Nation Topics - Berlin | The Nation

Reviews the book "Shadow of Berlin," by David Bergelson, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel.

Reviews the book "Flourishing: Letters, 1928-1946," by Isaiah Berlin and edited by Henry Hardy.

Reviews the book, "Gögy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination," by Richard Steinitz; and the musical recordings, "The Ligeti Project: Volumes I-IV," featuring the Schönberg Ensemble, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Reinbert de Leeuw and Jonathan Nott, conductors; and "Ligeti/Reich: African Rhythms," featuring Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, and the Aka Pygmies ensemble.

Lula, Brazil's newly installed president, Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, told an appreciative crowd here on January 24, 2003, whose January 1, 2003 inauguration was dubbed the "first high point of the international left since the fall of the Berlin wall" by his adviser and renowned radical Catholic theologian Frei Betto--isn't your everyday populist. All Brazil knows how Lula was born in poverty and how his major campaign promise was to wipe out hunger. So when he spoke at the third annual World Social Forum, many of the 75,000 listeners at the Ptr-do-Sol outdoor amphitheater looked down and shook their heads; some wept. Brazil has the ninth-largest economy in the world but ranks fourth-worst on the globe in the gap between rich and poor-right behind Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic and Swaziland. In the shadow of Brazil's military dictatorship, Lula led the rejuvenation of the national labor movement and engineered the building of the PT--a sui generis mass leftist party that is neither orthodox Marxist nor social democratic but somewhere in between. José Dirceu, Lula's chief of staff and top strategist, was trained as a guerrilla fighter in Cuba and reentered Brazil after plastic surgery; his own wife didn't know his real identity until years later. But while the social portfolios all went to the left, Lula packed his economic team with conservatives: Vice President José Alencar is a textile magnate, and Central Bank president Henrique Meirelles is orthodox enough to calm the troubled sleep of Brazil's Wall Street investors and inspectors.

In more than fifteen years of rock-and-roll touring, my worst night of sleep followed a June 10, 1989, show at Centro Sociale Leoncavallo, an anticapitalist squat in Milan. On that impossibly long tour, ending just months before the Berlin wall fell, my band Soul Side played at social centers lodged in squatted buildings in Italy, Holland, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Germany. None, however, rivaled the squat in Milan where we were taken after our concert at Leoncavallo to "sleep" in a bat-infested room, on mattresses that had seemingly been marinated in bodily fluids. Since the mid-1970s, groups of anarchists, communists, punks and artists across Europe have availed themselves of liberal housing policies to seize and inhabit abandoned buildings, former factories, churches, schools, etc, and turn them into nonprofit, anticapitalist social centers. They are essentially illegal, and plenty are mercilessly crushed by the police. After several evictions, one of which spurred national solidarity demonstrations in 1994, Leoncavallo resides in an assortment of buildings behind huge walls that can be quickly barricaded in the event of another police raid. Social centers like Leoncavallo host a wide range of cultural and political activities: theaters, bookstores, art galleries, guaranteed shelter/or homeless immigrants, meeting spaces for antiglobalization organizing, Internet cafes, soup kitchens, yoga classes and live music of varied genres.Many social centers have disappeared, while a few have been given official recognition and support from local governments. Under the reign of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is hostile to anything and anyone falling under the "no global" umbrella, Italy has nearly 150 active social, centers, most of them stationed in squatted buildings. My band, Girls Against Boys, discovered that Leoncavallo is considered a menace to Italian society.

The three main interpretations of the cold war's demise reflect the right, center and left of U.S. politics. Since the tearing down of the Berlin wall, the right wing has claimed a resounding victory for U.S. president Ronald Reagan's military buildup and tough talk. The rapid expansion of the U.S. military spending, it is argued, also threatened Moscow with bankruptcy. Centrists, typically visible as the Democratic Party leadership, argued that the forty-year effort to check and reverse Soviet influence was a bipartisan endeavor. There is a third view, which sees the cold war as a logical and reprehensible outgrowth of a U.S. political system seemingly dependent on military spending for prosperity, willing to put the whole world at risk for its perfervid anticommunism.

The article discusses media coverage on reporting the U.S. national military budget. A decade after the fall of the Berlin wall, the U.S. national military budget still approximates 85 percent of the 1976-90 cold war average. At $270 billion, it makes up half the government's discretionary spending. Defense reporters and analysts say military budget stories are a hard sell for a number of reasons, the lack of significant dissent on Capitol Hill, a booming economy, a complacent public, the disappearance of the disarmament movement of the eighties and shrinking news holes for military stories in general.

This article focuses on the book "Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin," by Alexandra Richie. Richie, a Canadian scholar descended from one of the principal families of the German military aristocracy, is relentless in her assault on the myths of Berlin, and attentive to the ironies of its history. Richie's account of the postwar years is likely to be the most controversial part of her book, since historians' debate on the cold war is intensifying. The author states that Richie could have balanced her top-down political history with a richer sense of lived geography.

The article presents the author's views. While living in Seoul in the summer of 1992, I visited the demilitarized zone with a friend. His elderly father, Kim Young Son, seemed particularly melancholy, staring wistfully through a barbed wire fence at a mountain not many miles across the North Korean border. Son is among the last remaining victims of the cold war, an estimated 10 million South and North Koreans who, like him, remain separated from loved ones left on the other side of the arbitrary political borders drawn when the war ended in the year 1953.

The article focuses on the book "A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany," by Jürgen Habermas. For Habermas, learning from the past means that any future German republic must anchor itself firmly in the traditions of liberal democratic constitutionalism and respect for universal human, civil and political rights, including the social and economic rights gained by the working classes in welfare-state democracies. Only a vibrant civil society and an energetic public sphere, in which social movements create alternative associations and spaces along-side representative democratic institutions, can guarantee that liberal-democratic constitutionalism becomes a living culture rather than a dead tradition.