Lords of Finance

For many years people believed [...] that an economic cataclysm of the magnitude of the Great Depression could only have been the result of mysterious and inexorable tectonic forces that governments were somehow powerless to resist. Contemporaries frequently described the Depression as an economic earthquake, blizzard, maelstrom, deluge. All these metaphors suggested a world confronting a natural disaster for which no single individual or group could be blamed. To the contrary, in this book I maintain that the Great Depression was not some act of God or the result of some deep-rooted contradictions of capitalism but the direct result of a series of misjudgments by economic policy makers, some made back in the 1920s, others after the first crises set in - by any measure the most dramatic sequence of collective blunders ever made by financial officials.

Liaquat Ahamed tells the story of 1929, the Great Depression, and the bankers who broke the world in his Lords of Finance. He focuses extensively on the main financial protagonists of the time (most importantly: Hjalmar Schacht, Benjamin Strong, Montagu Norman, Émile Moreau) as well as their antagonists (mainly: Keynes) in order to recount the policy failures that led from the Paris peace conference in 1919 to German hyperinflation in the 1920s and ultimately to the bust of 1929 and the ensuing global depression. His book is a gripping piece of personalized historical writing.

Most eerily and pertinent for today are undoubtedly the many similarities of the situation in Europe at the moment with what happened at the time. While policy makers clearly have drawn some lessons from the past and the kind of complete societal and economic breakdown of the 1930s has not repeated itself, there are enough worrisome comparisons that still apply. Whereas today the PIIGS owe more than they will be able to pay, at the time it was Germany stuck in the same situation. And while back then it was the strict adherence to the gold standard that worsened the economic situation in the UK, US, and Germany, it is today the Euro, which forces Spain and others through a deflationary, low growth (even recessionary), high unemployment period.

Of course superficially comparable situations will not necessarily result in the same horrifying course of events, but a study of the past makes one also painfully aware of how much of déjà vû the structural monetary and financial problems of the European debt crisis really is.

Aurélien

 Quoi dire sur Aurélien de Louis Aragon? Il semble presque bizarre qu'une personne comme moi - prétendue rationnelle, orientée par des faits - aimerait autant une histoire d'amour si sentimentale.  Mais Aragon est sentimental, ses deux personnages principaux se dévorent d'un amour impossible voire vain- et basé sur rien hormis quelques petites rencontres, sans trop l'être. Il garde - surtout à la fin en fait - un sang froid intellectuel que je trouve impressionnant. De la même manière Aragon semble un très, très fin observateur des humains et de leurs interactions. Ses remarques - presque des aphorismes - sur le comportement de ses protagonistes sont convainquantes(et déprimantes par leur réalisme de temps en temps). Un livre très fort.

Making the European Monetary Union

Harold James' history of the Euro, Making the European Monetary Union - The Role of the Committee of Central Bank Governors and the Origins of the European Central Bank was directly commissioned by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) both of whom made their archives containing protocols and minutes available for the author. I have no idea to what extent the Euro crisis played a role in this commission, but it is what makes a rather tedious piece of bureaucratic history a fascinating read.

What is maybe the most important lesson of this history, is how little the issues discussed in years leading up to EMU have fundamentally changed. The following clearly applies to the situation today as much as it refers to the 1950s and the following decades:

"One way of thinking about these imbalances is as a reflection of changes in relative competitiveness. Thus a German surplus was a reflection of favourable development of productivity gains and of wage costs contained by a collaborative and collective approach to wage setting."

What still escapes me to some extent is that "there was a clear economic as well as as political logic behind the creation of a single European economy." James describes this economic logic as the forefathers of the ECB (the aforementioned Committee of Central Bank Governors (the CoG)) looking to overcome "genuine problems of currency instability and misalignment at the international level [meaning the dollar]." Yet, this logic of course contrasts starkly with the misalignments at the European level clearly visible today and also directly runs counter the Bundesbank's preference, expressed here by the President of the New York Fed as late as 1992, for "what they think is the single most important principle of the mechanism [the ESM], i.e., that it be flexible."

People clearly understood the problems associated with a common currency, see the Bundesbank's President Karl Otto Pöhl:

"In a monetary union with irreversibly fixed exchange rates the weak would become ever weaker and the strong ever stronger. We would thus experience great tensions in the real economy of Europe. [...] In order to create a European currency, the governments and parliaments of Europe would have to be prepared to transfer sovereign rights to a supranational institution."

Or the the Italian Finance Minister Giuliano Amato:

"Indeed, there is a "fundamental problem" in the EMS; which can be attributed to the fact that there is no "engine of growth." Not only is the pivot currency of the system fundamentally undervalued, but the growth of domestic demand in Germany is lower than the average; the result is that the country has structural surpluses also vis-à-vis the rest of the EEC. These surpluses, both commercial and current, on the one hand induce tension within the exchange system, pushing up the D-mark, particularly when the dollar drops, and, on the other hand, they remove growth potential from the other nations. In the long run, the cohesion of the system could suffer."

"Pöhl [...] thought that the best option was for the European governments to call on the CoG to investigate a currency union as the endpoint of a process of economic integration,"a point that is still off into the future then. Yet, the Delors Committee, which paved the way for EMU really and of which the European central banks' presidents were members, believed that the "maximum possible extent adjustment should occur by way of market mechanisms" with a Community budget of around 3% providing an additional escape valve. The problem of course today is that the EU's budget still hovers near the 1% mark.

The ECB to large extent has to be seen as the successful upload of the Bundesbank's preferences to the European level ("astonishingly all the committee members agreed with the German position") including central bank independence, the absence of an "explicit role for the ECB in supervising banks," and strict inflation targeting.

Harold James describes the Bundesbank's support for EMU very interestingly - and convincingly - as a way for German central bankers to preserve their independence, which was constantly being threatened by the international agreements German politicians entered into and which undercut the Bundesbank's control over the DM's money supply figures. 

"The Bundesbank was really not strong enough to stand up to such an orchestration of demands, so it needed to cast around for allies. [...] the Bundesbank needed to look more to a European mechanism for building support for its bargaining position in a German context."

History is an inaccurate social science. It is far from clear what lessons James' detailed account offers us then. Most interestingly maybe is the repetitiveness of the arguments we believe to be du jour and the conclusions which were drawn from them then (banking union, reinforced intra-EU financial support mechanisms, deeper economic integration/convergence) as much as today without truly having been put into place neither then nor now.

Der brave Soldat Finck

Werner Fincks Der brave Soldat Finck erzählt die Geschichte des Lebens des Autors als politischer Komödiant unter den Nazis. Finck ist kein großer Schriftsteller und seine - wohl inhärent zum Komödianten passenden - konstanten Versuche Witze zu reißen, fallen leider ab und an flach. Nichtsdestotrotz erzählt er eine spannende und ereignisreiche Geschichte von einem Star des politischen Kabaretts, der sich durch seine Haltung gegenüber den Nazis (und angeblich vor allem Goebbels gegenüber) ins KZ redete.

Young Europe

I've started writing on a blog for a Polish think tank, Instytut Obywatelski, called Young Europe. Here is the introductory piece, and here my first content piece on the lessons of the US Supreme Court for European integration.

Doghouse Roses

Steve Earle is of course one of my most favorite musicians (check here for statistical proof), it was a no-brainer for me to obtain his collection of short stories Doghouse Roses then - if ten years after it had originally come out. As King Kaufman rightly puts it, this really is a songwriter moonlighting as a short story writer and some of his stories are more like songs than anything else. Earle tries to latch onto his songs style and also the kind of crude, working-class modern Southern fiction often times sounds like (Dagoberto Gilb, Larry Brown, or William Gay come to mind). The problem is, he only succeeds at this to some extent. His stories are too simplistic, too much like songs really, too often and the same can be said for his language, which works much better in the starker poetic environment of song-writing than in the prosaic world of fiction-writing. 

 

All in all a must for anybody fascinated by the living legend, activist, and torch-bearer that is Steve Earle, but I am more curious to listen to his next album than to read his second book (a novel) which came out in 2011.

Nord

Lecture difficile. J'ai eu du mal à finir Nord de Céline en parallèle avec mes études. Ce roman autobiographique est beaucoup moins accrocheur que son œuvre la plus connue, Voyage au bout de la nuit. Le style d'écriture est par ailleurs peu accessible. Céline y décrit le début de son exil après la fin du régime de Vichy et l'occupation allemande de la France. L'auteur a été qualifié par Malraux de « pauvre type » mais de « grand écrivain », admiré pour son Voyage au bout de la nuit et condamné pour son collaborationnisme intellectuel et ses diatribes antisémites.

En 1944, il fuit Paris avant la libération, craignant les répressions dont il pourrait faire l'objet. Il se rend en Allemagne, à Baden-Baden, puis à Berlin et finalement à Kränzlin (Zornhof dans son roman - petit village aux alentours de Berlin). Céline décrit une Allemagne en désarroi dans les derniers mois de la guerre, les fêtes orgiaques à Baden-Baden où - comme partout - tout le monde sait que la guerre est perdue mais personne ne l'admet, la corruption voire la tromperie à Zornhof où un dernier SS et la police règnent toujours sans que l'espoir ni la croyance ne subsiste. C'est un monde apocalyptique qu'il voit et décrit peuplé de personnage désespérés, perdus et sans scrupules. Il y voit relativement clair sans doute.

Pourtant l'auteur est incapable d'appliquer cette franchise intellectuelle à lui-même. Non seulement attaque-t-il ceux qui osent le qualifier dans la France d'après-guerre d'hypocrite et de ridicule, et dénonce-t-il leur focalisation sur lui - sans doute à raison vu l'importance de la collaboration en général - mais il nie aussi toute erreur de sa part. Il estime ne pas avoir commis de fautes, réagissant seulement à des circonstances difficiles . Il prétend s'être retrouvé dans cette situation à son insu et le lecteur cherche en vain une réflexion de sa part sur l'horreur du régime nazi et sur sa collaboration (intellectuelle).

Une lecture difficile donc, au niveau linguistique et en raison de son contenu. Le livre est loin d'atteindre la qualité de Voyage au bout de la nuit, mais reste néanmoins intéressant.

Iron Curtain

Anne Applebaum of Gulag: A History fame - within certain circles in any case - has recently published another historical account Iron Curtain - The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944 - 1956. As Eastern European history has been one of my more current fads - following Snyder's Bloodlands and Mink's Vie et mort du bloc soviétique, I am currently reading Tony Judt's Postwar - her new book fits right in. It helped to peak my interest of course that Applebaum is married to one of the more impressive European statesmen of the day, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski - check out his great speeches at the DGAP in Berlin and at the Blenheim Palace in the UK if interested.

Back to the Iron Curtain though, in it the author attempts to explain how a whole region, Central and Eastern Europe, but heavily concentrating on East Germany, Poland, and Hungary, came not just under the sway but the totalitarian control of the USSR. Applebaum's book ends where Mink's process of désoviétisation sets in with the uprisings in East Germany (1953), Poznan (1956), and Hungary (also 1956). Her focus lies on the preceding soviétisation then, the establishment of national Communist regimes subservient to the USSR.

Applebaum's book sets in with the conquest of the Red Army of Poland, where it allowed the remnants of the Wehrmacht to crush the Warsaw Uprising killings hundreds of thousands and indirectly undercutting any sizable armed opposition to Soviet-instilled rule. She moves on to the raping and pillaging of Eastern Germany followed by the creation of ethnically homogeneous nation-states in the geographically newly established Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, et al. What follows is the sly takeover of national Communist parties dominated by Moscow cadres and thus to the detriment of not only non-Communist politicians of all colors but also oftentimes of convicted Communists having spent the war in their home country or in Western exile. Early post-war all-party coalition governments were often led by non-Communist leaders, while the Communists concentrated on strategically important régalien ministries such as defense, justice, interior, et al. Direct Soviet control was usually exerted over the most important propaganda tool of the day, radio, and the swiftly established repressive secret police force. A number of disappointing electoral results led to the forceful establishment of totalitarian Communist power involving a whole number of show trials diminishing opposition politicians ranging from the far-right (fascist collaborators) to social-democrats and even non-Stalinist Communists.

All in all a fascinating account of a history whose outlines one might be familiar with but whose details provide interesting insights into the emptiness of Stalinist propaganda, its excessive economic and political failures, but also the naivety of national as well as Soviet cadres, and finally their nonetheless successful - if temporary - establishment of totalitarian regimes.

Once again reviews abound (the New Yorker's might be the best, the Washington Post also had one, here is the Telegraph, the New York Times and the Guardian).

La construction de l'Europe

La construction de l'Europe de Pierre Gerbet est une histoire de l'intégration européenne commençant avec les idées intégrationnistes du début du 20ème voire avant et se terminant à la fin de ce dernier siècle. Je l'ai lu il y a carrément trop longtemps pour en faire une critique adéquate surtout parce que Gerbet présente une vue globale des développements sur plusieurs décennies. Pourtant l'auteur réussit à permettre au lecteur de développer une meilleure connaissance l'histoire de l'intégration. Peu importe si cela inclut les tentatives d'intégration avortées des années 20, les essais forcés ou échoués de la deuxième guerre mondiale, voire les crises des années intermédiaires entre l'échec de la Politique européenne de défense et l'Acte unique.

Une petite collection des meilleurs citations afin de conclure:

• Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène : Je ne pense pas qu'il y ait en Europe d'autre grand équilibre possible que l'agglomération et la conféderation des grands peuples.
• Les apôtres du mouvement des nationalités espéraient que les peuplés libérés, pacifiques par nature, seraient frères.
• Bismarck : L'Europe n'est qu'un mot employé par les puissances, qui exigent des autres ce qu'elles n'osent pas réclamer en leur nom.
• Ernest Renan : Les nations ne sont pas quelque chose d'éternel. Elles ont commencé, elles finiront. La confédération européenne, probablement, les remplacera [1887!].
• Edvard Beneš comme militant du Pan-Europe de Coudenhove-Kalergi
• 16 juin 1940, proposition d'une Union franco-britannique au gouvernement de Reynaud, même soirée que celui démissionne et Pétain est nommé Président du conseil

Why Nations Fail

One of the most recently hyped books on the political economy, Why Nations Fail - The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson tries to explain why some nations grow rich while others fail their citizens. Reviews abound (Dan Drezner, William Easterly, Martin Wolf), my addition to these luminaries weighing in would hardly seem to matter at the margins even.

I will try but little then. Robinson and Acemoglu put forward a very interesting argument showcasing how institutions - political and economic ones - determine long-term growth and in that sense are to belie the performance of nations/states. Neither culture, nor religion, nor even geography matter to the same extent and with the same durability and importance as to the authors. It's a very convincing argument devoid of the old cultural, xenophobic, racist, or even geopolitical prejudices. In order to generate and most importantly sustain long-term economic growth countries were in need of inclusive institutions, which the authors juxtapose with the extractive institutions present in far too many African or even Asian or South American states.

In more detail:

Extractive institutions ... have a powerful logic: they can generate some limited prosperity ... while distributing it into the hands of a small elite. For this growth to happen, there must be political centralization. ... The growth generated by extractive institutions is very different in nature from growth created under inclusive institutions ...most important, it is not sustainable. By their very nature extractive institutions do not foster creative destruction and generate at est only a limited amount of technological progress ... [also] strong incentives for others to fight to replace the current elite. Infighting and instability are thus inherent features of extractive institutions. The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards.

The Geopolitics of Emotion

Dominique Moïsi proposes a new theory of international relations in his book The Geopolitics of Emotion  - How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World. Ok, it's not really a developed new theory and I also did not find it convincing overall nor even as a coherent argument, but that it is a theory is the idea behind it.

Moïsi starts out from a commonplace perspective that I - but not Realists - very much agree with: "This book is formed on a [...] conviction [...] one cannot fully understand the world in which we live without trying to integrate and understand its emotions." From there he essentially argues that three broad strains of emotions govern whole world regions (hope: Asia; humiliation: the Arab world; and fear: the West).

The simplicity of the argument is almost stunning. It first of all is almost necessarily inductive, broad political developments are retrospectively grouped under one fitting emotion while contrary changes or motivating emotions are being ignored. It second of all groups a variety of countries together that is confounding. Sure, both Dubai and Yemen are Arabic countries, but are both 'humiliated'? Thirdly, complex human reasoning is broken down to one determining emotional factor. To ignore that al-Qaeda has a deep ideological foundation and even had an explicit strategic plan to draw the United States into battle in a Muslim country is incredibly reductive, yet it is what Moïsi does when ascribing the attacks of 9/11 to Arabs' humiliation on the hands of the West.

Let me end with one citation, which showcases well why I find it extremely difficult to take the whole argument serious:

It can be argued that the first Asian economic miracle in the 1980s was at least in part a triumphant response to national feelings of humiliation. Countries such as South Korea and even Taiwan wanted to prove to Japan, their former occupying power, that they too could perform well on the global economic stage. An initial feeling of defiance has also been one of the motors of the current Chinese renaissance. Thus the humiliation inflicted by the Japanese on the rest of Asia has constituted and energizing drug for the entire region.

Really?

The Post-American World

In one of the more hyped books of the political science literature, Fareed Zakaria, explains The Post-American World, which were to follow the United States unipolar moment during the late 20th/early 21st century. For Zakaria this is not so much due to "the decline of America but rather about the rise of the everyone else." The economic success and increasing geopolitical importance of "the rest," the non-Western world, has been "most visible in Asia but it is no longer confined to it" with the rest of the BRICs but also large parts of Africa having made tremendous progress.

Zakaria goes then on to detail to some extent the rise of China and India contrasting their respective economic and political (dis)advantages - democratic governance vs efficient decision-making to sum it up really concisely. His final chapter then deals with the US again and effectively proposes policy but also cultural or societal changes that would help the country, which for the coming decades undoubtedly will remain the major player in a multipolarizing world, adapt to its relative decline in a constructive manner as the UK did in the early 20th century.

While I am very much in agreement with most of what Zakaria puts forward in his book, which I am wary to truly consider part of the political science canon, his argument feels slightly redundant or rather commonplace in today's world. He wrote it in 2007/2008, so maybe he was more of an outlier at the time, yet arguably his stance and book has only become such a modern, classic of political commentary literature because of the American insularity that he decries himself. Essentially, knowledge of other languages, other cultures, other political system, other economic success stories in the US remains astonishingly limited - or is belittled in any case. Movements in the tectonic plates of global power politics are noticed slower than in the US as they are in culturally more internationally aware and open societies. The Post-American World provides little added-value to the politically- and economically-informed reader of news and - non-scientific - analysis.

Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin made a lot of noise when it came out in 2010, mostly because of its perceived moral equation of Hitler's and Stalin's crimes. Personally, I am not sure Snyder is even interested in the moral question though, for me he simply states that there is a striking geographic overlap in the areas where both Soviet Communists and German Nazis had most of their victims. 

These Bloodlands - between Eastern Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics and Western Russia - suffered from the Ukrainian famine, the concomitant invasion and occupation by Germany and the USSR in 1939, followed by a second invasion for the formerly USSR-occupied regions in 1941, the starvation of millions of Soviet soldiers, the Holocaust in both its early (bullets) as well as late (gas) stages, and finally reconquest by the Red Army with the Wehrmacht leaving a bloody trail on its way back to Germany.

It's essentially an absolutely horrifying account of the unprovoked killings of 14 million civilians in a 12-year span.

There is little that I feel I can truly contribute to this debate, which involves far too many outlets and national perceptions as it is (hier in der Zeit, the NYRB, ou Le Monde) and I will let historians figure out whether Snyder's Fascism-Communism comparison holds true or not:

Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory. (Wikipedia)

Let me just say that as someone possessing slightly above average knowledge of the history of the Third Reich I discovered relatively little new in Bloodlands concerning the atrocities committed by the Germans - and, yet, even there specific events especially in Belarus and Warsaw I was little familiar with - while the account of the Soviet crimes perpetrated during those years were revelatory and for the most part completely new to me.

Vie et Mort du bloc soviétique

La Vie et Mort du bloc soviétique de Georges Mink est un court ouvrage moyennant récent qui se concentre surtout sur l'histoire de l'Europe central - Pologne, Tchécoslovaquie, Hongrie, Bulgarie et Roumanie mais aussi à un moindre degré l’Albanie et Yougoslavie.

L'auteur discerne deux grandes lignes dans l'histoire post-guerre de cette région la soviétisation - ce qui est la transplantation du modèle soviétique dans sa zone d'influence - de 1947 jusqu'aux milieu des années 1950 et la désoviétisation à partir de ce moment jusqu'à la fin de l'empire soviétique.

Après-guerre la plupart des pays libéré par l'Armée rouge - comme en France vraiment - ont été gouverné par une vaste coalition des partis politiques divers. Ce dualisme des politiques est remplacé par une soviétisation de la politique et par une prise de pouvoir des partis communistes (voire commune socialiste et communiste) par différents moyens - semi-révolution, semi-coup de d'Etat en Tchécoslovaquie, des élections faussées en Pologne.

Suivi la tactique du salami qui consistait dans l'élimination de l'opposition politique commençant par l’extrême droite - souvent les collaborateurs avec des Allemands - et passant par le centre jusqu'aux politiciens de gauche trop social-démocrates voire indépendants vu leur engagement individuel au sein par exemple de la guerre civile en Espagne. Ces purges aurait été nécessaire pour réaliser une soviétisation parfaite, condition sine qua non de l'homogénéité du bloc.

Les nouveaux régimes profitaient d'une certaine légitime politique voire soutien populaire basée sur ceux qui profitaient du nouveau système. Effectivement la situation d'économies sous-développées [...] encore sous-industrialisés, à dominante agricole, avec une population habitant majoritairement les zones rurales, employés dans une agriculture d'autosubsistance se prêtait aisément à un "capital-based" développement de l'industrie lourde, technologiquement peu avancé. Ce soutien s'est basé alors à la fois sur les nouvelles élites ayant remplacées celles victimes de la purge et les anciens paysans devenu travailleur.

Mais, la soviétisation [...] provoque la naissance de [...] la désoviétisation à cause de sa nature trop rigide et doctrinaire. La désoviétisation décrit un ensemble de mécanismes [...] qui permettent au régime communiste de perdurer.
 

Surtout au niveau économique se présentait des problèmes à cause d'une croissance économique extensive - c'est à dire basée sur une augmentation d'"input" (travailleurs et capital) - qui fallait être remplacée par une croissance intensive - c'est à dire basée sur une augmentation de la productivité. Un besoin économique voire financière qui n'était augmenté par le mal du bloc soviétique de maintenir leurs dépenses militaires élèves.

Suite vient la tentative de sauvetage du bloc par sa modernisation et sa relégitimation [qui finalement] échouera. Cet effet Gorbachev consiste en partie de l'idée de faire de la Pologne (et de la Hongrie) un modèle réformateur mais pas de faire du table rond - pour juste citer un exemple - un modèle de la sortie du communisme pour le pays de l'Europe central en grande partie à cause du fait que la certitude que les moyens de coercition internes étaient hors d'image devait être confortée par la preuve que le centre de l'empire ne réagissait pas non plus.

Ce qui nous laisse avec une réfolution (contraction des mots évolution et reforme) en Europe central qui menait à une passation du pouvoir - à l'exception de la Roumanie - négociée.

An Enemy We Created

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn are two young Dutch and Germans respectively who have been living - on and off I assume - for a number of years in Kandahar, Afghanistan. I had first heard about them in a collective article they wrote for Foreign Policy two years ago, since they have published - to my knowledge - a collection of translated Taliban poems and edited the autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef a former senior member of the Taliban. Having lived in a working class part of Tunis for the better part of two years and having done an extremely short excursion to war-torn Libya last year, I can hardly contain my respect for the authors in light of the difficulties they must have faced and overcome in their daily - and not so daily - life. Modern day heroes in the daily fight against Orientalism's ugly face to be far too poetic.

Their book An Enemy We Created - The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2001 finds an apt expression in its title. The authors recount the differing histories of the Taliban and al-Qaeda through the years of the Mujhadeen fighting against Soviet occupation with American support, over the Taliban's conquest of Afghanistan 'inheriting' al-Qaeda in the process, and finally the post-9/11 story of Western occupation and Taliban insurgency. It is an incredibly detailed - if at times sloppily edited and thus repetitive - account of the ideological, political and war history of two differing currents of modern - today might be more apt a word - political Islamist thought (and action).The reader is left with an appalling feeling of emptiness when faced with the lack of understanding in the West for the actual events on the ground in a country that same West has been occupying for a decade. He (she) also gains a more profound understanding of Islamist thought and especially of Afghan history.

An Enemy We Created easily is one of the most impressive works of intercultural scholarly work I have yet read, relying on Arabic as well as Pashtun sources and interviews, and dealing with a country that even in the 21st century seems to be as far removed from decadent Europe as one could imagine.

Prater Violet

Christopher Isherwood famous mostly for his great Berlin trilogy wrote much more than those three novels of course yet I had hardly ever heard of any of them before. Prater Violet sees the literary Isherwood - the author is the character is not the author? - working on a film set in England under an Austrian director having fled the restrictions imposed upon him in his native country. His story is essentially a portrayal of the clash between a culturally aware and demanding director schlepping in his tow his script-writing underling and the commercially-focused producer. It is a short, enjoyable read, showing Isherwood's forte, human observations and transports a slightly melancholic understanding of humanity that I personally find quite beautiful.

Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert

Walter Benjamin gehört - zumindest mit diesen Erinnerungen - zur Flaneur- bzw Observationsliteratur der 20er und 30er Jahre vergleichbar mit z. B.  Franz Hessel. Benjamin erzählt mit detailliert und romantizierend Anekdoten und Beobachtungen seiner Kindheit in dem Vorkriegsberlin, welches kein Berlin nach 1945 geboren noch kennt. Das macht ihn zwar einerseits faszinierend und eine interessante Quelle, aber andererseits versteht selbst der sich in Berlin auskennende Leser (icke) viele geographischen Andeutungen kaum. Eine gleichermaßen frustrierende wie anregende Lektüre auf eine gewisse Weise.

Notes on Norman Mailer's White Negro

- it is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times

- the hipster [...] knows that [...] our collective condition is to live with [...] a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stiffled

- one is Hip or one is Square [...] one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed

- it may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath [...] the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone

- many hipsters are bisexual

- it is not granted to the hipster to grow old gracefully

- if the liberal should prove realistic in his belief that there is peaceful room for every tendency in American life, then Hip would end by being absorbed as a colorful figure in the tapestry

Norman Mailer - The White Negro (1957)

Chien blanc

Un français qui voyage aux Etats-Unis et les expliquent à ses contemporains français voire européens. Quoi de neuf? Ce n'est ni Crèvecoeur, ni Tocqueville mais une version littéraire de la vie de Romain Gary et son épouse Jean Seberg entre LA et Paris en 1968. Le Chien blanc du titre fait référence à un chien dressé contre les noirs qui leur tombe dans les mains et qui l'auteur/le personnage principal veut faire guérir avec l'aide d'un dresseur d'animaux noir. Gary (l'auteur) démontre bien le racisme des blacks autant que des blancs dans son livre au même temps qu'il y voit la futilité d'une lutte où les blacks se sentent américains sans de le s'admettre tout à fait.

Un livre qui bouge (saute?) entre la vie familiale de Gary, le civil rights movement, la bataille de rue à Paris en 68, et plusieurs individus sur les différents côtés.Ce mélange est son forte mais aussi son faiblesse. Parfois le récit faisait l'impression de manquer de cohérence mais au même temps quelques descriptions font une forte impression sur le lecteur (voire moi) par exemple un leader militant des noirs Afro-Américain 'Red' dont un fils à déserté l'armée, l'autre y fait carrière ou la scène où Gary et un co-resistant dessinent des slogans de leur jeunesse (sur l'Espagne et des autres sujets) sur un mur dans le Paris révolté de 68.

Friedrich II. von Hohenstaufen

Die Biographie von Friedrich II. von Hohenstaufen von Jacques Benoist-Méchin war mir bei meinen Eltern wegen der Verbindungen, welche der Hohenstaufer in die Arabische Welt pflegte, ins Auge gefallen. Nun, einige Monate später, las ich seine Biographie endlich. Friedrich II. (1194-1250) war Kaiser des Heiligen Römischen Reiches, König Siziliens sowie König Jerusalems. Er profilierte sich in unzähligen Konflikten mit dem Papst, den ihm unterstehenden Fürsten auf Sizilien sowie in Deutschland, und schaffte es eine relativ lange und stabile Herrschaft aufrecht zu erhalten, was relativ erstaunlich war angesichts seiner kindlichen Machtlosigkeit. 

Doch diese Verschwörungen und Machtkämpfe interessierten mich letztens Endes weniger als die faszinierenden europäisch-arabischen Kontakte, welche dieser Kaiser pflegte. In Sizilien aufgewachsen sprach er fließend (oder zumindest ein wenig, je nach Leseart) Arabisch und baute seine spätere Machtfülle zum Teil auf eine Leibgarde arabischer Ritter, welche er (nachdem die deutschen Fürsten sie in Sizilien von der Macht vertrieben hatten) befriedete und in einer Siedlung (Lucera) mit allen Rechten angesiedelt hatte. Desweiteren leitete er den 5. Kreuzzug und beendete diesen (ohne den kriegerischen Teil überhaupt je wirklich angefangen zu haben) mit einem Vertragsfrieden und der christlichen (Wieder-)Machtergreifung in Jerusalem.

Die ideologisch geprägte Dichotomie zwischen Europa und dem Nahen Osten bzw dem Norden Afrikas wurde in der Gestalt Friedrich II. ad absurdum geführt. Nicht nur hatte dieser arabische Gelehrten an seinem Hof, er ließ weiterhin viele ursprüngliche griechische Texte aus dem arabischen ins lateinische übersetzen und lass obendrein arabische Logiker, Mathematiker und Mediziner.

Auch wenn der Autor Jacques Benoist-Méchin ein berühmter Kollaborateur war, was mir erst im Nachhinein bewusst wurde und sich im Text nicht niederschlug, was mich am meisten an ihm störte waren seine überzogenen Interpretation (genre: 'Friedrich II. war glücklich als er die Sonne aufgehen sah') und seine zeitweise naive Argumentation (genre: 'Denn war Friedrich II. nicht schon als Kind stolz gewesen?'). 

Die historische Figur des Kaisers bleibt nichtsdestotrotz faszinierend. Dieser versuchte sich auch an einem empirischen wissenschaftlichen Werk (über die Falknerei) auf Erfahrungen und nicht Zitaten aufbauend (und damit im Gegensatz zum Totschlagargument 'in der Bibel sagte Salomon bereits...'). Die negative Seite dieser erforschenden Neugierde wurde von einigen seiner Untertanen gezahlt. So ließ er eine Gruppe von Babies aufziehen unter dem strengsten Verbot mit ihnen zu sprechen. Sie starben alle schnell. Sein Ziel hierbei war gewesen, zu sehen, auf welche Ursprache sie zurückfallen würden.