born. Ms. Bishop rendered one mov- visory Committees of Presidents Eisen- much the country had changed. He had,
ing passage into English this way: hower and Kennedy, and was treasurer after all, become the first Jewish dean of
We are exactly alike: exactly the of the National Academy of Science. a major law school. And when he be-
same big head After retiring from I.B.M., he founded came president of the University of Chi-
That’s hard to balance properly, the New York City Hall of Science which cago in 1968, he said he believed he was
The same swollen belly on the was located on the old 1939 World’s Fair the first Jewish president of a major pri-
same skinny legs, grounds in Queens. vate university, other than one with a
Alike because the blood we use Emanuel Piore was born in Vilnius, Jewish identity such as Brandeis.
has little color. Lithuania, and came to the U.S. with his His slim book, An Introduction to Le-
And if Severinos are all the mother at age nine. He graduated from gal Reasoning (University of Chicago
same in life, the University of Wisconsin in 1930 and Press, 1949), was a foundational text for
We die the same death, the same received his doctorate in physics in 1935. students, with its emphasis on analogy
Severino death. He was 91 at his death in May 2000.  as the logic of legal reasoning. As a law

48
 Necrology

teacher, his student Robert Bork re- an “un-American” lesson about the a quintessential Romantic poet who
called, “He was the most dazzling class- frailties and follies of human endeavor. made a transition from the lush poems
room performer any of us had ever Yet he never retreated into the hopeless of his youth to a tragic sense of life.
seen.” And as Dean of the Law School, conservatism or the droll cynicism that But it was with Samuel Johnson that
Mr. Levi introduced the law and econo- have so often captivated disillusioned Bate had the greater affinities. When he
mics movement as a major development modern American intellectuals. Wood- lectured at Harvard on the harrowing
of legal education, founding the school’s ward’s liberalism made him a public fantasies and nightmares of the great
Journal of Law and Economics. writer as well as a scholar. Apart from lexicographer, students felt as if their
Although appointed by a Republican W.E.B. Du Bois and John Hope Frank- teacher had momentarily become Dr.
president, Mr. Levi never considered lin, no twentieth-century American his- Johnson. No doubt that it was this ele-
himself to be a political partisan. Robert torian made greater intellectual and ment of identification that made his
Bork, who was solicitor general under political contributions to the cause of biography of Samuel Johnson the great
Mr. Levi, called him simply the greatest racial equality. At age 90, his body fail- critical success in 1977, winning the
lawyer of his time. Mr. Levi served as ing but his mind still sharp, he spoke Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award
President of the American Academy of out as an historian and citizen against and the National Book Critics Circle
Arts and Sciences from 1986 to 1989. He the constitutional dangers raised by the Award in the same year.
was 88 years old at his death.  crusade against President Clinton. And His political sympathy with Samuel
earlier, in the wake of American Stalin- Johnson plunged Bate into the cultural
Sources: Obituaries by Neil A. Lewis in ism and McCarthyism (and later of wars in the university departments of
the New York Times, March 8, 2000, and by George Wallaceism and the late-60s New literature that began in the late 1960s.
Robert H. Bork, in the Wall Street Journal, Left, which he disliked), when it be- He declared himself to be a classic
March 13, 2000. came fashionable among liberals to be humanist with conservative views,
disenchanted with popular dissent, themes he had expressed in his books:
Woodward would not comply. Criticism: The Major Texts (1952) and
C. Vann Woodward The ironist expected, of course, that The Burden of the Past on the English

C. Vann Woodward, who died on

December 17, 1999 at the age of
91, was one of the best American histo-
his own labors would one day be sur-
passed and possibly forgotten. And if, in
the fullness of time, Vann Woodward’s
Poet (1970), a work that anticipated
Harold Bloom’s book on the anxiety of
influence. But it was his polemical essay,
rians and the best historian ever of the interpretations prove vain—which they “The Crisis in English Studies,” that
American South. He excelled as an will not be—his example of moral seri- became the focus of a national debate.
interpreter, a scholar who asked big and ousness and integrity will continue to In that essay, Bate described the situa-
original questions and then dug deep inspire, as will his devotion to the histo- tion in the humanities as “the worst
into the sources and his own imagina- rian’s craft. On December 16, 1999, home since the modern university was formed
tion for the answers. His findings trans- at last from a long hospital stay and a century ago.” He accused the new aca-
formed the study of the South—and eager to get back to work, he asked to be demic theorizing as abandoning the
thus, of course, of the United States. helped to his desk, which had been humanistic ideal of literature that had
Woodward’s prose was spare and ele- moved upstairs from his study. There, at prevailed in the West since the Renais-
gant, befitting his taste for ambiguity his desk, he died the next day.  sance. The English departments, he
and paradox. The best way to under- —Sean Wilentz declared wryly, were not “countries for
stand the South, he believed, was Source: Adapted from the New Republic, old men.” Bate grasped, as few did in
through its ironies. Those ironies could January 10, 2000. 1982, that the changes in education
be biographical, as in the career of the were epochal and that the organization
Georgia populist-turned-racist Tom of knowledge would never be as it had
Watson, the subject of Woodward’s first Walter Jackson Bate been, before the onset of the modern
book, published in 1938. They could be
institutional, as in the case of Southern
segregation—a curse that, as Woodward
W alter Jackson Bate, one of the
great literary historians of his
generation, died in Cambridge, Massa-
research university.
Yet Bate’s own magisterial works
brought him personal recognition. At
showed in his pathbreaking book The chusetts, on July 26, 1999, aged 81. Harvard, his university, he was named
Strange Career of Jim Crow, arose as Bate concentrated a lifetime of schol- a university professor, the highest rank
much from planters’ and businessmen’s arship on an early book, From Classic to in the faculty, then a select position for
fears of lower-class whites as from their Romantic (1946), a study of how English the few, and elected to the British
fears of blacks. There were larger ironies writing changed from the heroic cou- Academy and the American Academy of
as well, which rendered the South a pow- plets and balanced prose of eighteenth- Arts and Sciences.
erful exception to the great American century neoclassicism to the Romantic —Mark Krupnick
myths of innocence and invincibility. styles of the first half of the next cen- Source: Adapted from an obituary in the
Woodward wanted these ironies to tury. His John Keats, published in 1963, Guardian, August 2, 1999.
humanize his readers and to teach us all won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the study of

49
 Necrology

Academe
In the period after World War II, American universities exploded in completely unprecedented ways. Not only was there a
huge expansion of students, created by the G. I. Bill of Rights, which gave free schooling to those who had served in the armed
forces, there was the transformation of graduate schools to focus on research, and the creation of “area studies” to provide spe-
cialists for the United States in its new role in world society. One significant feature of this transfiguration was the entry of new
faculty—many of them émigrés, or children of émigrés, many of them Jewish—who had been denied positions in the university
before the war. Many of these became leaders of their disciplines. That postwar generation, alas, is now passing. We present here
some notices, regrettably short, of some of the most distinguished of that generation.

story is told of his being presented a T- he was awarded the John Bates Clark
Benjamin Schwartz shirt by his students, inscribed on the medal given every two years to the best

B enjamin Schwartz was probably the

foremost scholar of Chinese intel-
lectual history, who had an encyclope-
front, “On the One Hand,” and on the
back, “On the Other Hand.” Ben
Schwartz’s comment was that there was
economist under age forty.
In 1993, Grilliches was elected presi-
dent of the American Economics
dic range from the ways of thought in always a third possibility.  Association. In his presidential address,
ancient China to the political ideas of he tearfully and truthfully described his
Mao Zedong. gratitude to this country for permitting
Ben Schwartz was born in December Zvi Grilliches a young refugee to rise to such a posi-
1916 in East Boston, of a poor working-
class family. He graduated from Boston
Latin, the city’s premier high school for
Z vi Grilliches was a leading econome-
trician and had he lived, a leading
candidate for the Nobel Prize. He died
tion of prominence.
In recent years, Grilliches was the
founder of the Moscow School of Eco-
talented youths, and entered Harvard in November 1999 at age 69. nomics and had begun work on a care-
College in 1934 as a scholarship student. Zvi Grilliches was born in 1930 in ful history of the rise to minor fame in
He graduated magna cum laude, special- Kaunas, Lithuania. With the arrival of the nineteenth century of the Grilliches
izing in romance languages, and ex- the Germans in 1941, the Grilliches fam- engravers in the court of the Czars. 
pected to become a high-school teacher ily was ordered into the ghetto, and
or rabbi. But during the war he served eventually into the work camp in Dachau
in the army as a cryptoanalyst, break- in Bavaria. Grilliches was not yet fifteen Raymond Vernon
ing Japanese communication codes, and
one night, while on duty in the White
House, he received the communiqué
when, after losing both parents, he was
liberated by the American troops led by
General Patton in 1945. Traveling under-
I f anyone invented the academic field
of global economics, it was Ray Ver-
non, who died in August 1999 at age 85.
from the Emperor announcing the sur- ground through Europe, he was on a Vernon was a member of the team that
render of Japan. boat for Palestine that was intercepted by designed and implemented the Marshall
Returning to Harvard, he took a Ph.D. the British, and interned for seven Plan for the reconstruction of Europe
in history and Far Eastern languages. months in Cyprus. He arrived in Haifa in after World War II. He was instrumental
His doctoral dissertation in 1951 on 1947, joined the Israeli army, and became in the development of the International
Chinese Communism and the Rise of a student at the Hebrew University of the Monetary Fund and the General Agree-
Mao, was the first work to demonstrate great skeptical historian Jacob Talman, a ment on Tariffs and Trade, known as
that Mao had swerved from Soviet doc- disciple of Karl Popper. GATT. In 1965, he began the major re-
trine and established the peasantry as In 1951, Grilliches won a scholarship search on multinational corporations,
the base of his revolutionary force. It to the University of California at Berke- work that produced Sovereignty at Bay:
remains a key source today. A second ley in agricultural economics. Later, at The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enter-
book, In Search of Wealth and Power: the University of Chicago, working with prises, and Storm Over the Multination-
Yen Fu and the West, was about a mem- Theodore Schultz, he became a leader in als: the Real Issues, both of which have
ber of the traditional gentry of the late the field of economic measurement. His been translated into Japanese, Italian,
Qing dynasty (1644-1912) who was the work on the diffusion of hybrid corn Spanish, Russian, Swedish, and French.
first to translate European works into launched a wave of research on the eco- Born in September 1913 in New York
Chinese in order to understand the nomic incentives to technical change, at City, Ray Vernon was one of four children
secret of Western power. In 1985, reach- the time a highly neglected field. His in a family of Jewish immigrants from
ing back further into the past, Schwartz work on automobile model changes Russia. His father drove a truck deliver-
published his magisterial book, The produced the “hedonic” price indexes ing seltzer water to restaurants and bars.
World of Thought in Ancient China. which became standard for estimation The family name was Visotsky, but the
Ben Schwartz, as his Harvard col- of quality changes in products. At children changed their name to Vernon
league Roderick MacFarquhar remarked Harvard, with his colleague Dale Jor- since the eldest said that a name change
in a eulogy, was a man of gentle spirit genson, he became the leader in the would improve his chances of being
and genuine intellectual humility. A measurement of productivity. In 1966, accepted to medical school. All four of

50
 Necrology

the siblings earned doctoral degrees. teaching career at Princeton, but most was his primary occupation. Research
Ray Vernon received a bachelor’s of his academic life was spent at M.I.T., and students were his main concern.
degree from the City College of New beginning in 1961, until 1999, when he The Russian Research Center was his
York in 1933, and a Ph.D. in economics retired as Ford International Professor home—quite literally—for many
from Columbia in 1941. From 1935 to of Political Science. decades. He really was one of the giants
1946, he worked at the S.E.C. and from His award-winning book, Party Build- in a rich generation of refugee scholars,
1946 to 1955 in the State Department, ing in a New Nation (1968), dealt with the most of whom—alas—are gone.”
where he brought Japan into the GATT reasons for the success of the Congress Ulam was born in April 1922 in what
trade system. In 1956 Vernon joined the Party, its compromise with local party was then Lwow, Poland, now part of the
faculty of the Harvard Business School structures, and its decline with the ero- Ukraine. He emigrated to the United
and then held a second, joint appoint- sion of internal democracy and the States in 1939 with his older brother
ment at the Kennedy School. excessive reliance on personalities. Stanislaw. The brothers left the country
Slim and wiry, Vernon was an athlete In the late 1960s and 1970s, Weiner two weeks before Germany attacked Po-
until almost the last year of his life. An challenged “modernization” theory land. Stanislaw was one of the most emi-
avid oarsman, he rowed daily at dawn on which predicted the erosion of reli- nent mathematicians of the twentieth
the Charles River in a single scull. In his gious, caste, linguistic, and tribal iden- century. His invention of the “Monte
eighties, he set a world record for his age tities as the countries “modernized.” To Carlo” method of estimation played a
group in a class of “indoor sprints” row- the contrary, he argued in Sons of Soil crucial role in the development of the
ing machines with odometers attached. (1978), as groups organized for eco- thermonuclear bomb. Their experiences
Though he helped shape the postwar nomic gain and political power, mod- together are recounted in Stanislaw’s
system of international trade and influ- ernization could be expected to reacti- autobiography, The Adventures of a Math-
enced thinking about the global econ- vate and intensify ethnic conflicts. ematician, and in Adam’s own memoirs.
omy, Vernon believed in markets, but he His most recent work, The Child and Ulam wrote eighteen books, many of
also saw their weaknesses, particularly the State in India (1992), challenged the which are classics in the field. His study
in relation to the developing countries. notion that child labor would disappear The Bolsheviks (1965) remains one of the
He felt that state-owned enterprises as India became richer. He pointed out definitive treatments of the Communist
could not compete efficiently with that the caste system would continue the Party under Lenin. His massive 760-
investor-owned multinationals, said division between the menial work per- page work Stalin: The Man and His Era,
Daniel Yergin, the co-author of the book formed by children from the lower was acclaimed not only as a biography
The Commanding Heights, and his castes and the skilled work by those but as a “morally as well as historically
research became part of the push to pri- from the upper castes. It was a tribute to definitive” book.
vatization in the 1980s.  Weiner’s stature that a book so critical of His crowning work, the magisterial
India’s policy makers and elites was read account of Soviet foreign policy, Expan-
so widely by intellectuals and govern- sion and Coexistence, published in 1967,
Myron Weiner ment officials. As a comment in The was regarded as the most influential

I n June 1999, Myron Weiner, one of

the foremost Western scholars of
Indian politics since the Second World
Hindu of June 27, 1999 put it: “Myron
Weiner will be remembered as the
scholar who did for political science,
book to have appeared on the subject,
and with several subsequent editions
became the standard text in the field.
War, died at age 68. Weiner was a highly what Amartya Sen has done for develop- His sequel, Dangerous Relations, pub-
respected figure in American political ment economics—make the discipline lished in the early 1980s, completed the
science; his productivity was breathtak- more practical and less esoteric.”  study of Soviet foreign policy to the rise
ing, writes Ashutosh Varshney, a former of Mikhail Gorbachev.
student, now teaching at the University His colleague Edward Keenan, Direc-
of Notre Dame, in the Times of India of Adam Ulam tor of the Dumbarton Oaks Research
June 12, 1999. Together with his wife
Sheila, a scholar of Indian art, and their
children, he lived in India for several
A dam Ulam, one of the world’s lead-
ing authorities on Russia and the
Soviet Union, died in April 2000, at age
Library, described Ulam as “a gentle,
playful Galician cosmopolitan, a prodi-
gious reader and an enormously fluent
years and made short research trips vir- 77. He was a member of the Harvard fac- writer. A narrative historian by inclina-
tually every year. ulty from 1947 until his retirement in tion and practice, he was somewhat out
Born in a family of Jewish immigrants 1992. He taught thousands of undergrad- of place in a department he thought to
of modest means in New York, Weiner uates and graduate students, including be increasingly influenced by vaporous
went to City College and began the Robert Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. abstractions and models.” 
study of India as a Ph.D. student at Henry Rosovsky, the former Dean of
Princeton in 1952. He authored thirteen the faculty of Arts and Sciences at  Illustrations in this issue are by
books, edited nineteen others, and Harvard, wrote: “Adam Ulam was an Gavarni, Honoré Daumier, Katsukawa
wrote innumerable articles on India and old-fashioned professor in the best Shunsho, and Torii Kiyonaga.
comparative politics. He began his sense of the word. The life of the mind

51
 A Report to Our Readers
THE COMMITTEE ON
INTELLECTUAL CORRESPONDENCE
is an international project spon- Continuing Our Work
sored by the Suntory Foundation
This is Issue No. 6 of the twice-a-year Correspondence, a project of the Committee on
(Japan), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Intellectual Correspondence. The committee was initiated by Masakazu Yamazaki,
Berlin and the American Academy Wolf Lepenies, and Daniel Bell, and the organizations they represent, and funded by
of Arts and Sciences. the Suntory Foundation. With Issue No. 5, the Council on Foreign Relations joined as
publisher. We now have a circulation of over seven thousand to academic and public
Directors figures in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and to all the members of the Council. Much of
Daniel Bell Correspondence appears in Japanese in the periodical Asteion of the Suntory Foundation.
Wolf Lepenies Our intention has been to create a cultural milieu which reduces the insularity
Masakazu Yamazaki between countries and the increased specialization within disciplines. One of our
ways is to focus in each issue on a significant or neglected topic. In the past, this
Editor has been the digital age, history revisited, and translation. Here we take up the world
press and the Internet, and the vicissitudes of language in the global village.
Daniel Bell
As the publisher, the Council on Foreign Relations also states the following:
Managing Editor The articles in Correspondence do not represent any consensus of beliefs. We do not
expect that readers will sympathize with all the opinions they find here, but we hold
David Jacobson that Correspondence can do more to inform public opinion by a broad hospitality to
divergent ideas than it can by identifying itself with one school. While we do not accept
Associates responsibility for the views expressed in articles that appear in these pages, we do accept
Japan the responsibility for giving them a chance to appear.
Masayuki Tadokoro
Germany
Michael Becker Contributors to this Issue
U.S. ■ K. Anthony Appiah is Professor of Afro-American Studies and of Philosophy
Mark Lilla at Harvard University, and author of In My Father’s House, a study of African
Alexander Stille identity. ■ David A. Bell is Professor of French History at Johns Hopkins
University. ■ Stefan Collini is a Reader in Intellectual History at Cambridge
Intern University. ■ Brendan Dooley is Associate Professor of History at Harvard and
Catherine Pitt author of The Social History of Skepticism. ■ Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior edi-
tor of the New Yorker. He was a speech writer for President Jimmy Carter and
Graphic Designer the editor of the New Republic. ■ Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao is Professor of
Sociology at National Taiwan University. ■ Georges Khalil heads the group
Glenna Lang Modernity and Islam at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. ■ Nina Khruscheva is
a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School. ■ Walter Laqueur
U.S. Address: is editor of the Journal of Contemporary History. ■ Paul Lemerle served as the
CORRESPONDENCE French Minister to the U.N. on economic and social matters. ■ Jacques Lesourne
c/o Council on Foreign Relations was managing director of Le Monde from 1991 to 1994. ■ André Liebich teaches
58 East 68th Street at the École des Hautes Études Internationale in Geneva. ■ David Lipsey, a recent
New York, New York 10021 Labour peer, was political editor of the Economist and author of The Secret Treasury.
■ Sonja Margolina writes on Russia for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Telephone: (212) 434-9574 ■ Ryan McKittrick is a freelance theatre critic in Boston. ■ Darrin McMahon is

FAX: (212) 861-0432 the author of the forthcoming Enemies of the Enlightenment. ■ Pratap Mehta,
Associate Professor of Government at Harvard, is the author of the forthcom-
E-mail: cic@cfr.org
 ing Consolations of Modernity: Adam Smith and the Making of the Enlightenment.
■ Herbert Passin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Columbia. He is the author
of Japanese and the Japanese: The Language and the People. ■ Ilan Stavans is
The Committee on Intellectual Professor of Spanish at Amherst College and the author of The Hispanic Condition.
Correspondence gratefully acknowl- ■ Fritz Stern is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University.
edges the continued support of the ■ Alexander Stille is a writer at the New Yorker and the author of Benevolence
Sasakawa Peace Foundation of and Betrayal: Five Italian-Jewish Families Under Fascism. ■ Shigehiko Togo is
Japan and a generous grant for the the Tokyo correspondent for the Washington Post. ■ Stefan Voigt is an economist
year 2000 from the Zeit-Stiftung at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany. ■ George Walden, a former min-
Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, a foun- ister in the Thatcher government, is the author of the autobiography Lucky George.
dation of the German newspaper
Die Zeit. The editor wishes to thank Beatrice White, Sulochana Glazer, and Bill Kovach for editorial help.

52