Dialog International

Erich Fromm and Baader-Meinhof

This month marks the 30-year anniversary of the Deutscher Herbst ("The German Autumn"), those weeks when an entire nation was gripped by fear of a small band of terrorists. And still today the RAF - or Baader-Meinhof - continues to fascinate Germany. Even now new information continues to come out about the home-grown terror group: just today it was revealed that the RAF intended to blow up the Berlin offices of Pan-American Airlines, since they believed it to be a  cover operation for the CIA.  And today we also see an echo of that terrible period in the assault on civil liberties in Germany by the interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble.

Recently the journalist Jan Feddersen wrote about a fascinating historical footnote about the Baader-Meinhof era in Die Tageszeitung. After the core members of the group were captured and imprisoned - including Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader - in the maximum-security prison in Stammheim, their lawyers and sympathizers began to circulate rumors of torture and extreme isolation confinement. To gain legitimacy and international support for the RAF cause, the lawyers reached out to the leading intellectuals of the time, requesting they come and meet with the famous prisoners. Jean Paul Sartre played the useful clown here, and dutifully showed up to denounce the "inhuman conditions" of the imprisonment. Then the lawyers contacted the most influential German-American intellectual of the period: Erich Fromm. Fromm was certainly no fan of the American "system".  A committed socialist, Fromm viewed the USA - and, by extension, West Germany - as a "sick" society that celebrated mass consumerism devoid of human content. In Escape from Freedom Fromm analyzed the "automaton conformity" of mass American society, portraying a people willing to trade freedom for security. Fromm watched West Germany's reaction to the RAF terror threat with alarm. The nation, he felt, was abandoning democratic principles out of "Terrorhysterie". So perhaps the RAF lawyers thought Fromm would be open to meeting with Baader and exposing the "capitalistic terror" Baader and his cohorts were being subjected to.

Here is Fromm's response to the invitation from the RAF lawyers; to my knowledge it has never been translated into English (until now):

"Ich würdige Ihren Wunsch beziehungsweise den Wunsch der Angeklagten, dass ich mit Ihnen und Frau [] ins Gespräch kommen möge. Jedoch muss ich zugeben, dass ich einigermaßen erstaunt bin, dass die Angeklagten dieses Gespräch wollen, obwohl sie meine Schriften kennen. Ich hätte eher vermutet, dass meine politische Haltung ihnen so negativ erscheint, wie die ihrige es für mich ist. Um es deutlich zu sagen, bin ich radikal gegen ihre Strategie und ihre Taktik, die ich politisch und auch menschlich äußerst abstoßend finde."  ("I very much appreciate your wish - that is, the wish of the accused - to meet with you and Frau X. But I must confess that I am rather astonished that the accused want to have this meeting, since they must know my work. I would have thought that my political beliefs would be repellent to them, the same way theirs are to me. To put it bluntly, I am completely against your strategy and tactics, which I view as totally repulsive - both politically and humanly.")

A year earlier - writing specifically about Ulrike Meinhof - Fromm had observed:

„Man kann häufig feststellen, dass Menschen, die die Fähigkeit zu lieben verloren haben, ihre Unfähigkeit durch die Idee ersetzen, ihr Leben zu opfern,und dann diese Selbstaufopferung als Beweis nehmen, dass sie eben doch lieben können. Unter Umständen bleibt dann kein anderer Ausweg aus einer völlig verfahrenen und verzweifelten Situation als der Terror" ("It is often the case that people who have lost the capacity to love replace this inability with the thought of sacrificing their own life, and then take this self-sacrifice as some kind of proof that they can indeed love. In some cases terror is the only escape from a completely hopeless and desperate situation.")

With Ulrike Meinhof this hyper-narcissism indeed had the outcome that Erich Fromm expected: the world would not heed her call for total revolotuion, so the world could no longer have her. Ulrike Meinhof hung herself in her cell in Stammheim. Her cohorts followed her example during the German Autumn.

For Fromm, the vision of the RAF was completely negative - a vision of total destruction that was doomed to failure. For radicalism to succeed it had to contain the human element of hope: a vision of an alternative reality.

"Man kann andere Menschen für etwas gewinnen, indem man ihre Entrüstung, ihren Ehrgeiz oder sogar ihren Hass anspricht. Man kann aber mit diesen Gefühlen Menschen nie dazu bringen, konstruktive und wahrhaft revolutionäre Handlungen mitzutragen. Menschen können zu verändernden Handlungen nur motiviert werden, wenn sie Hoffnung haben. Und sie können nur Hoffnung haben, wenn es eine Vision gibt; und sie können nur dann eine Vision haben, wenn man

ihnen Alternativen zeigt. Solche Alternativen aber gibt es nur auf Grund enormer

Anstrengung von Denken und Vorstellungsvermögen und nicht, wenn sich alle

Energien auf Protest und Entrüstung konzentrieren +(You can win over people for something by appealing to their indignation, their ambition or even their hate. But by appealing to these feelings you can never motivate people to truly constructive and revolutionary activities. People can only be motivated to truly transformative actions when they have hope. And they can only have hope, whey there is a vision; and they can only have a vision when they are shown alternatives. But alternative visions can only be achieved through tremendous effort of thought and imagination, and not when all energies are consumed by protest and indignation.)

verloren haben, ihre Unfähigkeit durch die Idee ersetzen, ihr Leben zu opfern,

und dann diese Selbstaufopferung als Beweis nehmen, dass sie eben doch lie-

ben können. Unter Umständen bleibt dann kein anderer Ausweg aus einer völlig

verloren haben, ihre Unfähigkeit durch die Idee ersetzen, ihr Leben zu opfern,

und dann diese Selbstaufopferung als Beweis nehmen, dass sie eben doch lie-

ben können. Unter Umständen bleibt dann kein anderer Ausweg aus einer

verloren haben, ihre Unfähigkeit durch die Idee ersetzen, ihr Leben zu opfern,

und dann diese Selbstaufopferung als Beweis nehmen, dass sie eben doch lie-

ben können. Unter Umständen bleibt dann kein anderer Ausweg aus einer völlig

verfahrenen und verzweifelten Situation als der Terror.

verloren haben, ihre Unfähigkeit durch die Idee ersetzen, ihr Leben zu opfern,

und dann diese Selbstaufopferung als Beweis nehmen, dass sie eben doch lie-

ben können. Unter Umständen bleibt dann kein anderer Ausweg aus einer völlig

The Myth of "The Good War"

Americans are taught from an early age that "we" won WWII - The Good War - which pitted good against evil. Not only did American soldiers beat the evil Nazis, they rescued western civilization and brought Democracy to Europe.  Nothing could be further from the truth, according to British historian Norman Davies.  In a lecture delivered the other day at Harvard University, Davies exploded some of the myths of The Good War:

Among the Davies so-called myths:

That D-Day was big and decisive. (About 80 percent of German forces were lost on the Eastern Front, he said, where the biggest battles raged.)

That the West triumphed over the Third Reich. (Germany was all but defeated by the Soviets well before the Allies landed troops on the continent, he contended.)

In fact, asserted Davies, it was the Red Army that played the decisive role in defeating Germany, “and they were in the service of an evil tyranny.”

As for the myth that the war liberated Europe, said Davies: Most of Europe went from being under Hitler’s boot to being under Stalin’s.

Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other nations at the crossroads of combat were gobbled up by the Soviets in 1944 and early 1945, while the Red Army idled outside Berlin waiting for the Allies to creep toward the Rhine.

Winning a war means defeating an enemy, collapsing its economy, destroying its political structure — then replacing it with another. By those terms, Davies averred, the Soviets won the war in Europe.

Militarily, the Allies contributed less than the Soviets to the defeat of Germany, he said. Politically, they failed to restore democracy to most of Europe.

Will Americans ever revisit their own history? Unlikely, since that would also surface some uncomfortable questions about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the firebombing of German cities, targeting civilians.

The Seven-Year Proposal

More innovation from Bavaria.  Conservative politician Gabriele Pauli is an authority on marriage: she has been divorced twice. Today she came up with a proposal that will resonate with anyone who has gone through a divorce:

MUNICH, Germany (AFP) - A conservative German politician on Wednesday proposed making marriage contracts expire after seven years, with the option to renew for those not feeling the proverbial itch.

"I propose that marriages lapse after seven years," Gabriele Pauli told reporters in Munich, the capital of the largely Catholic southern state of Bavaria.

"This would mean that one will only commit for a fixed period and will actively have to renew your vows if you still want to continue."

Pauli, 50, has been divorced twice.

The proposal is part of her manifesto as she prepares to contest the leadership of Bavaria's governing party, the ultra-conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), next week.

Pauli had earlier raised some eyebrows by posing as a dominatrix for a magazine.

Her idea of the seven-year marriage contract surprised and angered several of her political rivals - including Horst Seehofer, who recently revealed he had a second family in Berlin.

I think she should export the idea to the United States and team up with Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani - a thrice-married Catholic.

UPDATE: A timely article in today's New York TImes shows that Gabriele Pauli is absolutely correct in her analysis of marriage duration:

One statistical constant has been the so-called seven-year itch, as popularized in the 1950s play and film about errant husbands. Couples who separate do so, on average, after seven years and divorce after eight. The duration of first marriages that end in divorce appears to have increased slightly among men.

Art and "entartete Kultur"

Gerhard Richter recently unveiled his new spectacular abstract stained glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral. Richter explained the concept behind his creation:

72 shades of color, each appearing 72 time per level, “out of which the computer uses a random number generator to determine the color arrangement for one half of the cathedral window; the other half is a reflection of the first."

A complete view of the windows can be found here. The windows have been described as a "Symphony of Light" and have been praised lavishly by critics around the world.

The only dissonant note came from Cologne's Cardinal Meisner, who was so angered by the windows that he said "they belonged in a mosque".  Evidently consigning something to a mosque is a terrible insult.  But the good cardinal was just getting started. A couple of days later Meisner gave a sermon at the opening of a museum where he uttered these words - perhaps with Richter and his windows in mind:

Vergessen wir nicht, dass es einen unaufgebbaren Zusammenhang zwischen Kultur und Kult gibt. Dort, wo die Kultur vom Kultus, von der Gottesverehrung abgekoppelt wird, erstarrt der Kult im Ritualismus und die Kultur entartet. Sie verliert ihre Mitte.  ("When culture becomes disconnected from religion, from the worship of God, religion becomes ritualism and the culture becomes degenerate." )

The word "entartet" (degenerate) carries a specific historical meaning in German, for that is how the Nazi's described modern art - especially German expressionism. The 1937 Nazi art exhibit - Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) was a sensation, and meant that most of the great German painters could no longer work in Germany (This was a great bonanza for America, for we ended up with many of the paintings and artists ). Meisner may not have been intentionally referring to  Nazi art-appreciation, but he is prone to using inflammatory language, and this comes just a week after Eva Herman's disgraceful performance. Also, one has to question Meisner's appreciation for any art since at least 1800, when artists no longer saw their primary role as "worshipping God". It is perhaps not a coincidence that 1800 is also approximately the point in history when official Roman Catholic theology stopped developing. I like what one of Meisner's strongest critics - theologian Hans Küng had to say about the affair:

"All true art is about the meaning of life, but you can't ban artists from portraying chaos, ugliness and evil," said Kueng, who lives in Tuebingen, Germany.

Obama "We Must End This War Now"

Last night in a televised address to the nation President Bush vowed that his war in Iraq would be permanent. The idea that our children and grandchildren will be coming home from Baghdad in flag-draped caskets is just beginning to sink in. Some in the German press have taken note:

Immerhin, Bush hat ehrlich gesagt, was zukommt auf Amerika: Über Jahre, ja Jahrzehnte werde es amerikanische Truppen im Irak geben. Der Präsident will die Supermacht langfristig mit Militärbasen im Nahen Osten verankern und so den Einfluss der Mullahs in Iran - die eigentlichen Gewinner des Irakkrieges -eindämmen.

On Wenesday Barack Obama spoke about what is needed to end this war, now opposed by the vast majority of Americans.

"The American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We've had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet. We've had enough of mounting costs in Iraq and missed opportunities around the world. We've had enough of a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged.

I opposed this war from the beginning. I opposed the war in 2002. I opposed it in 2003. I opposed it in 2004. I opposed it in 2005. I opposed it in 2006. I introduced a plan in January to remove all of our combat brigades by next March. And I am here to say that we have to begin to end this war now."

Read Barack Obama's entire speech here

What's Wrong with the SPD?

The New York TImes has a flattering piece today on Angela Merkel and her enormous popularity in Germany. The NYTimes attributes her strength in the polls to Germany's better economic performance (Aufschwung) and her embrace of status quo politics.  Her popluarity comes at the expense of the SPD.  According to a poll that was published today, Merkel is 41 points ahead of her SPD rival - Kurt Beck. And then there was this report that caught my attention last week:

"The SPD has suffered a major shock in the German state of Saxony in a new poll conducted by the Forsa Institute. In results that is bound to reverberate across the whole of Germany, the far-right NPD has overtaken the SPD for the first time ever in an opinion poll."

"The fact that poll shows the NPD ahead of us cannot be," Martin Dulig, the SPD's parliamentary faction leader in Saxony told German news magazine Der Spiegel's Web site. "I cannot be compared with Nazis."

What happened to the fortunes of one of Germany's major Volksparteien when even the neo-Nazis are outpolling it in the east? The economist Albrecht Müller, who worked for the successful SPD campaigns of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, has an interesting perspective in his blog NachDenkSeiten. He contrasts the ability of Angela Merkel to appeal to different constituencies to the ideological rigidity of the SPD.  The SPD expends an enormous amount of energy demonizing DIe Linke ,even as that party has successfully outflanked the SPD on the left and is gaining voters.

Angela Merkel hat begriffen, dass eine Volkspartei wie die Union oder die SPD Wahlen nur dann erfolgreich bestehen kann, wenn sie viele Gruppen bedient - mit faktischer Politik oder mit programmatischen Formulierungen oder nur mit als glaubwürdig vermittelten Worten. Nur wenn sich Menschen aus vielen verschiedenen Gruppen mit sehr verschiedenen politischen Anliegen wiedererkennen, sind Wahlergebnisse von über 40% für eine Partei überhaupt denkbar.

In a very deft move today, Chancellor Merkel praised her Social Democratic predecessor - Gerhard Schroeder - for implementing the neo-liberal reform program Agenda 2010, reminding voters who was behind the original attack on the German Sozialstaat while she herself has abandoned some of the harshest measures.  This further confuses the identity of the SPD in the minds of German voters: who are the the true social democrats?

Nazism as Anti-Feminist Utopia

In Germany it is quite popular for conservative media personalities to blame the 68ers  (the rebellious students from late sixties) for all of society's ills, just as American conservative pundits blame the "dirty hippies" (and Bill Clinton) for every conceivable problem from "losing the Vietnam War" to sexual promiscuity. Perhaps no other media star in Germany went so far - and became so successful - in bashing the 68ers than Eva Herman. For Herman, the feminist ideals that were first articulated in the 1960s have been very damaging to German women. In her best-selling book Das Eva-Prinzip Herman told women to abandon the workplace and stay home with their children - that is the true feminine ideal. This retrograde vision of women resonated with conservative politicians and emboldened Eva Herman to attack feminists even more viciously.

But today Eva Herman revealed the ideological roots of her thinking, and, in doing so, violated the last taboo in Germany:

BERLIN: Germany's NDR public broadcaster fired a talk show host and author on women's issues after she praised Nazi Germany's attitude toward motherhood, the station said Sunday.NDR said Herman, who has written books urging a return to more traditional gender roles, was fired after confirming to station management that she made the statement reported in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.The statement was: "What I wanted to express was that values which also existed before the Third Reich, such as family, children and motherhood, which were supported in the Third Reich, were subsequently done away with by the 68ers" — a reference to 1960s leftists.Other news reports had quoted her as saying at the presentation of her latest book that, while there was "much that was very bad, for example Adolf Hitler," there were good things, "for example the high regard for the mother" under the Nazis.

The authoritarian thrust of Herman's polemic was apparent from the beginning. The journalist Thea Dorn was sued by Eva Herman over a year ago for publishing a commentary in the Tageszeitung entitled Das Eva-braun Prinzip (I found a reprint here). So one has to ask: why did it take NDR so long to fire her?  Why does the media promote women with reactionary views and silence those with progressive idea? We have the same situation in the US media, where racists like Michelle Malkin and right wing fanatics like Anne Coulter are spotlighted. Coulter has written books praising the neo-fascist tactics of Joe McCarthy; she labeled a Democratic presidential candidate a "faggot" and "jokingly" called for the murder of "activist" judges. Malkin wrote a book praising the internment of tens of thousands Japanese-Americans in WWII and urged a similar policy today for American Muslims.  Where are the boundaries in the American media?  At least Eva Herman was honest about the origins of her ideas and now she has paid the price.

The Origins of (German) Islamic Terrorism

This week a joint German-American team arrested three suspected Islamic militants who were planning a terrorist attack on a US facility. Some of us were surprised that two of the three were German nationals. What caused them to embrace an extremist brand of Islam and plan a crazy plot that could have killed many people - including fellow Germans?  The anti-German Bush-blog Medienkritik knows what is to blame for their actions: the German Sozialstaat.

The terrorists were supported by the German welfare state - via the German taxpayer. Does this deeply surprise anyone? Some of the 9/11 hijackers also took advantage of free education and other handouts from the German "social" system.

No surprise there.  When a several of the Islamic terrorists in the UK turned out to be medical doctors, the right-wing pundits in the US were quick to blame the British system of universal health care. I guess that means that the US - with its 47 million uninsured citizens and growing poverty - is pretty much immune from such "home-grown terrorists".

A much better discussion of the possible attraction of Islamic extremism to German youth can be found in this Tageszeitung article by Eberhard Seidel. Islamic extremism - according to Seidel - is the internationalist flip-side of right-wing (neo-Nazi) extremism.  The underlying attraction is the same, but there are noticable class differences: the Islamic variety of extremism appeals to a more affluent/educated class:

"In Germany at present there are two panaceas on offer that promise to beat the system and enhance one's status on offer: right-wing extremism and Islamism. For obvious reasons right-wing extremism, with its nationalist ideological foundations, is unattractive to youths and young adults from immigrant families. Islamism, on the other hand, dispenses with the exclusivity of 'blood' and is open to anyone who voluntarily professes their belief in it - irrespective of national, religious, social or ethnic background. Islamism, as the internationalism of the 21st century, is therefore also attractive to people searching for meaning and action in their lives, who weren't been born into the Islamic tradition."

The Surge of Iraqi Refugees

President Bush's much-heralded surge (escalation) of US troops in Iraq has resulted in a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. The surge of ethnic cleansing has made tens of thousands of Iraqis desperate to leave. SInce the 2003 invasion, more than 4 million Iraqis have been displaced, with half of them seeking refuge outside of Iraq. Most of these have found their way to Syria - a charter member of President Bush's "Axis of Evil'. Syria is overwhelmed, and today announced that it can only accept Iraqis with a valid visa - essentially shutting the door.

This chart shows which countries have taken in displaced Iraqis; an interactive version can be found here:

So, according to this data Syria has absorbed 1,200,000 refugees from Iraq.  Germany - ridiculed by many in the US for not joining President Bush's "Coalition of the Willing in invading Iraq - has taken in over 51,000.  The country responsible for this staggering misery - the United States - has absorbed 6,000, about half as many as tiny Denmark.

But the situation for Iraqi refugees in Germany is hardly secure. The German group Pro Asyl reports that many of these Iraqis face deportation back to their homeland, embroiled in violent civil war that has been exacerbated by the Surge.

About 14,000 Iraqi are subject to deportation from Germany. Due to a lack of air connections and to negotiations on return, Germany has not yet executed deportations on a large scale. Still, the Home Secretaries of the German federal states have attempted to deport Iraqi refugees into North Iraq. As of now, 'offenders' and so-called 'security risks' are due for deportation, although these categories are rather questionable. For example, someone leaving his county without permission or sending money back home to their families in spite of the economic embargo may become an 'offender'. Over and above problematic individual cases, the Home Secretaries are further striving to deport many Iraqi refugees into the war zone. During their meeting in November 2006 they confirmed their aim "to expand repatriations to Iraq as soon as possible".

The United States has abdicated its moral responsibility for the tragedy it has created. Europe needs to step up its assistance:

Iraq is burning, millions of refugees are on the road inside and outside the country - and Germany and most EU countries try to refuse or withdraw protection with political and legal means. The European and particularly the German policy regarding Iraqi refugees contradicts international law and is a disgrace. The countries neighbouring Iraq are forced to deal with the problem. Instead of contributing to the rescue of people from the war zone those in charge are trying to deport people to that very same region and are treating refugees like troublesome petitioners.

Disruptive Innovation from Germany

Like most people, I get most of my news on the Internet these days. This means I have to contend with with a plethora of pop-up ads, banner ads, video ads - every conceivable type of annoying advertising - just to get the content I want. This is the established business model for Web-based content: the online reader gets free content, but is forced to look at ads. 

Now a young programmer in Cologne by the name of Wladimir Palant has developed some software that puts this entire model in jeopardy. Adblock filters out ads on Web sites, and so acts almost like a TiVo for the Internet, execpt that Adblock is much better than TiVo, since the blocking is contemporaneous with viewing the Web page, and Adblock is a free download. For now, Adblock only works and extension of the Firefox browser, which is probably why Microsoft hasn't yet come after Wladimir Palant.  Still, there is a great deal of anxiety about Adblock, as the New York Times reports:

The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model. After an installation that takes but a minute or two, Adblock usually makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No Google ads based on the search terms you have entered.

From that perspective, the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter.

Some Web sites have retaliated by blocking Mozilla, and some Web designers have equated using the ad-blocking software as tantamount to stealing content.  But Palant explains that the sites have only themselves to blame:

“There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren’t blocked — make sure the users don’t want to block them,” he wrote. “Don’t forget about the users. Use ads in a way that doesn’t degrade their experience.”