Author: NYRblog

Richard Dorment

With the opening of an exhibition of nine important old master paintings from Dulwich Picture Gallery at the Frick Gallery this month, New Yorkers are at most a mere cab ride away from seeing major yet relatively little-known paintings by van Dyck and Poussin, Rembrandt, Murillo, Watteau, and Gainsborough. Even if you think you know these artists well, go anyway: these pictures rarely travel and many are atypical of the artist’s work.

The Canaletto, for example, is not the usual view of Venice but one of a relatively small number of pictures painted during his English period. It shows the wooden arches of Old Walton Bridge over the Thames (c. 1754) on a thundery summer afternoon only moments before a cloudburst will drench the tiny figures animating the foreground. Similarly, most of us think of Peter Lely as a portrait painter; but in his early Nymphs by a Fountain (c. 1650), included here, his brush describes bare flesh so sensuously that you can see at once why Restoration wantons like Barbara Villiers or Louise de Keroualle wanted to be painted by him. And Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s The Flower Girl—Spring (c. 1668–70) is neither portraiture nor still life nor genre painting, but a combination of all three. The little street girl is painted life-size and with the surface brilliance usually reserved for portraits of noblewomen. Presented to us without sentimentality, her appeal is to the eyes and not—as so often with Murillo’s urchins—to the heartstrings.

What’s been sent to the Frick is only an amuse-bouche to encourage Americans to visit the historic collection at Dulwich the next time they are in London. As at the Frick, the collection isn’t huge and it is displayed in a building that’s human in scale, so getting to know the collections in depth is much easier than it is at lumbering giants like the Met or National Gallery. And as the present show demonstrates, a small exhibition can be every bit as lively and often more rewarding than a blockbuster. The pictures in this show were clearly chosen not only to resonate with the Frick’s holdings, but to supplement them. For instance, the Frick has two wonderful full-length Gainsboroughs, neither of which is as fresh or as intimate as Dulwich’s full-length double portrait of Elizabeth and Mary Linley—the Linely Sisters (1771–72). Believe it or not, there is no Poussin at the Frick and its only Watteau, The Portal at Valenciennes (1709–10), isn’t a fête galante like Les Plaisirs du bal (c 1717) from London. And although the Frick has eight van Dycks they are all portraits, whereas Dulwich has lent a magnificent early subject picture, Samson and Delilah (c 1618–20).

The story of how the Dulwich collection came to be formed is almost as remarkable as the pictures in it. In 1790 the Polish King Stanislaw Augustus commissioned the French art dealer Noël Desenfans and his Swiss business partner Sir Francis Bourgeois to put together a collection of pictures he would purchase en bloc to form the nucleus of the National Collection of Poland. Five years later, their work was finished. But before they could deliver the pictures, international politics intervened to kill the sale. When the country formerly known as Poland was partitioned by Russia, Austria and Prussia, Stanislaw Augustus abdicated, leaving the art dealers with stock they couldn’t readily shift in a market already flooded with paintings displaced by the French Revolution. As a result, the collection not only remained more or less intact, but by selling several of the smaller works, they were able to make further important acquisitions.

When Bourgeois died in 1811, he left his pictures to Dulwich College, nowadays among the most prestigious day schools for boys in London. He chose Dulwich because it already possessed a small (and distinctly doubtful) picture collection and also because of its location in a leafy village far from the polluted air of central London. To build his gallery, he named the architect Sir John Soane, who came up with a design so innovative that his building is studied by architects even today as a model of how to create ideal viewing conditions for displaying pictures, which are illuminated indirectly with natural light provided by skylights. Any visit to the gallery includes an obligatory peek into the lugubrious mausoleum opposite the entrance where Bourgeois and Desenfans lie side by side in eternal rest, proving that even if you can’t take your art collection with you, at least you don’t have to leave it too far behind.

Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery is England’s first purpose-built public art gallery and so well worth taking in that it attracted 140,000 visitors last year. Though only four miles from central London, anyone who lives North of the River Thames will tell you that getting there can be an adventure—and not in a good way. For Dulwich Village is in the vast no man’s land across the Thames known as South London. A glance at an A-Z street map shows that the underground system hardly extends into this part of the city. Though it can be reached either by car or by public transportation, your best bet is to take one of the trains to Dulwich Village that run frequently from Victoria station, with a fifteen minute walk to the gallery at the other end. It used to be possible to drive, but nowadays if you took your car you’d be letting yourself in for a nightmare experience.

Even when motorists pay the hated congestion charge (which has now been raised from £8 to £10 by the new mayor, Boris Johnson), they still sit for hours in traffic queues caused by never ending road works—a situation exacerbated by the urgent need to replace the Victorian pipes that supply Londoners with their water. For months at a time, major roads are closed arbitrarily. And with no central office to coordinate the work, London’s traffic has descended into chaos. For example, it was recently announced that no fewer than five bridges over the Thames are to be closed to traffic, some for up to a year, which means that soon the whole of South London will be cut off from the rest of the city. It may be an exaggeration to say that these treasures of the Dulwich Picture Gallery will be more accessible to us on East 70th Street than they are when the pictures are hanging back home, but with a mayor as useless as Boris Johnson, you New Yorkers don’t know how lucky you are.

Tony Judt

Félix Vallotton

In 1992 I was chairman of the History Department at New York University—where I was also the only unmarried straight male under sixty. A combustible blend: prominently displayed on the board outside my office was the location and phone number of the university’s Sexual Harassment Center. History was a fast-feminizing profession, with a graduate community primed for signs of discrimination—or worse. Physical contact constituted a presumption of malevolent intention; a closed door was proof positive.

Shortly after I took office, a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study—beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the premiere of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.

How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour—that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.

The life of an early-’60s adolescent male was curiously confined. We still inhabited our parents’ moral universe. Dating was difficult—no one had cars; our homes were too small for privacy; contraception was available but only if you were willing to confront a disapproving pharmacist. There was a well-founded presumption of innocence and ignorance, for boys and girls alike. Most boys I knew attended single-sex schools and we rarely encountered women. A friend and I paid hard-earned money for Saturday morning dance classes at the Locarno Ballroom in Streatham; but when it came time for the annual social, the girls from Godolphin & Latymer School laughed at us all the same. We cut the experiment short.

Even if you got a date, it was like courting your grandmother. Girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips, and petticoats. Older boys assured me that these were mere erotic impedimenta, easily circumnavigated. I found them terrifying. And I was not alone, as any number of films and novels from that era can illustrate. Back then we all lived on Chesil Beach.

And then, to our surprise, we learned that we were part of the “sexual revolution.” Within a matter of months, a generation of young women abandoned a century of lingerie and adopted the miniskirt with (or without) tights. Few men of my acquaintance born later than 1952 have even heard of—much less encountered—most of the undergarments listed above. The French pop star Antoine sang optimistically of buying contraceptive pills in the Monoprix (approximately France’s K-Mart). At Cambridge, cool and worldly, I helped a friend arrange an abortion for his girl. Everyone was “playing with fire.”

Or claiming to. My generation was obsessed with the distinction between theory and practice—I knew a man in California whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to “Theory and Practice in theory and in practice.” Sexually, we lived the contrast. In theory we prided ourselves on being the cutting edge. But in practice we were a conformist cohort: shaped more by our ’50s youth than our ’60s adolescence. A surprising number of us married young—often to our first serious girlfriend. And of that number, many have stayed married. Championing the inalienable right of everyone to do anything, we had scant occasion to do much ourselves.

Our predecessors had grown up in the claustrophobic world of Lucky Jim and Look Back in Anger. Constrained by the limits they were taught to respect, they might try to seduce an office junior or a female student but were instinctively rule-bound: they did not expect to live out their fantasies. We, by contrast, had trouble distinguishing our fantasies from everyday life. The solipsism of the ’60s—“make love, not war,” “do your own thing,” “let it all hang out”—certainly destroyed taboos. But it also muffled the conscience: nothing was off-limits.

In 1981, shortly after arriving at Oxford, I invited a student and her boyfriend to dinner. My wife and I lived in a country village and by the time the young couple arrived it was snowing hard. They would have to stay overnight. I casually pointed out the tiny guestroom with its double bed and wished them good night. Only much later did it occur to me to wonder whether the pair were sleeping together. When I delicately alluded to the matter a few days later, the young woman patted me on the shoulder: “Don’t worry Tony, we understood. You ’60s types!”

Our successors—liberated from old-style constraints—have imposed new restrictions upon themselves. Since the 1970s, Americans assiduously avoid anything that might smack of harassment, even at the risk of forgoing promising friendships and the joys of flirtation. Like men of an earlier decade—though for very different reasons—they are preternaturally wary of missteps. I find this depressing. The Puritans had a sound theological basis for restricting their desires and those of others. But today’s conformists have no such story to tell.

Nevertheless, the anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the university for failing to take seriously “her” needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.

So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman—isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case.

On another occasion, a student complained that I “discriminated” against her because she did not offer sexual favors. When the department ombudswoman—a sensible lady of impeccable radical credentials—investigated, it emerged that the complainant resented not being invited to join my seminar: she assumed that women who took part must be getting (and offering) favorable treatment. I explained that it was because they were smarter. The young woman was flabbergasted: the only form of discrimination she could imagine was sexual. It had never occurred to her that I might just be an elitist.

This story is revealing. When discussing sexually explicit literature—Milan Kundera, to take an obvious case—with European students, I have always found them comfortable debating the topic. Conversely, young Americans of both sexes—usually so forthcoming—fall nervously silent: reluctant to engage the subject lest they transgress boundaries. Yet sex—or, to adopt the term of art, “gender”—is the first thing that comes to mind when they try to explain the behavior of adults in the real world.

Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ’60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.

Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”

The playful mantras of our adolescence have become a way of life for later generations. At least in the ’60s we knew, whatever we said, that sex was about…sex. All the same, what followed is our fault. We—the left, academics, teachers—have abandoned politics to those for whom actual power is far more interesting than its metaphorical implications. Political correctness, gender politics, and above all hypersensitivity to wounded sentiments (as though there were a right not to be offended): this will be our legacy.

Why should I not close my office door or take a student to a play? If I hesitate, have I not internalized the worst sort of communitarian self-censorship—anticipating my own guilt long before I am accused and setting a pusillanimous example for others? Yes: and if only for these reasons I see nothing wrong in my behavior. But were it not for the mandarin self-assurance of my Oxbridge years, I too might lack the courage of my convictions—though I readily concede that the volatile mix of intellectual arrogance and generational exceptionalism can ignite delusions of invulnerability.

Indeed, it is just such a sense of boundless entitlement—taken to extremes—that helps explain Bill Clinton’s self-destructive transgressions or Tony Blair’s insistence that he was right to lie his way into a war whose necessity he alone could assess. But note that for all their brazen philandering and posturing, Clinton and Blair—no less than Bush, Gore, Brown, and so many others of my generation—are still married to their first serious date. I cannot claim as much—I was divorced in 1977 and again in 1986—but in other respects the curious ’60s blend of radical attitudes and domestic convention ensnared me too. So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Reader: I married her.

—This post is part of a continuing series of memoirs by Tony Judt.

David Cole

John Yoo; drawing by David Levine

Whatever else you might say about John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who drafted several memos in 2002 authorizing the CIA to commit torture, you have to admit that he’s not in the least embarrassed by the condemnation of his peers. On February 19, the Justice Department released a set of previously confidential reports by its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) excoriating Yoo’s legal work—but stopped short of referring him for professional discipline by his state bar association. Since then Yoo has written Op-Eds for The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer trumpeting his “victory.” In the Wall Street Journal piece, entitled “My Gift to the Obama Presidency,” Yoo argued that President Obama owes him a debt of gratitude for “winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.” Four days later, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Yoo called the decision not to refer him for bar discipline “a victory for the people fighting the war on terror.”

This is a bit like a child coming home with an F on his report card and telling his parents that they should congratulate him for not getting suspended, or President Clinton proclaiming to Hillary that Congress’s failure to impeach him was a vindication of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The one thing practically everyone interviewed by the OPR agreed about was that Yoo’s legal work on the torture memos was atrocious. Bush’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey called it “slovenly.” Jack Goldsmith, another Republican who headed the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004, said that Yoo’s August 2002 memo justifying torture by the CIA was “riddled with error” and a “one-sided effort to eliminate any hurdles posed by the torture law.”

Daniel Levin, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel after Goldsmith left and, like Yoo, was a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, described his reaction upon reading Yoo’s memo as “This is insane, who wrote this?” And Stephen Bradbury, who became acting head of the OLC after Levin’s departure, also under President Bush, and who wrote several memos authorizing torture himself, said of Yoo’s arguments about presidential power, “Somebody should have exercised some adult leadership” and deleted his arguments altogether. These are the assessments not of human rights advocates or left-wing critics but of Yoo’s Republican colleagues at the Justice Department.

The OPR itself, which is comprised of career civil servants charged with monitoring ethics violations by department lawyers and is not known for being eager to discipline its own, decided before President Obama took office that Yoo and Jay Bybee, Yoo’s superior, had violated their ethical duties as attorneys. After considering responses from Yoo and Bybee, the OPR reaffirmed that Yoo had “put his desire to accommodate the client above his obligation to provide thorough, objective, and candid legal advice, and…therefore committed intentional professional misconduct.” It found that Bybee, who signed the 2002 torture memos and is now a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, had acted in “reckless disregard” of the same professional obligation. It recommended that both lawyers be referred to their respective state bar associations for discipline.

So how can Yoo portray this process as a victory? Only because a single Justice Department official, Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, overruled the OPR’s considered opinion, finding that while Yoo and Bybee exercised “poor judgment,” they did not knowingly provide false advice, and therefore were not guilty of professional misconduct. But Margolis’s assessment was in no way an endorsement of Yoo’s theories or practices. He described the issue of whether Yoo engaged in misconduct as a “close question,” called the memos “an unfortunate chapter in the history of the Office of Legal Counsel,” and said he feared that “John Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, views of executive power.” In short, no one reviewing Yoo’s work gave it a passing grade. And he narrowly escaped a referral to his bar association for disciplinary action only because of the decision of a single lawyer in the Justice Department.

The OPR and Margolis largely agreed that Yoo’s memos contained many serious flaws. Yoo interpreted the ban on torture to require the intentional infliction of severe pain of the level associated with death and organ failure, a standard he imported from a health benefits statute having no relevance to the issue at hand. The standard is literally meaningless, as neither death nor organ failure are associated with any particular level of pain. Yoo appears to have adopted it to permit the CIA to inflict an extraordinarily high degree of pain.

Yoo wrote that an interrogator could inflict even severe pain as long as he did not “specifically intend” to do so. He advised that the president could order outright torture, and that a criminal statute to the contrary could not constrain the president as commander in chief. (Indeed, he later told the OPR that the president could not even be prohibited from ordering the extermination of an entire village of civilians.) And he reasoned that an interrogator who engages in torture could defend his behavior by claiming that it was done because of “necessity” or because it was required for self-defense—of the nation, not of the interrogator himself. In both cases Yoo employed unprecedented and virtually unrecognizable versions of these defenses. (Indeed, the OPR report discloses that even the lawyer who worked under Yoo on the memos initially found his argument about self-defense “wholly implausible,” because self-defense requires an imminent threat to the person invoking it, and interrogators faced no such threat.)

The OPR and Margolis were in full accord that these opinions are deeply misguided. But where the OPR viewed the errors cumulatively as evidence of an extraordinary and ultimately bad-faith effort to contort the law to a predetermined result, Margolis considered the errors one by one, and concluded that no single error “of itself” warranted a finding of professional misconduct. Margolis, in short, missed the forest for the trees.

In a more fundamental sense, however, both the OPR and Margolis failed to confront the real wrong at issue. They focused exclusively on the manner by which Yoo and Bybee arrived at their result, rather than the result itself. What is most disturbing about the torture memos is not that they employ strained reasoning or fail to cite this or that authority, but that they do so in the name of authorizing torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of human beings. Remarkably, neither the OPR nor Margolis directly considered the illegality of the conduct that was authorized by the memos. The OPR stated that it “did not attempt to determine and did not base our findings on whether…the Memos arrived at a correct result.” Margolis also did not address whether the conduct authorized was illegal. But surely that is the central issue.

Why, then, did the OPR and Margolis fail to take up the question of the legality of the brutality itself? Almost certainly because doing so would have implicated not only John Yoo and Jay Bybee, but all of the lawyers who approved these methods over the five-year course of their application, including, within the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, Daniel Levin, and Stephen Bradbury, Bybee’s successors as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the two attorneys general, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. Notwithstanding their criticism of Yoo’s errors, all of these men concurred with the basic conclusion of the Yoo and Bybee memos that the tactics being used by the CIA were legitimate.

Goldsmith, Levin, and Bradbury could have reversed the authority that Yoo and Bybee gave the CIA. They each actively participated in rewriting memos to replace or supplement the initial 2002 memos—but while the subsequent memos were written more carefully, they reached the same bottom line and continued to allow the CIA to inflict waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and other illegal tactics on detainees.

Margolis sought to excuse Yoo and Bybee in part on the basis of the extraordinary circumstances in which they wrote their initial memos, within one year after September 11. It’s not clear why this consideration would warrant approval of torture. In any case, Yoo and Bybee’s successors in the Justice Department wrote their memos not in the heat of the moment, but after the program had been in place for years, and had been the subject of substantial criticism by the CIA’s own inspector general. He found, among other things, no evidence that the practices in fact obtained useful information that lawful, noncoercive tactics would not have obtained. Yet the OLC continued to approve of the practices.

Responsibility for the illegal brutality inflicted on CIA and Guantánamo detainees cannot be limited to Yoo and Bybee. It extends to all those who approved the tactics—even those so eager later to condemn Yoo’s reasoning. And unless we as citizens demand that these lawyers be held to answer for the wrongs done in our name, responsibility extends to all of us, too. We must continue to insist on accountability—whether in congressional hearings, citizens’ commissions, civil lawsuits, or the marketplace of ideas. The essential lesson must be that torture and cruel treatment are not policy options—even when a lawyer is willing to write an opinion blessing illegality.

—An expanded version of this post will appear in the April 8 issue of The New York Review.

Anthony Grafton

Oxford Fellows ‘envisaging the weather’; drawing by Max Beerbohm
from Zuleika Dobson, or An Oxford Love Story, 1911

British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy.

As an “Occasional Student” at University College London in the early 1970s and a regular visitor to the Warburg Institute, Oxford, and Cambridge after that, I—like many American humanists—envied colleagues who taught at British universities. We had offices with linoleum; they had rooms with carpets. We worked at desks; they sat with their students on comfy chairs and gave them glasses of sherry. Above all, we felt under constant pressure to do the newest new thing, and show the world that we were doing it: to be endlessly innovative and interdisciplinary and industrious.

British humanists innovated too. Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Frances Yates and Peter Burke, and many others formulated new ways of looking at history for my generation. But British academics always admitted, as we sometimes did not, that it is vital to preserve and update our traditional disciplines and forms of knowledge: languages, precise interpretation of texts and images and objects, rigorous philosophical analysis and argument. Otherwise all the sexy interdisciplinary work will yield only a trickle of trendy blather.

There was a Slow Food feel to British university life, based on a consensus that people should take the time to make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to produce, regularly and rapidly. By contrast, Michael Baxandall spent three years at the Warburg Institute, working in the photographic collection and not completing a dissertation, and several more as a lecturer, later on, writing only a few articles. Then, in 1971 and 1972, he produced two brilliant interdisciplinary books, which transformed the study of Renaissance humanism and art, remain standard works to this day, and were only the beginning of a great career. Gertrud Bing, E.H. Gombrich, J.B. Trapp, and A.M. Meyer, who administered the Warburg in those days, knew how to be patient. Their results speak for themselves.

From the accession of Margaret Thatcher onward, the pressure has risen. Universities have had to prove that they matter. Administrators and chairs have pushed faculty to win grants and publish and rewarded those who do so most successfully with periods of leave and other privileges that American professors can only dream of. The pace of production is high, but the social compact among teachers is frayed. In the last couple of years, the squeeze has become tighter than ever. Budgets have shrunk, and universities have tightened their belts to fit. Now they are facing huge further cuts for three years to come—unless, as is likely, the Conservatives take over the government, in which case the knife may go even deeper.

Administrators have responded not by resisting, for the most part, but by trying to show that they can “do more with less.” To explain how they can square this circle, they issue statements in the Orwellian language of “strategic planning.” A typical planning document, from King’s College London, explains that the institution must “create financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment.”

The realities that this cloud of ink imperfectly conceal are every bit as ugly as you would expect. Humanists who work on ancient manuscripts and languages or write about premodern history or struggle with hard issues in semantics don’t always make an immediate impact or bring in large amounts of grant money—even when other scholars around the world depend on their studies. If you don’t see the point of their work, why not eliminate them? Then you have room for things that pay off immediately.

At King’s College London, the head of arts and humanities has already informed world-famous professors—one, David Ganz, in paleography, the study of ancient scripts, and two in philosophy—that their positions will be discontinued at the end of the academic year. All three are remarkable scholars who have had remarkable students. Paleography—to take the field that I know best—is to the study of texts what archaeology is to the study of cities and temples. Paleographers lay the foundations other humanists build on. They tell historians and literary scholars which texts were written when and what they say, which scripts were used where, and why, and by whom. Training in the analysis of manuscripts is central to the world-famous programs in medieval studies that are among the glories of King’s College. That is why Jeffrey Hamburger, the Harvard art historian who is one of the world’s leading experts on medieval manuscripts, has helped to organize a worldwide campaign to reverse the decision. (Similarly, the Chicago philosopher Brian Leiter has publicized the cuts in philosophy on his widely read blog).

The cuts are not intended to stop with the first victims. All other members of the arts and humanities faculty at King’s are being forced to reapply for their jobs. When the evaluation is finished, around twenty-two of them will have been voted off the island. Even the official statements make clear that these faculty members will be let go not because they have ceased to do basic research or teach effectively, but because their fields aren’t fashionable and don’t spin money. When criticized, the principal of King’s, Rick Trainor, complained that foreign professors don’t appreciate the financial problems that he faces. He’s wrong. All of us face drastic new financial pressures.

But we also appreciate a principle that seems to elude Mr. Trainor—as well as his colleagues at Sussex, who have begun similar measures, and the London administrators who seem bent on turning the Warburg Institute from a unique research center, its open stacks laden with treasures uniquely accessible to all readers, into a book depository. Universities exist to discover and transmit knowledge. Scholars and teachers provide those services. Administrators protect and nurture the scholars and teachers: give them the security, the resources, and the possibilities of camaraderie and debate that make serious work possible. Firing excellent faculty members is not a clever tactical “disinvestment,” it’s a catastrophic failure.

Are academic salaries really the main source of the pressure on the principal? Vague official documents couched in management jargon are hard to decode. The novelist and art historian Iain Pears notes that King’s has assembled in recent years an “executive team with all the managerial bling of a fully-fledged multi-national, complete with two executive officers and a Chief information officer.” The college spent £33.5 million on administrative costs in 2009, and is actively recruiting more senior managers now. These figures do not evince a passion for thrift. Moreover, the head of arts and humanities proposes to appoint several new members of staff even as others are dismissed. Management probably does want to save money—but it definitely wants to install its own priorities and its own people, regardless of the human and intellectual cost.

Universities become great by investing for the long term. You choose the best scholars and teachers you can and give them the resources and the time to think problems through. Sometimes a lecturer turns out to be Malcolm Bradbury’s fluent, shallow, vicious History Man; sometimes he or she turns out to be Michael Baxandall. No one knows quite why this happens. We do know, though, that turning the university into The Office will produce a lot more History Men than scholars such as Baxandall.

Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme.

At this point, American universities are more invested than British in the old ways. Few of us any longer envy our British colleagues. But straws show how the wind blows. The language of “impact” and “investment” is heard in the land. In Iowa, in Nevada, and in other places there’s talk of closing humanities departments. If you start hearing newspeak about “sustainable excellence clusters,” watch out. We’ll be following the British down the short road to McDonald’s.

Martin Filler

The winning design for the US Embassy in London, by KieranTimberlake (KieranTimberlake Architects)

One of the most well-intentioned artistic initiatives ever undertaken by the United States government has turned out to be among its least successful: the embassy design program meant to present America’s best architectural face abroad. The latest evidence of this effort’s often dispiriting outcome is the selection of the little-known Philadelphia firm of KieranTimberlake to create a new US embassy in London.

Planned for a derelict industrial site of almost five acres near the Thames in south-of-the-river Wandsworth, the project carries the astonishing price tag of $1 billion, and brings to mind an International Style corporate headquarters as well as a medieval castle keep. At first glance, this 12-story cube-shaped structure recalls countless other glass-sheathed office buildings. However, upon closer inspection other associations predominate.

The embassy’s “ground” floor is elevated atop a bunker-like podium, the top of which is densely landscaped with grassy berms, trenches, and a water feature best described as a moat. The building’s square footprint, chunky massing, fortified perimeter, and relation to the river make it a twenty-first-century avatar of the Tower of London, several miles to the northeast on the opposite bank of the Thames.

The building’s exterior cladding of glass—a material often equated simplistically with governmental openness—is treated with polymer plastic to lessen its projectile force in case of explosion. Similarly, the undulating earthworks at the base of the tower are meant to deter the advance of truck bombers. Given the likelihood of another al-Qaeda assault on the capital city of America’s principal ally in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, such defensive measures seem only prudent, but the extensive checklist of protective requirements included in the design brief clearly had an inhibiting effect on even the most gifted of the competition’s entrants.

The new legation building would replace Eero Saarinen’s US Embassy Chancery of 1955-1960, which occupies the entire west side of Grosvenor Square in north-of-the-river Mayfair. Whether intentionally or not, the modular, gridded elevations of KieranTimberlake’s project look like a stack-up of three Saarinen façades. (The old building has been sold for a reported $533 million to the government of Qatar, which plans to redevelop it into a hotel and apartments, but must retain the once-controversial, now-landmark street front.)

Eero Saarinen’s US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London (Alastair Grant, AP Images)

Saarinen’s Brutalist limestone intrusion, topped off with a garish gold sculpture of a screaming eagle, spoke as revealingly of America’s postwar hegemony as the mixed message of KieranTimberlake’s scheme does of our very different place in the world order fifty years later. Apart from the need for more office space, the old embassy’s locale was deemed to make it too inviting for terrorists, and thus prompted the move to a less populous neighborhood that could accommodate a setback of some one hundred feet for a buffering “blast zone.”

KieranTimberlake’s scheme was strongly opposed by the two British members of the seven-person design jury—the architect Richard Rogers and Peter Palumbo, a former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain. They were quickly joined by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the government’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, which initially announced it could not approve the winning design.

According to The Guardian, Rogers and Palumbo “fought to the death” to keep their American fellow jurors from approving this entry, and instead pushed for the proposal by Thom Mayne of the Santa Monica firm Morphosis which they maintain was “touched by genius.” Even though Mayne’s scheme is not nearly as fine as his magisterial Federal Office Building of 2000-2007 in San Francisco, it was indeed the best among four finalists, which also included Pei Cobb Freed & Partners’ tepid glass-skinned, cross-braced ovoid and a confused neo-Constructivist composition by Richard Meier, which recalls the gigantic cash register pavilion at the 1939 New York Word’s Fair.

For a century and a half after independence, America’s foreign representatives were customarily housed in existing quarters built for other purposes. In 1926, Congress created the Foreign Service Buildings Office to oversee the design and construction of US embassies and consulates, but the results were hardly distinguished, and ran to Beaux-Arts Classical or Colonial Revival cliches. The widespread acceptance of Modernism after World War II led to a radical change in this country’s official architectural presence abroad.

In 1954, the State Department’s revitalized embassy design program embraced the new architecture in much the same spirit that it exported jazz and Abstract Expressionism: as talismans of American creative freedom at the height of the cold war. A major principle of this endeavor—the subject of Jane C. Loeffler’s 1998 book The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies—was to give the new structures “a distinguishable American flavor,” while at the same time referring to local traditions in contemporary form.

Several architects followed that mandate all too literally. Edward Durrell Stone’s perforated New Delhi embassy of 1954-1958 summons up a lacy MGM seraglio; the colonnaded Athens embassy of 1959-1961 by Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborative evokes a savings-and-loan Parthenon; and John Johansen’s circular Dublin embassy of 1957-1964 resembles a cross between an Irish Martello tower and a Jet Age airport hotel. The extent to which these culturally condescending designs—risibly aloof from the surrounding urban setting—all exhibit “a distinguishable American flavor” is somewhat akin to an obese tourist decked out in cargo shorts, baseball cap, and Hawaiian-print shirt.

Things got even worse after the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998, the reaction to which marginalized aesthetic concerns in favor of heightened security.  As Loeffler wrote in 2005, “the inaccessibility of these [more recent] buildings coupled with the new standardized design, may be harming efforts to portray America as an open society.”

With KieranTimberlake’s scheme, the costume has changed to the architectural equivalent of Kevlar body armor thinly disguised underneath a Tommy Hilfiger seersucker suit. No doubt to soften the new embassy’s Fortress America connotations, the architects have gussied up their presentation with crowd-pleasing environmental details of the sort that real estate developers throw in to gain planning approval for otherwise objectionable projects.

Here, the exterior will sport photovoltaic cells to collect solar power and make the building energy self-sufficient. One corner near the top of the structure will be cut out to create a covered terrace planted with large trees, a dubiously sustainable gesture derisively dismissed in advanced ecological circles as “parsley.”

Perhaps KieranTimberlake’s arboreal reference is Shakespearean. In Macbeth, enemy troops advance on the title character’s stronghold wearing tree branches to camouflage themselves, and thereby fulfill the cryptic prophecy that he will remain safe until “Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane.” In Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce reframes that line as “a burning would is come to dance inane,” a not-inappropriate gloss on this tragicomic evidence of America’s postmillennial quandary in architectural guise.

Robert Barnett

President Barack Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama in the Map Room of the White House, February 18, 2010 (Pete Souza/whitehouse.gov)

Since President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama on February 18, the details of the closely-watched encounter have been carefully parsed, from the history of the room in which the two men met (the White House Map Room, an apparent indicator that a meeting is private, yet not personal) to the absence of the First Lady (making the meeting more official), and the serving of tea (making it less formal). Even the garbage bags that the Dalai Lama passed on his exit (seen as either incompetence by White House staff or a veiled message to Beijing) and the Dalai Lama’s flip-flops (seen as a metaphor for his policies or a rebuttal to Rupert Murdoch’s claim that the Tibetan leader wears Gucci shoes) were debated.

Yet some of the most interesting details—those that may bear most directly on Obama’s handling of the China-Tibet issue—were missed. Chief among them, perhaps, was that the official White House description of the meeting omitted any mention of religion. It did not even pretend that the two leaders had discussed religion, spirituality, world peace, or any of the other fig-leaves used by European leaders like Gordon Brown to mollify Beijing when committing the offense of meeting with the Dalai Lama. There was also little mention of the fact that the President and his spokesmen did not use the rhetoric about democracy or freedom that in the past has made American leaders (and sometimes the Dalai Lama) look like ideologues.

Instead, administration officials described the meeting as a discussion in plain terms about the political situation in Tibet, thus sending a muscular message to Beijing, which, after all, remains firmly in charge of that territory. The press also downplayed the Dalai Lama’s separate, extended meeting with the Secretary of State, although that could be taken by Beijing as a serious indication that the US views him as a national leader. This perhaps explains why the State Department referred to the Dalai Lama as “a religious and cultural leader,” while the White House described him much more assertively as also “a spokesman for Tibetan rights.”

But what may turn out to have been the most explosive element of ritual emerged only during a minor speech on a quite different topic by the Dalai Lama the following day, and was noticed by a sharp-eared AFP reporter and a Tibetan specialist from VOA: President Obama gave his visitor a gift, mentioned in no official statements—a specially bound volume containing copies of the five letters sent by Roosevelt and Truman directly to the young Dalai Lama when he ruled what was, in practice, an independent country. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to guess how that went down in Beijing.

Still, Chinese leaders must have relished the visual record of the event. The subtext of the single photograph of the meeting, released by the White House, was clear to anyone familiar with Buddhist, Asian or Chinese iconography, literate or not: it showed the President speaking to the Dalai Lama with his right hand raised, much as in the teaching mudra used to show the Buddha preaching to his disciples; while the Dalai Lama, like an attentive pupil, has turned to listen, so that his eyes cannot be seen.

The 5th Dalai Lama meeting the Qing Emperor Shunzhi in 1653

The most famous visual record of any encounter between the Tibetan pontiff and a worldly ruler is the mural in the Potala Palace that depicts the 5th Dalai Lama meeting the Qing Emperor Shunzhi in 1653. The Chinese authorities misread that powerful image in the past: they reproduced it in the 1980s in innumerable postcards and propaganda books because it shows the Emperor sitting on a slightly higher throne than his Tibetan visitor—until they discovered that all Tibetans and any Buddhist could see that the mural shows that the Dalai Lama has his right hand raised and is clearly teaching his imperial disciple. This time, it is the Emperor who is preaching.

But even for the most secular Tibetans, the White House photograph is puzzling: it shows the President with his legs crossed, unthinkable casualness for a Chinese or Tibetan leader. And then there’s the tea: the photograph shows a tea-cup and a cookie in front of the Dalai Lama, while the President has neither, an unmistakable sign that the President did not deign to drink with his visitor. In case anyone thinks that drinking tea together is not important, they need to reread their copy of the Dukula, the 5th Dalai Lama’s autobiography, in which he describes his 1653 meeting. Immediately after noting that the Emperor’s throne was slightly higher than his, he writes:

gsol ja byung ba’i dus sngon la ‘thung gsungs kyang de ‘dra mi ‘gab zhus pas dus mnyam du ‘thang gnang ba sogs mthong gzos shin tu che ba mdzad

When tea was served, the king asked me to drink first. I replied that this would not be proper. So he suggested we drink at the same time. He showed much respect.

That’s something you won’t read in Beijing’s accounts of the meeting, just as you won’t find the contemporary descriptions—unthinkable to those brought up on the Chinese myth that Tibetan leaders had to kowtow to the Emperor—of Shunzhi descending from his throne to meet the Dalai Lama, walking “approximately four bow-lengths” (about 30 feet) towards him and taking him by the hand. Consider The Secret History of the Potala Palace, the famous feature film produced in Lhasa in 1989, in which the historic 1653 meeting was recreated by contemporary Tibetan actors without a kowtow: it has been banned by Beijing since its first showing.

The White House photograph’s symbolism was presumably unintentional, but it carries another echo from the past: American officials tried to tone down Dalai Lama meetings once before, and it did not work out well. In 1908, the great Tibetologist William Woodville Rockhill, then the US envoy in Beijing, insisted that the 13th Dalai Lama reverse the precedent of 1653 and show submission to the Imperial throne probably because the US sought a Chinese alliance in order to deny the British market access to the Qing domains. The 13th compromised and went down only on his knees, not unlike Lord Macartney, sent to China in 1793 as the first British envoy, who had gone down on one knee before the Emperor Qianlong. But Rockhill’s efforts at staging conciliation failed: within 2 years the Qing had sent an invasion force to Lhasa, and three years later the 13th Dalai Lama, disappointed with misjudged American conciliation and increasingly close to the British, declared Tibet to be independent.

His successor, the 14th Dalai Lama, travels the world constantly scoring symbolic victories and will be unconcerned about the President’s teaching mudra or the single cup of tea. Inside Tibet, however, people might fear that the shade of Rockhill is whispering equivocating advice in the corridors of the White House. This would seem a little unjust if the other details are considered (though the garbage bags don’t help). But it raises the central and as yet unanswered question, which is whether Obama’s long-awaited initial foray into the Tibet issue will bring Beijing, masters of the land, any closer to settling with their Tibetan neighbors, masters of symbolic ritual.

Pankaj Mishra

Kashmiri women looking over a wall at the funeral ceremony of Sajjad Ahmed, a suspected militant allegedly killed by Indian security forces, Rajpora, India, February 19, 2010 (Dar Yasin, AP Images)

In New Delhi last week the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan met for the first time since the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008; the official talks concluded with both sides arguing over what they should talk about. India demanded that Islamabad prosecute the Pakistani militants responsible for the Mumbai attacks more vigorously. Pakistan insisted that the core issue between the two countries remains the India-held Muslim majority valley of Kashmir, where, out of a population of some 7.6 million people, more than 80,000 people have died since an insurgency supported by Pakistan began in 1989.

In one sense at least, the faltering dialogue between India and Pakistan resembles the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East: by the time any ways to proceed are agreed upon, usually with much acrimony, peace seems even further away. Last week’s talks in Delhi most likely came about because of pressure from the United States. The Obama administration seems to have decided that it cannot do without Pakistani assistance in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and that Pakistan has its own strategic interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan has rewarded this overdue acknowledgment of its concerns by arresting senior Taliban leaders who have long been living in its territory. In return, the Obama administration has pressed India to be more conciliatory over Kashmir.

Of course, protecting American security interests isn’t the only reason why India and Pakistan should work toward a solution in Kashmir. As Basharat Peer’s new book, Curfewed Night, recounts, India’s occupation of the valley, enforced by more than half a million soldiers, has given a powerful raison d’etre to militant organizations in Pakistan, which have grown exponentially since 1989. Peer, a Kashmiri journalist and currently a Fellow at the Open Society Institute, was in his teens when the insurgency began in Srinagar, the capital of India-held Kashmir. His own friends, enraged by police firing upon unarmed demonstrators, left the valley to train in militant camps set up across the border by Pakistani intelligence and army officers. Sent away to India by his parents, Peer witnessed the progressive alienation and isolation of Muslims as Hindu nationalists unleashed one violent campaign after another through the 1990s. He later returned to Kashmir as a journalist, and Curfewed Night reflects his diverse experience of the valley by combining memoir with reportage, history, and analysis.

In clear, swift prose, Peer evokes the relentless ordeal of checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and disappearances that Kashmiri Muslims live with. He explores the valley’s syncretic Islam, and the attempts to undermine it by fundamentalists from Pakistan. He describes the plight of the poorest among more than a hundred thousand Kashmiri Hindus, who fled the valley after radical Islamists killed many of them. He also investigates the widespread use of torture against Kashmiri young men by Indian security forces, particularly the practice of inserting live copper wires into penises, which led to hundreds of cases of impotence in the valley.

Peer is not writing about a remote past; torture and extrajudicial execution remain commonplace in Kashmir today, even though Pakistan-trained or indigenous militants are fewer and less lethal. Nor have India and Pakistan gotten any closer to resolving their dispute over the region. Pakistani army and intelligence officers loudly invoke the alleged existential threat from India, helping them to preserve the ISI’s extra-constitutional authority (and business monopolies) in Pakistan and severely limiting the prospects for democracy and equitable economic growth.

Kashmir also exacts a great price from India, which is still overwhelmingly poor despite its fast-growing GDP, while radicalizing many among the country’s 150 million Muslims. The Chennai daily, The Hindu, revealed last month that Pakistani militants demanding the Indian army’s withdrawal from Kashmir during the four-day terror attack on Mumbai in November 2008 were being prompted via their mobile phones by an Indian Muslim, who advised them to call the media to condemn India’s “two-faced” policy toward Muslims. The new round of talks could be derailed by another terrorist attack in India—such as the one last month that killed 15 Indians and foreigners in the Western Indian city of Pune—or against an Indian target in Afghanistan.

In any case, the Obama administration doesn’t seem much interested in slowing or reversing the arms buildup in South Asia—the necessary prelude to peace in the region—as it promotes major arms deals with both India and Pakistan. As is well known, the Pakistani army under General Pervez Musharraf eagerly appropriated for their own purposes the $10 billion in aid showered on Pakistan by the Bush administration after September 11. Beholden for his survival to the army and the ISI, Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari seems far from renouncing the venal ways that earned him long spells in prison. Nevertheless, American military sales to Pakistan, paid for with aid money, will increase almost two-fold next year. Meanwhile, American defense firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing are currently vying for the world’s biggest weapons contracts from India, which is racing to modernize its military.

Almost entirely exempt from parliamentary debate or public scrutiny, the unprecedented expansion of India’s defense budget, which rose 34 percent last year, is a bonanza for the country’s alarmingly numerous corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and army officers. The consensus on defense spending is facilitated by an increasingly right-wing press that is constantly raising the alarm about various external and internal enemies. There are, as the political scientist Sunil Khilnani recently warned, grounds to fear the emergence in India of a “military-industrial complex”—especially while the Indian state, as Khilnani points out, is at war with its own people in Central India: the Mao-inspired guerillas who have organized India’s traditionally disadvantaged tribal communities and low-caste peasants into a militant movement spanning 20 of India’s 28 states.

The apparent failure of an ambitious counterinsurgency campaign called “Operation Green Hunt” has recently forced the Indian government to propose ceasefire talks with the “Maoists.” As politicians and columnists frequently point out, “they are our own people.” But no such magnanimity may be extended to the 4 million Kashmiri Muslims who many Indians regard as blatantly treasonous after twenty years of anti-India, Pakistan-supported militancy.

Of course most Kashmiris, weary of both radical Islamists from Pakistan and Indian security forces, long to be free of their overbearing neighbors. But even before its recent jingoistic phase, Indian press and television tended to obscure the clear Kashmiri demand for self-determination, preferring to highlight the depredations of Islamic fundamentalists. The complexity of the conflict as well as strictures on travel continue to inhibit foreign reporters from covering what Bill Clinton in 2002 described as the “world’s most dangerous place.”

More disturbingly, a generation that has grown up in the shadow of the insurgency may soon be provoked into a new cycle of extreme violence. Scantily reported in the Indian and international press, Kashmir has been paralyzed for the last two weeks by strikes and clashes between police and young Kashmiri Muslims angered by the alleged killing of two unarmed teenagers by Indian soldiers. The possibility of participating in India’s growing economy will only partly defuse the fresh rage and frustration of these youths: they may prove to be no less compromising than their predecessors—Basharat Peer’s generation—who took up arms against the Indian state. No doubt Pakistani army and intelligence officials are watching them with interest, especially as talks between India and Pakistan go nowhere and the two countries embark upon their costliest arms race yet.

Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland (Scribner, 2010)

In “The Anger of Exile,” from the March 25 issue of The New York Review, Colm Tóibín discusses two recent novels by writers from Lebanon now living in North America. One of them is Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati, set in a Lebanon that is, according to Tóibín, “rendered in luscious, luxuriant detail, with an extraordinary sense of felt life both in the present and in the remembered past, as though Bonnard were an abiding spirit here.” But in Alameddine’s novel, Tóibín writes, “always there is the legacy of war, like gray or black pigment, both in the narrator’s memory and in the very gaps between buildings, the ‘shards of metal, twisted rubble, strips of tile, and broken glass’ that are still ‘scattered across piles of dirt.’”

Tóibín refers to Alameddine’s writing as an act of “painting,” and perhaps it is no surprise to learn that—along with storytelling (a hakawati is a traditional storyteller)—Alameddine has spent time practicing that art. During a period of about four years in the 1990s, he painted more than 270 self-portraits, “hoping to become a better painter,” he says, “and contemplating the idea of an immortality project.” Here are some of his paintings; more can be seen on his Web site, rabihalameddine.com.

Mary Beard

The new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Fizwilliam Museum, Cambridge; photograph by Mary Beard

I am one of a team that has been redesigning the Greek and Roman Galleries in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. We’ve finished—and a couple of weeks ago the new display opened to the public. This is nothing on the scale of the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of course. But, after the British Museum and the Ashmolean in Oxford (also recently “re-hung”), the Fitz has the best collection of classical antiquities in the UK—thanks to generous donations since the mid-nineteenth century from professors and alumni of the University.

Our task was, partly, to bring it up to date in museological terms. So we have used a lot of label and panel space in discussing not only the ancient history of the objects, but also what has happened to them since—who found them, who bought or collected them, who restored or conserved them, and how? My own favorite story is the “Parthenon metope” brought back to Cambridge from Athens by Edward Daniel Clarke, who went on to become the professor of mineralogy. He bought it from the Turkish garrison commander at about the same time as Lord Elgin’s men were removing their “marbles.” And Clarke was very smug that his own piece of the famous temple had been acquired completely legitimately. The only problem, as you can now read in the gallery, is that it was not a piece of the Parthenon at all, but a piece of Roman sculpture probably from a nearby theater. Smugness is always dangerous in archaeology.

One big dilemma was how to welcome visitors to the galleries: what object should greet them as they entered? This was made more difficult to decide as two different routes converged on our entrance, and we did not want to privilege one above the other. We decided to show a colossal head of Antinous, found in the eighteenth century at Hadrian’s Villa a Tivoli. Raised on a pedestal above eye level, and set at an angle, he manages to greet visitors entering by both doors.

Antinous has a colorful history. He was the young Bithynian “favorite,” and presumably lover, of the emperor Hadrian, who drowned in mysterious circumstances in the river Nile in AD 130. “Did he jump, was he pushed or did he merely fall?” are questions that have never been resolved. Marguerite Yourcenar’s idea in her Memoirs of Hadrian that it was more than simple suicide, but a religious self-sacrifice, is one of many appealing, extravagant, and untestable theories. Hadrian, in any case, is said to have been grief stricken: he turned the boy into a god and littered the Roman world with his statues—of which this is one.

It was only at the opening party that I began to wonder how we were going to sell Antinous to the hundreds of seven-year-olds who visit these galleries (seven being the age that the British National Curriculum decided that schoolchildren should study Greek art). How were we intending to make Antinous and his story meaningful for them—without prompting a stream of complaints from outraged parents?

A few days later I realized that a new book by Christopher P Jones, New Heroes in Antiquity, possibly held an answer. Modern heroism—as in “hero worship,” “culture hero,” “working class hero,” and so on—is not quite the same as the ancient version. The heroes that Jones discusses were divine or semi-divine figures, occupying part of that large grey area between “proper” Olympian gods and poor suffering, ordinary humanity. For the Greeks and Romans, “hero-worship” was not a metaphor. The grave of a hero would become a religious shrine (in Greek, heroon) and receive sacrifices and offerings from those who came, literally, to worship.

A krater depicting Helen and Menelaos at the Sack of Troy (440-430 BCE), one of the objects on view in the exhibition Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece (Walters Art Museum)

It is impossible to pin down exactly what the qualifications were for ancient heroic status. Like many ancient religious categories it was capacious and its boundaries conveniently vague (as a general rule, Greco-Roman polytheism tended to incorporate rather than exclude). For a start, anyone who fought in the Trojan War was a “hero”—for the ancient Greeks saw this as the great former age when all “mortals” were “heroes.” Some were even given their own shrines. Visitors to Sparta in the fifth century BCE would have been able to visit the Menelaion—an impressive sanctuary of King Menelaos and his errant wife Helen (also a “hero” on this definition—and worshipped in Sparta well into the Roman period, and probably for longer than Menelaos himself). There are some tremendous ancient images of this kind of hero in a stunning new exhibition, Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece, organized by the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, currently on show at the Frist Center in Nashville.

But Jones is more concerned with heroes who were created from the classical period of Greece on. He starts from the Spartan general Brasidas who died fighting the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War and was worshipped as a “hero” in the city where he had fallen, with sacrifices and annual games. He shows that it was probably “heroization” that Cicero had in mind when, four centuries later, he planned a “shrine” (Latin fanum), to be erected for his dead daughter, Tullia. And his last main example from pagan antiquity is Antinous—whose cult, as established by Hadrian, he sees very much in ancient “heroic” terms.

It’s an excellent book. But I found myself most interested in how it would help me in my own particular dilemmas with the seven-year-olds. We can skate over the details of the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous, and we can wonder about different versions of heroism—from the Homeric “heroes” on view on the Athenian vases through Antinous, to their own view of who might count as a hero.

Christopher P. Jones, New Heroes in Antiquity: From Achilles to Antinoos (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece is on view until April 25, 2010 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.

Cathleen Schine

Miniature Portrait of Jane Austen, 19th century (Anonymous/Morgan Library & Museum)

I met a friend for lunch the other day at The Morgan Library. In honor of their Jane Austen exhibit, they are serving a Regency lunch. Whenever I hear the word Regency, I think not of Jane Austen, but of Dickens’s Old Mr. Turveydrop, celebrated everywhere for his Deportment, who named his son Prince. I don’t know if Old Mr. Turveydrop would have approved, but we thought it was a delicious Regency lunch—Poached Atlantic Salmon, Fricassee of Macomber Turnips & Mushrooms, Mustard Greens, Baked Apple Cobbler—though what exactly about the menu qualified as Regency is somewhat obscure. The turnips? I have never eaten more delicious turnips. I happily imagined Jane Austen eating delicate, sweet Macomber turnips, too. But at home, after a little on-line research, I came to realize how unlikely it is that she did—Macomber turnips seem to be a cross breed of radishes and rutabagas developed by the two Macomber brothers in Westport, Massachussetts in 1876.

Here is what Virgina Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, said about Jane Austen in 1876, the year the Macomber turnip was born:

I never, for example, knew a person thoroughly deaf to humour who did not worship Miss Austen, or, when her writings were assailed, defend themselves by saying that the assailant had no sense of humour. Miss Austen, in fact, seems to be the very type of that kind of humour which charms one large class of amiable persons; and Austenolatry is perhaps the most intolerant and dogmatic of literary creeds. To deny Miss Austen’s marvelous literary skill would be simply to convict oneself of the grossest stupidity. It is probable, however, that as much skill may have been employed in painting a bit of old china as in one of Raphael’s masterpieces. We do not therefore say that it possesses equal merit.

(And here is the fantastic collection of criticism about Jane Austen where I found it.)

I particularly like Stephen’s term Austenolatry. I think you can date this latest wave of Austenolatry to 1995 when Clueless, the brilliant film adaptation of Emma, came out. Emma is my favorite Jane Austen novel, one of my favorite novels period, a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong. I worship at the Austenolatry shrine in general, but even so, I was not prepared for how deeply moved I was by the Morgan’s exhibit.

There, among a collection of prints from Austen’s time, of illustrations from her books, early editions, a rough copy of her first novel, Susan, with corrections and excisions squeezed in between the narrow lines of exquisite handwriting, were several of her letters.

A letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, cross written to save paper, February 8-9, 1807
(Morgan Library & Museum)

And though I was ready to be overwhelmed by seeing some of the letters by one of the greatest novelists in history written in her own hand, I didn’t anticipate how intimate an experience it would be.

Of course we think we know a writer through that writer’s works: reading a novel is like a whispered conversation. And of course, simultaneously, we know that we don’t know the real writer at all. In the case of Jane Austen, whose relatives began protecting the myth very quickly after her death and even before it, we never will.

But the letters—they were such wonderfully quotidian, idiosyncratic, exuberant, dilatory, unstructured glimpses. And glimpses they were. For most of the letters just one side of the creased paper crowded with handwriting was displayed. Somehow, this seemed only to add to the sense that these were moments of a life into which we were getting a flash of insight.

In a 1799 letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen wrote:

My cloak is come home and here follows the pattern of its’ lace—if you do not think it wide enough, I can give 3 d. a yard more for yours, & not go beyond the two Guineas, for my cloak altogether does not cost quite two pounds. … I saw some Gauzes in a shop in Bath Street yesterday at only four s. a yard , but they were not as good or so pretty as mine.—Flowers are very much worn, & Fruit is still more the thing.—Eliz: has a bunch of Strawberries, & I have seen Grapes, Cherries, Plumbs & Apricots—There are likewise Almonds & raisins, french plumbs & Tamarinds at the Grocers, but I have never seen any of them in hats.

In another letter she gaily comments on a dance, listing her partners—“the two St. Johns, Hooper Holder—and very prodigious—Mr. Matthew, with whom I called the last, & whom I liked the best of my little stock.”—then goes on to describe the other ladies: “There were very few Beauties, & such as there were, were not very handsome.” My favorite part is the picture of a Mrs. Blount—“the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, & fat neck.”

There is something wonderfully spontaneous about these letters—they are full of fun and gossip. The sense of artless immediacy makes it all the more clear how very artful Austen was in creating the immediacy in her novels. The letters are framed: yellowed sheets of paper creased where Austen had folded them into square envelopes. Post scripts are tossed in above the address, “crossed” lines wriggle sideways over other lines in order to say as much as possible yet save paper and postage, the way we used to speak as quickly as we could, long ago in the days of Bell telephone, on our 3-minute long distance calls.

There is a letter from Edmund Wilson urging Nabokov to include Jane Austen in his Masters of European Fiction course (he did), although Wilson weirdly thought Mansfield Park her masterpiece. And then, oddly, wonderfully, there is Kipling. Instead of the term Austenolatry, Kipling’s word is Janeite. There in the Morgan Library in a glass case on the last page of an unlikely story by Rudyard Kipling about WWI soldiers who form a secret group of Janeites is the sentence that, for me, summed up why this exhibit exists, why Jane Austen has been the subject of Austenolatry, why we are all still such ardent Janeites (even Leslie Stephens started to appreciate her in his old age): “There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.”

“A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy” is on view at the Morgan Library and Museum until March 14.

Ian Buruma

A poster for Jew Süss, 1940

Hitler’s Third Reich produced no great films. Leni Riefenstahl was a brilliant innovator and superb editor, with an extraordinary gift for visual effects, but I would hesitate to call Triumph of the Will, or even Olympia great films, unless greatness can be confined to technical prowess. Nazi Germany did not have the equivalent of an Eisenstein or Pudovkin, who still managed to create masterpieces out of political propaganda. Perhaps this reflects a difference between National Socialism and Communism, even though Stalin was no less murderous than Hitler. Great work can still emerge from the utopian ideal of the workers’ paradise. It is harder to imagine artistic excellence arising from violent racism. D.W. Griffith’s white supremacist movie The Birth of a Nation is a possible exception to this rule, but this film, too, is more remarkable for its technical innovation than anything else.

The most infamous Nazi propaganda film is Veit Harlan’s Jew Süss, made in 1940. It’s a vicious reworking of Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel about an 18th century Jewish financier, named Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, whose daughter is raped and killed by his boss, the Duke of Württemberg. In the film, it is the sinister Jew who cheats the innocent Duke, infiltrates and corrupts the Gentile community, and rapes a pure Christian woman, who drowns herself as a consequence. To the cries of “Kill the jew!” from the baying mob, Süss is hanged in the climactic scene. Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss a brilliant new documentary on Harlan and his legacy directed by Felix Moeller, does not dwell on Harlan’s motivation. Instead, it shows how the director’s family was affected by his notorious career. It is a brilliant exposé of the way history resonates through the generations, of the ripples that continue to emanate from one man’s nefarious actions.

Jew Süss was a huge success in Germany. Heinrich Himmler ordered all SS men to see it. Veit Harlan became Goebbels’s star director, displaying in several films his technical mastery of crowd scenes and lurid dream sequences, as well as an appalling taste for sentimental excess (rather like Riefenstahl’s feature films). And his wife, the Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum, had a glittering career in wartime movies as a romantic blonde heroine who almost invariably dies beautifully, usually of drowning, earning her the sobriquet Reichswasserleiche, the Reich’s water corpse.

It is impossible to know for sure why Harlan, who had many Jewish friends and whose first wife was in fact Jewish, agreed to direct this vile piece of work. Opportunism, perhaps; careerism; an attraction to power; or perhaps he shared enough of the Nazi ideals to join the brown ranks. Maybe it was all these things. After the war, Harlan was tried twice for complicity in crimes against humanity. He maintained that he had been forced to make the movie. And twice he was let off as a mere mitlaüfer, a fellow traveler.

Veit Harlan (Deutsches Filminstitut)

There is always a temptation to ascribe all oddities and misfortunes in a family to some dramatic factor in the past, but the fact that two of Harlan’s three daughters, and one niece, married Jews is unlikely to be a total coincidence. One of the marriages ended badly. Maria Körber, whose acting career began in one of her father’s films, now says that she only married a Jew because she felt sorry for what he had suffered. The second daughter, Susanne Körber, committed suicide after her husband died. Her daughter, Jessica Jacoby, considers herself Jewish, and writes for a German-Jewish paper. Harlan’s niece, Christiane, married Stanley Kubrick, who had wanted to make a film about Harlan, but never managed to get the script right.

The most intriguing member of the immediate family is Harlan’s eldest son, Thomas, who was a keen Hitler Youth during the war, and worked with his father after the war. But he changed his mind about everything when his father was declared innocent for the second time by a judge, who, like many German jurists at the time, had wartime blood on his own hands. “That did it,” he says in the film. “I wanted nothing more to do with those kind of people.”

As often happened in such cases, he became an obsessive seeker of justice, a Nazi hunter in Poland, a Communist revolutionary in Portugal and Chile, and a lifelong critic of his father. He was the son, who took on the burden of guilt from an unrepentant father. Old and sick himself now, Thomas declares that this burden should never be lifted. Responsibility, he says, should be born by my children, and the children of my children, and their children, and so on and so on.

It is a frightful burden, and one can understand (even if one cannot quite sympathize with) the feeling of his half brother, Kristian, an architect living in Zürich, who refuses to publicly acknowledge his father’s guilt, and is furious at what he sees as Thomas’s betrayal. Hearing some of his siblings talk, it is as though Thomas, and not Veit Harlan, is the main villain for exposing to the public the family’s raw nerves. Even Jessica Jacoby, who is anything but soft on the past, finds an excuse for her grandfather, whose propaganda played a part, however indirectly, in the murder of her Jewish grandfather. It was Harlan’s bitterness about being left by his first (Jewish) wife, Dora Gershon, that explains his collaboration with the Nazis, she believes.

But the saddest statement in the film comes from one of Harlan’s granddaughters, Alice, who is French, lives in Paris, and doesn’t even speak German (although she looks like a propaganda picture of blonde, blue-eyed, Aryan womanhood). Alice is Thomas’s daughter. When her grandfather’s film was discussed in school, Alice denied that she was related, despite her surname. She now works as a physical therapist. Some of her patients are Jewish survivors. She knows that she is blameless for her grandfather’s sins. Yet she talks about her “tainted blood.” Jew Süss, and the horrors it represented, she says, has left a “genetic trace,” a guilt that was passed on from father to child.

Alice Harlan is utterly innocent, of course. But the very notion of tainted blood, alas, is uncomfortably close to what stirred up all the violence in the first place.

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, written and directed by Felix Moeller and distributed by Zeitgeist films, will be playing at Film Forum in New York City March 3–March 16.

A new exhibition of street photography, “Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959,” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, brings together work by photographers ranging from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans to Helen Levitt, W. Eugene Smith, and Weegee; it also includes paintings by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart—all of whom were making images during and immediately after World War II. “Abstract Expressionism, film noir, Beat poetry, and the New Journalism are all widely recognized aftershocks of World War II,” writes Lisa Hostetler in the catalog of the exhibition. “It is time to add the ‘psychological gesture in photography’ to the list.” These photographs, with their emphasis on mood and atmosphere, and their exploration of blurred motion, shadows, and solitary figures, are very different from images made before the war.

On view through April 25, “Street Seen” focuses on six photographers in particular: Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, Robert Frank, and William Klein—whose Man under El, New York, from 1955, appears in the March 25 issue of The New York Review. The catalog has just been published by the Milwaukee Art Museum with DelMonico Books and Prestel.

Martin Filler

Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea (Flickr/08 ROTCH simoneau)

Although Alvar Aalto first won worldwide attention in the early 1930s as a leading exponent of the International Style—a reductive form of modern architecture proposed as equally applicable anywhere on the planet—his more expressive, site-specific work from the mid-Thirties onward marked him as a regional designer in the best sense, and the quintessential Finnish master builder. In 1989, however, thirteen years after Aalto’s death, his friend and official biographer Göran Schildt revealed Aalto’s rollicking 1943 junket to Germany at the invitation of Albert Speer, Hitler’s court architect-turned-munitions chief, to inspect construction there just as the Final Solution shifted into overdrive. Schildt’s tragicomic account reads like a plot outline for The Three Stooges Go to Hell.

Thus, it is startling that Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen chooses to omit that episode in Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics, particularly in view of her publisher’s claim that the new book offers a “dramatically different interpretation” of Aalto’s central part in defining Finland’s international reputation during the Cold War—or, more to the point, after his homeland sided with Germany against the Soviet Union during World War II.

Through an ingenious postwar public-relations campaign, the resourceful Finns—implicitly anti-Communist notwithstanding their official neutrality after 1945—exploited Aalto’s humane, organic version of high-style Modernist design (along with work by his like-minded though lesser compatriots) to dispel unpleasant memories of Finland’s Faustian bargain with Hitler, a misalliance apologists ascribed to age-old hatred of Russian oppression and rationalized by the truism “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (In fairness, Finland was attacked by Soviet troops in 1939 and hoped to use its alliance with Germany two years later to protect against further Soviet encroachment and regain the considerable territory it had lost.)

Alvar Aalto (center) visiting the studio of Arno Breker, Hitler’s official state sculptor, with Finnish architects invited by Albert Speer, Berlin, 1943; from Göran Schildt’s Alvar Aalto: The Mature Years

Indeed, apart from his reprehensible dalliance with Nazi Germany, Aalto’s humanism—exemplified by his love of warm, natural materials and move away from severe, mechanistic imagery—remains beyond question. By the time World War II began, Aalto had abandoned the International Style and developed a far more personal approach reflected in buildings responsive to their natural settings, exemplified by his Villa Mairea of 1937-1939 in Noormarkku, the interior of which connects with and evokes its surrounding landscape with remarkable immediacy yet an utter lack of representational kitsch.

Uneasy with the industrial connotations of tubular metal furniture designed during the Twenties by modernists including Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Aalto devised bent and molded plywood chairs, stools, and tables that are warm to the touch and less reflective of light and sound. Tellingly, many of those pieces are still in production after almost eighty years.

There is no evidence that Aalto harbored any Fascist sympathies either before or after that one major lapse. But because Pelkonen (a Yale architecture professor and co-editor of the catalog for the traveling Eero Saarinen retrospective now on view at the Yale University Art Gallery) purports to address twentieth-century geopolitics—an ambitiously broad topic—her fixation on Soviet-Finnish relations and her silence on Finland’s and Aalto’s wartime involvements with Germany fatally undermine her stated intention.

Furthermore, there is nothing novel in Pelkonen’s observation that Aalto’s work embodied the same patriotic values earlier expressed by the architecture of Finland’s National Romantic movement, a regional variant of Arts and Crafts “total design” that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century. Likewise, Aalto’s sensitivity to nature and responsiveness to the environment have been amply illuminated by many other scholars who have noted his subtle evocations of arctic terrain in schemes such as the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The architectural historian Barbara Miller Lane’s National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (2000) placed Aalto firmly within the broader setting of culture and détente that Pelkonen promises but fails to fully elucidate. Lane’s pioneering research into the architecture of the Third Reich—epitomized by her classic 1968 study Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945—helped legitimize that long-taboo topic by confronting stark realities this new book ignores. Despite the Finnish-born Pelkonen’s linguistic advantage in dealing with Aalto, she seems subject to the same willful amnesia that still enshrouds this dark chapter in their country’s history.

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009)

Timothy Snyder

Independence Day, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1993 (Josef Koudelka, Magnum Photos)

The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century.

Born in 1909, Bandera matured at a time when the cause of national self-determination had triumphed in much of eastern Europe, but not in Ukraine. The lands of today’s Ukraine had been divided between the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy when World War I began, and were divided again between the new Soviet Union and newly independent Poland when the bloodshed ceased. The Soviets defeated one Ukrainian army, the Poles another. Ukrainians thus became the largest national minority in both the Soviet Union and Poland. With time, most Ukrainian political parties in Poland reconciled themselves to Polish statehood. The Ukrainian Military Organization, however, formed of Ukrainian veterans in Poland, followed the movement that sought to change the boundaries of Europe: fascism. With Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922 in Italy, as their model, they mounted a number of failed assassination attempts on Polish politicians.

By the time the Ukrainian Military Organization became the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), in 1929, a younger generation was dominant. Young terrorists such as Stepan Bandera were formed not by the prewar empires, but by fascist ideology and the experience of national discrimination in Poland. In the 1920s the Polish authorities had closed Ukrainian schools and ignored Poland’s promise to provide for Ukrainian national autonomy. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as a new Polish government sought reconciliation with its five million Ukrainian citizens, Ukrainian nationalists acted decisively to prevent any compromise settlement. Bandera was one of the main organizers of terror campaigns intended to prevent Ukrainians from accepting the Polish government by provoking Polish retaliation. The main targets of their assassination attempts were Ukrainians and Poles who wished to work together. The OUN assassinated the leading advocate of Ukrainian-Polish rapprochement, Tadeusz Holówko, in his sanatorium bed. They also sought (but failed) to kill Henryk Józewski, who was implementing a policy of national concessions to Ukrainians in Poland.

Stepan Bandera on a 2009 postage stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth

Bandera and his fellow Ukrainian nationalists were aware of the far greater repressions on the Soviet side of the border, where far more Ukrainians lived; given the effectiveness of the Soviet secret police, however, they could only act within Poland. They did nevertheless react to Josif Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine in 1933. Bandera was probably involved in planning the revenge assassination of a Soviet diplomat in Poland late that year. Ukrainian nationalists hoped to use the trial of the young Ukrainian who carried out the assassination as a forum to spread the news of the famine, but Polish authorities did not allow this. Ukrainian nationalists (and many other Ukrainians in Poland and elsewhere) were embittered by the failure of the west to respond to the mass death in the USSR. 1933 was also the year when Hitler took power in Germany. Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as the only power that could destroy both of their oppressors, Poland and the Soviet Union. OUN activists were in contact with German military intelligence.

In June 1934, the OUN assassinated Bronislaw Pieracki, the Polish minister of internal affairs, when he began to negotiate with moderate Ukrainian groups in Poland. For his part in organizing the murder, Bandera was sentenced to death—commuted to life imprisonment–-in January 1936. He was released from prison when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, and now sought to bring the OUN under his own command. Instead, it split into two factions, with Bandera commanding the more radical, known as the OUN-Bandera or OUN-B.

Bandera was active in a time and place where violence was very practicable, but where the chances that it would lead to Ukrainian national independence were minimal. His followers fell ever further into the maelstrom of violence on the eastern front, without thereby creating a Ukrainian state. The Germans did destroy Poland in 1939, as the Ukrainian nationalists had hoped; and they tried to destroy the Soviet Union in 1941. When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union that June, they were joined by the armies of Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Slovakia, as well as small contingents of Ukrainian volunteers associated with the OUN-B. Some of these Ukrainian nationalists helped the Germans to organize murderous pogroms of Jews. In so doing, they were advancing a German policy, but one that was consistent with their own program of ethnic purity, and their own identification of Jews with Soviet tyranny.

Ukrainian nationalist political goals, however, were not identical with Hitler’s. In June 1941, supporters of Bandera declared independence for a Ukrainian state, while promising cooperation with Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler was not interested in Ukrainian independence on these or any terms, and eventually had most of the leadership of the OUN-B arrested. Bandera himself was incarcerated in Berlin and then in the camp at Sachsenhausen. Like other east European nationalists of stature, he was being held in reserve for some future contingency when he might be useful to the Nazis.

Ukrainian partisans, 1943

Bandera was still in the German camp at Sachsenhausen, and without influence, when his group took command of a partisan army in early 1943. As the tide turned against the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad, Ukrainians who had served the Germans as auxiliary policemen left the German service and went into the forest.  Among their duties as policemen had been the mass killing of west Ukrainian Jews. These Ukrainians, some of them members of the OUN-B, formed the core of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UPA), which declared itself against both the existing German occupation and the coming Soviet one. Two leaders of Bandera’s organization, Mykola Lebed’ and Roman Shukhevych, brought the UPA under the control of the OUN-B.

Under their command, the UPA undertook to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. UPA partisans murdered tens of thousands of Poles, most of them women and children. Some Jews who had taken shelter with Polish families were also killed. Poles (and a few surviving Jews) fled the countryside, controlled by the UPA, to the towns, controlled by the Germans. Those who survived formed self-defense organizations, or joined the German police (replacing the Ukrainians) or the Soviet partisans who were fighting against the UPA. In all of these conflicts Poles took revenge on Ukrainian civilians. The UPA, for that matter, probably killed as many Ukrainians as it did Poles, since it regarded people who did not adhere to its own brand of nationalism as traitors.

After the Red Army drove the Germans from Ukraine in summer 1944, the UPA engaged Soviet forces in large-scale partisan war. In late 1944 the Germans released Bandera from Sachsenhausen, and he considered returning to Ukraine. His fellow Ukrainian nationalists dissuaded him from doing so, on the ground that he was too valuable as a symbol of the struggle and should not risk his life. Meanwhile thousands of Ukrainians died fighting for independence under his name. No other underground force resisted the Soviets for as long as the UPA, or caused such losses. By the end of the 1940s, however, the Soviets prevailed, having killed more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians, and deported many more to Siberia. If Soviet counts are reliable, Ukrainian nationalists suffered more mortal casualties fighting communist rule than did the US Army in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

It is this legacy of sacrifice that many in western Ukraine today associate with Bandera, and do not wish to be forgotten. The UPA also fought on the Polish side of the border, resisting a Polish communist regime there that was deporting Ukrainians from their homeland. Many people who joined the UPA in both the Soviet Union and communist Poland did so after the war, in self-defense, and took no part in the earlier murder campaigns. As the Cold War began, some OUN-B members and UPA fighters were recruited by British and American intelligence, and then dropped by parachute in doomed missions across the Soviet border. Soviet and Polish communists, having consolidated their rule by the late 1940s, demonized the OUN and the Ukrainian partisans as “German-Ukrainian fascists,” a characterization accurate enough to serve as enduring and effective propaganda both within and without the Soviet Union. Bandera himself remained in Germany after the war, a leading figure in the fractious milieu of Ukrainian nationalists in Munich. He remained faithful to the idea of a fascist Ukraine until assassinated by the KGB in 1959.

Fascism never had a significant influence in eastern and central Ukraine, and was only important in west Ukrainian political life in the very special circumstances of World War II and the partisan war against Soviet power, when terrorists with underground experience enjoyed a natural advantage. Nevertheless, Bandera is associated with a certain alternative history of the country, one which is beyond the reach of Russia and the Soviet Union. Bandera was born in the Habsburg monarchy rather than the Russian Empire, and his movement arose in Poland rather than the Soviet Union. These lands only became part of the Soviet Union as a result of World War II. Ukrainian nationalists from this region believed that they were taking part in a larger European movement, and they were right. The recovery from fascist ideology in southern, central, and western Europe took place only after World War II, in circumstances of American occupation and prosperity. For many people in western Ukraine, the triumphant westward march of the Red Army through their homeland was not so much a liberation as the beginning of another occupation, Soviet after Polish and German. The UPA was the only hope for national self-defense.

This is one telling of Ukrainian history, but it is not the dominant one. Yushchenko was soundly defeated in the first round of the presidential elections, perhaps in some measure because far more Ukrainians identify with the Red Army than with nationalist partisans from western Ukraine. Bandera was burned in effigy in Odessa after he was named a hero; even his statue in west Ukrainian Lviv, erected by city authorities in 2007, was under guard during the election campaign. For Yushchenko, who is not a west Ukrainian, the embrace of Bandera was part of a more general attempt to distance Ukraine from the legacy of Stalinism. As everyone who is interested in the history of Soviet Ukraine knows, from Vladimir Putin in Moscow to Ukrainian nationalist emigrants in Toronto, partisans fighting under Bandera’s name resisted the imposition of Stalinist rule with enormous determination. Thus there seems to be a certain binary political logic to Yushchenko’s decision: to glorify Bandera is to reject Stalin and to reject any pretension from Moscow to power over Ukraine.

Consistent as the rehabilitation of Bandera might be with the ideological competition of the mid-twentieth century, it makes little ethical sense today. Yushchenko, who praised the recent Kiev court verdict condemning Stalin for genocide, regards as a hero a man whose political program called for ethnic purity and whose followers took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and, in some cases, in the Holocaust. Bandera opposed Stalin, but that does not mean that the two men were entirely different. In their struggle for Ukraine, we see the triumph of the principle, common to fascists and communists, that political transformation sanctifies violence. It was precisely this legacy that east European revolutionaries seemed to have overcome in the past thirty years, from the Solidarity movement in Poland of 1980 through the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005. It was then, during the Orange Revolution, that peaceful demonstrations for free and fair elections brought Yushchenko the presidency. In embracing Bandera as he leaves office, Yushchenko has cast a shadow over his own political legacy.

Tony Judt

Straus Park, New York, 1997; photograph by Dominique Nabokov

“Identity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In Italy, the politics of identity were reduced in December 2009 to house-to-house searches in the Brescia region for unwanted dark faces as the municipality shamelessly promised a “white Christmas.”

In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.

As so often, academic taste follows fashion. These programs are byproducts of communitarian solipsism: today we are all hyphenated—Irish-Americans, Native Americans, African-Americans, and the like. Most people no longer speak the language of their forebears or know much about their country of origin, especially if their family started out in Europe. But in the wake of a generation of boastful victimhood, they wear what little they do know as a proud badge of identity: you are what your grandparents suffered. In this competition, Jews stand out. Many American Jews are sadly ignorant of their religion, culture, traditional languages, or history. But they do know about Auschwitz, and that suffices.

This warm bath of identity was always alien to me. I grew up in England and English is the language in which I think and write. London—my birthplace—remains familiar to me for all the many changes that it has seen over the decades. I know the country well; I even share some of its prejudices and predilections. But when I think or speak of the English, I instinctively use the third person: I don’t identify with them.

In part this may be because I am Jewish: when I was growing up Jews were the only significant minority in Christian Britain and the object of mild but unmistakable cultural prejudice. On the other hand, my parents stood quite apart from the organized Jewish community. We celebrated no Jewish holidays (I always had a Christmas tree and Easter eggs), followed no rabbinical injunctions, and only identified with Judaism over Friday evening meals with grandparents. Thanks to an English schooling, I am more familiar with the Anglican liturgy than with many of the rites and practices of Judaism. So if I grew up Jewish, it was as a decidedly non-Jewish Jew.

Did this tangential relationship to Englishness derive from my father’s birthplace (Antwerp)? Possibly, but then he too lacked a conventional “identity”: he was not a Belgian citizen but the child of stateless migrants who had come to Antwerp from the tsarist empire. Today we would say his parents were born in what had not yet become Poland and Lithuania. However, neither of these newly formed countries would have given the time of day—much less citizenship—to a pair of Belgian Jews. And even though my mother (like me) was born in the East End of London, and was thus a genuine Cockney, her parents came from Russia and Romania: countries of which she knew nothing and whose languages she could not speak. Like hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants, they communicated in Yiddish, a language that was of no discernible service to their children.

I was thus neither English nor Jewish. And yet, I feel strongly that I am—in different ways and at different times—both. Perhaps such genetic identifications are less consequential than we suppose? What of the elective affinities I acquired over the years: am I a French historian? I certainly studied the history of France and speak the language well; but unlike most of my fellow Anglo-Saxon students of France, I never fell in love with Paris and have always felt ambivalent about it. I have been accused of thinking and even writing like a French intellectual—a barbed compliment. But French intellectuals, with outstanding exceptions, leave me cold: theirs is a club from which I would happily be excluded.

L’exil, West Berlin, 1977; photograph by Dominique Nabokov

What of political identity? As the child of self-taught Jews brought up in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, I acquired from an early age a superficial familiarity with Marxist texts and socialist history—enough to inoculate me against the wilder strains of 1960s-era New Leftism while leaving me firmly in the social democratic camp. Today, as a “public intellectual” (itself an unhelpful label), I am associated with whatever remains of the left.

But within the university, many colleagues look upon me as a reactionary dinosaur. Understandably so: I teach the textual legacy of long-dead Europeans; have little tolerance for “self-expression” as a substitute for clarity; regard effort as a poor substitute for achievement; treat my discipline as dependent in the first instance upon facts, not “theory”; and view with skepticism much that passes for historical scholarship today. By prevailing academic mores, I am incorrigibly conservative. So which is it?

As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for “Jewishness” in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of “rootless cosmopolitan.” But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.

In any event, all such labels make me uneasy. We know enough of ideological and political movements to be wary of exclusive solidarity in all its forms. One should keep one’s distance not only from the obviously unappealing “-isms”—fascism, jingoism, chauvinism—but also from the more seductive variety: communism, to be sure, but nationalism and Zionism too. And then there is national pride: more than two centuries after Samuel Johnson first made the point, patriotism—as anyone who passed the last decade in America can testify—is still the last refuge of the scoundrel.

I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.

To be sure, there is something self-indulgent in the assertion that one is always at the edge, on the margin. Such a claim is only open to a certain kind of person exercising very particular privileges. Most people, most of the time, would rather not stand out: it is not safe. If everyone else is a Shia, better to be a Shia. If everyone in Denmark is tall and white, then who—given a choice—would opt to be short and brown? And even in an open democracy, it takes a certain obstinacy of character to work willfully against the grain of one’s community, especially if it is small.

But if you are born at intersecting margins and—thanks to the peculiar institution of academic tenure—are at liberty to remain there, it seems to me a decidedly advantageous perch: What should they know of England, who only England know? If identification with a community of origin was fundamental to my sense of self, I would perhaps hesitate before criticizing Israel—the “Jewish State,” “my people”—so roundly. Intellectuals with a more developed sense of organic affiliation instinctively self-censor: they think twice before washing dirty linen in public.

Unlike the late Edward Said, I believe I can understand and even empathize with those who know what it means to love a country. I don’t regard such sentiments as incomprehensible; I just don’t share them. But over the years these fierce unconditional loyalties—to a country, a God, an idea, or a man—have come to terrify me. The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity. But illusory or not, we would do well to cling to it. Certainly, it is that faith—and the constraints it places upon human misbehavior—that is the first to go in times of war or civil unrest.

We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability. Globalization itself—the “flat” earth of so many irenic fantasies—will be a source of fear and uncertainty to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for protection. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.

Being “Danish” or “Italian,” “American” or “European” won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps. Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will demand “tests”—of knowledge, of language, of attitude—to determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of British or Dutch or French “identity.” They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people. My people.

—“Edge People” is part of a continuing series of memoirs by Tony Judt.

Charles Simic

Heimrad Bäcker; photograph by Franz Linschinger

A strange little book came in the mail the other day. It’s called transcript and is published by the admirable Dalkey Archive Press. Translated from the German by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling, its author, Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003), was unknown to me. He was an Austrian book editor, photographer and concrete poet who as a teenager joined the Nazi party and became an active member in the regional leadership of the Hitler Youth. At a first glance, his book looks like a collection of verbal scraps of uncertain origin, some of which have the appearance of avant-garde poetry, but on examination it turns out to be something entirely different. Bäcker’s “poems” consist of excerpts from documents by Holocaust planners, perpetrators, and victims.

There are quotes from concentration camp files, arrest reports, instructions for operating gas chambers and hanging prisoners, comments by executioners and witnesses, notes on medical experiments and other such material found in the vast files of a regime that was not only busy exterminating millions of people, but striving to micromanage its degrading acts down to the smallest detail:

you are requested to leave the keys in the locks of all furniture, chests etc. as
well as the keys in the locks of all interior doors. if the keys are on a separate
key ring, they are to be taken off and placed in the lock of the receptacle to
which they belong. to the building and hallway keys should be attached a
ribbon and a piece of cardboard on which you are to write your names and
apartment number and identification number. these keys are to be given to
the authorized official. before leaving your residence, the list of assets that
was issued to you is to be

Bäcker doesn’t invent anything. There is a full bibliography at the end of the volume. He edits a bit to isolate some bit of information and lets it stand alone, so that like a poem it may invite the reader to ponder a word or an image until its full meaning unfolds in all its horror:

men in white lab coats were sitting in the next room, near the windows, at
tables reinforced by cold blue light shining up from inside them. they were
weighing loose diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and similar stones.
they would wash them in liquids that had a caustic odor and then eye them
through jewelers’ loupes to determine their weight in carats and thus their
value. every color of the rainbow gleamed and sparkled in the dishes.

                cadence 1 to the stool

                cadence 2 onto the stool

                cadence 3 reading of the sentence

                cadence 4 stool removed

not suspecting their impending scheduled death, the people clapped and
some broke out in jubilant cheering

The cumulative effect of these fragments is harrowing. A letter says: “i probably won’t ever see you again, won’t hear your voice, won’t kiss you. but how i want to see you, if only once!” In the long lists of names, one or two stick out. What did the tailor Zoltan Fleishmann look like? What sort of life did the shopkeeper Bernhard Herskovits have? We read about a camp inmate who was punished with death for not executing with total accuracy the motion of taking off his cap and putting it back on, of another who was shot because he was no longer capable of performing certain kinds of heavy labor owing to his physical condition, and of a little four-year-old Jewish boy who distributed short pieces of string to men and women on the way to the gas chamber—presumably by way of reassurance. Poetry is in the details, we usually say, but so is cruelty.

I first thought the book could have been longer to drive the point home, but then remembered the old saying about poetry that less is more. Patrick Greaney is right when he writes in the afterword that “The Shoah is transformed from something that readers thought they already understood into something that they have yet to grasp and that transcript allows them to examine.” Even someone who has a solid knowledge of the literature of Nazi Germany may encounter things here they didn’t know about or simply overlooked. I, for one, was astonished to discover that the Nazis were already using the phrase “enhanced interrogation” to refer to what they did to people in their prisons so they wouldn’t have to call it torture.

Heimrad Bäcker, transcript, translated by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010)

Jeremy Bernstein

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touring the enchrichment facility at Natanz, Iran

Iran’s civilian research reactor in Tehran, the Tehran Research Reactor, has been much in the news lately. It has an interesting past and perhaps an interesting future. In March of 1974 the Shah of Iran declared that Iran’s goal would be the construction of some twenty power reactors to provide electricity for the country. The Tehran reactor, known as the TRR, was to be used for training students. There is little doubt that the Shah’s goal was to make nuclear weapons. Indeed, after he was overthrown in 1979, the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who said he believed that nuclear weapons were un-Islamic, dismantled most of the program. One of the survivors was the TRR. In recent weeks, Iran has claimed that its existence—and need for nuclear fuel—justifies pursuing uranium enrichment to higher levels, ostensibly for peaceful use. Many have doubted that claim, and now the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has given official weight to those doubts. In its new report, the IAEA for the first time states outright what I outlined in November, that Iran’s enrichment activities may be related to “the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” To understand why, it is worth considering the history of the TRR.

Located at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center in Amir Abad, a suburb of Tehran, the Tehran Research Reactor went “critical”—its nuclear chain reactions began producing power—in 1967. It was part of the Atoms for Peace program set in motion by President Eisenhower to encourage peaceful uses of atomic energy: developing countries were given grants to buy American made technology such as civilian reactors. The TRR and its clone in Pakistan—the Pakistan Atomic Resarch Reactor (PARR), located near Rawalpindi—were built by the Atomics division of the American Machine and Foundry Corporation, a company better known for making bowling alleys and motorcycles. These reactors are of the “swimming pool” type—the fuel elements sit in a pool of water that is used both to cool them and to moderate the speed of the neutrons emitted in nuclear fission.

A curious feature of the fuel elements supplied by the Atoms for Peace program is that they made use of highly enriched uranium—the kind that is used to make a bomb. No doubt a good deal of the stuff was left over from our weapons program and no one thought that “backward” countries like Pakistan and Iran would have the technological capacity to make nuclear weapons. Some of this highly enriched uranium that went all over the world in the 1950s and 1960s is still unaccounted for.

A swimming-pool type reactor similar to the Tehran Research Reactor (armscontrolwonk.com)

The TRR is designed to produce about five megawatts of power. A full scale civilian power reactor produces at least a thousand megawatts. Thus the TRR was not meant to be used to generate electricity. It produces medical isotopes (small quantities of radioactive particles that can be used to treat some diseases) and trains students to use nuclear technology. It also produces tiny amounts of plutonium—not enough for nuclear weapons but enough for testing experimental ways of extracting it. The power in this reactor is generated by splitting the uranium-235 nucleus into lighter nuclei along with neutrons. Since the uranium-235 nucleus is essentially destroyed in the process in the course of time the fuel elements in the reactor must be replaced.

When the TRR initially needed new fuel elements it was shortly before the 1979 revolution, and the Iranians chose simply to replace the TRR with a new, safer model of reactor designed in part by Freeman Dyson and manufactured by the San Diego firm General Atomics, which they ordered and paid for. Before it could be delivered, however, the revolution came and General Atomics’ export license was revoked. I do not know if the Iranians got back their money. But they decided to keep the old reactor, the TRR, and buy new fuel elements. In 1987 they signed a $5.5 million contract with the Argentinean Company Investigaciones Aplicados for these fuel elements, which contained 115.8 kilograms of 19.75 percent low enriched uranium. These are the fuel elements that the reactor has used until now and they are in the process of running out. This brings us to the present.

The most straightforward thing the Iranian government could do is to buy new fuel elements from abroad as it did before; I can’t imagine that there would be any objection from the international community or the IAEA to this. Instead, they have announced that they have begun to enrich their own stock of uranium at Natanz, their centrifuge facility in central Iran, to 19.75 percent, in order to supply the fuel for the Tehran reactor. (This enrichment to nearly 20 percent—the internationally recognized dividing line between low enriched uranium, LEU, and the highly enriched uranium, HEU, that is suitable for bombs—was behind Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim on February 11 that Iran is now a “nuclear state.”) Making fuel elements out of what is basically uranium hexafluoride gas is not easy; there is no reason to believe that the Iranians have this technology. But they are technologically apt and sooner or later they could acquire it. There are always foreign experts who can be bought. But meanwhile the fuel for the TRR may run out. If the Iranians were sincere about the need to use this reactor to make medical isotopes they would seek a more timely way to refuel it.

More likely, I think, the Iranian government is using the TRR as an excuse for starting the steps that will lead to weapons grade uranium. This possibility is reinforced by the enrichment activities documented in the February 18 IAEA report. At Natanz there are two enrichment facilities—the large FEP and a smaller PFEP. The smaller one is a pilot plant in which the Iranians have installed some of their most advanced centrifuges. As of February 14, they have moved about 1950 kilograms of low 3.5 percent enriched uranium hexafluoride, nearly the entire stock, from the FEP to the PFEP and have enriched some of it to 19.75 percent uranium hexafluoride. The Iranians provided the IAEA inspectors evidence for this but did not reveal how much uranium had been enriched. If they enrich the whole stock it will yield about 200 kilograms of 19.75 percent enriched uranium. At a minimum this is a ten-year supply for the TRR. More plausibly it is more like a twenty-year supply, a good deal more of this uranium than the TRR needs. Once you have 20 percent enrichment, increasing that to 95 percent is much easier than it was to get to the 20 percent. You can think of the uranium-235 nuclei as needles in a haystack of uranium-238 nuclei. The more needles you start with the easier it becomes to look for them. We are rapidly coming to the point of no return.

Martin Filler

Rem Koolhaas’s House in Bordeaux, in a still from Koolhaas: HouseLife (Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine)

Few makers of architectural documentaries exploit the full potential of film to create a convincing sense of what it is like to move through a sequence of interiors, an ability made much easier with the introduction of the Steadicam in 1976. A rare exception is Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine’s 58-minute-long Koolhaas Houselife (2008), one of two recent releases on the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam.

Now 65, Koolhaas has managed to preserve his longstanding reputation as the bad boy of his profession while executing one of the most impressive bodies of built work of his generation. Koolhaas Houselife, about which this all-controlling architect must have very mixed feelings, is among four films by Bêka and Lemoine being screened at New York’s Storefront for Architecture through February 27 (along with three other features from their Living Architecture series, on buildings by Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron).

Koolhaas Houselife is best seen together with another recent documentary on the same subject, Markus Heldingsfelder and Min Tesch’s 97-minute Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect (2008), which has been broadcast on cable television. Its frenetic pacing, dizzying crosscuts, and pulsating digital effects typify the pervasive influence of MTV’s hyperactive music-video formula on current filmmaking. It also reflects the annoying notion held by many documentarians that it is infra dig to use captions to identify interviewees or locales—leaving the viewer at times guessing who or what we are seeing. Nevertheless, Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect, though considerably overlong, captures the character of its subject’s exuberant output with exceptional fidelity.

The unenclosed lift, providing access to all levels of the Bordeaux house (Hans Werlemann/OMA)

Koolhaas Houselife, in contrast, presents a portrait of the architect’s House in Bordeaux of 1994-1998, a country residence outside the village of Floriac and overlooking the river Gironde. This rectangular three-level flat-roofed structure—already under the protection of France’s Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques—was commissioned by Jean-François Lemoine, a newspaper editor who was paralyzed in an automobile accident and died only three years after his home was finished. Although housing for the handicapped has become an important specialty of professional practice, relatively few high-style architects have addressed the domestic needs of the disabled, let alone with the imagination Koolhaas demonstrated in this scheme.

After Michael Graves was rendered paraplegic by a disease in 2003, he remodeled his own house of 1977 in Princeton to make it accessible by wheelchair, but those modifications did not significantly alter the Postmodern Classical nature of the interiors. Another Postmodern design in Princeton, Charles Moore and Richard Oliver’s House near New York of 1973-1976, was created for Gordon Gund, who lost his sight to retinitis pigmentosa. That scheme hewed to traditional methods of making a dwelling safely habitable for the disabled, including ample use of protective railings, clearly defined interior circulation, and rounded or chamfered corners.

Characteristically, Koolhaas—whose projects are always radical and frequently perverse—flouted received wisdom about architecture for the handicapped with his House in Bordeaux, which American building inspectors would deem a potential death trap. Yet Lemoine did not want to live in a private Hôtel des Invalides, but rather a dwelling that did not advertise his disability, a fact that Koolhaas Houselife suggests only obliquely—an odd decision given that one of the film’s two directors is Lemoine’s daughter. Instead, she and her collaborator came up with an inspired organizational conceit.

Koolhaas Houselife comprises twenty-four brief segments, separated by short blackouts accompanied by the twang of a stringed instrument like a Seinfeld episode. The production’s unlikely star is the Lemoines’ middle-aged Spanish housekeeper, Guadalupe Acedo, who seems to have wandered in from an Almodóvar comedy about a dysfunctional middle-class Madrid family. Her non-stop, throw-away commentary is by turns gossipy, sagacious, pragmatic, and critical, but she remains self-effacing and sympathetic to her unseen employers (Lemoine’s widow still uses the house) and their bizarre but essentially wonderful domain.

Guadalupe Acedo, in a still from Koolhaas: HouseLife (Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine)

Acedo makes her initial appearance in the movie’s opening scene as she ascends with her cleaning equipment on the hydraulic platform elevator that Koolhaas placed at the heart of the house to give his wheelchair-bound client easy access to all levels of the three-story structure. The charwoman’s slow-motion rise on the unenclosed lift is accomplished to the lilting strains of Johann Strauss the Younger’s Acceleration Waltz, one of several homages to Stanley Kubrick’s unsurpassable pairing of three-quarter time and futuristic engineering in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

At first sight, this poker-faced housemaid, stout and impassive, brings to mind the sculptor Duane Hanson’s hyper-realistic multimedia simulacra of defeated and depressed working stiffs. But Acedo is made of sterner stuff, and as she starts bustling through the house on her chores, accompanied by the exhilarating waltz-tempo aria Je veux vivre from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, she animates her chilly surroundings to perfection.

Several scenes expose the deplorable physical condition of the building, which is falling apart after little more than a decade. Leaks, which have plagued many houses by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier because of inadequate detailing, are far from the only problems, not least of which is the rapid degradation of the internal concrete core that holds up the house and frees large portions of the exterior from load-bearing encumbrances. Contradictorily, Koolhaas surmounted the breathtakingly open ground-level public living areas with a topmost bedroom-and-bathroom story ponderously sheathed in Cor-Ten steel and punctuated with portholes like an outsized slab of rust-colored Swiss cheese.

Guadalupe Acedo’s aperçus are generally spot-on despite her frequent demurrals, and at times are hilarious, such as when she jokes about Koolhaas’s enormous ears, or her unaccepted offer to barter laundry services for a house design by him. Far from being immune to the immense cultural cachet that has made the House in Bordeaux a tourist attraction among architectural cognoscenti, she is acceptingly aware, like a canny servant girl in a Mozart or Rossini opera buffa, of this contemporary landmark’s many flaws, and therein personifies the humanity and common sense that can elude even a creative genius.

— Koolhaas: HouseLife is being screened at the Storefront For Architecture, 97 Kenmare Street, New York City, as part of the exhibition “Living Architectures,” which runs through February 27. Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect will be released on DVD in June 2010.

Perry Link

Feng Zhenghu, who had been prevented from returning to China, during his 92-day protest in Tokyo’s Narita airport (China Digital Times)

On February 12, Chinese human rights campaigner Feng Zhenghu was allowed to return to Shanghai after a 92-day stay in diplomatic limbo at the Tokyo Narita airport. Having left China last April to visit family in Japan, Feng, who is a Chinese citizen, was repeatedly denied reentry by Chinese immigration officials; when he was sent back to Tokyo last November, he remained in the Tokyo airport in protest, waiting for the Chinese government to change its mind. The international press has portrayed Feng as a solitary figure, pursuing an admirable if somewhat flamboyant quest for his personal rights. But the point of Feng’s protest goes much, much deeper than the fate of one man, and Feng hopes that the world will understand why.

Feng’s tactics have been unusual, but his problem is by no means new. On October 15, 2009, Li Jianhong, a Chinese citizen and vocal critic of the Beijing government, was blocked from entering China at the Luohu rail station near Shenzhen upon return from a trip to Sweden. A week later Jia Jia, a Chinese scientist and democracy advocate who had been in New Zealand, was arrested upon arrival at the Beijing airport and held for interrogation. Incidents such as these have made other Chinese free thinkers reluctant to leave their country, lest they be prevented from going home.

For years the Chinese government has kept blacklists of Chinese citizens in exile who are to be subject to “special treatment” by police if they attempt to travel to China. Human Rights Watch obtained one of these lists in 1994 and published it in a January 1995 report. The names on the lists were of well-known political dissidents, including highly respected figures such as Liu Binyan, Su Xiaokang, and Zheng Yi. They fell into three categories: those to be immediately arrested as criminals; those to be refused entry and sent back to the country from which they had entered; and a third group to be handled “according to circumstances” (which meant detention until authorities decided what to do).

Feng Zhenghu went to visit his sister who lives in Motoyawata, Japan, in April 2009. When he attempted to return in June to Shanghai—where his wife, brother, and hospitalized mother are living—he was refused entry and sent back to Japan. He tried seven more times with the same result. On his eighth try, he decided that enough was enough. The law was on his side, he felt. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the Chinese government has signed but has not ratified) states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter one’s own country.” The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights says (article 13) that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country,” and China’s own constitution declares “restriction of citizens’ personal freedom” is unlawful (article 37).

Last November 4, again rebuffed at the Shanghai airport, Feng was ordered to take the next All Nippon Airways (ANA) flight back to Japan. When he refused to board, Chinese police, assisted by ANA personnel, physically forced him onto the plane and into a seat. Upon arrival in Tokyo, Feng refused to go through immigration to enter Japan. He remained in an airport corridor for 92 days, living on the donations of sympathetic travelers and communicating with the world by cell phone. With assistance from supporters, he published his news and his thoughts on Twitter and Chinese-language websites. He criticized ANA for serving as accomplices of the Chinese police; he satirized Chinese diplomats for sending him a message, through his brother, that he should consider the humiliation he was causing the motherland and not let himself be “used by hostile foreign forces.” On January 30, he arrived at an understanding with Chinese authorities that he would end his vigil in return for assurances that he would be allowed to go back to China after spending a few days in Japan. Chinese authorities apparently concluded that Feng’s vigil was costing more to their image than it was gaining them in security.

Why did Feng do all this? To call attention to a method of repression that has long been used by the Beijing government, yet has until now attracted little notice. For decades Chinese authorities have used their control of permission to cross the Chinese border—in either direction—as a device to extract compliance from people, including even Westerners. Chinese citizens who are deemed troublesome have been denied passports, meaning they cannot leave China. Dissidents who are living abroad have had their passports confiscated when they bring them to a Chinese consulate for renewal, leaving them “locked” outside China.

Exiled dissidents who really need to go home—because a loved one is ill or has died, for example—have negotiated temporary returns, but only under strict conditions spelled out by the authorities: one must fix an itinerary in advance, must not speak in public, may not see certain people, and must tolerate constant surveillance. The police invite you for “chats,” serve you tea, and gently remind you that there is no reason that they need to continue being gentle. When Su Xiaokang’s father, who had been a prominent Communist, died a few years ago, Su, who lives in exile in Delaware, was allowed to travel home but not to attend the funeral; he could view his father’s body only in private.

Some elderly dissidents, such as Yu Haocheng and Su Shaozhi, have negotiated permanent returns in exchange for silence on political matters (a promise that Yu, who signed Charter 08, did not keep very well). Others have “earned” the right to go home by providing information to the police. Some have refused deal-making of any kind, and of those a few, such as Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang, have died in exile. One of Liu’s last wishes was that at least his cremated ashes be sent back to his beloved China, and his family members went to considerable lengths of secrecy to be sure that it got done. (They were unsure whether even the ashes of a non-compromiser might be blocked at the border.)

In view of this history, Feng Zhenghu’s principle that “you have a right to go home” will, if it holds up, directly affect many other cases. The very day after Feng announced his victory, I heard from a prominent critic of the Chinese government that she will proceed with plans to travel abroad since she is now confident that she cannot be forcibly barred from returning. (I withhold her name to avoid compromising her situation.) But even cases like hers will be few in comparison with the much larger number of people—at least in the millions—who have been indirectly affected by the Chinese government’s consistent message over many years that simply speaking out about basic rights can lead to denial of a passport or forced exile. This consequence has come to be assumed by many Chinese people, as if it were simply part of the natural order of things. By challenging such an understanding, Feng Zhenghu’s assertion that a citizen has a “right” to cross a border has profound implications. Here is one example where a single person may truly have done a great deal of good.

In September 2008, fifteen months before he died, David Levine met with New York Review editor Sasha Weiss at his apartment in Brooklyn to talk about his caricatures. Over a period of more than four decades, he made some 3,800 drawings for the Review, ranging from Albert Camus in 1963 to Barack Obama in 2007.  We hope the following narrated slide show, drawn from that conversation, will go some way toward capturing the wildly varied imagination of this remarkable artist.