Correspondence
Issue No. 6
An International Project of the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence
Published by the Counci l on Foreign Relations
In This Issue
The World Press: U.S. & Britain
The First Global Newspaper
Journalism—Where It All Began
American Press: Facing the Internet
Who Owns the Media?
British Press: A Golden Age
Report from Britain
The Devolution of the U.K.
Intellectuals
Cultural Cold War—50 Years Later
Joseph Rovan
Alexandre Kojève: Russian Agent?
Ignazio Silone: Fascist Informant?
The World Press: France & Italy
French Press—The Quality Remains 17
The Italian Press 18
The World Press: Germany
German Press—Covering the World 20
Feuilleton & the Theatre of Politics 21
Marion Dönhoff at Ninety
Reports from Russia
The Russian Press
New Russian Theatre
Vladimir Putin, Cultural Maestro
(continued on next page)
An International Review of Culture and Society
Spring/Summer 2000
The Double Bind of the World Press
I n 1793, while hiding in a Parisian garret from Robespierre’s police, the emi-
nent French mathematician and Enlightenment philosopher the Marquis de
Condorcet wrote the remarkable Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès
de l’esprit humain. In that sketch, Condorcet, who had invented a calculus of
probabilities that underwrote the principles of insurance, declared that with the
discovery of printing and the diffusion of scientific knowledge, an enlightened
public opinion must ultimately win out: “It is enough for there to exist one cor-
ner of the free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves.” Condorcet,
unable to find asylum, was arrested and imprisoned at Bourg-la-Reine, and found
dead in his cell on the following day.
A free press is a condition for liberty and the test for every nation that pro-
claims itself to be free. In the United States, the foundations go back to the eigh-
teenth century. In 1734, still under English colonial rule, a New York editor,
Peter Zenger, was arrested for seditious libel for criticizing the provincial gover-
nor. He was acquitted on the then-revolutionary ground that truth was no libel.
But there was still the threat of government intimidation. In 1798, during the
3
Federalist presidency of John Adams, the Congress passed the Alien and Sedition
4 Acts, which made it a misdemeanor to speak or write against the president or
6 the Congress “with the intent to defame.” Twenty-five persons were arrested,
8 including a member of Congress, and several opposition Republican editors were
9 silenced by heavy fines or jail sentences. Two state legislatures, in protests
drafted by Jefferson and Madison, declared the act to be unconstitutional. The
election of Jefferson in 1800 quashed the act. Consistently, the Supreme Court
11 has upheld the freedom of the press, most notably in recent years in Sullivan v.
The New York Times (1964), which held that criticism of a public official was not
in itself libelous.
12
According to the latest annual survey by the New York-based pro-democracy
13 organization Freedom House, of 186 countries in the world, only 69 have a free
15 press, and these are principally in North America (the United States and Canada)
16 and Western Europe. More than half the press in the Middle East, Africa, and
Asia are not free. Repressive regimes crack down openly. In Serbia, newspapers
are shut down, journalists routinely jailed, and media outlets suddenly expro-
priated from their legal owners through mysterious court decisions and put into
the hands of others more loyal to the regime. In Iran, where newspapers had
bravely led the reform movement in support of President Khatami, eight news-
papers and four weeklies were abruptly shut down by decisions of the judicial
court and several editors jailed for defamation of Islam.
Freedom of the press is a perennial issue in the world, but in the past two to
22 three years newspapers have faced an extraordinary technological challenge that
is transforming the character of the press itself. This is why in this issue of
Correspondence we print reports on the press in eight major countries—the
23
United States, England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, India, and Japan.
24 The challenge is the Internet, one of the most astonishing and unexpected
26 technological developments of the century, which has revolutionized the infor-
mation infrastructure of world society. To illustrate: on January 8, 1815, there
was a Battle of New Orleans in which almost all the British troops were massa-
 The World Press

(continued from previous page)

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

2
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
The First Global Newspaper—Which?
I nevitably, with globalization there is a race to create a
global newspaper. As is now readily apparent, the Internet
makes it possible for any newspaper to be read everywhere.
The New York Times or Le Monde can be read in Timbuktoo (if
there is a phone modem there) or by the little lady in Dubuque.
In speaking of a newspaper, we mean, first the physical
print paper that one has in one’s hands. To that extent, the
first global paper has been the International Herald Tribune
which prints in twenty different plants and circulates in 187
different countries. The IHT, based principally in Paris, has
its own staff, but also draws heavily from its co-owners, the
Washington Post and the New York Times. (The Herald
Tribune, an original sponsor, fell by the
wayside many years ago.)
The IHT is crisply written and merci-
fully short (thirty to forty pages) against
the elephantine bulk of its parent papers,
but it does cover the major political and
cultural news, and to a lesser extent the
business world. But the readership of the
IHT, by and large, is primarily among
Americans living abroad, or some of the
business elites in Europe who want a
quick reprise of American events, and,
in the summertime, American travelers
who want a comfortable reminder of
their nationality. The IHT is now trying
to enlarge its scope, and (as we report in
our article on the German press), the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germa-
ny’s largest newspaper, now puts out an English-language sec-
tion on Germany that is folded into the IHT. The IHT has a
new editor, David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist with
broad international experience, especially in the Middle East,
but also a novelist and thriller writer, and so may enliven its
feature reporting.
The English Guardian puts out an English-language weekly
with translated pages from Le Monde and the Washington Post,
but the pages from Le Monde are few and the pages from the
Washington Post mostly its reviews, so the Guardian Weekly
remains principally a U.K. paper with international pretensions.
But it is the business press that is making the major efforts
to become global, largely because business advertising is
global, and that is where the riches lie. Among the business
weeklies, the strategies differ. Business Week, the most com-
prehensive of the business publications, has gone online,
allows its readers to download the magazine before the maga-
zine comes to the mailbox, is updated every business day, and
provides detailed daily briefings on dozens of different sub-
jects (with extensive dossiers the paper edition never fea-
tures). It is, if one so wishes, a daily business magazine.
The London Economist has a Web edition, free to paid sub-
scribers, organized thematically so that readers can quickly
select which stories interest them most, while providing de-
tailed statistical analysis on more than sixty countries for ready
reference. Its most ingenious innovation is a “mobile edition,”
so that anyone with a handheld device, such as a Palm Pilot,
can click into the magazine, wherever they are, and read pages
from the magazine. Increasingly, other publications are using
the same system. One gets free software from a company called
AvantGo, specifies which publication one wants to subscribe
to, connects their personal computer to the Web site, and the
handheld device is synchronized with the PC.
But the main competition, the global duel, is between the
two behemoths, the American Wall Street Journal and the
English Financial Times. The WSJ has by far the biggest cir-
culation in the world, totalling 2,400,000
in its regular print editions, as against
the FT’s 440,000. But most of the WSJ
circulation is in the United States, while
the FT is much stronger in Europe, let
alone in the United Kingdom, where the
FT sells about 190,000 copies daily.
The Wall Street Journal has long had
worldwide regional editions, such as the
Asian Wall Street Journal, or Wall Street
Journal Europe. Its strategy seems to be
to expand its print editions, but to tailor
them more to regional considerations. In
February, a redesigned Wall Street Jour-
nal Europe, on which the company says
it will spend $60 million, appeared on
the newsstands. The old WSJE looked
exactly like the American edition. The
new one introduces color photographs, and feature stories
spring out boldly across three columns in a more horizontal
“European” layout. The Wall Street Journal has special edi-
tions where bannered pages from the American edition are
translated and appear in local languages in twenty-six coun-
tries. The Wall Street Journal Americas, a set of special edi-
tions, is translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
The Financial Times, with its distinctive salmon-colored
pages, seems to have a different strategy. While the FT has an
affiliate in France, has acquired the Economic Times of India,
and now puts out a complete Financial Times Deutschland, on
salmon-colored paper (both reported on in this issue), the
paper now, as it states, produces two versions of the Financial
Times, one available on paper, one on the Web. With a new
technology, it has become a full global business portal, and the
site has seven channels covering everything from business
news to leisure. The FT now claims a roster of two million reg-
istered users and more than one million pages delivered daily.
What the Financial Times is saying is that it is not a newspa-
per with a Web site attached, but a journalistic enterprise “that
operates freely across media boundaries” and not committed
to any one form of publication. Which strategy will win out is
one of the fascinating questions in journalism today. ◆
—Daniel Bell
3
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
Journalism—Where It All Began
P olitical information first became a commodity in the
newsletters of the late sixteenth century. The stage was
set by the economic unification of Europe and the estab-
lishment of the first public postal systems. The sources were
the emerging state bureaucracies, not only by the communica-
tion networks they set up, but by the political decisions and
the military events that furnished the material for news.
The first peddlers of such news were not large printing
houses, but writers of the so-called avvisi, or handwritten
newsletters serving the customers all over Europe. These mer-
chants of information included government officials and
ecclesiastical bureaucrats, as well as lawyers, notaries, scribes,
literary hacks, unemployed intellectuals, and even murderers
and extortionists. Some, following
the example of Pietro Aretino,
commanded higher prices for what
they did not write than for what
they wrote.
Forging a new genre from the
mix of diplomatic or commercial
correspondence of officials or
businessmen, they began to circu-
late their newsletters on a weekly
or semi-weekly basis through
maintaining a characteristic anon-
ymous format. Despite intermit-
tent persecution, they provided
the most mordant and incisive
commentary and criticism of their
governments. From the French
religious wars to the conclusion of
the War of the League of Augsburg
(1555) they provided an unfolding
narrative of the ceremonial en-
trances and exits, the ministerial
scandals and royal deaths that
were the extraordinary spectacle
of early modern Europe, a specta-
cle, glittering or shabby, that continues to this day.
What a newsletter writer said depended to a considerable
extent on the interests of his purchasers, on what he was told
to write, or on subtle hints dropped by this or that govern-
ment seeking advantageous publicity. Wherever there was
news writing, the exercise of power and influence was never
far away. However, news writing was a business, and for the
week-to-week raw material for their sheets, newsletter writ-
ers depended most of all upon what they could glean from a
wide variety of sources more or less close to political events.
Fortunately, ambassadorial staffs were notoriously ill-paid
and susceptible to bribery, making the security of informa-
tion nearly impossible to protect. Information in the seven-
teenth century was nobody’s property; and in one way or
another newsletter writers were able to procure documents of
the most extraordinary kind.
4
Newsletter writers were as much a part of the oral as of
written culture. Far more than accredited sources, they
depended for their news gathering on rumor and hearsay.
And when they began a story by the customary diction, “it
is said that,” and variations thereof, this was exactly what
they meant. They regarded the general import of a communi-
cation as more important than specifics. If they kept any
notes at all, such notes more often included lists of topics
than lists of important details. After all, details could be
invented when necessary. They expected their sheets to be
discarded after dissemination or, as often happened, recy-
cled; preservation in an archive (where they could be con-
sulted) they would regard as a peculiar trick of fate.
Nowhere in seventeenth-cen-
tury cultural life was the concept
of authorship as appropriation
more accurate for describing how
texts were generated than in the
case of the newsletters. Newslet-
ters directed to the most excellent
purchasers were subsequently
leased, borrowed, or stolen, and
copied either word for word or in
combination with information
from still other newsletters or doc-
uments and then distributed to
still other customers. As soon as a
newsletter left the desk of its com-
poser it became fair game for
legions of copyists and hacks, with
no more imagination or daring
than what was necessary for living
by the efforts of their neighbors.
In spite of their notorious de-
fects, the newsletters filled an
important niche in early modern
society. They were as essential for
conducting international relations
as they were for slaking the thirst for salacious gossip. They
were often written by immigrant writers unable to break into
the closed worlds of the guilds and universities. At the same
time, they offered second incomes to underpaid civil servants
and scribes. And wherever rich and influential purchasers
could be found, they flattered the vanity of writers by the
prospect, however vague, of high connections. What was
more, newsletters were essential for the composition of the
more public genres of official printed news. Provided that
they transcribed accurately, which was not always the case,
their accounts were only as good as their sources.
The first great modern skeptic was Pierre Bayle, who
expressed his views in his periodical the Republic of Letters.
Reading the war of words between the late seventeenth-cen-
tury Catholics and Protestants, Bayle wondered whether the
truth about any event described by one side or the other could
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
ever really be known. And when this partisanship was com-
pounded by newspaper writers seeking fast gain by sensa-
tionalism or flattery, the unreliability was bound to increase.
When events were fast-moving and complex, the sources
could be highly difficult to interpret. “The affairs of the
Kingdom [of England] have never been as confused or in such
an unfortunate state as they are at present,” noted an apolo-
getic Théophraste Renaudot, founder of the Gazette de Paris,
in August 1642, at the height of the Civil War.
Writers just as often made their editorial choices simply in
order to flatter those in power. Indeed, to ensure good cover-
age, governments took considerable care to keep the local jour-
nalists on their side. A group of petitioners including newslet-
ter writer John Pory proposed an official news book series as
far back as the reign of King James I. The best way to shake
people out of their natural torpor and bring them under the
rule of right reason, they asserted, was by “spreading among
them such reports as may best make for that matter to which
we would have them drawn.” Finally in 1643, in the midst of
an explosion of hostile publications, the royal government
began sponsoring the Mercurius Aulicus. In a similar spirit,
the Milanese government and that of Piedmont eventually
gave the official print shop exclusive rights to publish the
local newspaper. That of Piedmont gave the journalist a 1000-
lire pension; while the government of France was giving the
same journalist half as much. Indeed, the latter government,
also maintaining Renaudot on the payroll, furnished battle
reports to the Gazette de Paris penned by none other than
Louis XIII himself.
Printed news was nothing new in the seventeenth century,
to be sure; but its volume was unprecedented. Entrepreneurs
included successful printers as well as newsletter writers, nov-
elists as well as failed actors. After the first regular newspapers,
dated 1609, began competing in Strasbourg and Wolfenbüttel
with existing one-time publications like news books and hand-
bills, they emerged in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, London,
Genoa, Milan, Barcelona, and hundreds of smaller centers. In
Germany, no less than two hundred newspapers were pub-
lished within the century. In England, some 350 titles of news
publications of all kinds appeared in the period from 1641-59
alone. Wide differences in literacy levels determined wide vari-
ations in diffusion. But the general impression of jurist Ahasver
Fritsch in Jena that news publications “get into the hands of
everyone” whether by reading or by listening, was exactly
echoed by engraver Giuseppe Mitelli in Bologna and by an
anonymous pamphleteer in Padua.
With all its contradictions and constraints, the news busi-
ness established in early modern Europe contained the basic
elements that would make it a feature of modern political prac-
tice in the centuries to come. The business raised many of the
questions about the nature and impact of information that
arose within the emerging public sphere and which remain to
be confronted today. ◆ the credibility of their coverage.
—Brendan Dooley
Note: This essay is drawn from the first chapters of Brendan Dooley’s
The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern
Culture, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Miscellany
Scandal in the Israeli Press
T he most bizarre of the season’s scandals revolves
around Ofer Nimrodi, director of the Israel Land
Development Corporation, a company that deals in
real estate, insurance, and publishing. He is editor-in-chief
of the country’s second largest newspaper, Ma’ariv, as well.
Nimrodi, 43, is a Harvard M.B.A. who once clerked at
Israel’s Supreme Court, but his moral compass seemed to
have gone haywire when he took over the family company
in the early ‘90s. Determined to save Ma’ariv from near
certain extinction, he sought to take what had once been
Israel’s biggest selling daily and remodel it on the lines of
Yediot Acharonot, a tabloid that sells more copies than all
of its competition combined.
Nimrodi seemed to have become somewhat overzealous
in his efforts to make Ma’ariv number one. He commis-
sioned wiretaps of top people at Yediot, of some of his own
journalists, and a variety of leading figures in Israeli soci-
ety. That was in 1994, and resulted in a series of court bat-
tles. Two years ago, having exhausted all legal avenues, he
made a plea bargain: he admitted to wiretapping and some
of the charges of tampering with justice, and was given an
eight-month prison sentence. That was reduced by a third
for good behavior and ended a year ago.
A month later, Nimrodi remarried, and the guests in-
cluded Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ezer Weiz-
man. Shortly afterward, however, he faced trouble. Rafi
Pridan, the private investigator Nimrodi had hired to carry
out the wiretaps, offered the Tel Aviv prosecutor material
incriminating his former employer in an effort to reduce his
own prison term. He claimed that his wiretapping partner,
Ya’acov Tsur, who had turned the state’s evidence during
the first investigation, was marked for death by Nimrodi.
Nimrodi was arrested in November 1999. The prosecut-
ing attorney declared that the eight counts of his indict-
ment had “no parallel in the State of Israel.” At a Novem-
ber hearing on Nimrodi’s continued detention, the head of
police investigation declared that the press mogul had
tried to buy off his entire unit.
As if the case was not troubling enough, it has under-
lined the fact that the country’s major media outlets are
owned by a small group of families. Together, the Nim-
rodis (Ma’ariv), the Mozeses (Yediot), the Schokens
(Ha’aretz), and Eliezer Fishman (a Mozes partner in
Yediot) own not only the country’s remaining Hebrew
papers, but also cable TV networks, the commercial TV
channel, book publishing, long-distance telephone ser-
vices, and Internet access. Sometimes they do business
together, and sometimes they feud, aligning and realign-
ing themselves so that the consumer can never be sure of
—David B. Green
Source: “Israel’s Winter of Discontent,” New Leader, March/April
2000. David B. Green is an editor of the Jerusalem Report.
5
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
The American Press: Facing the Internet
A few months ago, Hotaling’s closed down for good. Hotaling’s was New York’s best out-of-
town newsstand. From the 1920s on, it occupied street-level space at the uptown foot of the
Times Tower, and, like the news zipper girding that trapezoidal building, helped give cre-
dence to Times Square’s boastful claim to be the Crossroads of the World. The news zipper is still there,
though its bulletins are now provided by Dow Jones, not by the New York Times (and the building,
which the Times long ago outgrew, is a Warner Bros. souvenir
shop topped by gigantic billboards). Hotaling‘s, in its heyday,
was (if you love newspapers) a wildly romantic place, with
hundreds of front pages—the San Francisco Call-Bulletin! the
New Orleans Item! the Chicago Daily News! the Memphis
Scimitar!—clamoring for the attention of passing tourists,
pimps, and sailors. Toward the end of the century, Hotaling‘s
moved to humbler quarters in a storefront on 42nd Street, and
its inventory shifted toward foreign newspapers and maga-
zines, the better to serve the immigrants and adventurers
flooding into the city from abroad. Now it‘s gone.
What killed that fabulous old newsstand was, of course, the
Internet. But it hasn‘t been such a bad trade. A gigantic
Hotaling‘s is now at the fingertips of everyone in the world
who has access to a computer and a modem. The Call-Bulletin
and the others mentioned above are stone dead—they and
hundreds of their brethren were swept away by an earlier tech-
nological innovation, television—but just about every news-
paper in the world that‘s still in business is online, available
worldwide and free of charge at the moment of publication.
This is the biggest change in newspapering since Linotype
machines and rotary presses. Only a few of its eventual conse-
quences are as yet visible. What‘s happening to the American
press—to the press everywhere, for that matter—is a vast
melting, a dissolution, a liquification. Everything is dissolv-
ing and reforming in ways whose ultimate course can be envi-
sioned in a fuzzy sort of way but not precisely predicted. At
the moment, a number of effects—some transitory, some in all
likelihood permanent—are clear.
From the reader‘s point of view, there has been a staggering
expansion of choice. News is more available—faster, cheaper,
and in greater quantity and depth—from more sources than
ever before in human history. But this cornucopia is largely
notional, because what is not more available, unfortunately, is
time. The contemporary culture of work, paced by the new
economy, is a culture of long hours and short vacations. As
disposable income increases, disposable time contracts. And
the competition for that shrinking time—not only from old
favorites like books and family life but also from non-news
electronic distractions—grows ever fiercer.
One of the less remarked-upon features of the expansion of
choice offered by the new electronic technologies is that it has
involved a huge shift of administrative labor to the individ-
ual. We are all bank tellers now. We are all our own typists
and typesetters. Managing one‘s personal telephone service,
if one wishes to bother optimizing the supposed benefits of
6
deregulation, is as big a headache as running a business. And
cybernews is making each of us his or her own editor and,
increasingly, publisher.
From the point of view of the newspaper business, the new
technologies mean clammy insecurity in the present and, for
the future, some combination of oblivion and bonanza. The
present situation is inherently unstable. All that wonderful
stuff that‘s free on the Internet can‘t stay free forever. Right
now, it is subsidized by the parent newspapers‘ buyers and
advertisers, who will eventually tire of carrying the freight.
Ways will have to be found to get Internet readers to pay up.
How this will be done is as yet unknown; that it will be done
is certain. The infrastructure of publishing—not just news-
paper publishing but books and magazines too—is an absur-
dity that sooner or later must collapse. All those trees cut
down and pulped, all that ink pumped, all those plates made,
all those factories humming, all those trucks and ware-
houses—all that is ludicrously cumbersome, dangerously
slow, and unbelievably expensive. The real cost of a fifty-cent
newspaper is several dollars a copy, most of which goes for
manufacturing and distribution. At the newsstand, a year‘s
worth of the New York Times costs $365—$521 if you buy the
national edition. On the Internet, the price is zero. The latter
figure obviously requires adjustment, though it need rise to
only a fraction of the former. As money, like information,
increasingly streaks across the Internet in infinitely divisible
digital form, much of the true core cost of a “paper” like the
Times—the cost of its “wetware,” the editorial staff—will
eventually be borne by readers throughout the world paying
an affordably low price per head. Readers who still prefer
“hard copy” will simply print their own, buying their own
ink and paper and using their own “presses”—computer
printers whose capacity and quality (though not their prices)
rise dramatically every year. Stephen King has pointed the
way: he sold half a million “copies” of his new novella on the
Internet, and he was able, while still pocketing his usual
ample royalty, to sell them for $2.50 instead of $20 apiece,
because he didn‘t have to pay for trees and trucks.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the papers keep coming
out. The United States was always two countries from the
standpoint of the news business, the mass and the elite. Slowly
but inexorably, the newspapers are losing their hold on the
masses, who pay the bills—mostly indirectly, by serving as the
passive product that is sold to advertisers. The result is chronic,
low-grade panic in the business, the symptoms of which are
all too well known: the desperate search for jazzy graphics and
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
for “lifestyle,” celebrity, and consumer service content certi-
fied by focus groups alluring enough to pry the eyes of read-
ers, especially young readers, away from their television sets;
consolidation and editorial cost-cutting; marketing gimmicks
of all kinds, including the use of the paper as a delivery sys-
tem for preprinted advertising supplements. (For an authorita-
tive, and harrowing, account of the newspaper business‘s fear
and trembling, see Michael Janeway, Republic of Denial, pp.
109-154.) The local monopoly daily remains a cash cow, but
publishers‘ fears are palpable, yielding curious blends of timid-
ity and recklessness, stodginess and glitz.
Local and regional papers are (on average) rather worse than
they were a hundred years ago,
when Father would read aloud
to the family from their long
grey columns, but (on average)
rather better than they were
thirty or forty years ago:
blander, lighter, and as alike as
slices of Wonder Bread, but
more reliable and considerably
less slanted than they used to
be. For elite readers, though,
the great development of the
last quarter century has been
the emergence of national
dailies, a longtime feature of life
in geographically compact Eu-
rope lately made feasible here
by new technologies of print-
ing and satellite transmission.
There are three fully-fledged
nationals: the Wall Street Jour-
nal, the New York Times, and
USA Today. All—including,
surprisingly, the last-named—
are of high quality. (Down-mar-
ket national papers like Britain‘s Sun and Germany‘s Bild have
no direct American equivalents: high distribution costs mean
that national papers here must sell to affluent readers at pre-
mium prices. Celebrity magazines, weekly supermarket
tabloids, and trash television fill the gutter gap.) The three
U.S. nationals have tiny circulations, relatively speaking—
some four million copies a day altogether, about the same
absolute number as Britain‘s four national daily broadsheets,
which serve an overall population a fifth the size of ours. But
their audience dominates the political and economic life of
the country.
The New York Times plays a special role. It is read more care-
fully than the others, and by a wider range of elites; the Journal
eclipses it in the business community, but among cultural,
political, and “media” movers and shakers, it is without peer.
It is a kind of public utility; its excellence is so taken for
granted as to be hardly noticed except when it falters. Its
authority is ontological: it defines public reality. Its exquis-
itely calibrated front page constitutes a system of weights and
measures by which, willy-nilly, the importance of events, rela-
tive and absolute, is gauged. In recent decades, the paper has
added “lifestyle” and consumer sections—on entertainment,
shelter, food, and so on—in order to snare readers and adver-
tisers in and around its home city, and these have eaten into
the space given to the “news hole,” the “A section” of report-
ing and analysis of national and international affairs. The
change is less noticeable in the paper‘s national edition, a
streamlined paper in which the A section material, uncon-
densed, bulks relatively larger. The Times is better written,
more analytical, more sharply edited, and—for better and for
worse—more selective than it once was. But there is no getting
around the fact that it contains considerably less raw informa-
tion. It no longer runs important
state papers and speeches in full,
and its foreign coverage is spot-
tier, if sometimes deeper, than
before. When the Soviet Union
was collapsing, the Times ran
many stories mentioning the
“Union Treaty” through which
Mikhail Gorbachev was trying
to hold the empire together, but
never got around to publishing
the text of the treaty itself.
Elections overseas used to be
covered on an almost daily basis;
now there is typically one story
before the voting and one after.
All those speeches and docu-
ments and foreign political
updates are still readily avail-
able, of course—on the Internet,
for readers who have the time,
the inclination, and the surfing
skills to find them.
Ah, the Internet—the Alpha
and, especially, the Omega of
any survey of the contemporary news business. A decade and
a half or so ago, the Washington Post quite consciously
decided to forego the opportunity, created by its Watergate
glory and the growing importance of the capital, to remake
itself into a national paper. Instead, it turned inward,
focussing on building its impregnability in its local market.
Its prosperity is now unrivaled, at the cost of greatness. But
the potential remains. As the New Yorker cartoonist Peter
Steiner once pointed out, “On the Internet nobody knows
you‘re a dog.” On the Internet every paper is a national,
indeed a global, paper; for that matter, every high school kid‘s
homemade Web site has global reach. But the prizes, one day,
will belong to the papers (and the high school kids) best able
to provide the “content” that turns reach into grasp. The Post
has quietly poured tens of millions into its Web presence. It
may yet have something like the last laugh. Or it may resur-
face in some as yet unanticipated form, as newspapers, maga-
zines, books, and Web sites merge and flow into each other.
No one knows. All that is solid melts into pixels. ◆
—Hendrik Hertzberg
7
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
Who Owns the Media?
T raditionally, newspapers in the United States were fam-
ily-owned. The major examples are still the New York
Times, owned by the Ochs/Sulzberger family since
1896, and the Washington Post, bought by Eugene Meyer in
1933 and since then run by his daughter Katherine Graham,
and now her son Donald. There was also the Chandler family
of the Los Angeles Times; the McCormick family of the Chicago
Tribune; Field of the Chicago Sun; Patterson of the New York
Daily News; Bingham of the Louisville
Courier-Journal, and the Schiff family
of the New York Post.
All those are no more. There were
newspaper chains started by individ-
uals: the Hearst press, Scripps-
Howard (created by Roy Howard),
the Gannett chain, and the Newhouse
newspapers. The first two had news-
papers in major American cities, the
Gannett chain concentrated on
regional papers, and the Newhouse
on marginal papers where the penny-
pinching could squeeze out some
profits. The chains remain, but other
than the Newhouse family, they are
primarily corporate entities. The
Dow-Jones company, which owns the
Wall Street Journal, as well as many
other interests, is family-owned, but not family-managed.
Does it make a difference? As Katherine Graham wrote in the
Wall Street Journal of March 20, 2000, it does. The families have
been rooted in the cities where they publish, have a strong
sense of responsibility for quality, and have pride in their name,
while faceless managers can move from paper to paper.
The change in the ownership of American newspapers is
striking. At the beginning of the century, 99 percent of the
daily newspapers in the United States were individually owned.
By the mid-1980s more than 70 percent belonged to a newspa-
per chain. Today, of the roughly 1320 daily newspapers in the
United States, fewer than 20 percent, or about 265 papers, are
independent, and they are principally in small towns.
But perhaps the more important developments for the future
are the number of mergers and the creation of multi-media con-
glomerates in which newspapers are submerged. To under-
stand what is happening, one has to observe the distinction
between conduits, formats, and content. The internet or cable
or telephone are conduits through which information or data
or entertainment flows. A newspaper or magazine or television
screen are formats, ways of organizing the information flow.
Content is the articles or news which goes through the conduits
and is expressed in the formats. What is happening today is
the blurring of all these channels by the media conglomerates.
Take the $8 billion merger of the Tribune group and the
Chandler-owned Los Angeles Times Mirror Co., the third largest
newspaper in the country, which took place in March. The
8
Tribune Company is a conglomerate of eleven newspapers
(including the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and New
York Newsday) twenty-two television properties, Internet inter-
ests, and radio stations. The combined Tribune and Times
Mirror company is able to offer advertisers audiences in all these
media, plus 3.4 million visitors to its Web sites that is well ahead
of any other newspaper combination in the country.
What troubles thoughtful observers of the newspaper
scene, such as Bill Kovach, the retir-
ing curator of the Nieman Foun-
dation at Harvard, is the crumbling
wall between newspaper and adver-
tising copy, which is already happen-
ing online.
And beyond the borders are the
nine global media groups such as
Rupert Murdoch’s news corporation,
the largest English-language newspa-
per producer in the world; Time
Warner with over two hundred sub-
sidiaries in every media market in the
world; A.T.&T. which with Liberty
Media has large holdings in South
America and Asia; Sony, whose major
holdings are outside Japan; and
Bertelsmann, the German company
which is probably the largest book
publisher in the world, along with its TV and music interests,
which dominate the world markets.
Reports such as these may conjure up images of octopi
spreading their tentacles around the world. And there are dan-
gers, as when Rupert Murdoch uses his New York Post to ham-
mer away at Hillary Clinton, calling her the sixth most evil per-
son of the millennium! Yet most nations are too large for the
Orwellian image of Big Brother to become the single screen of
the society. And one should not forget the “subversive” role
of technology which not only created the Internet but also
allows alternative voices and alternative conduits and formats
to slither between the cracks, and sometimes widen them. ◆
—Daniel Bell
The March of a Moloch
1990: Time Inc., and Warner Communications complete
a $14.1 billion merger, creating the world’s biggest media
conglomerate.
1995: Time Warner and the Turner Broadcasting System
complete a $7.6 billion merger with CNN, the world’s
biggest TV news channel, broadcasting to more than 200
nations coming into the conglomerate.
2000: America Online agrees to buy Time Warner for
$183 billion, joining the Internet conduit with Time-
Warner formats in the largest media deal in history. So far.
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
The British Press: A Golden Age
T his is the golden age of the quality British press. There
has never been so much of it. Helped by the destruc-
tion of the old overmighty print unions, over the past
forty years, one new national daily quality paper, the Indepen-
dent, has been born (making, with the Times, the Guardian,
and the Daily Telegraph, four). We have two new quality daily
Sundays, the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph
(which in March won the British Press Award for newspaper
of the year), making (with the Sunday Observer) five.
Each daily paper has vastly more material in it: for example,
the Times in 1959 averaged 1.5 pages of foreign news each day
compared with six pages in 1999. And this is not, as critics com-
plain, mere lifestyle froth: for example,
the Times now devotes an average of four
pages a day to the arts compared with half
a page in 1959. Partly in consequence of
all this, and despite competition from
television and new media, sales are rising,
up from 2.6 million copies a day in the
first half of 1989, to 2.8 million today.
Equally, there has never been so much
worth reading. Take for example the
quality of political commentary: from
their different perspectives Hugo Young
(of the Guardian), Donald Macintyre (of
the Independent) and Andrew Rawnsley
(of the Observer) combine knowledge of
politics with strong progressive views. It
may be doubtful if there has ever been a
political writer who walks the tricky path between closeness
to politicians and sycophancy more skillfully than Peter
Riddell (of the Times). Those who do not read Riddell do not
know what is going on. Jonathan Freedland, the Amerophile
new kid on the block in the Guardian, bids fair to challenge
their supremacy. The work of Michael White, the Guardian’s
political editor, and Matthew Parris and Simon Jenkins,
mostly-political writers on the Times, has not been surpassed
since and bear comparison in their prose with the journalism
of Hazlitt and Orwell. And that is just political commentary,
on which I am best qualified to comment. A similar list could
be compiled by those qualified to comment for example on
business reporting, the arts, and, certainly, sport.
Any visitor to these shores, however, should beware of recy-
cling this opinion at respectable dinner tables. Brian Mac-
Arthur, a senior editor on the Times, and leading commenta-
tor on the media, points out that the paper has been accused
of dumbing down ever since he joined it in 1969. Retired
colonels spluttered into their gin-and-tonics when advertise-
ments were replaced on the front page by news in 1966.
William (now Lord) Rees-Mogg, now regarded as the last
patrician editor of the Times ran into a hail of criticism when
he wrote a leader supporting Mick Jagger after he had been
convicted of a drug offense, a leader famously entitled “Who
breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” And so it has gone on: the
alleged lurch downmarket when Rupert Murdoch took over
the Times in the 1980s; an alleged further lurch when he made
Charles Wilson, a rough Scot, editor; a further alleged lurch
when Mr Jenkins was replaced as editor by Peter Stothard
some seven years ago; and so on.
Britain of course is congenitally inclined to prefer its past
(as reinterpreted through sepia-tinted spectacles) to its pre-
sent. The bien pensant view of newspapers reflects that of the
character in Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play Night and Day: “I’m
with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”
The general assumption, so common as almost to be accepted
without question, is that newspapers have “dumbed down”
to a mid-Atlantic cultural pap.
And of course there is plenty to be said
in support of this view, too. No one for
example could think this is the golden
age of the popular press. Essentially, the
popular press has moved toward being
an entertainment medium rather than
anything more elevated. The appearance
of page-three girls uncovered from the
waist in the Sun is taken as the symbol of
the change, though in fact the Sun has
been cutting back on tits, as readers have
gotten bored with them.
The chattering classes worry greatly
about the political influence of the popu-
lar newspapers. The Daily Mail touts a
xenophobic populist agenda. Rupert
Murdoch’s Sun is credited with evil powers on behalf of the
political right, culminating in its headline on the day of the
1992 general election which featured a picture of Neil Kinnock,
the Labour leader, with his head represented as a light bulb
and the headline: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person
to leave Britain please turn the lights out.”
In fact, the effect of this is doubtful. Professor John Curtice, a
leading psephologist, has found that newspapers do not strong-
ly affect voting behavior. However, power, as the American
columnist Jimmy Breslin once pointed out, is being believed
to have power. It matters less whether the popular press actu-
ally affects voting, than that politicians think it affects voting.
The government’s recent decision not to introduce an extra
BBC license fee for those who bought digital televisions for fear
of upsetting Mr Murdoch shows that it has that power.
Perhaps more damaging than its political influence is the
social influence of the popular press. Unable to compete in
real news with broadcasting, it has taken to a kind of pseudo-
news: breaking, for example, “news” of forthcoming devel-
opments in popular soap operas. Moreover, there is an increas-
ing tendency, where there is no news, to make it up with tales
of the sexual and personal habits not only of the famous but
of ordinary people. Any relationship between such tales and
the truth is purely accidental. Yet, in a country where suing
for libel is both expensive and hazardous, only the rich can
9
 The World Press: U.S. and Britain
afford to do so. Such tales destroy the life of individuals, but
it is also corrosive of social capital such as trust. For this rea-
son, there is a strong case for a proper privacy law in Britain.
Short of that, the best hope of reining in the excesses of the
popular press lies in readers. And there is some sign that this
is happening. Sales of the Sun for example slumped when they
sought to portray the Liverpool fans who fell victims of the
Hillsborough stadium soccer disaster, as thugs. Under reader
pressure, the Mirror has begun to reintroduce serious stories.
Most encouraging, sales overall of the popular press are
falling, down from some 12.2 million in 1989 to 10.2 million
in 1999. That could of course be due to the rise of competitive
media. It could also just be that the legendary tabloid editors
have done what has long been regarded as impossible in news-
papers, and lost sales by underestimating their readers.
Beyond this, however, lies a broader issue as to the extent
that newspapers are creators and shapers of society, or reflec-
tions of it. It is almost too obvious to say that technological
change has changed the nature of the beast. With the rise of
radio, then television and now the Internet, being first with
the news is no longer an attainable objective for newspapers.
Their comparative advantage lies elsewhere. A bad effect of
that is the rise of pseudo-news of the type described above,
which is largely unavailable on television in Britain because
its content remains subject to outside regulation. A good effect
is an increasing emphasis on analysis, accompanied by help-
ful graphics and useful Web-links, which helps make some
sense of the kaleidoscope of the postmodern world.
But social change has had enormous effects too. British
newspapers used to be largely class newspapers: the Telegraph
the voice of Colonel Blimp, the Express of Pooter Britain, the
Mirror of the working classes and so on. But class and its
attributes are fracturing, even if more slowly than the trendier
members of New Labour believe. For example, the most down-
market of recent British newspapers, the near-pornographic
Sport, attracts a laddish but relatively upwardly-mobile audi-
ence. The business-oriented Financial Times has expanded its
general news and culture for its expanded readership, though
it still resists sport. Newspapers are by no means alone in feel-
ing adrift in these swirling currents, and by no means alone
in their uncertainty of how to react.
Will newspapers disappear? Despite difficult challenges, of
which the loss of classified advertising revenue to the Internet
is probably the gravest, it seems unlikely—certainly absent
someone inventing a laptop that you can use in the bath. The
worst future almost certainly lies ahead for the worst newspa-
pers, those pandering to popular prejudice and touting titilla-
tion: their natural audience is declining, and increasingly
finds other entertainments more beguiling. The brighter
future almost certainly lies ahead for the best newspapers,
including The Economist which styles itself a newspaper: that
is to say with journals that seek to interpret the world and its
complexities and act as trusted guides to its ways. They also
have the advantage of appealing to the better-off members of
society, whose numbers are growing. This may be a golden age
for quality newspapers but the best may yet be to come. ◆
—David Lipsey
10
Miscellany
The German Business Press
T he announcement of a new German business daily
met with disbelief and skepticism. Not that its own-
ers, the British Pearson group and the German
Gruner+Jahr, do not have enough experience and resources
to launch a new daily—but the Financial Times in another
language? On February 21, the first issue appeared. The
Hamburg-based Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) is not a
translation of the British edition, but a newspaper of its
own, although the salmon-colored paper clearly indicates
its famous parent. Its editor-in-chief, Andrew Gowers,
explains that its reporting focuses on Europe, not Germany.
After its competitors decided to take the announcement
seriously, they started to prepare for tougher competition.
There is only one widely distributed German daily with a
clear focus on business and finance news, the Handels-
blatt. The Düsseldorf-based paper decided it should face
the challenge by extending its scope of coverage beyond
markets and finance. In October 1999, the Handelsblatt
launched a new design to underscore the change. It is too
early to tell whether the FTD will take readers away from
the Handelsblatt.
The FTD hired almost 120 journalists, which led to a
huge reshuffle in many papers. The Handelsblatt, for exam-
ple, lost staff not only to the FTD, but also to the business
section of the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, now
headed by Marc Beise and Nikolaus Piper, who used to be
with the German weekly Die Zeit. These changes testify to
the permeability of the German business press. Ideological
differences have become less important, with the possible
exception of Die Zeit, with its constant skepticism toward
globalization. Nevertheless, German business press sets the
stage for important debates, such as the controversy over
the introduction of the euro.
Germany’s most important economics and business sec-
tion is clearly that of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(FAZ), Hans Barbier being the doyen of German econom-
ics journalism. Over the last few years, its business and
finance reporting has expanded considerably. With the
increasing number and importance of joint-stock compa-
nies and the increasing number of mergers, the FAZ some-
times even has two economics and markets sections. Its
style is very sober, at times even boring. Journalists rigor-
ously adhere to the professional principle of distinguish-
ing between news and comments. The FAZ’s answer to the
challenge of FTD was to cooperate with the International
Herald Tribune. Soon, the IHT will carry an eight-page
summary of the FAZ.
The German reader who is interested in an assessment
from outside but wants to read a paper in his own language,
can turn to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Here, it is a principle
not to separate news and comments. The NZZ often has a
fresh perspective, though a sometimes didactic style.
—Stefan Voigt
 Report from Britain
The Devolution of the U.K.
A mong the many unfortunate symbols suggested by the
London Millennium Dome, the greatest perhaps is the
thinness of the constitutional shell that covers the
United Kingdom. On the face of it, pressures for a break-up of
the U.K. have been headed off by devolution. Scotland has its
Parliament and Wales has its Assembly, as has Northern Ireland.
But if this is seen by the Labour Government as a grand settle-
ment of the constitutional question, it may be a precarious one.
There have been ructions in Wales as the Welsh rejected a first
secretary imposed by the government and began doing what
all devolved bodies do, which is to ask for more money. The
Northern Ireland executive has been suspended since Sinn
Fein/IRA insist on sitting in the Assembly while retaining their
weapons. But the real Achilles heel of the U.K. is Scotland.
The Scottish National Party got 20 percent of the initial vote,
rising to 29 percent in a recent by-election. If Scotland were
to swing in favor of independence, the U.K. would be im-
mersed in a major constitutional crisis. Defense, oil and gas
wealth, relations with Brussels (at present handled by the U.K.
Government) would instantly be up for grabs. The impact on
national confidence, as the Government became immersed in
what would no doubt be a long drawn-out negotiation with
the Scots, as well as the psychological effects of the shrinkage
of the country, would be immense. The run of luck the New
Labour government has enjoyed (especially economic) may not
hold forever, and though influential Scottish voices warn
against the nationalist lure, sentiment north of the border
could still change at some point in the future.
The biggest current constitutional problem, paradoxically,
lies in England. Three times since the war a Labour govern-
ment has been kept in power in Westminster by its majority
of Scottish seats. But what was accepted in the past would not
be accepted today, under devolution. The simple point is that
the English are finding it ever harder to tolerate a situation
where Scottish MPs at Westminster have a say in every aspect
of English lives—education, for instance—a prerogative that
is not reciprocated north of the border.
Some parliamentarians think of a separate English Parlia-
ment to deal with specifically English legislation. But the cre-
ation of yet another layer of MPs in a country already seen as
having too many, would be a heavy bureaucratic price to pay.
Douglas Hurd, the former Conservative Foreign Secretary,
who has been musing on these matters, suggests that it would
be easier to come to one of those pragmatic English arrange-
ments whereby the parliamentary speaker ensured that only
English MPs were present and voted when strictly English
matters were under discussion.
The problem about the future England is not confined to
technical political questions. In response to the assertiveness
of their one-time tributaries, a mood of self-doubt, or better
perhaps, ontological self-interrogation, has begun to grip the
nation. The English have taken to asking themselves, in a way
they have never quite done till now, who they are and what
they are for. Books on the theme have poured from the press.
These have included one, The English, by Jeremy Paxman,
anchorman of the BBC’s Newsnight current affairs program,
and another by a respected journalist and political thinker,
Andrew Marr. The title—The Day Britain Died—reflects its
mood. Were it not that the country is enjoying a sustained
period of prosperity and continues to show confidence in
Tony Blair’s administration, the introspection and self-doubt
would no doubt be worse.
Marr (a Scot as it happens) is on the center-left, and is seen as
something of a pivotal figure in political journalism. The main
interest of his book lies in its openness to radical change. He is
opposed to Scottish independence, but he does not believe that
the U.K. can survive for long as it is. His solution is to convert
Westminster into a purely English Parliament, and transform
the House of Lords,
currently under re-
form, into a United A mood of self-
Kingdom Assembly.
For good measure he doubt, or ontological
shows himself ready
for membership in the self-interrogation,
euro at a suitable mo-
ment, and for a refer- has begun to grip
endum on the monar-
chy in which he the nation
himself would vote for
abolition. These last
two predilections put him way ahead of public opinion, whose
attachment to their coins and their queen is all the stronger
since these are literally attached. Yet Marr’s thinking is signifi-
cant, since it illustrates how considerations of the future of the
United Kingdom quickly become bound up with other issues.
The appearance of Marr’s book coincided with yet another
tome on the theme, this one by Tom Nairn, a romantic left-
winger whose colorfully and powerfully written work, After
Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, predicts the
breaking of the U.K. on the anvil of Scottish nationalism. For
him the United Kingdom is a dried-out husk, a pointless relic,
meaningless without Empire. He calls the U.K. Ukania, a pun
on Kakania, the nickname for Austro-Hungary (the k. und k.,
or kaiserlich und königlich realm) in Robert Musil’s classic
novel The Man Without Qualities. While the Great War that
would bring down the Austrian Empire was looming, Musil
in his novel has Kakania’s elites busy planning a gigantic cel-
ebration. Celebration of what exactly they find it hard to con-
ceive or to explain.
Which would seem to bring us back to the Dome, our latest
national symbol. Its hugely embarrassing failure does not nec-
essarily presage the demise of the United Kingdom. But the fact
that a young Frenchman experienced in the ways of French
Disneyland, M. Gerbeau, had to be imported to sort things out
and bump up attendance has done nothing to answer the ques-
tion of who the British are and what they are for. ◆
—George Walden
11
 Intellectuals
The Cultural Cold War—Fifty Years Later
W ith the opening of some of the Soviet and the East German archives, more is now known
about the history of the Cold War than ever before: whether there was a real chance to
end West/East conflict in 1953, the background of the Korean War, the extent of Soviet
infiltration into the West, and other topics. Harvard’s new Journal of Cold War Studies publishes arti-
cles based on this documentation, an institute at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center has produced
learned monographs along similar lines, and the Gauck-
Behörde in Germany is doing the same with the Stasi papers.
Public interest in these publications has been limited, how-
ever, for reasons that remain to be explored. But public indif-
ference need not be permanent, for such lags are normal.
Interest in World War II (and the Holocaust), for instance, was
far more intense in the 1970s and ‘80s than in the immediate
postwar period.
And already there are exceptions to this indifference; cer-
tain aspects of the Cold War era have attracted a great deal of
attention and debate over the last year or two. This is certainly
the case with regard to the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
founded in Berlin in June 1950, the same week the Korean War
broke out. Though based in Paris, the Congress published a
number of journals in other major cities; the best-known and
most widely quoted of these were Encounter (London) and Der
Monat (Berlin). It also ran conferences and seminars which
were influential in shaping the Zeitgeist; had its impact been
less it would now be forgotten.
The history of the Congress—whose activities, under a
slightly different name, stretched to 1975 (Encounter was pub-
lished up to 1991)—has been provided in The Liberal Conspi-
racy by Peter Coleman, an Australian politician and intellec-
tual, and more recently in L’Intelligence de l’Anticommunisme
by Pierre Gremion, a French historian. The former, though not
uncritical, was semi-official in character; the latter focused on
the Paris headquarter’s activities.
Following the breakup of the Soviet empire and the declas-
sification of various archives, including the CIA’s, a new liter-
ature has sprung up, ranging from muckraking, in television
producer Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper (Lon-
don; but titled The Cultural Cold War in the New York edi-
tion), to near-hagiography in the seventy-page portrait of
Leopold Labedz, the legendary editor of the London Soviet-
affairs magazine Survey.
Several academic studies have appeared in Germany that fall
between these extremes, including Anselm Doering Manteuffel
on the Westernization of Germany after World War II (“Wie
westlich sind die Deutschen? [How Western are the Germans?]
1999) and Michael Hochgeschwender on the Congress’s activi-
ties in Germany (“Freiheit in der Offensive” [Freedom on the
Offense] 1999). Specialized articles have appeared, including
those by Giles Scott Smith on the early days of the Congress (in
the Journal of Contemporary History and in Studies in Intel-
ligence). This summer a public conference on the Congress is to
take place in Berlin. Maria Mudrovic has written a Spanish-lan-
12
guage history of the Congress’s first decade (Mundo Nuevo), and
the Congress figures prominently in David Cesarani’s recent
biography of Arthur Koestler, who was initially one of its lead-
ing figures but soon dropped out when it failed to be militant
and radical enough for his taste. In Gdansk, Poland, a political-
cultural magazine appeared that was modelled on the old
Encounter and reprinted some of the old texts.
The Congress, during the first and most important period
of its existence, was financed by the CIA, a fact bound to
reverberate once it became known in the late 1960s. Given the
situation in Washington, a less controversial way of financing
could scarcely have been found in the early postwar period.
But this argument did not cut much ice once the immediate
postwar crisis was over. Some circles believed, in fact, that
this crisis never existed: it was a figment of the imagination,
cultural freedom was a sham, and criticism of Soviet politics a
priori reactionary. This belief, which was prevalent in the late
sixties, is shared now by Miss Saunders, who therefore focuses
on the scandal of the Congress’s financial sources, offering lit-
tle sense of its political and cultural significance.
What is disturbing about Miss Saunders’s book is the lack
of any historical memory. For her, the Cold War was a “fabri-
cated reality,” fashioned by George Kennan, as director of the
Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, “to oversee the
ideological-political containment of Europe” (not of Russia,
mind you, but Europe), in order to “design the Pax Ameri-
cana.” As Josef Joffe wrote in a critical review in the New York
Times Book Review of April 23, 2000 “Saunders deftly isolates
from its [historical] context what she sees as a heinous intelli-
gence plot so that she can drench it all the better in self-right-
eous ahistorical wrath. But if the war was make-believe what
were the Soviets doing when they tried to bring Communism
to power in France and Italy…when they financed antidemo-
cratic forces everywhere?”
In the final analysis such hostile attitudes may indeed be
little more than a new manifestation of the old antagonism the
Congress had to face in Britain from the outset; they were
rooted not so much in radical politics as in traditional anti-
Americanism.
The debate about the historical role of the Congress for
Cultural Freedom will in all likelihood continue; for all one
knows, it may just be starting. But two striking facts have
already emerged: the burial of the Congress in the 1970s was
clearly premature, and it continues to preoccupy friends and
foes alike. The ideas emanating from its seminars and periodi-
cals continue to attract as much interest as ever.
 Intellectuals
This and the great interest shown by a young generation of
historians has gratified the well-wishers of the Congress and
greatly annoyed its enemies. But how to explain, fifty years
after the event, the sharply divergent views, almost as hostile
as the clashes between fellow-travelers and liberal anti-com-
munists in the 1950s? Why is it that Preuves (the Congress’s
French-language publication) has been reprinted in Paris
many years after it went out of business, and a huge selection
of essays from Der Monat has just appeared in Germany?
How to explain, in other words, that the verdict on the his-
torical role of the Congress has been so positive in Western
and particularly in Eastern Europe but that this revival of
interest has provoked such angry responses in some circles in
Britain and the United States? It may have to do with the fact
that whereas the money and the logistic support for Congress
came from the U.S. and to a lesser degree from Britain, these
countries were not in the frontline of the ideological cold war
and that the understanding of the issues involved was much
less developed there. No sane German would have argued (as
does Miss Saunders) that the Cold War was not a reality.
Radical chic as it manifested itself in the late 1960s is no
longer an issue, but the impulses underlying it have found
other outlets inside and outside the academic world. There
has been no intellectual sea change in London and New York
comparable to the one that took place in Paris twenty years
ago when the ‘68 generation shocked itself to discover the hor-
ror of the Gulags. To a certain extent this divergence of views
might be a generational problem But this cannot possibly
explain the bitterness of those unwilling to accept the out-
come of battles fought decades ago. One may have to wait for
the end of the debate, or at least a major lull, to find a more or
less satisfactory explanation.
—Walter Laqueur
Joseph Rovan: The Last
European Intellectual
Who is Joseph Rovan? By conventional standards he is the
author of eighteen books before this one with the puzzling title:
Mémoires d’un Français qui se souvient d’avoir été Allemand [The
Memoirs of a Frenchman who remembers having been German]
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999). But the life as laid out in these
memoirs is a template of the twentieth century: of Jewish origin
yet raised in the Christian faith, a refugee, Resistance hero, con-
centration camp inmate, a political activist, yet neither left nor
right, a remarkably decent man who may be regarded now as the
last of the independent European intellectuals.
B orn Joseph Rosenthal in Bavaria in 1918, he belonged to
a family of well-to-do businessmen and professionals
long established in and around Munich, Berlin, and
Vienna, almost all Jews, and for many generations unquestion-
ing Germans. His parents and grandparents, as well as himself,
were educated in the Lutheran religion, like the good Germans
they felt they were. Until the time, as Rovan puts it, Hitler
“appointed them Jews,” none of them doubted their German
destiny—a destiny which, for those of Rovan’s kin who did not
leave their country early enough, eventually meant murder.
Young Joseph and his parents did leave early enough, com-
ing to Paris in 1934. Fifteen, and an excellent humanities stu-
dent in his Berlin Gymnasium, he easily became an excellent
humanities student at a Paris lycée. At the time of the German
invasion, he had graduated from the Sorbonne and the École
des Sciences Politiques, traveled extensively in France and
◆ Italy, and apparently met every interesting person he could.
In the summer of 1940, he refused an American friend’s offer
of an affidavit which would have allowed him to come to the
U.S., a priceless privilege then. He writes that he had grown
too many roots in France and his duty was to stay.
His years there, 1941-1944, were both intensely formative
and dangerously militant. The formative side included eager
reading of Marx and Heidegger and joining a remarkable
intellectual group attempting to make sense of the country’s
chaos, shame, and helplessness, and to envision a better future
for it. The dangerous side came with Rovan’s participation in
the Resistance, running the manufacture and distribution of
forged documents for all non-Communist Resistance members.
It was in that capacity, not as a Jew, that the Nazi police
finally caught him in February 1944 in Paris. In jail he writes
soberly, “I experienced the bathtub torture (the Gestapo’s
usual practice of repeatedly half-drowning its captives), and
beatings, but was not tested beyond my forces”—a choice of
words typical of the man’s steely character.
In this four-month imprisonment he also felt what he
describes as a quiet attraction to the Roman Catholic faith, and
was christened by a fellow-inmate priest. In the few mentions
of his religious beliefs in his book, Rovan always gives the
impression of having an intense trust in God’s wisdom, though
never feeling obliged to follow the Church’s earthly preferences.
In July 1944, Rovan was put in a freight train with 2500
13
 Intellectuals
other prisoners, and sent to the concentration camp of
Dachau, where nine hundred of the passengers arrived dead.
At the camp, he took advantage of his command of German
and managed to be assigned to Central Records. In that posi-
tion and as chief assistant to the de facto spokesman for the
French inmates, Edmond Michelet, he played a major role in
resistance activities and in the orderly disbanding of prison-
ers, after a terrible typhus epidemic and the liberation of sur-
vivors by American troops. He describes all that, and the
workings of the complex society living and dying in the camp,
with a matter-of-fact detachment that gives way to emotion
only when he mentions the friends he made and admired, and
whose wretched deaths he witnessed too often.
Returning to Paris in the summer of 1945, the twenty-seven-
year-old Rovan began a career as activist, writer, teacher,
adviser to the powerful, and advocate for the weak that con-
tinues to this day, fifty-five tireless years later. He has always
held at least three more or less full-time jobs. From 1946 to
‘51, he was an official in the French Military Government
(later High Commission) in Germany, dealing with youth orga-
nizations, adult education, and other cultural contacts, in
friendly cooperation with emerging new German leaders.
From 1945 to this day, he has been a journalist, debuting
with a still-remembered article in the October 1945 Esprit,
under the self-explanatory title, “The Germany We Shall
Deserve.” He became a daily correspondent on French affairs
for several German publications, and a frequent contributor
to various French journals and papers on German affairs. Add
to this half a dozen short books written to steer French public
opinion away from misperceptions of present-day Germany or
the necessary prospects for Europe.
From 1946 to ‘78, he held various key posts at “Peuple et
Culture,” an organization dedicated to improving the school and
university systems and training better citizens, for which
Rovan wrote in 1962 a short yet seminal book entitled A New
Idea: Democracy. From 1968 to ‘86, as professor of German Stu-
dies at two Paris universities, Rovan gathered material for a
thousand-page history of Germany, published in France and
Germany in the early nineties. This monumental work was pre-
ceded by two other scholarly works, one on the history of polit-
ical Catholicism in Germany and the other a history of social
democracy, as well as a highly attractive book on Bavaria, its
history, politics, landscapes, monuments, customs, and food.
Rovan was never to join a political party or to seek election.
His reputation and direct influence seldom extended beyond
specialists and leaders in either country. He firmly takes sides
for his basic values: peace in Europe through a genuinely demo-
cratic Germany’s tie to France; a federated Europe; respect for
human rights; devotion to rational knowledge, whether its dis-
course be threatened by totalitarianism or the spectres of radi-
cal revolutionaries. Last but not least, a taste for the good life,
which surfaces in many a passage of these memoirs, where the
style mellows from factual objectivity into an expression of ten-
der feelings for his wife and sons, his friends and his houses in
Auvergne and Provence, a good meal, a good bottle—not to
mention nine pages in praise of his dachshunds. ◆ Supplement, February 4, 2000.
—Paul Lemerle
14
Miscellany
Swamped by Metaphor
I n his first issue of Die Fackel [The Torch] in April 1899,
the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936) stated the
magazine’s aim: to attempt to drain “the swamp of
metaphor” [“den Phrasensumpf ”]. By Phrasen Kraus
meant those idioms which, having degenerated into
clichés, elicited stock responses. Die Fackel’s 922 issues
appeared sporadically until Kraus’s death in 1936; after
1912, he became its sole contributor.
In time for the Fackel centenary, scholars using micro-
chip technology have produced a chronological selection
of the abused expressions Kraus cited as evidence of the
press’s corruption of public discourse. Sifting through
22,586 pages (some six million words), the makers of this
large “Dictionary of Idiomatic Expressions” focus on 144
key idioms. Passages from Kraus are printed mid-page,
flanked by lexicographical and editorial commentaries.
As a critic of debased figurative language, Kraus chose
his “torch” metaphor well: sleeping by day, he devoted his
nights to writing but also to giving solo recitals both of his
own works and of the literary classics he administered to
the public as antidotes to their journalistic poisoning. He
decried the newspaper’s role as “covert mouthpiece of the
regime” and of corrupt industrial interests. He especially
scorned the aestheticizing feuilleton (see page 21), which
in its casual blurring of fact and opinion, cramped the
writer’s own imagination by making him dependent on
outer circumstances he in turn distorted.
In World War I, Kraus, who had analyzed propagandistic
press coverage in the Balkan Wars, relentlessly lampooned
the brutality of militaristic euphemism (e.g., the “cleaning
out” of enemy trenches). A journalist claimed that “the peo-
ple are hungering after the results” of a particular peace
conference; after this conference, wrote Kraus, which would
prolong war, people really would be hungering.
Whereas civilized discourse sublimates violence through
figures of speech—we “cudgel our brains” and wield “the
lash of satire”—Nazism, as it spread, revealed its savagery to
Kraus by linguistic devolution: the cudgels and lashes grew
quite real. The Dictionary charts this through the German
idiom “ein Kampf bis aufs Messer” [being at daggers drawn].
A metaphor now literalized daily on the street had, around
1900, been a hollow threat; in WWI it had cloaked new mili-
tary technology in an antiquated romanticism.
A year before launching Die Fackel, Kraus turned down
the satirist’s post at Vienna’sNeue Freie Presse—and ever
after scoured it for proof of the “free press”’s prostitution.
Blessed, or cursed, with a photographic memory, he would
have little use for microchip glossaries; but as an enemy of
nationalistic cant, he might relish state-sponsored study of
his jeremiads in this heyday of an Austrian “Freedom Party.”
—David Jacobson
Source: Edward Timms, “Draining the Swamp,” Times Literary
 Intellectuals
Alexandre Kojève: Russian Agent?
T he publication last year of Christopher Andrew’s The
Mitrokhin Archive, which uses the notes of a former
KGB archivist, Vassily Mitrokhin, to develop an
account of Russian spy activity during the Cold War, contin-
ues to send ripples through political and intellectual circles in
Western Europe. Although Mitrokin’s notes are maddeningly
vague at times, they do clearly document a wide web of KGB
infiltration of ministries, major newspapers, and political par-
ties across the Continent. In France the book has had a large
echo because it was published about the time that someone
leaked a secret government report, written in 1982-3 in the
early years of François Mitterrand’s first presidential term
(and apparently at his request), titled “East-Bloc Espionage
and the French Left.” As Le Monde reported (September 16,
1999), among those named as having relations with the KGB
was Claude Estier, a high-ranking Socialist currently in the
French Senate who was mysteriously kept from occupying
ministerial office during Mitterrand’s reign. (Mr. Estier has
vehemently denied the charges.)
But certainly the strangest, and most widely discussed,
aspect of the French report was its assertion that one of France’s
premier philosophers of this century, Alexandre Kojève, was
also mixed up with the KGB. Who was Kojève? His given name
was Alexander Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov, and he was born in
1902 into a wealthy Moscow family that lost everything in the
Revolution. Young Alexander was arrested for black market
activities and was nearly executed but made his way abroad,
first to Poland, then to Germany where he earned his doctor-
ate, and finally to France in the twenties. There he lived the life
of an obscure émigré until he was asked by the great historian
of science, Alexandre Koyré, to teach a course on the philoso-
phy of the nineteenth-century German idealist, G. W. F. Hegel.
This course, which ran from 1933-39, was one of the most
important events in twentieth-century French intellectual his-
tory. Many of the most significant figures in French letters and
thought attended the course—philosopher Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, political thinker Raymond Aron, surrealist poet André
Breton, writer Raymond Queneau, psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan—and through them Kojève’s influence was enormous.
And it was not limited to intellectuals. After the war, which
he passed in Marseille, Kojève returned to Paris and joined the
foreign-economic-relations bureau of the French Finance
Ministry, where he remained until his death in 1968. There
Kojève worked tirelessly for the economic integration of
Europe and made disciples of important political figures like
future prime minister Raymond Barre and future president
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. He played a crucial role in reaching
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) accords,
and today the French consider him one of the architects of the
European Union.
What connection is there between Hegel and the EU?
According to Kojève and his students, there is a close one. In
the book put together by Queneau from Kojève’s lectures,
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève argued that Hegel
was the first modern philosopher to have understood that
world history is the theatre in which a single drama is played
out (what he called the “master-slave” dialectic), and that this
drama had reached an effective end with the Napoleonic con-
quests and the beginning of what we now call the “globaliza-
tion” of modern life. With Napoleon the end of history had
begun and was determining all the fundamental dynamics of
modern politics. Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel may have
been idiosyncratic but to French intellectuals watching the
decline of Europe in the thirties, and to French politicians who
felt themselves squeezed between the empires of the United
States and the Soviet Union in the postwar decades, he
appeared to be a prophet. And to those concerned about the
increasing pace of globalization in the post-’89 world, he still
is. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
was explicitly inspired by Kojève’s theories, and many lesser
books and articles have been, implicitly. For example, it was
Allan Bloom, the subject of Saul Bellow’s new novel Ravelstein
and Fukuyama’s teacher, who arranged the publication of
Kojève’s Hegel book in English, and whose bestseller, The
Closing of the American Mind, might be read as a protest
against the triumph of the “last man” Kojève saw.
There was, however, a political slant to Kojève’s ideas that
made him more than philosopher of history, and gives some
plausibility to the suspicions of the French espionage agen-
cies. While Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of Western-
style democracy after 1989, Kojève was first inspired by the
global aspirations of the communism, for which he never lost
his nostalgia. He was a great believer in what came to be called
the “moral equivalence” between East and West, since, from
his world-historical perch, they both seemed to be working
toward the same end: social egalitarianism, the leveling of
human aspiration, the economization of all aspects of life, the
bureaucratization and juridification of politics. He appeared
indifferent as to whether the Soviet Union or the United States
won the Cold War since, in his view, the world would even-
tually look the same in either case. He joked that Henry Ford
had been “the only great authentic Marxist of the twentieth
century” and that he himself was “the conscience of Stalin.”
But was Kojève a spy? The truth is we will never know. As
a left-wing Russian émigré he was always under suspicion,
and there is circumstantial evidence that his officemate in the
ministry, Charles Hernu, who later served as Mitterrand’s de-
fense minister, had been a spy for the Bulgarians, Romanians,
and Russians. There is, however, no smoking gun, and even if
there were, Kojève’s contemporary acolytes have suggested,
he may have been trying to use the Soviets to his own ends,
and not the other way round. The joke, in other words, would
have been on the Soviets, who now find themselves living in
a global economy designed by the bespeckled philosopher
they so rudely treated during the Revolution. ◆
—Mark Lilla
Source: A good English-language summary of the Kojève dispute
is in “The Spy Who Loved Hegel,” Lingua Franca, March 2000.
15
 Intellectuals
Ignazio Silone: Fascist Informant?
A few years ago, fragmentary evidence began emerging
indicating that Ignazio Silone, one of the preeminent
writers of Italian anti-fascism, had collaborated with
the Fascist secret police. Initially based on a handful of docu-
ments, these claims were greeted, at first, with a mixture of
outrage and incredulity. Silone, after all, had been a moral bea-
con to more than one generation of readers. His early novels,
Fontamara and Bread and Wine—descriptions of peasant life
under fascism in Silone’s native Abruzzi—electrified a wide
public and were hailed as being among the great political nov-
els of the twentieth century. After World War II, Silone made
an equally strong impression with his essay in The God That
Failed, which documented the romance and disillusionment
with communism on the part of such writers as Arthur
Koestler, André Gide, and Richard Wright. Silone had actually
been a youthful leader of the Italian Communist Party, served
on its central committee and witnessed first-hand the gradual
ascendancy of Stalinism during the 1920s. Silone had the fore-
sight and courage to break with the Communist Party in 1930,
before the major show trials in Moscow.
As a figure who had opposed fascism from the beginning
and broke with communism early on, Silone was widely
revered as a figure of rare intellectual and moral courage.
Thus, the accusations of spying for the Fascist police were dis-
missed as a revisionist attempt to blacken the name of another
prominent anti-fascist. In recent years, much press has been
given to compromises by various anti-fascist intellectuals such
as a letter written by novelist Alberto Moravia to Mussolini
asking for relief from censorship for his books, or youthful
pro-fascist sentiments by the philosopher Noberto Bobbio.
However, as research on Silone has continued, his ties with
the Fascist regime appear to be far more substantial and wor-
thy of serious consideration. The first important document to
emerge was a letter from April 1930 apparently in Silone’s
handwriting to a police official in Rome named Guido Bellone.
The letter is clearly that of an informant to his police handler,
announcing that he is breaking off his relationship of collabo-
ration. It is signed with the code-name “Silvestri,” but the let-
ter was stamped and placed by Fascist bureaucrats in Silone’s
personal file, or rather in the file of Secondino Tranquilli, his
actual given name before he adopted the pen name Ignazio
Silone. Further research by historians Dario Biocca and Mauro
Canali has bolstered the connection between Silone, the infor-
mant Silvestri, and the police commissioner Bellone. A signed
letter from 1928 by the chief of the secret police to Mussolini
himself states that “The Inspector General of Public Security
Commissioner Guido Bellone has received a telegram from
Basel from Tranquilli Secondino—one of the Communist lead-
ers—giving notice of his arrival in Italy. The conversation
with him could be interesting.”
Silone’s defenders have been forced to acknowledge the
authenticity of these documents and the existence of a relation-
ship between the writer and the Fascist police. “No one denies
that Silone had some disconcerting contacts with the Fascist
16
security apparatus,” the historian Alexander De Grand writes
in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Some Silone defenders
hypothesize that Silone had entered into dialogue with Bellone
after Silone’s brother, Romolo Tranquilli, was arrested in 1928
on suspicion of taking part in a terrorist bombing in Milan that
year. Silone, according to the defense, was negotiating to free
his brother, who later died in a Fascist prison.
This line of defense appears, however, to be crumbling. Re-
searchers Biocca and Canali have found archival documents
attributed to the informant “Silvestri,” dating back to 1924,
long before the arrest of Silone’s brother. Silvestri describes
the inner workings of the Italian Communist Party and the
Comintern, in which Silone played an active role and the
reports seem to follow Silone’s movements through different
parts of Europe. One police report goes on to discuss in some
detail personal vicissitudes of Silvestri, which coincide closely
with those of Ignazio Silone during that same period.
As disturbing as these revelations are, they in no way detract
from the force and importance of Silone’s novels, all of which
were written after his apparent break with the Fascist police in
1930. If anything, the letter with which he severs his relations
seems to contain much of the powerful fire that fuels his work:
“A sense of morality, which has always been strong in me, now
overwhelms me completely; it does not permit me to sleep, eat,
or have a minute’s rest. I am at a crossroads in my life, and there
is only on way out: I must abandon militant politics com-
pletely…. It was impossible for me to live such a troubled exis-
tence…firstly, I will rid my life of all falsehood, deceit and
secrecy; secondly, I will begin a new life…to seek redemption,
to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am bound with
every fiber in my body), and my country.”
What remains mysterious is Silone’s motivation for informing
in the first place. He may, however, have left us some clues in
his novel Bread and Wine. One chapter toward the end of the
book contains the confession of a young Communist who acted
as a police informant. After being arrested and beaten by the
police, the young man, Luigi Murica, is approached by a kindly
police officer who offers to help him in exchange for a little
information. Initially, he provides only generic reports, but then
is pressured by police to give more detailed information. He
compensates for his betrayal by working harder than ever,
allowing him, temporarily, to function on two levels at the same
time. “An insuperable abyss opened up between my apparent
and my secret life,” the young man says. Explaining his deci-
sion not to confess to his comrades, Murica says that “fear of
being discovered was stronger in me than remorse....I feared for
my threatened reputation, not for the wrong that I was doing.”
But, like Silone, the character overcomes his remorse by regain-
ing his religious faith, telling himself that “good is often born
of evil and that I would not have become a man without having
passed through the infamies and errors I committed.” ◆
—Alexander Stille
Note: A longer version of this essay by Alexander Stille appeared
in the New Yorker, May 15, 2000 as “The Spy Who Failed.”
 The World Press: France and Italy
The French Press—The Quality Remains
A s in most European countries, the situation of the press in France has been strongly shaped
by history. World War II marked a break in French press history. Newspapers that went on
being published during the Occupation were replaced by others born out of the Resistance.
New structures were created to assure the circulation of a wide spectrum of opinion. Thus in Paris, the
Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne [New Distributors of the Paris Press] (half owned by the
Hachette corporation and half by the set of newspapers they
serve) have a monopoly on distribution. Furthermore, the
eight “professions du Livre,” representing workers in pub-
lishing, from rotary-press operators to proofreaders, have a
closed shop which has exclusive rights to staff replacement—
a situation that has driven up production costs and led to
rather slack circulation policies.
Like those in other countries, French newspapers have, of
course, undergone many changes: the
disappearance of newspapers created in
the country’s postwar revival (Combat,
Ce Soir, etc.), the steady elimination of
subregional dailies (those of the départe-
ments), the mergers of regional dailies,
adaptation to new technology (hampered
by the Book Union’s resistance).
The dominance of Paris has divided the
daily press into two categories: those with
national and international circulation,
and those with largely regional reader-
ship. In the first category, there are three
unequal groups: the three major national
daily papers, then the business dailies,
and finally, what I would call the “idea”
dailies. We should add to this list L’Équipe,
the country’s lone daily sports paper.
Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Libération
form the core of the French quality press. The first two sell
between 400,000 and 500,000 copies daily, giving them a read-
ership of nearly two million; the third has roughly half the
circulation of the first two. All three papers have quite dis-
tinct personalities and histories. Only Le Figaro predates
World War II. Shut down voluntarily in 1940, it reappeared
during the liberation under its own name. It is a center-right
newspaper offering news to readers who are older, wealthier,
and somewhat further to the right than average voters. In the
1970s it was taken over by Robert Hersant, who also owned
regional dailies and a popular national daily, France-Soir,
which had its heyday in the 1950s and ‘60s. Yves de la Chasse-
Martin took it over at Hersant’s death, but his main role was
to reorganize it after bad mismanagement during the financial
crisis of the 1990s. In the last decades two great names
brought distinction to Le Figaro: Raymond Aron, and the
recently deceased Alain Peyrefitte, a former minister of de
Gaulle’s, and a member of the Académie Française. Until
recently, the paper’s editor-in-chief was Franz-Olivier
Giesbert, a sensible and open-minded journalist who spent
his early career at the Nouvel Observateur, a fashionable
weekly that is traditionally a preserve of the non-Communist
left. The newspaper has several different supplements, includ-
ing two full-color weeklies, Figaro Magazine, which used to
be further to the right than the daily, and Figaro Madame,
which focuses on fashion and home design.
Le Monde was created in 1944 by Hubert Beuve-Mery. It
replaced the major prewar Le Temps, tak-
ing over its typography, but by no means
its political orientation. Left-leaning,
though free of party affiliations, strongly
committed to international coverage,
though not at the expense of reporting
domestic political developments, it
quickly became the daily paper for high-
level businessmen and civil servants,
intellectuals and teachers. The newspaper
has gone through several crises—organi-
zational and financial—but, crucially, a
society to which all the journalists belong
owns 32 percent of the shares and has the
right to propose to the other share-hold-
ers—on a 60-percent majority vote—the
candidate for the editorship. Its current
director, Jean-Marie Colombani, a shrewd
domestic-policy journalist, is legally pres-
ident of a three-member board of directors. Among the daily’s
more specialized satellite publications are Le Monde diploma-
tique and Le Monde de l’éducation.
Libération is the newest of the major Paris dailies. A product
of 1968, it appealed from the outset to young readers who
found Le Figaro too conservative and Le Monde too institu-
tional, and who wanted a more anti-establishment paper, a
more modern, casual idiom, and greater openness to the avant-
gardes. The head of this venture was Serge July, a highly ener-
getic, outgoing man who was able to maneuver an organiza-
tion whose journalists had virtual self-management. Five years
ago the newspaper attempted major changes to cover a broader
field of information. The failure of this operation forced the
journalists to accept participation by private capital and a
return to their earlier set-up. Among the three current acting
editors-in-chief is Jacques Amalrie, a forceful personality and
former head of Le Monde’s foreign news desk.
For a long time the French press handled economic questions
quite badly. In the postwar years economic journalists were
17
 The World Press: France and Italy
distinctly mediocre. Through the efforts of Le Monde and the
magazines L’Expansion and L’Entreprise, however, the level
eventually rose, and today the French press boasts two highly
competent economic dailies: Les Echos, a paper which, though
geared to small- and medium-sized businesses, has become a
broadly informative newspaper with fine editorialists such as
Paul Fabra and Eric Izraelevitch. The paper is now an affiliate
of the Financial Times, though it has kept its own personality.
Its alter ego, La Tribune, first served the interests of big busi-
ness, but today the contents of the two papers are quite close.
And, last in this triptych, there are the daily “papers of
ideas,” the “quotidiens de pensée”: La Croix, which, as its
name suggests, is published by a Catholic press corporation,
and L’Humanité, the old pre-World War I socialist newspaper,
which became the voice of the Communist Party in the 1920s.
The former now has a circulation close to 100,000 copies and
the latter around 50,000. The editor-in-chief of La Croix is
Bruno Frappat, an excellent editorialist with a keen sensitiv-
ity to ethical questions. The latter is run by Richard Benninger
and Pierre Zarca; now that Party dogmatism has abated, it is
known particularly for the quality of its literary criticism.
This survey would be incomplete without a few words about
the foreign daily press in France, which is almost exclusively
English-language. The Herald Tribune is valued for its coverage,
at once broad and concise, of world events. The economic world
reads the Financial Times, considered more multinational and
more thorough than domestic economics dailies, and reflective
too of Anglo-Saxon opinion. The Wall Street Journal Europe, a
newer arrival, strikes French readers as more “parochial”—even
if the parish in question is the American empire.
Despite the advance of television news, the national daily
press still dominates the debates of opinion. It is still in the
columns of newspapers that politicians, business and social
leaders, and intellectuals hold forth. The issues launched in
the newspapers are only then taken up by the TV stations.
Print journalists often participate, broadening their influence
in the process. Yet, unlike the postwar decades, there are no
longer running editorial exchanges between well-known writ-
ers in one paper and another—no one with quite the impor-
tance of Raymond Aron or François Mauriac in their day.
The Internet, long a minor phenomenon in France, finally
reached the national dailies two years ago. The Web site for
Les Echos receives the most hits. Le Monde also has a Web site
at last, and a special subsidiary, Le Monde interactif, only
recently assumed its own advertising direction. Libération has
a site. Le Figaro, after lagging slightly behind, is announcing
ambitious plans of its own. Circulation for the print press
stagnated in 1999. Some attribute this to the development of
the Net, but advertising revenue remains high, and efforts
continue to cut production and distribution costs.
Perhaps we should add a finishing touch—a touch of
brightness—to this rather subdued panorama of France’s
national dailies, by underscoring their sheer quality. Well-
written, well-informed, produced with a deep respect for pro-
fessional ethics, they are a credit to their country. ◆ game are often little more than personal power; journalistic
—Jacques Lesourne
18
The Italian Press
A t first glance, the Italian daily press seems a lively
and diverse forum of national debate. There are sev-
eral genuinely national newspapers that are available
from Trento to Taranto. They span the ideological spectrum
from the avowedly right-wing Il Giornale (published in Milan)
to the neo-communist Il Manifesto, based in Rome, with sev-
eral smaller party newspapers in addition. The openly politi-
cal quality of the papers—which print their editorials on the
front and not the back page—can seem refreshing compared
to the blander style of the Anglo-Saxon press. Leading intel-
lectuals and writers—from the philosophers Gianni Vattimo
and Lucio Colletti to writers such as Antonio Tabucchi and
Enzo Siciliano—also appear regularly in their pages.
But on closer inspection and prolonged exposure, the Italian
press is in an extremely unhealthy state and, underneath the
ideological diversity, the different papers have common symp-
toms that make the Italian journalistic scene one of depress-
ing monotony. Despite its reputation as a highly political
nation of avid newspaper readers, Italy is one of the nations
in Europe where people read the least and buy the fewest
newspapers. There are fewer than seven million newspapers
sold in Italy—a country of about sixty million people—and a
substantial chunk of those are accounted for by the daily
sports newspapers, which are among the nation’s biggest sell-
ers. The largest quality newspapers—the Corriere della Sera
of Milan and La Repubblica of Rome—have circulations just
over 600,000 copies, despite being in cities of over three mil-
lion people and being able to reach the entire national reader-
ship. Moreover, most of the major papers have either lost read-
ers or had to spend mightily to maintain them: giving away
gadgets, movie videos and music CD’s along with their papers.
Although the political spin of the newspapers differs, the
subject matter of the five or six stories covered on the front
pages of the five or six leading dailies is almost always identi-
cal: the latest sayings and doings of the principal political
leaders in Rome. Part of the inability of the Italian papers to
reach out beyond a relatively small number of hard-core read-
ers is their strange symbiotic relationship with the political
class. Rather than practicing enterprising journalism, going
and finding out what is happening in the communities they
cover, a large number of journalists stand on the steps of the
Italian parliament building waiting for the party leaders to
emerge and make their declarations for the day. The principal
stories then consist of the ping-pong game that ensues
between the various political leaders. Other stories are also
reactive, responses to various kinds of government actions:
the issuing of a court sentence, the arrest of several criminal
defendants, or the publication of a major report.
This intense focus on the political arena may stem from a
time when Italy was a major battleground of the Cold War, in
which the ideological shifts of the main political parties was a
matter of international importance. But now, the stakes of the
skills appear to have atrophied, and the newspapers spend
much of their time recycling the same hot air.
 The World Press: France and Italy
The symbiosis between newspapers and politicians may
derive, in part, from the close relations between the owners
of the major media outlets and the Italian political class in gen-
eral. The importance of government regulation and the
omnipresence of the political parties in Italy has placed many
Italian businesses in a position of considerable dependence.
One recent owner of the Rome daily paper Il Messaggero was
quoted as saying that in order to be a major economic player
you need a newspaper. Pleasing and influencing the political
parties may be an important reason for owning a paper.
On a national scale, there are three principal media groups:
the Agnelli group, tied to the Fiat automobile fortune, which
controls the Corriere della Sera, the largest newspaper in the
country, and La Stampa, published in Turin, which has gen-
erally been the third or fourth largest paper. The second is the
group controlled by television magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who
owns, along with the three main private TV networks, two
openly conservative daily newspapers, Il Giornale, and Il
Foglio, as well as the largest newsweekly, Panorama, and the
Mondadori publishing empire, the biggest publisher of books
and magazines. The third and smallest group is L’Espresso-La
Repubblica, whose chief holdings are the newsweekly
L’Espresso and the Rome daily paper La Repubblica. Both are
traditionally left-of-center publications and their largest
shareholder is Carlo De Benedetti, the former head of the
Olivetti typewriter and computer company, which has now
become a leader in Italy’s cellular phone industry. All three
groups have depended on government favor while having
much to fear from the massive bribery investigation that has
shaken Italy in recent years.
The deleterious effect of close ties to the political system is
especially obvious in the case of the Berlusconi group. In early
1994, Silvio Berlusconi decided to enter politics and founded
his own political party, addressing the nation live on all three
of his national TV networks. Since then, his myriad media hold-
ings have acted as an extension of the party press office and
have attacked his political enemies with extraordinary ferocity.
Berlusconi’s main daily newspaper, Il Giornale, was founded
and edited by Indro Montanelli, a major figure in Italian jour-
nalism stretching back to the fascist era. Montanelli, while
sharing some of Berlusconi’s conservative politics, insisted
on having editorial autonomy and refused to endorse
Berlusconi’s decision to enter politics. As a result, Montanelli
was forced out of the newspaper he had founded in a brutal
and humiliating fashion, and a more pliant editor was hired.
Similarly, the head of the newsweekly Panorama, Andrea
Monti, was replaced for being politically suspect. No danger
of that with Berlusconi’s other newspaper, Il Foglio. It is run
by Berlusconi’s own speechwriter, Giuliano Ferraro, who was
the chief government spokesman during the several months
he was prime minister in 1994. Since Berlusconi has been
under investigation and on trial in various cases of political
corruption, his newspapers have kept up a relentless attack
on the magistrates, calling them “red robes,” agents in a
Communist plot to destroy Berlusconi.
The two main newspapers of the Agnelli group, Il Corriere
della Sera and La Stampa, have long been the voices of the
northern Italian moderate-liberal bourgeoisie and both have a
long tradition of journalistic excellence. But the ownership’s
considerable business interests have made them journalisti-
cally tame and cautious. For example, the Fiat car company
recently built a major new factory in southern Italy, which
benefitted enormously from sizeable government subsidies
meant to encourage development in economically depressed
areas. Moreover, for a time, there was considerable apprehen-
sion that long-time Fiat chairman Cesare Romiti might be
arrested for his alleged involvement in the bribery scandal.
This has meant that the Fiat-controlled papers have tried hard
to maintain favorable relations with both left and right. The
paper’s main editorial voices—Ernesto Galli della Loggia,
Sergio Romano, and Angelo Panebianco—have dedicated
numerous pieces to denouncing the excesses of judicial power
in Italy and attacking the anti-corruption magistrates.
The L’Espresso-La Repubblica group is tied to its owner,
Carlo De Benedetti, who, like his main competitors, has had
his own close encounters with the Italian law. To his credit,
De Benedetti has not interfered with his papers’ support of
the magistrates who have investigated his own business deal-
ings. However, it is also true that his papers’ close ties to the
center-left coalition have almost certainly given him highly
useful political influence. The journalists at both La Repub-
blica and L’Espresso have not hesitated at times to demonstrate
their own independence from the leaders of the center-left, but
the widely shared perception of partisanship has limited their
national influence. Although of a much higher quality journal-
istically than Il Giornale and Il Foglio, the De Benedetti papers
are seen as representing the left much as Berlusconi’s papers
represent the right. Thus each tends to cancel the other out.
The chief financial paper, Il Sole 24 Ore, is refreshingly con-
crete and replete with news, compared to some of the other
dailies. But it, too, is closely tied to a major economic player
with a strong stake in the political game: it is owned by the
Confederation of Italian Industry, the principal business asso-
ciation in Italy, which sits opposite the labor unions in the
negotiation of virtually all major national labor contracts.
The Balkanization of Italian journalism may be due in part
to the lack of strong reporting at any of the papers—some-
thing which might attract readers across ideological lines. It
has generally been true that Italian journalism has distin-
guished itself more for the quality of its analysis and commen-
tary than for reporters who wore out their shoe-leather track-
ing down stories. This appears to be more true than ever. It is
revealing, however, that many of Italian journalism’s biggest
names (Galli della Loggia, Panebianco, Romano) have no jour-
nalistic background at all (the first two are academics, the
third a former diplomat). It is sad to say that the Corriere’s best
journalist may be Montanelli, who rejoined the paper after
resigning from the editorship of Berlusconi’s Il Giornale and
is now in his nineties. Similarly, La Repubblica’s best may be
Giorgio Bocca, who is close to eighty. The best commentators
on foreign affairs—Barbara Spinelli (La Repubblica), Arrigo
Levi, and Enzo Bettiza (both with La Stampa)—have been at
their jobs for decades. ◆
—Alexander Stille
19
 The World Press: Germany
The German Press—Covering the World
G ermany today has about four hundred daily newspapers with a combined circulation of twenty-
five million copies in a population of over eighty-two million persons. Four out of five adults
are regular newspaper readers. Each region has its own predominant paper, with the excep-
tion of metropolitan Berlin where no single paper dominates. Today a few dailies make up “the national
press.” The Hamburg tabloid Bild is the largest, with a circulation of more than four million, while the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (known commonly as the FAZ),
Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), and Hamburg’s weekly Die
Zeit each have circulations of between four to five hundred
thousand copies: Die Welt (also published in Hamburg) has a
circulation of more than two hundred
thousand, and the Frankfurter Rund-
schau (FR) under two hundred thou-
sand. The weekly Der Spiegel (mod-
eled originally on Time, but much
superior in its writing and “bite”),
has over a million circulation, while
its competitor, Focus, founded only
in 1993, but oriented to the business
world, sells about eight hundred
thousand copies.
The FAZ and Die Welt have tradi-
tionally been conservative. The Süd-
deutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit are lib-
eral (in the American left-center
sense), and the Frankfurter Rundschau
is slightly left of them. Berlin’s Tages-
zeitung (Taz), an offspring of 1968,
once brought a freshness to German
journalism, but seems to have lost its
bearings. But such rough political classifications do not do
justice to the distinctions, for within each paper there is often
a spectrum of opinions, especially as between the political
columns and the feuilletons, the free-wheeling literary essays
(see the following essay by Wolf Lepenies).
German unification added a number of regional newspapers
to the total list, but none of the papers in “the East” have a
national circulation, or even a super-regional circulation in the
“new German states.” In Berlin, the quality papers, i.e. Der
Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Zeitung, are read chiefly within
their region and have not, as yet, profited from the govern-
ment’s move there. Of the national press of neighboring Switz-
erland, only the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) deserves mention
for its high quality and accessibility through the Internet, but
it remains largely confined to its Swiss readership.
All of the national quality newspapers have different
strengths. Some buy the Süddeutsche Zeitung for the articles by
Leyendecker or Stiller, for their political muckraking, or for
the distinctiveness of the music criticism. The special attrac-
tion of the Frankfurter Rundschau is its left-liberal appeal, its
extensive coverage of third-world countries, and its bi-weekly
section on the humanities. In the quality and breadth of its cul-
20
tural pages, one of the main yardsticks for rating a paper, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine is Germany’s leading newspaper, if not
one of the best in the world. What is remarkable is its network
of foreign correspondents, not only the largest in Germany, but
probably in the world as well, at a
time when almost all newspapers in
the major countries are reducing their
foreign reporting.
The distinctive feature of many
German newspapers is the strength
of their feuilletons; another is their
regular reports on the foreign peri-
odicals. In the “Berliner Seiten,” the
Berlin pages of the FAZ, one can
learn that the Turks in Berlin are
reading Hurriyet or Sabah (each of
which has a circulation in Berlin of
between seven and nine thousand
copies), or how Russkij Berlin, with
a circulation of fifty thousand, re-
ports on developments in Russia. Yet
despite the strength of the feuil-
letons within the national newspa-
pers, there are few German cultural
periodicals of any scope, or comparable to the TLS or the New
York Review of Books.
The most recent effort to “internationalize” the German
newspaper is the creation of a short English version of the FAZ,
which is inserted as a supplement in the International Herald
Tribune in Germany, and which will soon become available on
the latter’s Web site. The difficulty is that this shortened ver-
sion lacks the most attractive feature of the FAZ—its breadth
of content and its stylistic brilliance. This may be overcome as
the editorial staff gains expertise, or if instead of translating
articles from the FAZ, the staff is allowed to write its own arti-
cles based on the contents of the German edition. But the cru-
cial point is the beginning of a process of internationalization
in order to widen the foundations of newspapers.
Looking ahead, does the German press have secure founda-
tions or do they face a precarious future? Television, the
Internet, and the concentration in the media markets by the
growth of the two media giants Bertelsmann and Holzbrink
all pose threats to the national press.
In television, there has been an increase in the number of
political and other talk shows (as in the United States), but also
the start of two news channels, N-tv and Phoenix. N-tv spe-
 The World Press: Germany
cializes in short news reports. Phoenix gained a wide audience
by its detailed reporting on the finance scandals of Helmut
Kohl and the CDU (Christian Democratic Union). Those broad-
casts have affected German politics by increasing the number
of individuals who spend their time watching parliamentary
debates on TV. While this may have affected competition
between channels, it does not seem to have affected the read-
ing habits of the German population.
Newspapers have lived with TV for half a century. The
Internet is a more recent challenge. The global population of
Internet users is estimated to reach more than 500 million per-
sons in the year 2003. But its use in Germany is more limited
than in the U.S. Germany has about five million users, in large
part because Internet costs (including charges for local phone
service) are still prohibitive in comparison to the U.S. The
Internet, however, has led the German national papers to
establish their own presence, but practices and policies differ.
Newspapers and magazines such as Die Zeit, the SZ, Der
Spiegel, the NZZ, have their own Web sites. Some offer only
the day’s news, commentary, and reviews with or without
access to their archives. Some offer these free, or with a
charge. Some offer additional material produced especially for
the Web site on specific themes such as Kosovo, the CDU scan-
dal, pension reform, dual citizenship, etc. Some believe that
cost-free online additions will increase the sale of their print
editions; some regard the service as a source of additional
income either for the additional news or for advertising.
So far, no newspaper has made a list of its most frequently
used services or topics online. Nor would putting the English
FAZ in the shorter English version on the Internet enable
English readers to appreciate its quality. The process of defin-
ing the specific relation between the print edition of a news-
paper and the online edition is only now beginning. ◆ Memorial (where Peter Eisenman’s project provoked another
—Michael Becker
The Feuilleton and
the Theatre of Politics
T he tension between politics and culture is more char-
acteristic of newspapers in Germany than in any other
country. The German political columnist often does
not realize that, only a few pages ahead, the cultural critic will
vehemently contradict him. It is as if both wrote for a paper
they don’t read. In Germany, the feuilleton has always been a
playground where ideas could be hatched and ideologies pro-
moted that would never have been accepted on the political
pages of the same paper. In recent years, however, the balance
seems to have shifted toward culture. The most conspicuous
example of this change is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(FAZ), arguably the most important German daily newspaper
with a circulation of more than 400,000 copies during the
week and more than 500,000 copies for the weekend edition.
Its feuilleton has become more and more politicized. Where
its front page justified the war against Milosevic, the feuil-
leton often presented scathing criticism.
The relation between politics and culture, between the front
pages and the feuilleton, has been turned upside down quite
regularly. Political commentaries sometimes respond to argu-
ments previously published on the cultural pages; they are
sometimes written in the somewhat mocking style formerly
reserved for the feuilleton. The latter’s writers are, as a rule,
very young. Most of them could not care less about the usual
“copyrights and copywrongs” (Carlyle). These authors exhibit
a very un-German wit, a willingness to do anything except
succumb to boredom, and a healthy antipathy toward politi-
cal correctness.
There is only one paper that is even funnier and even less
politically correct than the feuilleton of the FAZ—the same
paper’s “Berlin pages.” Like all other major German dailies,
the Frankfurter Allgemeine competes intensely for the atten-
tion of the readership in the German capital. Even without a
single new newspaper on the market, the publishing scene
in the German capital has changed dramatically since all
national papers began carrying a Berlin metropolitan section.
The leader of the pack, again, is the FAZ—its “Berlin pages”
have made a trademark of not distinguishing between cul-
ture and politics.
The Berlin pages have profited from the fact that culture and
politics have become blurred genres in the Berlin Republic.
Some of the most important political debates, for instance,
have been transformed into aesthetic quarrels with architec-
ture playing the leading role. The three most conspicuous
examples are the Reichstag (the seat of the German parliament,
which was imbued with considerable cultural sympathy and
political legitimacy by Christo’s wrapping and by Norman
Foster’s glass dome), the Jewish Museum (which the erratic
genius of Daniel Libeskind turned into a memorial that should
not be used as a museum at all), and finally the Holocaust
debate on the German past that seemed to have been settled
quite a while ago). Writing about the Reichstag building, the
Jewish Museum, and the Holocaust Memorial does not only
mean engaging in a cultural discourse but also includes tak-
ing sides in hot political controversies.
Finally, the genres of culture and politics have also become
blurred in Berlin because the recent scandals over the CDU’s
financing schemes have turned the political arena into a stage
where politicians such as Helmut Kohl have suddenly turned
into actors in a tragicomedy that is not likely to end soon.
While almost all the theatres in Berlin promote political agen-
das that do not make for exciting productions, the more excit-
ing, or at least less cumbersome, Berlin Republic increasingly
resembles a theatre-state, to borrow anthropologist Clifford
Geertz’s notion. True, most of our favorite actors do not dis-
play nearly the precision and elegance of the Balinese whom
Geertz was studying. But to a considerable degree, they are
transforming German political life into drama and play. The
ordinary citizen must learn to become a critic if he wants to
understand what is happening on the political stage. Once
more, cultural competence is a prerequisite for understand-
ing German politics.
The feuilleton is everywhere—in the papers and in politics.◆
—Wolf Lepenies
21
 The World Press: Germany
Marion Dönhoff at Ninety
S he came from another world, yet helped shape ours:
born and bred at Castle Friedrichstein in East Prussia,
close to nature, with her roots in a now-vanished world
her descriptive gifts conjure up for us in her book Before the
Storm (1990) as a unique and extraordinary home—one Hitler’s
war robbed her of. With her famous ride west in early 1945 she
began a new life amid devastation, yet she has always kept faith
with her origins.
The best of old Prussia moulded her. The experience of July
20, 1944, that day in which many of her friends gave their
lives to free Germany of Hitler, indelibly marked her second
start. She has remained true to this legacy: necessarily blend-
ing the moral with the possible in her commitment to decency
in politics.
In 1946, as the country was commencing its own reconstruc-
tion, Marion Dönhoff began a completely new life—
though one prepared by a university study unusual enough at
the time for a woman of her station. By chance she landed a
job at a new weekly paper, Die Zeit—a paper her tone and style
has shaped for decades—for even in those earliest years she
possessed a moral authority arising not from her position but
from her very character, which combined absolute integrity,
brilliance of writing, and political judgment, with utter charm.
Her voice as editor and then publisher of Die Zeit helped steer
the new Federal Republic on a liberal course.
She was an early advocate of reconciliation with former ene-
mies, the very Poles and Russians who had seized her home-
land. She called for an opening to the East at a time when Cold
War policy favored hostile distance. She paved the way toward
Ostpolitik, a “policy toward the East” which she conducted in
public and in private, in direct contact with Russians and
Poles, the major dissidents as well as those in power. Here too
older tradition spurred new actions: she knew the east, as her
family had known it—without illusions, but also without
arrogance. She knew what Poles and Russians had suffered at
the hands of Germans.
Reconciliation was her hope and mission in other places, too.
Through her knowledge of South Africa she strove to achieve a
seemingly impossible peaceful end to apartheid, as evidenced
by her support of Bishop Desmond Tutu. Her globe-trotting and
her worldwide network of friends were the product of a well-
focused curiosity: all that was human, and political, has inter-
ested and enthralled her. And she has reported on it all—in a
clear, penetrating style —in countless articles, and many books.
I first met the countess at the end of the 1960s at a German-
American forum. An article I had written on the 1968 student
unrest had been circulated, and this led to her first pencilled
note to me, which I have kept: “Shall we have lunch at noon?”
She questioned me, criticized my conservative stance toward
the movement. Hers was the more balanced view. Looking
back, I would say her conservative principles were firm enough
to allow her to entertain new ideas open-mindedly and liber-
ally. She remains an open-minded conservative and a realistic
liberal: so different from today’s prevailing neo-liberalism with
22
its free-market idolatry. Civilize Capitalism [Zivilisiert den
Kapitalismus] is the title of one of her last books. In an age of
overwhelming globalism and greed that is technologically novel
but ethically primitive, she calls for reforms in keeping with
her tireless urge to understand and improve the res publica.
Marion Dönhoff has been honored throughout the world. In
1971 she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
This year, in the span of a few weeks, she was made an hon-
orary citizen of Hamburg and an honorary doctor of the uni-
versity of Königsberg (Kaliningrad), a first political and human
gesture from her old neighbors. But perhaps the greatest honor
has been the love so many people the world over bear toward
a woman who simply radiates decency, native good sense, and
so much quiet goodness. She has turned her private loss into
priceless gain for others. We feel gratitude for the past, hope
for future achievements, further encouragement to be better.◆
—Fritz Stern
Source: A longer version of this essay appeared in Tageszanzeiger
(Zurich), December 2, 1999.
Miscellany
Sartre Redivivus
J ean-Paul Sartre has risen from what the French call his
purgatoire, the period of indifference, even aversion.
Chief among rehabilitations is the bestseller Le Siècle
de Sartre [Sartre’s century] (Grasset, 1999) by Bernard-Henri
Lévy, the “New Philosopher” Sartre once denounced as a
CIA agent. Repenting past injustice, Lévy praises Sartre’s
philosophical and literary writings without concealing the
wrongheadedness of his political stances, his political
“schizophrenia” as anarchistic individualist and Stalinist,
philosopher of freedom and ideological dogmatist.
George Steiner (TLS, May 19, 2000) describes Lévy’s book
as “at its core, autobiography,” noting how Lévy’s career as
a public intellectual has “mimed” Sartre’s. Similar worldly
success may have blinded him to “the core of self-hatred” in
Sartre, who knew himself to be “the quintessential exempli-
fication of the bourgeois, mandarin ideals and rewards
which, indefatigably, he pronounced to be anathema to him.”
Like Steiner, Jürg Altwegg (FAZ, Feb. 5, 2000) reads
Lévy’s vindication as a national exoneration of “the intellec-
tual” as such, whose death has lately been proclaimed “as
often as Sartre announced the death of literature.” Steiner,
searching for some part of Sartre’s great, flawed achievement
that signals “ a beginning rather than an epilogue,” ulti-
mately proposes the philosopher’s “domestication of the
‘Godless,’” his “rigourously immanent,” Nietzsche-inspired
ontology and morality. Meanwhile, the apotheosis contin-
ues, in bookstores, conferences, talk shows. And the for-
merly nameless intersection opposite the Café des Deux
Magots is now called Place Sartre-de Beauvoir.
—David Jacobson
 The World Press: Russia
The Russian Press
A t the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev’s glasnost policy stimulated enormous growth in Russian
society’s interest in historical and political topics taboo until then. Some print media in Russia
reached record circulations of several million, and the popular weekly Argumenty i fakty
made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with a print run of 33.5 million. That made the decline
of the press market all the more dramatic when, in 1992, the removal of price controls, the collapse of
distribution networks, and the impoverishment of the popu-
lation brought the national newspapers to the brink of ruin.
Today there is next to no national press anymore. Moscow’s
papers are hardly read in the provinces,
partly because of the continuing process
of decentralization. The local press, fi-
nanced by and manipulated in the inter-
ests of local governments, is a vest-
pocket press that illuminates the
country’s political events from the view-
point of the governors and the financial
actors behind them. It exerts a much
greater influence in the respective
regions than the central press does. In
Moscow, most print media belong to and
are zealous lobbyists for the interests of
rival financial/industrial groups, for
example those of Boris Berezovsky,
Vladimir Gusinsky, or the energy
monopoly created by Viktor Cherno-
myrdin, Gazprom. They have degener-
ated into a rumor mill and a political
market, giving the task of providing information only sec-
ondary priority. Their target audience is the political and busi-
ness elite that is involved in the power struggles.
There are exceptions to the rule. For example, the weekly
newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti [Moscow News] (MN) is still
independent and a beacon of political continuity and journal-
istic integrity. Its editor-in-chief Viktor Loshak has not only
managed to retain his writers in the face of the wealthy com-
petition’s recruiting efforts, but also to develop an immunity
to the society’s cynicism. Moskovskiye Novosti is almost the
only newspaper that keeps its distance from the arrogant, sex-
ist language tinged with underworld jargon found in most of
the media. The MN is characterized by Leonid Nikitinsky’s
excellent research on corruption, objective reporting on the
war in Chechnya, and good criticism of society and culture.
The latter takes up half of the twenty-eight-page periodical.
The MN remains the paper of choice for Moscow’s liberal intel-
ligentsia and finds substantial resonance among Russian émi-
grés in the fifty-six foreign countries in which it is distributed.
Another independent newspaper is the bi-weekly Novaja
Gazeta [New Newspaper] (NG), which has a circulation of
80,000. The NG is one of the few papers that reports in depth
on the suffering of the civilian population in Chechnya. The
journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Elvira Goryuchina have
traveled in the combat zones and refugee camps and work for
the war’s victims with unparalleled selflessness. In March,
hackers destroyed a ready-to-print edition in the NG’s com-
puter system. The secret service (FSB) is
suspected to be behind this. If the FSB
increases its control over the media, the
NG could be one of the first victims.
These two newspapers are printed in
black and white on cheap newsprint,
while the weekly magazine Itogi main-
tains the same quality standards as its
joint venture partner, Newsweek. Not
only its outstanding color photos, but also
the high quality of its analyses make Itogi
one of the best current periodicals. Its
managing editor Masha Gessen, a re-emi-
grant from the U.S.A., would be a jewel in
the crown of any high-quality magazine.
For the average consumer, however, Itogi
is affordable only in Moscow.
Periodicals like Kommersant and Nesa-
vissimaya Gaseta [Independent News-
paper] were founded at the zenith of perestroika with the
intent of ushering in a new era of liberal media. Kommersant
was also the only paper to fashion itself as a Russian Financial
Times. It introduced a fresh, aggressive language that was
much imitated by other media, and it has an outstanding cul-
tural department with the respected art critic Katya Degot.
But even before Kommersant was sold to Berezovsky last year,
it had lost some of its élan, due to the 1998 financial crisis and
the staff’s “defection” to Vladimir Gusinsky’s daily Segodnya
[Today]. Kommersant was and is the newspaper for Moscow’s
high finance.
A different fate awaited Nesavissimaya Gaseta, which
Berezovsky rescued from bankruptcy in 1993. On the one
hand, with its many monthly supplements on various social
topics such as religion, literature, the military, or science, it
has contributed much to public debate. The paper has been
corrupted by its editor-in-chief, Vitali Tretyakov, a loyal vas-
sal of Berezovsky. In particular, its censored reporting and lies
about the Chechnya war, its rabble-rousing against human
rights activists, and the Great Power airs it puts on make it
seem the mouthpiece of the regime. Cynicism, inhumanity,
and nihilism – this message from the postcommunist elite to
the underprivileged masses appears especially nakedly in
Tretyakov’s newspaper. And yet it does not always take a
23
 Reports from Russia
“party line,” but publishes articles with liberal-democratic
views, for example criticism of Putin. But this pluralism seems
to reflect a transitional situation. The impulse of media free-
dom is still strong, but the future is highly uncertain.
The Moscow papers that have been privatized by the oli-
garchs have one thing in common, whether they are black and
white or boast a modern, color layout: they are media for the
political debate and power intrigues of Moscow’s elites, an
exclusive club of the winners in Yeltsin’s market reforms.
The numerous divisions in editorial staffs and the recruit-
ing of personnel by financially powerful media, as well as con-
flicts with owners, have reduced the stature of most of the
respected journalists. For example, when Izvestiya was
acquired by Gazprom, the paper’s long-time editor-in-chief
Tankred Golembiovsky founded Novye Izvestiya; but it never
measured up to its predecessor.
Many younger journalists abandoned the field to work on
Internet periodicals, and the best pro-Western journalists,
including Yevgenya Albaz, Andrey Piotrovsky, and Pavel Fel-
genhauer, are now on the staffs of English-language newspa-
pers such as the Russia Journal or the Moscow Times. For writ-
ers at this level, that is the equivalent of an inner emigration.
The English-language papers, including The Moscow Tribune,
are of a high calibre. The Moscow Times columnist John Helmer
is one of the best analysts of Russian conditions. But these news-
papers are read primarily by the expatriate community and
exert little significant influence on public opinion in Russia.
The oligarchs have managed to split the journalists into two
camps: a well-paid, bought minority and a poorly-paid major-
ity. This undermines solidarity within the profession and the
possibility of promoting common interests. Journalistic pro-
fessional ethics were the first victim sacrificed to Mammon.
The general population is alienated from the Moscow elite
and has no trust in the powers that be. The broad masses con-
centrate on everyday survival. A newspaper devoted to the
simple things of life and to entertainment, like Argumenty i
fakty with its regional supplements, thus also finds a market
outside the capital. With a little politics, a lot of gossip, and
useful medical and household advice, it reaches a circulation
of more than two million, while the equally supraregional
Izvestiya, which lost its best journalists during privatization,
has therefore lost attractiveness. The tabloid Moskovskii
Komsomolets, with a circulation of one million, is a special phe-
nomenon. Its mixture of dubious scandal mongering and
youth culture reporting appeals to the young, apolitical gener-
ation, even outside Moscow. Its long-time editor-in-chief Pavel
Gusev cultivates close ties to Moscow’s mayor Yuri Lushkov.
Whatever its political direction and quality, no newspaper’s
influence even begins to approach that of the television chan-
nels, such as ORT (Public Russian Television, half private, half
government-owned, and largely controlled by its main in-
vestor Berezovsky), which manipulates the public for elec-
tions, propagates the war in Chechnya, and stirs up anti-
Western resentment among the masses. The print media’s
greatest hope for a measure of freedom of expression under
Putin may lie paradoxically in their lack of influence. ◆ projects. But most repertory theatres have managed to survive
—Sonja Margolina (translated by Mitch Cohen)
24
New Russian Theatre:
The Moscow Scene
I n 1919 Lenin nationalized the theatres, hampering artis-
tic expression, but also guaranteeing state support and
cheap tickets. Under the Soviets, Russians came to look
on inexpensive admission to the theatre as an inalienable
right. But over the past decade, the Russian government has
cut state subsidies, resulting in heftier ticket prices. Some
tickets to productions in this year’s sixth annual Golden Mask
Theatre Festival, a celebration of national ballet, drama, ope-
ra, and puppetry, sold for forty dollars—a bargain on Broad-
way but to most Russians a rip-off.
Increased ticket prices have not kept Muscovites from
attending the theatre. But the theatre scene has changed over
the last ten years. Audience demographics have shifted. Rich
New Russians in swank outfits now flock to the theatres to
begin a night on the town. Right before the curtain rises,
many theatres make an announcement reminding affluent
audience members to turn off their cell-phones. In response
to new audience tastes, the repertory is changing. The emer-
gence of commercial theatre, both imported and domestic,
now provides an alternative to classical drama. Profit-making
West End and Broadway spectacles such as Tomorrowland and
Metro make guest appearances in Moscow’s opera houses, rid-
ing the tide of popular consumerism flooding Russia.
The freedom of the post-communist era, however, has ush-
ered in more than expensive sensationalism. Directors now
tackle scripts which communist censors would have quickly
banned, such as Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, a new
British play that grapples with issues of homosexuality, maso-
chism, and consumerism. Directors are also staging adapta-
tions of older works that the Soviet regime kept under lock
and key. Yuri Liubimov began this trend in 1977 with his stag-
ing of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a pro-
duction that the communists refused to fund but tolerated
with disapproving silence. A decade later, Geta Yanovskaya
pioneered the spirit of perestroika with an adaptation of
Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, a title the regime had forbidden
even mentioning. (Both productions remain in repertory as
historical landmarks.) This year, Lev Dodin, the artistic direc-
tor of the St. Petersburg Maly Theatre, won the Golden Mask
Best Director Award for his adaptation of Andrei Platonov’s
novel, Chevengur. Written in 1928, the novel was accused of
presenting “an incorrect portrayal of the Revolution” and
thus appeared in only edited fragments in Russia until the
Gorbachev era. Dodin staged Platonov’s critique of the Civil
War and the Great Utopia as a poetic meditation on Russia’s
vicious cycle of hope and disillusionment.
The tumultuous past decade, punctuated by the August
1998 economic crisis and the second war in Chechnya, has
delayed production premiers and thwarted plans to open new
theatres. The fluctuating exchange rate, paraded on the street
by men in sandwich boards, makes it difficult to launch new
the shock and rejuvenate their repertories. Directors invited
 Reports from Russia
from the similarly troubled ex-Soviet republics and satellite
states have chosen Shakespeare, a standard in the Russian
repertory thanks to the translations of such poets as Boris
Pasternak, to express the trials and misfortunes of contempo-
rary life. At Moscow’s Satirikon Theatre, the Georgian direc-
tor Robert Stouroua recently staged a confrontational, mafioso
Hamlet designed to catch the consciences of the New Russian
kings. In St. Petersburg, Bulgarian Alexandr Morfov directed
a production of The Tempest that parodied, through improvi-
sational acting, the characters’ island freedom. The playful set
of swinging, wooden beams won Emil Kapulyosh this year’s
Golden Mask Award for Best Scenic Design. Lithuanian direc-
tor Eimuntas Niakroshius
won the Best Foreign Pro-
duction Presented in Russia
Award for his expressionis-
tic Macbeth, a relatively
speechless production that
conjured haunting images of
axe-murder, shrieking, blonde
Baltic witches, and shattered
mirrors to portray a nation
plagued by insecure, incom-
petent leadership.
Russian directors, too,
have used the unstable polit-
ical atmosphere and volatile
economy as a source of
drama. At the tiny Helikon
Opera, Dmitry Bertman has
injected a political critique
into his staging of Rimsky-
Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, an operatic adaptation of
Pushkin’s short story. Directors often stage this opera as an
innocuous fairy tale. In Bertman’s Brechtian production,
however, a chorus of Moscow’s ubiquitous beggars and hag-
gling babushkas surround a bumbling, intoxicated ruler who
relies on a magic cockerel to protect him from danger instead
of resolving his kingdom’s problems.
Kama Ginkas, who had three shows in this year’s festival,
directed his own adaptation of The Golden Cockerel at the
Theatre of the Young Spectator. Like many children’s shows in
Moscow, Ginkas’s Cockerel captivates both the young and old.
His bloody production presents a nightmare of violence culti-
vated by faulty leadership. A mastermind at manipulating
audience emotion by combining naturalistic acting with
Brechtian breaks in the fourth wall, Ginkas won this year’s Best
Production Award for The Room of Laughter, a play in which
Russia’s stalwart actor Oleg Tabakov portrays a neglected old
man suffocating in a dilapidated, Soviet-bloc apartment.
Tabakov shared the spotlight this year with Yevgeny
Grishkovets, a writer/director/actor from Kaliningrad whose
mesmerizing monologue How I Ate A Dog, about daily life in
the Russian navy won him the prize for innovation. In spite of
increasingly cosmopolitan attitudes, such drama of provincial
Russian life moves Muscovites. Pyotr Fomenko’s productions
of Ostrovsky’s Guilty Without Guilt and Wolves and Sheep are
two of the most celebrated shows in the Moscow repertory.
Fomenko’s treatment of nineteenth-century country life cap-
tures a national spirit that enchants audiences.
With the opening up of former Soviet borders, many Rus-
sian directors have begun working in the West. Most pass
through while touring their productions, but some have stayed
longer to teach and direct. Last fall, Yuri Yeremin, the artistic
director of the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow, staged Chekhov’s
Ivanov at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The production, a first glimpse of Russian the-
atre for many audience members, alternated between moments
of bold expressionism and detailed naturalism. After the suc-
cess of this show, Yeremin was
invited back to Cambridge to
direct three of Chekhov’s
vaudevilles next fall.
An adherent of the
Stanislavsky System of act-
ing, Yeremin also teaches at
the ART Institute for Ad-
vanced Theatre Training.
Two years ago, ART Insti-
tute students began study-
ing with Russian directing,
acting, movement, and dra-
maturgy professors from the
Moscow Art Theatre School.
The United States has inher-
ited the Russian theatrical
tradition primarily through
Lee Strasberg and Stella
Adler’s conflicting interpre-
tations of Stanislavsky’s system. Yet as the Golden Mask win-
ners demonstrated, contemporary Russian theatre draws not
only on Stanislavskian naturalism, but also on the avant-
garde innovations of practitioners such as Vsevolod
Meyerhold and Yevgeny Vakhtangov, to name two. The recent
collaboration between The American Repertory Theatre and
The Moscow Art Theatre has dispelled myths about the
Stanislavsky system and expanded understanding of Russia’s
theatrical past and present. Russians, too, seem eager to learn
about Western theories and styles. Foreigners now frequently
work in Russia and the former Soviet Republics. The German
director Peter Stein recently staged The Oresteia and Hamlet
with casts of Russian actors from various Moscow companies.
Last year, British director Declan Donnellan and actors from
Lev Dodin’s Maly Theatre (which recently joined the presti-
gious European Union of Theatres) won the top Golden Mask
prize for their joint production of The Winter’s Tale. And this
March, in the middle of the Golden Mask Festival, ART
Institute students premiered François Rochaix’s English-lan-
guage production of Goldoni’s Holiday Trilogy at the Moscow
Art Theatre. These exchanges and the international audience
at this year’s festival signal the beginning of an era when
world theatre is enriched through interaction rather than
diminished through isolation. ◆
—Ryan McKittrick
25
 Reports from Russia
Vladmir Putin, Cultural Maestro
R ussian leaders have always been keen to have artists
on their side, and the artists, in turn, have usually
bowed to power. Pushkin announced: “No, I am not a
flatterer when I sing praises to my Tsar.” Dostoyevsky offered
as justification for Russia’s national uniqueness: “We are prob-
ably backwards, but we have souls.” Even Mandelstam sub-
mitted and once wrote an Ode to Stalin.
Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev—all staked their
ideas of Russian culture on what they called socialist realism
to be propagated by the Russian intelligentsia. Yeltsin, pro-
moting democracy, then chose comfort over culture and
shifted his attention toward money and media. Culture was
left to drift on its own with no relation to the state’s agenda.
Not president Putin. In his effort to revive the moral fiber
of the Russian people, their glory and international respect,
he has turned back to culture. After all, if figures such as
Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov helped to bring down the legiti-
macy of the Soviet regime, the process might be reversed by
new cultural figures. In the months as acting and now as the
elected president, Vladimir Putin has established himself as a
fan of Russian culture in all its aspects—film, literature,
music, architecture, etc. He meets with scientists and teachers
seeking to convince them that they, no less than the military,
are Russia’s hope for the future. While he shakes one hand
with Madeleine Albright to steady Russia’s relations with the
U.S., he writes letters to Brigitte Bardot with another. He goes
to the theatre almost every week and pays friendly visits to
the homes of various members of the intelligentsia.
History repeats itself. Josef Stalin, too, was the “friend” of
writers, composers, poets, and artists. “Gogol, Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy…” he mused, “those names sound as loud as cannons.”
Osip Mandelstam is probably still shivering in his grave,
remembering Stalin’s “friendship.” As are Bulgakov, Pasternak,
and Shostakovich. Josef Vissarionovich would telephone
Bulgakov after repeated viewings of The White Guard, in his
favorite Moscow Art Theatre, to express his admiration:
“Mikhail Afanasievich, Stalin speaking,” and the author would
freeze, speechless and stunned. And Stalin would find time to
discuss with Dmitri Shostakovich the necessity of writing songs
rather than symphonies—and how lovely Shostakovich’s songs
for movies were: live-affirming and cheerful.
Vladimir Putin has his own appreciations. The First Person,
Conversations with Vladimir Putin, a book of biographical inter-
views with Putin, his family and friends (incidentally, written
in the best of traditions of the cheerfully enthusiastic pioneer
stories of Arkady Gaidar, famous Soviet children’s writer and
grandfather of a reformer Yegot Gaidar), Putin’s character is
largely seen through the eyes of his very best friend—an artist,
a musician. Putin says he enjoys performances. On the inau-
gural day as Prime Minister (in September 1999), he went to the
Satirikon Theatre’s anniversary. Apparently, it was a sentimen-
tal occasion, for Putin had met his wife at a performance by
Arkady Raikin, an official Soviet stand-up comedian, whose
son Konstantin is the Satirikon’s artistic director.
26
Yet Putin can be harsh. Although now it is the media who
suffers most. In February the acting president allegedly ordered
the arrest of Radio Free Europe’s correspondent in Chechnya,
Andrei Babitsky, and then ordered his release in order to show
journalists that they should not contradict the official line. In
early May various outlets printed a Kremlin “working paper”
that proposed the intervention of the security services into the
reporting of opposition media. In mid-May this “paper draft”
was tested in practice. Now as president, Putin justified the FSB
(Federal Service Bureau) search raid of the Moscow MOST-
group, whose media outlets have been critical of the Kremlin.
But while the press is being punished, with culture it is flat-
tery that rules. Putin’s benevolent gestures toward mastera
cultury (maestros of culture) are now cynically accepted by
the current mastera. Valery Gergiev, the famous conductor of
the Marinsky Opera in St. Petersburg, who regularly performs
classics such as Eugene Onegin, was pleased by the President’s
interest in his new production of War and Peace, the
Prokofiev operatic adaptation of Tolstoy, as was Nani
Bregvadze, the legendary Georgian singer, whom Putin
begged on his knees to sing for him personally after he missed
her concert at the Moscow Conservatory.
During presidential elections, special correspondents spent
the entire day at the polls where members of the intelligentsia
were voting. Thus the whole nation learned that most of them
were great Putin supporters. If Bella Akhmadulina (prominent
Russian poet)or Vladimir Spivakov (famous conductor of the
Moscow Virtuosi orchestra) vote for Vladimir Putin, there
must be something to him.
Power knows that in a country like Russia it is important to
make culture its ally: “art belongs to the people” was a great
slogan of Lenin and Stalin. Putin recently confirmed this idea
with his signature pragmatism by telling artists, “Your works
are of great socio-political importance. Many of you are not
simply loved but worshipped.”
So far Putin’s calculations have proved right. Nikita Mik-
halkov, the famous director of the Oscar-winning Burnt by the
Sun, the Russian Art Academy President pianist, Nikolai Petrov,
and the singer and composer Alexander Gradsky during the
last few months, addressing various Moscow and international
forums, expressed their concern over the media’s disservice to
the new leadership: the negative coverage of Chechnya creates
an unfavorable impression of the Putin regime and seriously
damages Russia’s image both in Russia and abroad. They have
been calling for the agreement with the presidential spokes-
man’s directive: “When the nation mobilizes its forces to
achieve some task, that imposes obligations on everyone,
including the media.” Nikita Mikhalkov went even further to
suggest at the celebration of the World War II May Day vic-
tory at Volgograd where the 1943 battle against the Nazis took
place the city should be given back its old name of Stalingrad.
This was the time of Russia’s glory and its strength. And cul-
ture was then at the front line in the battle for Great Russia. ◆
—Nina Khrushcheva
 Language

Spanglish—A New Vernacular

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

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

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

27
 Language
So the emergence of Spanglish is neither sudden nor new.
In one way or another it has been around for decades, even
centuries, although since the mid-1980s it has gained not
only national attention but a sense of urgency, making its
presence felt in rap and rock music, art, and literature. But
even though poets and singers are beginning to pen it down,
and sections such as the classified ads in newspapers and
music and sports magazines can’t avoid it, it remains, for the
most part, an oral code of communication, free in spirit and
defying standardization.
—Ilan Stavans
Source: Ilan Stavans, Hopscotch, Volume 1, Number 1, 1999, Duke
University Press.
A Spanglish Sampler
T he selected lexicon Hopscotch presents from a
“pool of over six thousand words” identifies
entries, wherever possible, as Cubanism, Mexi-
canism, Chicanism (Mexican-Americanism), Iberianism,
Puerto Ricanism, Nyuorricanism (New York Puerto Ri-
can), or Cyber-Spanglish; and it traces their coinage to
East Los Angeles, the Northeast, the Southwest, etc.
Many of these words remain close if not identical in
meaning to the “Anglicisms and U.S. pop culture terms”
they adapt phonetically, but the borrowed terms are not
solely English: a bom, denoting a “homeless person”
(from the English slang bum), must not to be confused
with a bum, or “explosion” (English boom); whereas el
hood (or hud) denotes “the ‘hood” (a slang abbreviation
for one’s “neighborhood” that has entered white Ameri-
cans’ slang), la hooda, a Chicanism for “the police,” de-
rives from the Spanish judicial.
Certain easy, common expressions that revel in their
mix of languages—dirìsimo, the sweet superlative of
“dear,” culìsimo, an interjection for what is “very
cool”—may well soon prove irresistible to English-
speaking Americans with little or no Spanish. They
could learn much about recent U.S. Hispanic history
browsing a lexicon in which the secondary meaning of
the familiar nacho (a “thick tortilla chip”) is “a disloyal
Chicano”—or the term for a “traitor” is the Cubanism
kenedito (“from English John F. Kennedy”).
For the Hispanic reader, of course, whether from Istlos
(East Los Angeles), Mallamibbish (Miami Beach), or that
one-time cradle of Yinglish, the Loisaida (the Lower East
Side of New York—even, in fact, for a Mexkimo, or “Mexi-
can residing in Alaska”—this record of a vernacular in
progress will confirm how linguistically fertile it is to be
in that state Northeast Spanglish speakers first defined as
haifenado: half-and-half, “having a divided identity.”
—David Jacobson
Note: Basic Books will publish Ilan Stavans’s lexicon The
Sounds of Spanglish in 2001.
28
Fear of Franglais
B ack in the seventeenth century, French linguists liked
to recount how the emperor Tiberius had attempted to
introduce new words into the Latin language by fiat,
and had failed, miserably. The story was both a not-so-subtle
means of pointing out the limits of even the most absolute
political power (such as that claimed by their own kings), and
also an illustration of a point dear to them: that the ultimate
◆ arbiter of language was not the state, but actual usage.
France’s kings did not entirely accept this point. They tried to
regulate and codify usage, notably through the creation of the
Académie Française in 1640. But neither did they ever dare to
follow Tiberius’ example.
The modern French civil service, on the other hand, has in
recent years displayed not merely a Louisquatorzien, but a
positively Tiberian arrogance when it comes to matters lin-
guistic. They incessantly legislate, regulate, reform and purge,
and woe to the French businessman who has the temerity to
advertise “un computer muni du dernier software e-mail” (a
computer loaded with the most recent e-mail software). Sacré
bleu! Unless he immediately does away with the offending
English words and puts up a new sign advertising “un ordina-
teur muni du dernier logiciel pour la messagerie électronique,”
he will face ruinous fines.
In the past few months, the French language police have
attempted to banish such words as le start-up, which they
insist, ludicrously, must be replaced with la jeune pousse (lit-
erally, the young plant). What the French fear of course is
franglais, the incursion of English words into the language,
such as le weekend, which the French now enjoy for two days
every week, at la fin de semaine. The language bureaucrats
have managed to rack up a few successes: notably ordinateur
(computer) and logiciel (software). But the invasion of Fran-
glais has barely slowed. The bureaucrats made a brave effort
to impose la télécopie, but le fax won out, along with the verb
faxer. La messagerie électronique looks no more likely to beat
out le mail. And the changes go well beyond technological
neologisms. Whereas twenty years ago le trafic referred only
to trafficking, now it means what it means in Los Angeles.
Franglais, it could be said, takes advantage of every possible
opportunité (yet another coinage). In matters linguistic, the
French now follow le leader. And the Internet has only accel-
erated things. As un webmaster might well declare, “Vive le
hit-parade des sites cools du web!”
It is indeed unfortunate that the French language is relent-
lessly losing ground around the world. Fewer and fewer for-
eigners learn it as a second language, and it has almost entirely
lost its status as the international language of diplomacy and
fine art. But it is hard to see how passing laws against le start-up
is going to change matters. By far the most effective means of
stirring new interest in the French language would be for
French novelists and poets to begin producing literary works
that stir even five percent of the excitement that their great nine-
teenth-century predecessors did. But even French bureaucrats
cannot legislate literary excellence, much as they might like to.◆
—David A. Bell
 Language
Parlez-vous Val?
W hen was the last time you heard a good European
conversation in Sami? How about Tundra Nenets,
Istriot, Friulian, or Walloon? If you have done so
recently, count yourself fortunate. For these and dozens of
other minority languages across Europe are in peril of extinc-
tion—a problem by no means confined to the continent. In a
recent article in the British journal Prospect (“The Death of
Language,” November1999), the linguist David Crystal esti-
mates that of the world’s approximately 6,000 living lan-
guages, roughly half will be extinct by the end of the twenty-
first century—an average of a language death (defined as the
death of the last living speaker )
every fifteen days.
Such numbers are disturbing.
Yet it is also true that the extinc-
tion of language is as much a fact
of history as the extinction of
species. Norn, Gothic, Dalma-
tian, Cornish, and Manx—all
European languages that have
perished in recent memory—are
simply newer additions to what
is in fact a very old fossil record.
Is this just part of a “natural”
evolutionary process?
Perhaps. But as Crystal and
others are quick to point out, the
great predator that threatens lin-
guistic diversity today is man
himself. Beginning with the first
wave of European colonization
in the sixteenth century, and continuing, in more benign
form, perhaps with contemporary globalization, men and
women have wagged their tongues with tremendous force,
resulting in a steady reduction in the number of living lan-
guages, and posing ever greater challenges to linguistic sur-
vival. The question is, can anything—should anything—be
done to stop this process?
Crystal would answer a sober, if resolute, yes to both ques-
tions. He is certainly not alone. Many Europeans, in fact, share
his view that linguistic diversity, like bio-diversity, is inher-
ently good for the social environment. For some time they have
been taking steps to ensure it.
One such measure is the European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages, drafted by the forty-member Council of
Europe in the early 1980s, but which went into effect only on
March 1, 1998. Aimed at protecting linguistic diversity, the
charter decrees the “inalienable right” to “use a regional or
minority language in private and public life,” defining regional
and minority languages broadly as those “traditionally used
within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State
who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the
State’s population.” Thus lumping together a language such as
Catalan (spoken by over seven million people) with a language
such as Val (used by only a few hundred), the charter, in turn,
takes steps to promote the use of these languages in education,
the media, administrative, and judicial settings.
Fine in theory, but putting the directive into practice has
proved another matter. To date, only eight countries (Finland,
Liechtenstein, Norway, Hungary, the Netherlands, Croatia,
Switzerland and Germany) have ratified the treaty, and others
have signed it (France, Austria, Denmark, Spain, and Lux-
embourg), yet the experience of France suggests that moving
from concept to custom will not be easy. When the
Constitutional Council decreed this summer that acceptance
would require changes in
France’s constitution, President
Chirac and others balked, reject-
ing the charter as a threat to
France, and touching off a bitter
debate about the alleged dangers
it posed to French hegemony
and the sanctity of the mother
tongue. To this day, the charter
remains unratified in France.
Elsewhere, in Sweden and
Spain, for example, independent
efforts to protect minority lan-
guages have proved controver-
sial. More than a few Swedes
wonder whether passage of a law
protecting meän kieli, a Finnish
language spoken by a mere
30,000 people in the North of the
country, should confer the right
to use the tongue on the floor of parliament, or merit obliga-
tory instruction in public schools. In Spain, too, legislation
mandating that silbo gomero should be taught in some of the
Canary Islands has summoned shrill response; of African ori-
gin, this pre-Hispanic “language” consists entirely of whistles.
Yet for all this skeptical pursing of lips, real gains have
been made. Proponents point to the resuscitation of Welsh,
Irish Gaelic, and Catalan as model cases, and they argue that
with some 50 million speakers of various minority languages
in the EU alone, the numbers justify protective measures.
Italy, for its part, has just underscored this logic, passing leg-
islation which allocates over 20 billion lire to protect the
country’s eleven minority languages. Linguistic defenders
hope others will follow suit. As Crystal observes, if, at the
very least, measures are taken to ensure that native speakers
live to tell their stories, then future generations will have the
option to decide whether they, too, would like to speak
them, or forever hold their peace. ◆
— Darrin McMahon
Sources: Courrier International, No. 486 (February 24 - March 1,
2000).
The European Charter is online at http://www.coe.fr/eng/
legaltxt/148e.htm
29
 Language
Yinglish
Y inglish—the use of Yiddish words when no
other can do—is an argot developed by New
York intellectuals but stolen by Hollywood
insiders as a status badge in the competitive game of
one-upmanship.
Yiddish is a fruity language, like Elizabethan English,
in which there are few distinctions between high and
low, and thus one can be caustic without being coarse,
as would be the case in polite language. S. J. Perelman,
the noted humorist, was once asked in an interview in
The Paris Review why he used so many Yiddish expres-
sions in his writing, and Perelman replied, “In what
other language do you have sixteen different ways to
smack a man in the face?” The most notable Yiddish
writer was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel
Prize, and one of whose early stories, “Gimpel the Fool,”
was translated into English by Saul Bellow, also a Nobel
laureate, in Partisan Review. Yiddish is onomatopoeic,
which like the bouquet of a good wine, provides a breath
far beyond the literal meaning of a word. Yinglish is
always ironic, and sentences are often uttered in a rising
inflection. Here are a few instances of Yinglish and their
meaning (informed readers can provide their own words
and add to the list):
chutzpah—unmitigated gall, e.g. the man who shoots
both parents and then pleads for clemency on the ground
that he is an orphan
schlemiel—the man who always butters the wrong side
of the bread
schnorrer—an impudent scrounger
schmattes—the rag trade, i.e. fashion
maven—the man who knows it all, and tells you
macher—the big shot, with a pop gun
nebbish—Woody Allen, in person
tchochtkes—trinkets, baubles, and bibelots
yenta—a female gossip, without taste
kvetch—to groan endlessly in a minor key
kvell—to express joy in a major key
nudnick—the man who clutches your lapel and bores
you to death with his talk
Phudnick—a nudnick with a PhD.
Many years ago, Malcolm Muggeridge remarked that
when the London Times dropped the quotation marks
around the word “General” for Evangeline Booth of the
Salvation Army, she had become legitimate. By the same
token, when Yinglish words now appear without italics
in The New York Times, they have passed into the style
book of the language.
—Daniel Bell
30
Who Speaks Romanche?
S witzerland is multilingual, but the Swiss are not. Playing
on the double meaning of entendre, a (rare) Swiss witticism
has it that the Swiss get along because they do not under-
stand one another. The persistence of that truth resonates
throughout a new annual, Feuxcroisés, that seeks to build bridges
among the Swiss even as it laments the hopelessness of the task.
The paralyzing effect of the Swiss “Sonderfall” (special case)
haunts the contributors. “I don’t think a Swiss literature exists
but I hope that there is a Swiss literary consciousness,” writes
Hugo Loetcher wistfully. The Swiss literary capitals are Paris,
Milan, and sundry spots in Germany. Swiss-German writers
must make a detour abroad before being discovered in the
Romandie (French Switzerland). And how do French- or
Italian-speaking Swiss authors ever find their way to Zurich?
No wonder that translators are the heroes of Feuxcroisés
[Crossfires]. They are the passeurs—a term evoking Alpine
smugglers of goods or men—who bring literary works across
the barriers of language. The noblest of these language smug-
glers are those who translate from Romanche, the ancient
latinized language of the most remote mountain valleys. This is
where the search for Swiss authenticity leads. Beyond the cloy-
ing legend of the Helvetic pastoral paradise lies the myth of the
only authentic Swiss tongue. Feuxcroisés celebrates a love affair
with Romanche: a reverential rendering of the Romanche poet,
Luisa Famos, who died twenty-five years ago; the epiphanic dis-
covery of Romanche by Gabriel Mützenberg who has given his
life to its study and avows that he does not really speak it.
Since there are five Romanche variants, each with its own
“genius,” the contributors agree that government-sponsored
attempts at inventing a single Romanche koiné (the common
literary language of the ancient Greeks)—if only to be able to
put together a Romanche dictionary—are ill-inspired and will
end up killing Romanche instead of preserving it.
The fear pervading this collection is that not only the
Romanche tongue(s) but Swiss multilingualism is mortally
threatened. This French-language volume sees two enemies:
English and Swiss-German dialects. A recent Zurich school pol-
icy introducing English before (and, eventually, instead of) a
“national language,” i.e., German or Italian, has provoked
Cassandra-like cries throughout the country. This surrender to
globalization—inevitably dubbed “macdonaldisation”—
parallels an opposite but equally powerful trend among Swiss-
Germans: to forsake standard German in favor of micro-dialects,
equally impermeable to their German neighbors and to their
French- or Italian-speaking compatriots.
Those used to seeing the Swiss as a smug people will be sur-
prised to discover the anguish that runs throughout this vol-
ume. This too may be part of the Swiss identity. The most
famous French-language Swiss writer, C. F. Ramuz, wrote over
sixty years ago that soon the Swiss would have only the uni-
form of their postmen in common. Apparently, the Swiss are
still worrying about this, even as they hope that the postman
will be as reliable as he has always been. ◆
—André Liebich
Source: Feuxcroisés, Lausanne: Service de Presse Suisse, 1999.
 Language
The Internet—One Tongue or Many?
T he Internet was basically an American development, and it naturally spread most rapidly
among the other countries of the English-speaking world. Right now, for example, there are
roughly as many Internet users in Australia as in either France or Italy, and the English-speak-
ing world as a whole accounts for over 80 percent of top-level Internet hosts and generates close to 80
percent of Internet traffic. It isn’t surprising, then, that the Web is dominated by English. Two years
ago my colleague Hinrich Schütze and I used an automatic lan-
guage identification procedure to survey about 2.5 million
Web pages and found that about 85 percent of the text was in
English. The overall proportion of English may have dimin-
ished since then—a 1999 survey of several hundred million
pages done at ExciteHome showed English with 72 percent,
followed by Japanese with 7 percent and German with 5 per-
cent, and then by French, Chinese, and Spanish, all with
between 1 and 2 percent.
To a lot of observers, all of this suggests that the Internet is
just one more route along which English will march on an
ineluctable course of world conquest. It is not surprising then
that speakers of other languages view the prospect of an
English-dominated Web with alarm. The director of a Russian
Internet service provider recently described the Web as “the
ultimate act of intellectual colonialism.” And French President
Jacques Chirac was even more apocalyptic, describing the
prevalence of English on the Internet as a “major risk for
humanity,” which threatens to impose linguistic and cultural
uniformity on the world—a perception that led the French
government to mandate that all Web sites in France must pro-
vide their content in French.
On the face of things, the concern is understandable. It isn’t
just that English is statistically predominant on the Web.
There is also the heightened impression of English dominance
that is created by the ubiquitous accessibility of Web docu-
ments. If you do an AltaVista search on “Roland Barthes,” for
example, you’ll find about nine times as many documents in
English as in French. That may or may not be wildly dispro-
portionate to the rate of print publication about Barthes, but
it is bound to be disconcerting to a Parisian who is used to
browsing the reassuringly Francophone shelves of bookstores
and libraries.
Sometimes English is an obvious practical choice, for exam-
ple in nations such as Egypt, Latvia, and Turkey, where few
speakers of the local language are online and the Internet is still
thought of chiefly as a tool for international communication.
But the tendency to use English does not disappear even when
a lot of speakers of the local language have Internet access. Since
the Web turns every document into a potentially “interna-
tional” publication, there is often an incentive for publishing
Web sites in English that would not exist with print documents
that don’t ordinarily circulate outside national borders.
Still, it is a mistake to assume that any gains English makes
on the Internet will have to come at the expense of other lan-
guages. The Internet is not like print or other media, where
languages are in competition for finite communicative re-
sources. A French movie theatre has to choose between show-
ing Steven Spielberg or Eric Rohmer, and a print medical jour-
nal cannot print multilingual versions without substantially
increasing its costs. But on the Internet, the diffusion of infor-
mation is not a zero-sum game. The economics of distribution
make multilingual publication on the Web much more feasi-
ble than it is in print, which is why a large number of com-
mercial and govern-
ment sites in Europe
and Asia (and even, Choice of language is
increasingly, in the
United States) are chiefly dependent on
making their content
available in two or the purpose of com-
more languages.
Then, too, there are munication rather
strong forces militat-
ing for the use of local than on economics or
languages on the Web.
An increasing propor- geography
tion of new users who
are coming online in
places such as France or Italy are individuals and small busi-
nesses who are chiefly interested in using the Net for local com-
munication, unlike the large firms or public institutions who
have made up the first wave of adopters. An airline company or
research center in Germany may have an incentive to post its
Web pages in English, but a singles club or apartment rental
agency does not. And as more people in a language community
come online, content and service providers have a strong inter-
est in accommodating them in their own language. Yahoo! has
put up localized versions in French, Spanish, German, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese,
and in all of these markets it is facing competition from other
portals, both American and local. By limiting search engines
and portals to resources in their own language, users can choose
to ignore the sea of English content on the Web—and they are
not likely to miss it much.
This is not to say that the Internet will not have important
linguistic effects. Ultimately it could be comparable to the
importance of print, which first created standardized national
languages and then helped to create a sense of national com-
munity around them. The mistake is to assume that the effects
will be measurable in raw percentages of global language use.
The “how many speakers?” games that language chauvinists
31
 Language
like to play have always been one of the sillier manifestations
of cultural rivalries—like Olympic gold medal counts, only a
lot more inexact. What matters is not simply how widely a
language is used, but why and when people use it and how it
figures into their sense of social identity.
This is where the distinctive properties of the Net come into
play. Notably, electronic communication does not require large
capital concentrations to produce and distribute content, so
it needn’t entail the centralization that print and broadcast
do. And also unlike print, the cost of diffusion of electronic
documents does not increase proportionately with the dis-
tance or dispersion of the audience. And it is far more effi-
cient than print or broadcast in reaching small or geographi-
cally dispersed audiences, whether we are thinking of the
markets for scholarly books or medieval music or of the
Welsh-speaking community.
One important consequence of all this is to make the choice
of language chiefly dependent on the purpose of communica-
tion rather than on economics or geography. Take the diffu-
sion of news. In the worlds of print and broadcast, it is only
the English-language media—more specifically, the American
media—that have been able to achieve anything like genuine
worldwide news distribution. You can sometimes find a
French television news program on cable in big cities in the
United States or a three-day-old copy of Le Figaro at an inter-
national news dealer, but they aren’t available in every hotel
room and at every street corner the way CNN and the
International Herald Tribune are in France.
With the Web, this all changes. French speakers in non-
Francophone regions have access to the online versions of
twenty or thirty French-language newspapers and to as many
direct radio transmissions, and Web transmission of TV pro-
gramming will become routine as bandwidth increases. The
speakers of less widely used languages are nearly as well
served—Yahoo! lists electronic versions of newspapers from
Malaysia, Indonesia, Colombia, Turkey, Qatar, and about sev-
enty or eighty other nations.
No less important, the Net creates new forums for informal
exchanges among the members of geographically dispersed
communities. At present there are discussion groups in more
than a hundred languages, including not just major national
languages but Basque, Breton, Cambodian, Catalan, Gaelic,
Hmong, Macedonian, Navaho, Swahili, Welsh, and Yoruba,
among others.
These efficiencies of distribution work to the advantage of
dispersed language communities—whether linguistic diaspo-
ras like the Indonesians, Russians, or Greeks living abroad or
postcolonial populations that have up to now existed in the lin-
guistic penumbra of the metropolis. People in the Francophone
Caribbean or the Maghreb, for example, can have much quicker
and more extensive access to French-language content pro-
duced in other regions than with print or broadcast.
All of this presupposes, of course, that sufficient numbers
of people in the community will have Internet access, which
will be a long time coming in many parts of the world. Right
now, for example, China and India each have around two mil-
lion Internet users, and there are between three and four mil-
32
lion in Hispanophone Latin America. And while the Net is
growing rapidly in most of these nations, severe barriers must
be overcome. There are only ten telephones per hundred peo-
ple in Latin America, for example, and only two per hundred
in India, and while there are ambitious plans for extending
the Internet via wireless communication, these face daunting
technical and economic difficulties.
Yet the Internet may have important linguistic effects even
on communities by altering the kind of language that matters
in public life. Since the eighteenth century, most developed
societies have recognized a distinction between two varieties
of language. The first is the informal, rapidly changing variety
that you learn in the normal course of socialization, which is
adapted to private communication between individuals with a
lot of background in common. The second is a conservative
and relatively formal variety used in published writing and
broadcasting—a variety that requires explicit instruction and
that is designed to communicate to an anonymous audience
who can’t be presumed to know much about the writer’s cir-
cumstances or background. This variety may be loosely based
on middle-class speech, but it aims at being a neutral and uni-
versal medium, and tends to be less susceptible to regional and
national variation (The Economist is a lot easier for Americans
to follow than a conversation in a London pub). Traditionally,
this is the form of language that we look to dictionaries to
record and that attracts most of our critical concerns about the
state of the language and its consequences for public life.
But the Internet blurs this distinction, even as it blurs the dis-
tinction between “public” and “private” communication. The
language of the innumerable discussion groups and bulletin
boards of the Net has much of the tone of private communica-
tion—it’s informal, elliptical, and allusive. But it is conversation
filtered by a battery of conventions adapted to its new function.
There is a troubling paradox in all this. The forums of the
Internet undoubtedly create the opportunity for a wider and
more participatory public discourse than has ever before been
possible. True, we may want to be a little skeptical of the
visionaries’ picture of these interactive forums as the nuclei
of a new “electronic commons” that will wind up displacing
traditional political institutions with a direct democracy—it
is in their nature to be too chaotic, too fragmented, and too
unreliable to bear all the burden. But they have already
become important secondary media for transacting political
life, both as places where the news is critically interpreted and
as sources of information (sometimes correct) that the press
has not adequately reported.
Yet even as they open up the discourse, these forums can also
restrict and circumscribe participation in it, as the neutral lan-
guage of the traditional op-ed page yields to something that has
more of the tone of conversation in a Palo Alto coffee bar. This
may ultimately be the most important linguistic issue raised by
the technology. What does it matter how widely English or any
other language is used on the Internet if the language used there
has become less of a common medium for its speakers? ◆
—Geoffrey Nunberg
Source: Abridged from “Will the Internet Always speak English?”
The American Prospect, March 27-April 10, 2000.
 Language
Japonica: How to Read the Japanese Language
If You Know the English Source Code
F rom the Asuka period (552-645) through the late Heian
(end of the twelfth century), the Chinese language com-
pletely penetrated Japanese. Writing at the end of the
nineteenth century, Basil Hall Chamberlain, the pioneer for-
eign scholar of the Japanese language, was able to say that
written Japanese prose had scarcely anything Japanese about
it save for a few particles, auxiliaries, and such elements as are
necessary to provide the structure of the Japanese sentence.
Most of the vocabulary was Chinese.
This generalization can probably be
extended to the spoken language: about
60 percent of the vocabulary was Chinese
or of Chinese origin. (Nowadays, it is
perhaps 40 percent.)
The same thing, I would suggest, is
happening today with English. English
is in the process of being completely
absorbed, and its entire vocabulary is
becoming available for use in Japanese.
Today, when new words are made up,
they will come from English (or, to a
lesser extent, from some European lan-
guage), no longer from Chinese. (But
they are just as hard for English speak-
ers to understand as, I suspect, Sino-
Japanese was for Chinese speakers.)
It is hard to imagine modern Japan
without English. Right now, I am sitting
at my desuku [desk], or tēburu [table] with the rampu [lamp]on,
holding my kompyuta [computer], taipingu [typing], making
occasional notes with a boru-pen [ball-pen]. Since it is warm
today, in spite of the ea-kon (abbreviation of “air-condi-
tioner”), I am sitting in a “T-shirt.” This term, by the way, pre-
sents a special problem: most younger Japanese are indeed
able to pronounce the tee sound, but since there is no symbol
for it in Japanese script, it has to be written as teshatsu. The
usual solution, in newspapers or magazines, is to transcribe it
as T-shatsu. In this kind of warm weather, I hate to wear a
nekutai, [necktie.] I sip some kohi [coffee] from a gurasu [glass].
When I need a break, I move to the sofua [sofa], lean against
the kusshon [cushion], and read the nyusu [news] about the lat-
est sekuhara [sexual harassment] incident. I then turn to the
puroguramu [program] on the karar-terebi [color television]
and watch a homudorama [home-drama].
There is no “l” sound in Japanese so that all foreign words
with “l” are pronounced with an “r.” “Flight” becomes fright,
or more exactly, furaito. A further pronunciation problem is
that Japanese syllables all end in vowel sounds, except when
there is an “n.” “Book” becomes bukku, “size” becomes saizu,
“pencil” becomes penshiru. When the syllabic ending is “n,”
“pen” remains pen, “downtown” is dauntaun, a “can of beer”
becomes kan-biru.
Today, because of the enormous increase in the velocity of
communications and the diffusion of literacy, the assimilation
of foreign languages requires mere decades, or even years,
rather than centuries. There are several fairly distinguishable
stages in this process. In the first, foreign words are taken in
whole and used passively. Substantive nouns, technical terms,
and words without Japanese counterparts will be most promi-
nent. Verbs are created by taking the English verb + suru [to
do] in Japanese (which is exactly the way
verbs were created from Chinese). A
trendy recent example is gettosuru, (get
+ suru), [to find a boyfriend].
But once these words are domesti-
cated, they immediately open up a new
stage in which they take on a life of their
own. They are used in ways that may not
be instantly understandable to the
speakers of the original language.
“Mansion,” for example, (pronounced
manshon in Japanese), which usually
suggests to modern Western minds a
large, residential estate, like that of the
titled aristocracy or the wealthy, is com-
monly used in Japan to mean a pricey
apartment. The phrase, “He has sense”
(sensu), refers to “taste,” or “judgment,”
rather than, say, “common sense.”
The next step is essential for Japanese:
abbreviation. European words are often multi-syllabic, and
allowing for Japanese pronunciation patterns, they are usu-
ally even longer. “Strike,” for example, is a single syllable in
English, but five in Japanese: su-to-ra-i-ki. As a result, there
are now thousands of abbreviated English words used by
Japanese that, without explanation, usually cannot be under-
stood by English speakers. A few examples: “register”
becomes reji, “negative,” nega, “handicap,” hande, “repor-
tage,” rupo, “permanent wave,” pama.
Hundreds, or even thousands, of foreign compounds are
taken over with virtually no change (except pronunciation):
“golf-bag” [gorufu-baggu], “software” [sofutouea], “room-
cooler” [rumukuru], “after-care” [afuta-kea], “mass-media”
[masumejia], and so on.
Many, however, even though close to the original meaning,
are abbreviated, and once this happens they begin to look a
little different and usually cannot be understood by English
speakers. A classic example—by now, hardly used—is the
post-World War I moga (from modan garu, “modern girl”). Or
zenesuto—from abbreviated “general” (zeneraru) and “strike”
(suto)—is another revealing example. No native speaker of
English would recognize that it comes from his own language.
(Compounds created in the same manner as the English “info-
tainment”—making allowance for pronunciation characteris-
33
 Language
tics—are instantly understandable.)
At the next stage, foreign words in full or abbreviated form
are combined with Japanese words (including completely
assimilated Chinese words as well) to make new compounds.
An archetypal example is the by now rather old tonkatsu,
[pork cutlet] made up of the Chinese ton, “pork,” and katsu,
the abbreviation of “cutlet” (that is, katsu-retsu).
Just as Japanese used to create new words out of Chinese
freely and autonomously, so now it is beginning to create a
home-made English. When I gave up smoking at my doctor’s
orders, this was a dokutu-sutoppu [doctor-stop], an example of
what I would consider brilliant new English. One of my
favorites (which happens not to be English) is aru-saro. If we
spell it out fully, it is “arbeit-salon,” that is, the German
“arbeit” plus the French “salon,” both abbreviated for conve-
nience in handling and pronounced Japanese-style. In this
form, no foreigner would recognize the phrase. If we
explained its composition and then asked him to guess its
meaning, he would likely say that it means a work place, per-
haps a working studio. In fact, it means a nightclub where the
hostesses work part-time. The word “arbeit” in Japan is used
only for part-time, or for side work.
Other examples abound—phrases that are invented by
Japanese from English but are incomprehensible (without full
explication) by English speakers. I like bea, from besu-appu
“base-up,” that is, a rise in the base wage from which other
calculations for the total wage are made. The standard
Kadokawa Loanword Dictionary carries 25,000 words in daily
use. If one were to include all the specialized technical vocab-
ularies of science, the social sciences, economics, fashion,
sports, clothing, business transactions, and diplomacy, there
is no telling how many words we would find.
The penultimate stage comes when people are no longer
aware that the word is not native. Pan [bread] is from six-
teenth or seventeenth century Portuguese. But it is so deeply
rooted in Japanese that we now find the baffling compound
bureddo-pan [bread-pan].
In the final stage, the foreign word is completely assimilated
to the grammatical form of Japanese. Normally, foreign words
(including Chinese) are formed into verbs by adding suru [to
do], into adjectives by adding na, and into adverbs by adding
ni. Surprisingly, although very few Chinese words have been
completely absorbed and given Japanese verb form, English
has many cases. A good example is the old standby saboru.
Originally, it came from the abbreviated “sabotage”, sabo, but
it has become completely Japanified by adding the Japanese
verb form ru and then taken on a somewhat divergent mean-
ing: to play truant, to evade doing something one does not
want to do, not to do one’s part. An English speaker would
not recognize the word.
More recent examples of this creative innovation are proba-
bly completely incomprehensible to English speakers: makuru
[to eat at McDonald’s], saburu [to eat while riding a subway
car—from sabuue “subway”], sekuru [to harass sexually—
condensing the previously mentioned sekuhara, then turning
it into a verb], bakappuru [baka + “couple” = “foolish cou-
pling” or “a couple that behaves amorously in public”]. A
34
high point in this linguistic innovation may be seen in words
such as the old-fashioned ero-guro [abbreviated “erotic +
grotesque”] and the new-fashioned gurokawa [abbreviated
“grotesque” + kawaii, “cute”].
All languages take in foreign loanwords. In Japan, Chinese
was the first major penetration, and because it brought a writ-
ing system along with new ideas, concepts, technology, and
methods, its impact was overwhelming. Fourteen hundred
years later, something similar seems to be happening with
English. In the centuries in between, Korean, Dutch, and Por-
tuguese made significant, though lesser, contributions as well.
English itself developed in a similar way. Shaped from
Germanic, then invaded by Norman French, its intellectual,
legal, scientific, and religious vocabularies were also deeply
influenced by Latin. For many centuries, Latin was the lingua
franca of educated England and Europe. Today, English con-
tinues to take in new language from Anglo-Indian, Caribbean,
South-African, Irish, Scottish, Australian, Yiddish, and count-
less others. Words are abbreviated and new compounds are
constantly being formed.
Japanese, therefore, is not unique in this process. However,
we may come to rate the relative penetrability of languages—
and it is debatable, say, whether English, Japanese, Turkish,
or Uzbek is more “open” to foreign linguistic influence. The
process of English-absorption that is going on before our eyes
in Japan today is awesomely inventive. ◆
—Herbert Passin
Note: I would like to express my gratitude to writer and poet
Hiroaki Sato for his many helpful comments on linguistic matters.
The Death of a Language
A language dies only when the last person who
speaks it dies. One day it is there; the next it is
gone. In late 1995, a linguist, Bruce Connell, was doing
field work in the Mambila region of Cameroon. He found
a language called Kasabe, which no Westerner had stud-
ied before. It had just one speaker left, a man called
Bogon. Connell had no time on that visit to find out
much about the language, so he decided to return to
Cameroon a year later. He arrived in mid-November,
only to learn that Bogon had died on 5th November, tak-
ing Kasabe with him.
A survey published in February 1999 by the Summer
Institute of Linguistics established that there were fifty-
one languages with only one speaker left—twenty-eight
of them in Australia alone. There are almost 500 lan-
guages in the world with fewer than 100 speakers; 1,500
with fewer than 1,000 speakers; more than 3,000 with
fewer than 10,000 speakers; and a staggering 5,000 lan-
guages with fewer than 100,000 speakers. In fact, 96 per-
cent of the world’s languages are spoken by only four
percent of its people. No wonder so many are in danger.
Source: David Crystal, The Guardian (London), Oct. 25, 1999
 World Literature
African Literature: Old Voices and New
I grew up with modern African literature…or, at least, so I
am inclined to say. For the central core of modern African
literature, outside the Arab world, is in what were once
the colonial languages. You will find audiences for writing in
many languages that were born in Africa: Swahili, Yoruba,
Wolof, and Twi. These languages, however, are tied to partic-
ular territories, to parts (sometimes large parts) of the conti-
nent, whereas the literature that the continent shares, the lit-
erature with audiences all over the continent and into the
diaspora, was written largely in English and French. Yes, mod-
ern Arabic literature and some works in other African lan-
guages are known a little in the rest of Africa through transla-
tion; and a little Lusophone (Portuguese) African literature
has found its way around as well. But if African literature is
African in the way in which Thomas Mann is European and
Kingsley Amis is merely English, then it is in large measure
Anglophone and Francophone.
Modern African literature in French began, strictly speak-
ing, in the thirties with the extraordinary poetic vision of
Léopold Senghor. His is undoubtedly the first substantial cor-
pus of African literary work in that language. But I can feel
that I grew up with him because his Poèmes arrived in our
house when I was a teenager, and I fell upon them—some
already more than twice my age—with enormous enthusiasm
and pleasure. (They came—in the fifth edition of 1971, “exem-
plaire N˚ 10718,” seven years after this collection first appeared
in Paris—as a gift from the poet; and so, when I translated a
few of them, my proud mother sent these translations to him
and he received them courteously.) And, in fact, the major col-
lections anthologized are all post-Second World War: Chants
D’Ombre, the earliest of them, was published in 1945. In “Tout
le long du jour,” Senghor wrote as a poet “cherchant l’oubli de
l’Europe au coeur pastorale du Sine” [seeking to forget Europe
at the pastoral heart of the Sine] where he was born. The strug-
gle to forget Europe while writing in European languages has
remained an element of Africa’s literary condition.
In English, the first great corpus of writing is in the novel:
it is Chinua Achebe’s brilliant trilogy, Things Fall Apart,
Arrow of God, No Longer At Ease. These elegant and incisive
fictions were published in the late fifties and early sixties,
around the time of the great wave of African independences
(and, more importantly, for these egocentric purposes, after I
was born). And the drama of Wole Soyinka, which catapulted
Black African literature onto the Nobel stage in the mid-eight-
ies, began first to appear a little after Achebe’s novels, with A
Dance of the Forests, his first major work, presented in 1960
in his own production with Masks, his own theatre company.
I met first Soyinka when I was an undergraduate at
Cambridge, England, and then Achebe when I was a graduate
student in the same place: I was astonished, because I had
grown up with their words, to find myself in their physical
presence. It did not seem quite right that these novels and
plays could have been produced by actual people, men who
awed me, I will admit, with the charisma of authorship. (The
best-known Francophone African novel, best-known because
it is widely read in English translation, is probably Camara
Laye’s L’Enfant Noir [The Dark Child].)
But these are the African authors that everyone now knows:
along with Mahfouz from Egypt, Gordimer from South Africa,
and, perhaps, Nurrudin Farah from Somalia, to whom I will
return. These are the writers that educated cosmopolitans—in
Africa, in Europe, in the Americas, in Japan—would be likely
to find themselves embarrassed at not knowing. (Despite the
mention of Mahfouz, I will now beg forgiveness for continu-
ing the custom of treating the Arabic-language writers of
North Africa as a different case: by and large, their literary
frame and influences are those of the Arab world, not just of
the Maghreb but also of the non-African Middle East. Of writ-
ers of fiction in Arabic, only Tayeb Salih, who experimented
with a demotic Arab from his natal Sudan, and was early and
ably translated into English, is well known in the rest of the
continent, perhaps because he wrote both of a village life that
seemed somehow familiar to Africans further south, and be-
cause he dealt with Senghor’s problem: forgetting Europe.
Still, these are just excuses: on another occasion, I could rail
against the absurdity of leaving out so much of the continent.)
So what has happened since Senghor and Laye, Achebe and
Soyinka, the first generation, the generation of independence?
Well, first, Achebe and Soyinka, who were born in the early
thirties, are, of course, still writing. But it is important also to
observe where they are writing: for both of these Nigerian
writers moved their base of operations out of their countries
and, then, their continents. Achebe is now a professor at Bard
College (New York State); Soyinka at Emory University
(Atlanta, Georgia). For a period, under the military dictator-
ships that have dominated Nigeria’s life as a post-colonial
nation, Soyinka has been in exile, at risk, if he returned, of
his life. Nigeria’s universities, like Nsukka, in Eastern Nigeria,
where Achebe taught for a while, have been in decline for
much of the last two decades: they have not been (to put it
gently) the best places to teach or learn or write. And since
the university was one of the few places in Africa where seri-
ous writers could work and earn a living, the dispersal of some
of the best-known figures of the African intelligentsia epito-
mizes a wider condition. Of the Anglophone writers one
would be bound to mention as having come to prominence
after the generation of the founding fathers, many are in exile
of one kind or another.
Take Farah, who can represent what is finest among the writ-
ers who came to prominence in the 1970s. He was born in
Baidoa, Somalia, in 1945, but his family moved when he was
one, to what was then the British-administered Ogaden. When
the British left the Ogaden, they left its many Somali inhabi-
tants to the Ethiopians, creating a region of conflict that was to
smolder always and burst, from time to time, into the flames of
Somali-Ethiopian warfare over the next four decades. In 1963,
his family moved to Mogadiscio during one of these wars, one
family among a million refugees over the years driven by these
35
 World Literature
conflicts from the Ogaden. He went to university in Chandigarh
in India (choosing it over an offer from the University of
Wisconsin) and published a first novel From a Crooked Rib in
London in 1970, at the age of 25, becoming, with that work, the
first Somali novelist. (As he would be the first to insist, how-
ever, he is not Somalia’s first great literary figure: for he was
raised, like Achebe and Soyinka, within a tradition of oral lit-
erature, one that is among the richest in the world.)
Farah has lived in many parts of Africa—Gambia, Uganda,
now in South Africa — as well as in various parts of Europe
and in the Americas; but for twenty-two years, from 1974 to
1996, he was out of his homeland, kept away by the Somali dic-
tator Siad Barre. (When he planned to return home in the lat-
ter part of the seventies, he was
informed that Barre had not cared
for his 1976 novel, The Naked
Needle: given what Barre had done
to others whose doings he disap-
proved of, staying away was prob-
ably wise.) In his extraordinary
trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk (1979),
Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame
(1983) he indicts not only dictator-
ship—Siad Barre must surely have
wished that he had kept Farah
closer at hand—but also the
oppression of women, and the par-
ticular forms it takes in Somalia;
and at the same time the works cel-
ebrate the ways in which women
can structure both public and pri-
vate lives despite their oppression.
Or take Tsitsi Dangarembga,
author of one marvelous novel,
Nervous Conditions (1988), and a play, She No Longer Weeps
(1987), but also co-author and director of a film, Everyone’s
Child. Dangarembga grew up in Zimbabwe, in the seventies,
when it was still Rhodesia, and that novel propelled her out
of her homeland and into film school in Germany and a life
“outside.” Nervous Conditions is also a powerful exploration
of women’s lives. From its notorious first sentence—“I was
not sorry when my brother died”—it speaks of the differ-
ences in experience that gender makes, while never becom-
ing merely didactic. Tambu, the protagonist, growing up in
Zimbabwe (when it was still Rhodesia) struggles to integrate
the moral order of her village upbringing with a constantly
growing sense of the injustice of her position as a woman.
This developing awareness is driven not only by her own
experience but by the lives of the women around her: her
mother, fatalistic and self-giving; her uncle’s wife, Maiguru,
an educated woman, frustrated by her husband’s inability to
respect her opinions; her mother’s sister, Lucia, an adult
woman who follows her own way, negotiating between
Tambu’s father and her own lover, passing, in the final chap-
ter, her first-grade exams.
In the Francophone world in the eighties, Mariama Ba, who
was born in Senegal in the generation of the founders before
36
either Soyinka or Achebe, achieved voice and recognition
(though only in the last years of her life) with the brilliant
epistolary novel, Une si longue lettre (1979). Just as Dangarem-
bga’s Tambu is drawn between a village life and a life shaped
by a wider world connected to Europe—at one moment it is
her reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that defines her rebel-
lion!—so, in Mariama Ba’s novel, the protagonist has defined
an identity in Europe that makes her husband’s decision to
take a second wife in the “traditional” Moslem fashion hard
to bear, that is, even though she herself is a devout Moslem.
Senghor’s theme, “forgetting Europe,” lived on.
In the 1990s the great new Anglophone African voice, so it
seems to me, was Ben Okri (though he, too, is a Nigerian who
does not live in Nigeria). In The
Famished Road—five hundred
wonderful pages with only the
barest semblance of a plot—the
protagonist is Azaro, an abiku or
spirit-child, who, according to a
Yoruba tradition, is born and re-
born, only to die each time in
infancy, so that he can return to
the joyful play of the spirit world.
Sometimes, however, an abiku is
persuaded to stay on: Azaro de-
cides at some point to cease his
“coming and going.” He does not
settle on one story of why he
stayed. But he tells us: “I some-
times think it was a face that made
me want to stay. I wanted to make
happy the bruised face of the
woman who would become my
mother.”
The narrative yokes the familiar and the miraculous in the
language of synaesthesia (every odor has a color, every feeling
a smell); the effect is richer than some palates will care for. But
Okri has received rave reviews in Britain, where the novel won
the 1991 Booker Prize; and in the praises in the United States
that followed, many spoke of “magical realism,” explicitly con-
necting Okri with post-colonial Latin America, another place
that has lowered our barriers to “disorders” of language and
the imagination. And, ironically, because he has lived so much
in Europe, Okri does not share the earlier anxiety to forget her.
In the three decades since the sixties, the optimism of the
independence generation waned in literature as in reality. If
there is a new hope created by what South Africa’s Thabo
Mbeki has called the “African Renaissance”—symbolized by
the discovery of democracy in South Africa itself, its redis-
covery in Nigeria, the giant of West Africa, its return in
Uganda, which sank once so low under Idi Amin—it has not
yet taken form in the novel. If our great expectations have
been followed by hard times, however, that has not dimmed
the continent’s literary creativity: what it has done is to force
Africa to express herself in the somber tonalities of writers
such as Farah, Dangarembga, Ba, and Okri. ◆
—K. Anthony Appiah
 The Middle East
Christian Migration and Arab Citizenship
T he visit of Pope John Paul II to Egypt, Jordan, the
Palestinian Authority, and Israel, has focused world
attention on the fate and dwindling number of the
Christians in the Middle East. This question has already
engaged the concerns of a growing number of Arab intellec-
tuals—especially Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians, and Palesti-
nians—who regard Christian migration from the Middle East
as a cultural loss to their societies as well as a symptom of a
general crisis of the states they live in. Their views are worth
reporting outside Arab newspapers not only because they run
counter to what one might have expected to hear from Arab
intellectuals, but also because they voice a set of concerns so
different from the causes for concern about migration in other
parts of the world.
In the March issue of the Egyptian monthly book review
Wighat Nazar [Viewpoints], the noted journalist Muhammad
Hassanain Haikal, once the spokesman of pan-Arab Nasserism,
concluded a commentary on sectarian clashes—which led to
the death of twenty Christians and one Muslim in an Upper-
Egyptian village in early January 2000—by addressing the
question of Christian migration from the region. “What a great
loss it would be,” Haikal writes,” if the Christians of the Mashriq
(Middle East) were to feel, rightly or wrongly, that neither they
nor their children could have a future here.” He calls upon “the
entire Muslim community of the Arab nation” to be aware of,
and to nurture, the “multicultural components of its heritage.”
A few demographic figures may serve as background to this
and similar statements. According to Youssef Courbage and
Philippe Fargues (Christians and Jews under Islam, I.B. Tauris,
London and New York, 1997), the percentage of the Christian
communities in the Middle East (Egypt, and the territories of
present-day Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and
the Palestinian Authority) fell from about 18 percent to 4 per-
cent during the twentieth century. In 1995 about 6.7 million
Christians were still living in the Middle East.
While Ottoman rule during the nineteenth century had
been favorable to the demography of non-Muslim minorities
in the Middle East in general, the destiny of Christianity in
Turkey was sealed violently within a decade of the creation of
the secular republic following World War I. In the other
Middle Eastern countries the decline of Christianity vis-à-vis
Islam has resulted from a slow convergence of mortality rates
and divergence of fertility rates, accelerated by disproportion-
ately high migration. Over the last three decades an estimated
one million Copts have left Egypt for the U.S.A., Canada,
Australia, and Europe. About as many Christians have mi-
grated from Lebanon. Ten thousand Chaldeans and Assyrians
have fled hardship in Iraq since the Gulf War. In geographical
Palestine Christianity has shrunk to a mere 2 percent. The
number of Christians in Jerusalem has dwindled dramatically
from thirty thousand in 1948 to roughly two thousand today.
The ongoing migration of Christians from the cradle of
Christianity has become a major concern of Middle Eastern
churches since the late seventies.
The decrease of Christians in the Middle East was forth-
rightly pointed to by Ralph Ghadban, himself a migrant from
Lebanon to Germany, in a paper first presented at a Christian-
Muslim forum in Berlin, but later brought to the attention of
a larger Arab public with its publication in the influential cul-
tural weekly Mulhaq [Supplement] of the Lebanese newspaper
an-Nahar. With the provocative headline “Will the oriental
Christians die out?” Ghadban’s paper introduced an issue of
the supplement (January 10, 1998) entirely devoted to the
debate on Christian migration.
This debate was continued in subsequent issues of Mulhaq
an-Nahar. Prominent Arab intellectuals unanimously stressed
that the cultural, ethnic, and religious pluralism of the Arab
world constitutes its richness and strength, presenting the
exodus of the Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Coptic, Maro-
nite, Latin and Syrianic Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant
Christians from the Middle East as the symptom of a larger cri-
sis of the Arab national state, Arab thought, and Arab culture.
The Shiite religious figure Muhammad Hassan Al-Amin even
defined Arab societies as meeting points for countless confes-
sional, religious, ethnic, and ideological minorities. He and
other Muslim intellectuals like Ridwan as-Sayyid, the editor
of the prestigious Lebanese scholarly journal al-Ijtihad, writ-
ing from an Islamic religious perspective, have argued for a
reform of Islamic thought to provide the necessary ground for
pluralism. Elias Khoury, an eminent writer and the editor-in-
chief of the Mulhaq, described the forced migration of the
Arab Jews in the fifties as a defeat of Arab culture. Calling for
a renewal of the Arab idea in order to halt the Christian migra-
tion, he argued that Arabism, if reduced to a mere appendix
to Islam, would become meaningless.
Khoury, Ghadban, and many other contributors to the debate
maintain that the national states in the Middle East have failed
to provide a liberal and secular basis for citizenship. Following
the breakdown of the pre-World War I Ottoman Millet system
of semi-autonomous religious communities (which gave all mil-
lets or officially recognized religious communities their own
self-government within the general protection of the Muslim
State), the national movements in the Middle East by mid-cen-
tury had substituted the Islamic Caliphate with nation-states
based on military authoritarianism and nominal modernity. The
defeat of the short-lived Arab liberalism of the twenties and
thirties by military regimes, wrote Ridwan as-Sayyid, was a loss
for Arab Christians, since it blocked their emancipation as ordi-
nary citizens. And the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi wants
oriental Christians to accept their Arab identity and stay and
participate in the cultural and political life of their homelands.
However these contributors differ ideologically, they are united
in their disillusionment with “unity” as the guiding cultural
concept of the Middle East’s authoritarian nation-states. Thus
the debate on the westward migration of Christians from the
Middle East is essentially not a religious, but rather a political
debate on citizenship, democracy, and pluralism. ◆
—Georges Khalil
37
 The world Press: India
The Press in India: The Rise of the Vernacular Papers
T he press in India, historically quite independent and
varied, has been undergoing rapid transformation
through the country’s increasing literacy, growing
middle-class prosperity, economic liberalization, and shifts in
political mobilization. Between 1977 and 1992 newspaper cir-
culation for all Indian languages tripled from 9.3 million to
28.1 million, and the ratio of dailies per thousand doubled
from fifteen to thirty-two—a continuing trend for much of
the last decade, though reliable figures are not yet available.
With this growth in volume have come significant changes
in the nature of the press. While the prominent English
dailies, the Times of India, Indian Express, the Hindu, and the
Hindustan Times remain the chief national newspapers thanks
to their nationwide readership, their overall influence may be
diminishing. The expansion of the vernacular press is spec-
tacular: while as late as 1986, 60 percent of all print advertis-
ing expenditure went to English-language publications, by
1992 this was down to 46 percent and is still falling. Robin
Jeffrey’s authoritative survey of the vernacular press clearly
demonstrates that, whether as a cause or effect, this sector of
the Indian media has better reflected India’s political trends
over the last two decades and the considerable regional vari-
eties of its society. In Kerala, for instance, the press and its
leading exemplar, Malayam Maanorama, have long reflected
that region’s sober social consciousness. In Tamil Nadu the
press, exemplified by Tharasu, Nakkeran, and Thanthi, abun-
dantly displays the kitschy dominance of cinema on Tamil pol-
itics. The Telgu newspaper Eenadu was very much behind the
rise of one of India’s most powerful regional parties, the Telgu
Desam. In North India, the Hindi press was the best conduit
for Hindu nationalism throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. While
the three leading Hindi dailies, the Navbharat Times, Hindu-
stan, and Jansatta, are owned by proprietors of the largest
English-language dailies, many influential independent Hindi
dailies like Aj, Dainik Jagaran, Amar Ujala, Rashtriya Sahara,
and Rajasthan Patrika have openly embraced Hindu nation-
alism. With exceptions, these papers are considered very low-
grade; but they are better ideological barometers than the
English press.
The links between the national English press and regional
newspapers are multiple and varied. The regional conscious-
ness that the vernacular press has fostered has not clashed
with national identity at large. For one thing, most of these
newspapers depend on advertisements that come from com-
panies located elsewhere in India; hence they value access to
a wider Indian market. Second, they translate and reprint
many columns from the national press, and carry a number
of syndicated independent columnists. One leading Andhra
daily, Andhra Jyoti, boosted circulation just by translating
the script of the popular Hindi television serial The Mahab-
harata. The success of vernacular editions of India’s leading
English-language news magazine India Today proves that
regional consciousness and a desire to be part of wider Indian
identity can coexist.
38
Economic liberalization has also considerably altered the
character of the English-language press. Editorial opinion in
the four leading English-language dailies remains wide-rang-
ing, with a wider left-right spectrum than the Western edito-
rial pages. The Times of India, under Dileep Padgaonkar, prob-
ably has the most ideologically diverse op-ed fare, while the
Hindu, under N. Ram and Harish Khare, remains the most
intellectually serious. The Indian Express, always fiercely
independent, maintains its prominence, under Shekhar Gupta,
thanks to its broad distribution.
The quality of op-ed pages in Indian papers varies consid-
erably. Their columnists are not only journalists and a hand-
ful of academics, but increasingly, former members of the civil
service. The papers have no deep reservoirs of social-science
expertise to draw on; once-prominent government officials
such as Arjun Sengupta, K.P.S.Gill, and J.N.Dixit served as
experts in their fields. Some observers have also noted a
greater politicization of the press. Prominent Indian journal-
ists such as Swapan Dasgupta, Chadan Mitra, and Harish
Khare now seem more openly partisan. The appointment of
one of India’s best-known journalists, Arun Shourie, as a
senior minister in the present government exemplifies this
blurring of the line between politics and journalism.
Almost all the country’s major newspapers are now avail-
able on the Internet, giving them a wide readership among
the Indian diaspora that has become such an important force
within India. Heightened economic concern has raised the
standards of economic reporting in newspapers, and made
the daily Economic Times and Business Standard central pub-
lications in India. Only security matters still rouse marked
anti-Americanism. Like the media elsewhere, Indian newspa-
pers tend to rally around the flag on security issues and over-
whelmingly supported India’s nuclear tests. With the wisdom
of hindsight, some have softened their stance, but most
remain security hardliners, catering to the middle-class’s
reluctance to examine their attitudes on these issues. Mean-
while, C. Raja Mohan of the Hindu and Shekhar Gupta of
Indian Express are among the few really qualified journalists
in this field.
Strong and vibrant as the Indian press remains, it faces
major challenges. Television has spread, though its success
seems to affect weekly and monthly magazines rather than
daily newspapers. The latter have held their own, while a host
of English and vernacular magazines of reflective opinion have
folded. This may, paradoxically, make newspapers even more
important. Of course, restrictions on foreign ownership of the
Indian press have shielded Indian owners thus far from for-
eign competition; so if, as is likely to happen, more foreign
ownership of the Indian Press is allowed, the Indian press may
yet face its most formidable challenge. What impact the possi-
ble advent of Rupert Murdoch, or the recent acquisition of the
Economic Times by London’s Financial Times, could have on
the contentious Indian press remains to be seen. ◆
—Pratap Mehta
 Reports from Asia
In Japan Everyone Reads the Press
J apan can easily claim preeminence as a country for news-
papers, and its press strongly reflects the national char-
acter of the Japanese. According to 1998 statistics, the
circulations of daily newspapers totalled more than
53,670,000—or even 72,4100,000, if we add evening editions,
which is to say 1.57 papers per household, or 577 per 1000
people. The United States, to put this in perspective, sells 56
million, and China 42 million. And although Norway heads
the list of countries with 588 news-
papers per thousand people, Japan’s
577 is a high figure, particularly
when compared to America’s 201,
Russia’s 141, and China’s 36.
Of the 53,670,000 circulation, 51
percent are nationally distributed.
The Yomiuri Shimbun made the Guin-
ness Book of World Records when it
sold more than ten million copies. The
Asahi Shimbun is well known for its
high quality. There are also the Nihon
Keizai (Nikkei) Shimbun, the major
business daily, the Mainichi Shimbun,
and the Sankei Shimbun. These five
national newspapers compete fiercely
for news stories and sales.
Eighty percent of Japanese read one
or more of these national papers,
devoting on average 25.8 minutes a
day to them. This is probably due to
the fact that almost all Japanese have
gone through school and illiteracy is uncommon, and many
Japanese, as in Tokyo, spend a long time commuting to work.
It may be unimaginable in some countries that “taxi drivers
read the same newspapers as their passengers,” but in Japan it
is quite common for both to read the Asahi.
There are 20,000 reporters in Japan who work for 108 news-
paper companies, including national newspapers as well as many
regional newspapers specializing in local news and many so-
called sports newspapers, usually for men, which feature both
sports and popular culture. More than half the reporters cover-
ing these scenes are members of press clubs broadly affiliated
with central and local government offices, the police, businesses,
and sports groups. This has prompted criticism that the stories
in all these newspapers look alike and that their sources, partic-
ularly political and economic ones, control the information. Yet
even on the national level, a clear difference is emerging between
papers such as the Asahi and Mainichi which have followed the
path of postwar democracy and support the current constitu-
tion, and the Yomiuri and Sankei, which have recently advocated
realism in matters of security and constitutional revision.
Although Japan’s lifelong employment system is gradually
crumbling, newspaper reporters still generally stay loyal to a
single newspaper company, unlike their highly mobile Ame-
rican colleagues. Moreover, it is only within the past four or
five years that by-lines have begun to appear, establishing a
reporter’s individual name (and accountability). In the post-
war era, the status of reporters has risen dramatically; ad-
vancement is within their company from occupying a desk to
being division head, then possibly bureau chief, but not a
columnist in any sense of the word.
As for the content, newspapers follow the American model
in the strong emphasis on freedom of the press. Yet members
of the press seem insufficiently aware
of late that their freedom has, in some
instances, given them more sentenc-
ing power than the courts. Criticism
has often been leveled against the
media’s excessive and largely un-
checked use of “sensational” news, as
when it divulges a suspect’s real
name, with little regard to the harm
that can do.
On an entrepreneurial level, it is
hard to find any country in the world
with newspaper companies as diversi-
fied as Japan’s. They own not only
television stations and Internet opera-
tions, but newspaper companies such
as the Yomiuri Shimbun sponsor soc-
cer and baseball clubs. Since baseball
is Japan’s favorite sport, papers host
the very popular national high school
baseball championships in spring
(Mainichi) and summer (Asahi). The
sponsorship of these sports events, as well as internationally
recognized art shows and concerts, has prompted the criticism
that such activity is “drawing water to one’s own mill.”
There is little syndication or cooperation among national
newspapers or between national and regional newspapers,
though stories coming from the Kyodo News and Jiji Press agen-
cies are regularly published in the newspapers. Cooperation,
however, between national and international newspapers is
increasing, as with the Asahi and the London Times and New
York Times, the Yomiuri with the Washington Post, and the
Sankei and U.S.A. Today, which share reporting and columns.
In Japanese journalism, magazines tend to exert even greater
influence than newspapers. According to the Research Institute
for Publications, more than 3,300 titles and 4.8 billion copies of
magazines were published in 1998. There were eighty-nine
weekly magazines, with 1.7 billion copies. Seventeen magazines
published by newspaper companies accounted for sales of 84
million copies, while nine magazines produced by publishing
houses accounted for 270 million copies sold. While many are
all news magazines, they differ from their equivalents abroad
in mixing in nude photos and soft pornography along with the
international and domestic news.
Monthlies, however, such as Chuo Koron, Bungei Shunju,
Gendai, Seiron, Shokun, and Sekai remain as magazines of opin-
39
 Reports from Asia
ion. As with most journals of this kind, their articles are
signed. Political orientations differ in some cases: Sekai is left-
progressive, Seiron and Shokun right-realist school; the others
fall in between. The subject matter often ranges beyond daily
newspapers’ coverage, including important scoops. Scandals
about former prime ministers Kakuei Tanaka and Sosuke Uno
(money in the former, a woman in the latter) first broke in these
magazines (in Bungei Shunju and Sunday Mainichi respectively),
and led to calls for their resignation. The magazine writers do
not belong to the press clubs and usually keep a greater dis-
tance from their subjects than the newspaper reporters.
As elsewhere, the biggest problem facing the Japanese print
media, and especially newspapers, is the Internet. For all its
alleged threat to the daily paper, television, I always felt, was a
safely different medium. The Internet is another matter: it is
browsable for the stories one cares about, and a barrier against
the mounting mass of stories one doesn’t. Someday the Internet
form and contents may hardly differ from newspapers. So what
is their future? Reading a paper, however, is different from
reading a screen, and if the contents can remain superior, I
believe the charms and merits of newspapers have a future.
Last but not least, we should mention that flower of Japanese
culture, the comic book (manga), which appears often as a sep-
arate, independent form. Japanese comics come in many styles
and their contents vary to a degree unique in the world.
Elsewhere, “the comics” conjures the image of some strangely
distorted character in a small frame. Japanese comics, however,
seek, like “serious” art, to capture every form of movement
and expression. They aim beyond comedy or social sarcasm,
dealing with history, mythology, politics, economics, science,
social problems, and literature. They represent a new branch
of the visual print media, giving new meaning to the “comic
story” (Gekiga)—and in Japan, the 280 varieties they come in
account for sales of 1.3 billion copies annually. ◆ few foreign reporters argue that it has a major impact on
—Shigehiko Togo
How Good Is Foreign
Reporting on Japan?
A ccording to 1997 estimates, there are more than
eight hundred foreign press correspondents work-
ing in Japan. American and European press mem-
bers each represent roughly 40 percent of this corps, which
otherwise includes mainly East Asians (mostly Koreans and
Chinese), and a few Australians. In fact, even in many Asian
countries, information about Japan is obtained through Eu-
ropean and American media, which suggests that the image
of Japan much of the world press receives is in large part a
product of the West.
Yet it is also true that 40 percent of those working as foreign
press correspondents in Japan are themselves Japanese. The
large role the Japanese correspondents play in these bureaus
is related to the limited number of foreign correspondents who
can speak, not to mention read, Japanese. Actual reporting
requires Japanese reporters. In a choice of requirements, com-
petency in a foreign language is probably less in demand than
40
skill as a journalist; yet think how strange it would be to send
a reporter to cover Washington without English fluency.
The competence in Japanese of foreign reporters has, it is
true, increased markedly since the 1960s, when only a few had
any knowledge of the language. Yet since Japan has become a
crucial information point for international media, the commit-
ment to Japan on the part of elite correspondents who, for bet-
ter or worse, are rotated every few years to different points of
the globe, may be weakening. High-profile reporters such as
David Sanger of the New York Times and Fred Hiatt of the
Washington Post (now the Post’s editorial page editor) moved
on from Japan to Washington and Moscow. They are not
Russian or Japanese specialists, but rather, star journalists.
That does not mean, of course, that there are not foreign
correspondents who live for a long time in Japan, have their
own unique sources of information, and develop their own
analysis and view of the country. Two famous examples of this
would be Sam Jameson, former Japan bureau chief of the Los
Angeles Times, and Gebhard Hielscher, who recently retired
from the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Both are superior journalists
who have lived in Japan since the 1960s, are fluent in Japa-
nese, have a rich network of contacts, and can distinguish
very well between the surface appearance and inner workings
of Japanese society. Some in a new generation of younger for-
eign journalists, with many of these qualities, are now carry-
ing on the tradition of these two pioneers.
What remains the foreign press’s biggest impediment to
reporting in Japan are the Japanese press clubs. It is often said
of these press clubs that only reporters from the main Japanese
press are given access to information from important Japanese
news sources, such as government agencies and the police.
While criticism of the press club system comes not only from
foreign correspondents but also from Japanese as well, only a
reporting for the foreign press.
With the exception, of course, of economics wire services,
where one second can make a difference in the chase for
“scoops,” most of the news gathered at club-sponsored press
conferences and briefings can be obtained by foreign re-
porters by other means, and most of the minutely detailed
information is of little value to the foreign press. Very often,
the foreign press simply does not have the manpower to staff
someone at the press clubs.
Since the press clubs, in fact, are actually opening a little to
the foreign press, there are those in the Japanese media who
remain dissatisfied that members of the foreign press do not
even try to attend press conferences that have been opened. By
the same token, foreign reporters’ non-membership in the press
clubs keeps the foreign press free from the kind of collusion
that exists between news sources and the press in Japan, and
thus can be an advantage. Foreign media have been able to
obtain scoops relating to the Imperial Family—for example, the
engagement of Crown Prince Naruhiko and Princess Masako—
precisely because they are free from the news cartels. Moreover,
because many Japanese realize the influence of major newspa-
pers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, they
tend to give them privileged access to information. And since
 Reports from Asia
these papers, able as they are to influence American public
opinion, reflect America’s national power, some would say that
their reporters receive privileged treatment. The greatest barri-
ers, in fact, to information are not public or institutional, but
rather the informal, tacit rules and modes of expression in
Japanese society. It is debatable whether these problems are
exclusive to Japan, or routinely faced by serious foreign corre-
spondents throughout the world.
Most likely, the biggest difficulty the Euro-American press
faces when reporting from Japan is how to provide informa-
tion of news value to the home-country market. Until now,
the European and American press’s attention to Japan has usu-
ally been very small, in sharp contrast to the amount of for-
eign news (mostly about the United States) covered in Japan.
In the past, Japan, in all its geographical and cultural remote-
ness, was simply not a subject for general attention; at best
the image of an exotic Japan was marginally marketable. From
a Cold War point of view, Japan was a member of the anti-
Communist alliance—an exclusive vantage point that over-
looked the country’s average citizens and ordinary, daily life.
Compared to the rest of the world, the country offered little
by way of large political shake-ups, street violence, civil wars,
or natural disasters.
As interest in Japan’s economy and doubts about the Euro-
pean and American economies grew at the end of the Cold
War, Japan suddenly became an attractive news source. Many
instant Japanologists emerged in the press warning of the
threat and challenge of Japan. Now that the U.S. economy is
healthy again and the Japanese still in mid-recession, it has
become hard to sell Japan in the news market. The 1995 Kobe
earthquake was a big but brief story. The ending of the Libe-
ral Democratic Party’s thirty-eight-year reign and the birth
of the Morihiro Hosokawa Cabinet in 1993 attracted a lot of
attention, but its aftermath soon grew too difficult and too
boring for foreigners. The same media that once cried out
about the economic threat of Japan are busy now mocking its
economic plight. Several press agencies have therefore
decided to leave Japan and rely on stringers. The costs of
maintaining an office in Tokyo, as can be imagined, are
extremely high ($250,000 a year excluding salaries, estimates
the Washington Post).
In Issue No. 4 (“Japan, Made in U.S.A.”), we reported on the
book published in New York by Zipangu, a collective of
Japanese writers living in the U.S. that evaluated New York
Times Japan coverage as overly biased and insulting. Whether
this assessment is correct or not, it is clear that America’s inter-
est in Japan is no longer based on foreign affairs, military mat-
ters, or even economic problems, but rather on the homeless,
the place of women in society, family issues, and other social
problems. Which suggests that Americans’ reporting on Japan
has been less about Japan and more about their own society.
No doubt this applies to foreign correspondents the world
over. But since the role of the American press today is clearly
international, its internal and sometimes parochial perspec-
tives and criteria for news value are not truly healthy for
understanding the complexities of society.
—Masayuki Tadokoro
Taiwan’s Knowledge Class
S ince the 1980s, Taiwan has entered the global era, not
just in trade, technology, and communication, but also
in ideas. The international mass media played a major
role in bringing new thought to Taiwan. But intellectuals have
been the actual “carriers” of such concepts, ever since the
reverse brain drain of the early 1980s, when young Taiwanese
with advanced degrees from American universities came home.
This new “knowledge class” in Taiwan has permeated the aca-
demic, social-service, and cultural institutions—the media and
the public sphere. They have translated into Chinese, and pub-
lished, important works in virtually all fields, thus fueling the
rapid growth of Taiwan’s publishing industry since the 1980s.
Taiwanese publishing companies old and new now issue both
“serious” books and popular bestsellers from the West. Estab-
lished publishers such as China Times, Lien-Jin, and Common-
wealth, and new houses such as Rye Field and New Century
have produced translations under such imprint or series titles
as Next, New Age, Global Citizen, History and Culture, Classics,
Knowledge, and Inspirations. The public response to these
translations has been positive. The literary sections of major
newspapers frequently review these works. And the quality of
translations, long an issue, has much improved.
In addition to the greater availability of foreign thought to
the general public, there has been a carry-over into fields of
action: More than twenty new social movements have emerged
in Taiwanese civil society since the 1980s on the issues of
human rights, the environment, and gender equality. These
new Western/global values became the guiding principles and
frames of reference legitimating these new social causes. These
ideas have not been adopted mechanically, however, but have
been adapted by the grassroots organizations to local problems.
The indigenous response to Western cultural ideas has also
been a staple element in literature and social science. The
“indigenous literature movement” starting in the mid-1970s
was the deliberate effort by many of Taiwan’s young writers to
search for a native set of literary ideas and identity, and to
break with the Western modernism that had dominated
Taiwan’s literature since the 1960s. This literary movement has
since established “social realism” as the mainstream in Taiwan’s
writing, seeking to relate literature to society.
The redirection toward “indigenization” has extended to
other cultural fields such as music, performing art, and movies.
This indigenization was not aimed at halting learning from
Western social science. Rather, it was argued that through
“indigenization,” Taiwan’s social science should reflect the
dual conceptions of social science’s universality on the one
hand, and cultural and national relevance on the other.
The import of the West’s new thinking since the 1980s can
be seen as a double process: accepting cultural globalization
through which Taiwanese culture has participated in an “imag-
ined” global culture, and adapting these ideas to a cultural
localization, thus creating a cultural heterogeneity which
marks Taiwan today. The interesting question is whether this
◆ may be a model for mainland China tomorrow. ◆
—Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao
41
 Reports from Asia
Ghetto and the Japanese
Joshua Sobol, born in 1939, is one of Israel’s leading playwrights, having written an extraordinary number of plays (thirty-five),
which have been translated into twenty-five languages. His most famous play is Ghetto, the powerful story of the last days of the
Vilna Ghetto. At a conference organized by Jerome Chanes on “Writing the Jewish Future,” Mr. Sobol spoke of the circumstances
leading to the writing of Ghetto, and of its reception in Japan. The man who produced his play in Japan was our colleague Masakazu
Yamazaki, who is the artistic director of the Hyogo Prefecture Theatre in Japan. We are presenting the relevant portions of Mr.
Sobol’s essay (as printed in Judaism, Fall 1999), to which we asked Yamazaki-sensei to write an afterword.
I was born in Israel in 1939. I grew up in a village in the
center of the country. The village is called Tel Mond.
When I started as a child to discover the world around
me, I discovered a society of people talking a whole cocktail
of languages. I discovered people talking Yiddish and Hebrew,
German and Rumanian, Russian and Polish. We had Arab
neighbors who used to come and sell
vegetables, and they would speak
Arabic—but they would also speak a
kind of broken Yiddish with my grand-
mother or with my mother in order to
sell their merchandise.
I grew up as a child talking two lan-
guages simultaneously, Hebrew and Yid-
dish, because my grandmother was a
Bundist* and she refused to learn He-
brew until her last day, and she spoke
Yiddish and read Yiddish. She used to
receive the Yiddish press from the United
States from family members who lived in
Brooklyn. They used to send her the
Zukunft [The Future] and Der Ameri-
caner. When I was six years old my
grandmother taught me to read and to
write Yiddish. I read the Americaner.
And I remember even what interested me
most of all: it was “Vitzen vos Blitzen,”
“jokes that sparkle.” I grew up with
these two different languages in a time when it was very
unfashionable for a youngster in Israel to know Yiddish or to
admit that he knew Yiddish. But these two languages, so
unfriendly toward one another, suited me well, and I lived in
peace with the two of them.
Nowadays I am so grateful to my grandmother for her hav-
ing insisted on teaching me Yiddish. The book that influenced
me most of all was a diary written in Yiddish in the Vilna
Ghetto. It was Herman Kruk’s Diary of the Vilna Ghetto. This
book changed my writing and my career as a playwright and
it changed many things in my life. It happened to me when I
was already over forty. I heard about a theatre that had been
functioning in the Vilna Ghetto during the Second World War.
I am a man of the theatre, and my life is bound with the the-
atre. When I heard about that ghetto theatre, I got intrigued
and curious and stimulated. I felt that there was a secret stick-
ing in that story, a secret that must be important for me. I was
asking myself many questions about my activity as a man of
the theatre in Israel, such as: what is the sense of making the-
42
atre in our society, in our situation, and in our special context.
When I heard about that ghetto theatre, I started to look for
material. A survivor from the Vilna Ghetto asked me if I had
read Kruk’s Diary. The moment I opened it, I couldn’t put it
away. Everything that happened in the ghetto, including the
story of the theatre, is described in Kruk’s Diary with the
greatest precision and the minutest
detail. The Diary became my bedside
book. I kept reading and re-reading it. I
tell you all this because for me Kruk’s
Diary became almost the epitome of what
one can call Jewish writing. Let me try
to explain.
Kruk was a cultural activist of the
Bund in Poland between the two world
wars. Before the Second World War he
founded no less than four hundred
libraries and cultural centers of the Bund
throughout Poland. He wrote stories for
children, and he was a man of style. In his
Diary, written in the Vilna Ghetto during
the Nazi occupation, he apologizes for
having abandoned his style “because,” he
says, “I have no time to deal with style.”
He was too concerned with recording
precisely everything that was taking
place in this ghetto, and he had no time
or patience to bother about style.
I’m not one to judge the quality of Kruk’s Yiddish in the
Diary, but it feels like a very instrumental Yiddish, not a flour-
ishing Yiddish, not a colorful one but a very precise one. I’ve
rarely read a document written with such a precision and with
such an incisive look into reality. It is written with an
unflinching courage in observing a horrible reality in real
time, and not sentimentalizing it. Just to note down every-
thing—like the opening of a brothel in the ghetto, or the
orgies which took place in the Judenrat together with the
German officers. They are recorded with the dates and the
names of the participants.
Reading that book revolutionized my vision of the Holo-
caust. The diary suggests a vision of a society very busy with
living and not preparing to die. All this happened to the fif-
teen to sixteen thousand Jews who were left after the mas-
sacres, the remnant of almost eighty thousand Jews who were
the inhabitants of Vilna before the war. Kruk’s Diary depicts
the vitality, the energy, and the will to live that inhabited
and inspired those fifteen to sixteen thousand Jews who
 Reports from Asia
lived in the ghetto.
When I first read the Diary, I didn’t have the slightest idea
that I was going to write a play about the theatre of the
Ghetto. I was so overwhelmed by the Diary, by this kind of
writing which I didn’t encounter in any other culture. I read
Hebrew, French, English, German, and Yiddish. I can hardly
imagine a culture and a language other than the destroyed
Yiddish one which could produce such a gaze on reality as
Hermann Kruk offers you in his Diary. It compels you to
change all your opinions and your prejudices about a reality
that has been otherwise mythified. Reading Kruk was for me
an act of demystification.
One day my students asked me what I was writing at the
moment. I said I wasn’t writing anything, but that I was read-
ing about the theatre in the Vilna Ghetto. Before I knew what
I was doing, I found myself telling them the story of the the-
atre of the ghetto. It went on for two hours, and they were sit-
ting there looking at me with great amazement.
When I finished telling them the story, I knew that the play
was there, that it was written before I knew it, and that I had
become a kind of a pipe and simply had to let that story flow
through me to become a play because this is the only way I
know to express myself. This play somehow wrote me more
than I wrote it. When I wrote the play, I didn’t know where it
was going to take me.
The play has been produced almost all over the world, and
to my great astonishment, three years ago I was invited to the
opening night of the production of the play in Kobe, Japan.
The town of Kobe had been shattered by an earthquake, and
the premiere took place some three months after the catastro-
phe. The city was still bearing the marks of the earthquake.
I admired the high quality of that production and the way
they managed to reproduce what seems to me to be the Jewish
quintessence of that play. But what surprised me most of all
was the extremely warm reaction of the audience. They told
me that after the earthquake the play showed them that a soci-
ety struck by a catastrophe could and should find its own sol-
idarity with itself and draw its power, its strength, to strug-
gle against calamity from that solidarity with itself.
I realized that what the play meant to Israeli audiences it also
meant to foreign audiences, and that the bitter experience, the
terrible, the tragic experience of the Jews of Vilna was not lost
into a vacuum. It has not gone down the drain of humanity.
No, it is a precious heritage that we Jews can share with other
people. Probably in the future our mission as Jews is to open
ourselves up and to develop free dialogue with other nations,
with other people and with other cultures, be they English,
Japanese, or German, and we shouldn’t shy away from any dia-
logue. The dialogue should be inspired by the terribly tragic
experience of our people. This is maybe one of the most pre-
cious experiences that we are carrying with us, and which we
should share with other peoples and cultures. ◆ cess. His understanding and his feelings of camaraderie toward
—Joshua Sobol
[*The Bund was the Jewish working-class organization in Poland
which was non-Zionist, and fought for rights in Poland. Its two chief
leaders, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, were executed by Stalin
during the Nazi-Soviet pact.—ed.]
Is a Theatre Necessary
in a Graveyard?
I n the summer of 1995, Joshua Sobol and I found ourselves
seated in a theatre in the middle of the ruins following the
Great Hashin-Awaji earthquake. Even six months after that
disaster, there were daily reports of people who were narrowly
saved. On the stage of the theatre, somehow miraculously
spared, people dressed in ragged clothes were crying out, “Is a
theatre necessary in a graveyard?” Being performed was not an
impromptu play based on the tragedy of the earthquake, but,
rather, the Japanese version of Ghetto, one of Sobol’s master-
pieces about the sufferings and resistance of the Jewish people
during World War II. As the producer, I watched the perfor-
mance with the playwright who, having come all the way from
Israel, quietly murmured, “A theatre is indeed necessary in a
graveyard, too.”
The match in coincidences was almost too symbolic. Ghetto
is a story about people, a group of artists and an audience in a
concentration camp, who are brought together by a theatre
until moments before their death. The love of the theatre dur-
ing this extreme situation testifies to the strength and dignity
of the human spirit. While, of course, the historic scale of the
tragedies is different, the people in Hyogo Prefecture also
found themselves in an inhuman situation as a result of the
earthquake. Women and senior citizens experienced great
humiliation daily for a simple bucket of drinking water.
In the middle of this, I, as Artistic Director of the Hyogo Per-
forming Arts Project, decided to put on a play with the finan-
cial assistance of the Prefectural government. Friends ques-
tioned whether it might be too early to stage a play in the midst
of the suffering, advising that the money might be better spent
for food for the victims. I myself wondered whether it was a
good idea. What allowed me to go ahead with such a danger-
ous decision was the strong message that the work Ghetto left.
The performance was a great success. I will never forget a
letter left at the theatre by someone in the audience. He had
lost his family in the earthquake, and for several months after-
ward had fallen into a state of emotional paralysis. He contin-
ued to be unmoved even by happy music or comedies. When
he came into contact with this intense tragedy, however, his
sensitivity was revived through his ability to sympathize with
the heroic spirit in the play. Sobol’s message, the message of
the Jewish people that he writes of, certainly arrived in Japan
that day, fifty years later, demonstrating a clear universality.
Theatre people around the world, when they meet for the
first time, all remark on the same things: the non-artistic diffi-
culties—economic and social problems—inevitably connected
with performances. Sobol intuitively understood these fears I
had and the hard work I had put into making the play a suc-
me could be found in his hearty applause at the end of the first
performance. I had the feeling that, for the both of us, a mutual
friendship hard to forget was forged that day through our shar-
ing of staging a play in extreme circumstances. ◆
—Masakazu Yamazaki
43
 Reports from Asia

Soseki Natsume and the Discovery of “Existence”

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

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

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

44
 Reports from Asia
ernization. Winning the Russo-Japanese War, it was also feel-
ing the encroachment of full-scale industrialization. To intel-
lectuals, this was a first era of spiritual crisis. Victory in the
war had deprived the country of an immediate national goal,
and freed individual emotions from the ties of duty. In a soci-
ety in which strong bonds of common emotions were loosen-
ing, individuals began to explore their own emotions, none of
which induced a sufficient sense of urgency. Industrialization
was simultaneously bringing materialism and utilitarianism to
Japanese society, which intellectuals naturally opposed.
Moreover, the Confucian education which Japanese intellec-
tuals of the time had received led them to take a more puritan-
ical stance toward various modern concepts. The same attitude
which divorced sexual desire from love caused them to remove
the desire for self-aggrandizement from individualism. For
example, they emphasized the freedom of individuals from
their families, but this was no more than the freedom to escape
their families. Unlike the heroes of Balzac or Mauriac, they had
no concept of battling from within the family to acquire as
much of an inheritance as possible and expand their freedom.
They escaped from their families into freedom, but it was not
the freedom to do something. Since they slighted ambition, the
sort of freedom the protagonist of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le
Noir strives for was never a possibility.
For Soseki and his contemporaries, self was something to be
attained not by acquiring but by discarding. Soseki was fond
of the motto: “Transcend one’s self and become one with the
universe,” which reflects the Eastern philosophy of renuncia-
tion. On the other hand, it is also an extension of a Kantian view
of freedom, namely, that true freedom is the autonomy that
allows rejection of one’s own nature (desires). Sadly enough for
Soseki, his was no longer an era which could believe in the
divine order Kant discerned in “the starry skies above” and the
“moral law within.” Having ‘transcended himself,’ Soseki was
forced to struggle with the relative value of action.
Yet taking the actual substance out of the idea of self and
infinitely idealizing self as a pure agent leads back to the con-
cept of existence. Existence is self, but self in which all objec-
tive affiliation has been renounced, including not only desire
and a sense of duty, but also character and social status. While
this concept took hold in the West in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger,
Soseki could be seen as having independently approached
something extremely close to this discovery.
Existence entails the realization that one exists through a
type of direct sensation, a “mood”(Heidegger’s Stimmung). In
the West, this feeling is the fear of the accidental nature of one’s
existence, a vague unease (Kierkegaard’s Angst). In Soseki’s case,
the mood was one of groundless loneliness, a sense of power-
lessness which was almost impossible to heal. Becoming aware
of existence through mood generally requires a refined sensi-
tivity which recognizes the absurdity of nature. Soseki was a
writer of outstanding sensitivity, as is vividly portrayed in
Sorekara (1909). Looking at his feet in the bath, the protagonist
is suddenly seized by the sensation that these are strange
objects separate from his body, and is stunned by the ugliness
of forms which have lost their meaning. This is of course the
same discomfort experienced some thirty years later when the
central figure in Sartre’s La Nausée looks at the roots of a tree.
Nevertheless, unease and loneliness are clearly different
qualities. Existence in the West is an agency of self-projection
into something in the midst of causality (Heidegger’s entwer-
fen); in Soseki’s case, an agent hoping to “become one with the
universe.” Virtually no comparative research has yet been con-
ducted on the essence of this difference and the different cul-
tural backgrounds which may have created it. Very few peo-
ple outside Japan know anything about Soseki as a
philosophical writer, or as a thinker heavily influenced by
Henri Bergson and William James. The Los Angeles Times
questionnaire has proved a fine opportunity to point to an
area where West and East have yet to fully meet. ◆
—Masakazu Yamazaki
Eulogy for Seizaburo Sato
I n a postwar Japanese political science long dominated by anti-
American Marxism and progressivism led by Masao Maru-
yama (1914-1996), Seizaburo Sato led a new group of pro-
American conservative thinkers. Born in 1932, Sato was raised as
a Christian but became a Marxist during the university student
movements in the 1950s. But with further study he became dis-
enchanted with the schematic historical interpretations of Marx-
ism.At the University of Tokyo, Sato distinguished himself by
his intelligence and clear arguments. Along with Masataka
Kosaka (1934-1996) of Kyoto University, Sato became a leader of
a liberal-conservative movement that provided a consistent the-
oretical foundation for Japan’s political and diplomatic policies.
As a scholar, Sato’s works were wide and varied. Unlike
many academics, his first works were empirical studies of
modern Japanese history. Then with his colleagues Murakami
and Kumon, Sato wrote the pathbreaking Bunmei to Shite no Ie
Shakai [Ie Society as a Pattern Civilization](1979). Its thesis (the
emphasis on lineage) became a major but controversial inter-
pretation of Japanese society, for it provided an alternative
view of Japan’s modernization, indeed the very nature of
Japan’s civilization, from Western sociological theories.
Unlike most Japanese political scientists, Sato involved him-
self in politics, becoming a “brain” for many of Japan’s post-
war leaders. In particular, Sato was close to Prime Minister
Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982-1987). Although it would be easy to
envision Sato as a “rightist,” the fact is Sato hated authoritari-
anism. Because Sato boldly continued to challenge established
theories, he made scholarly enemies in Japan. However. he was
highly praised abroad and taught at Harvard University.
In recent years, several of Japan’s leading political scientists,
who were Sato’s peers, have passed away. The deaths of conserv-
ative critic Kosaka and progressive Maruyama seemed to sym-
bolize the end of the conservative-progressive division in Japa-
nese academia. Now influential liberal-conservative scholars
close to the positions of Sato and Kosaka, such as Akihiko Tanaka
and Shinichi Kitaoka, are beginning to assume a legitimate place
at the University of Tokyo, which, representing Japan’s acade-
mic community, had once been so dominated by progressives. ◆
—Masayuki Tadokoro
45
 Necrology
 In Passing… 
The term obit, a funeral service, derives
from Latin obitus; Obitus has the medie-
val Latin derivative obituarius, a death
notice, hence the English noun obituary…
But how did we come to the obituary
which is the staple feature of almost every
newspaper in the world today? In the
Financial Times of London (December 18,
1999), Malcolm Rutherford, the obituar-
ies editor, wrote a long article on the sub-
ject, ironically, shortly before his own
death. We excerpt here some sections:
O bituaries (or obits, as they were
originally called) was the term
used by friars in a monastery register-
ing the names of their founders and
benefactors. There was no need for an
accolade or an assessment of the life.
The names lived on, or were supposed
to, simply by being in the book.
No one is quite sure when obituaries,
as we now know them as a regular fea-
ture in many daily newspapers, first
began. One attractive theory is that the
founding father was John Aubrey, a sev-
enteenth-century eccentric who wan-
dered about the country and frequented
the London coffee houses, making jot-
tings on this, that, and the other, many
of them about people. Unfortunately,
the theory cannot be true since Au-
brey’s Brief Lives was not published
until 1898, well after obituaries had
become a feature in daily newspapers.
There is much to be said in Aubrey’s
defense, however. Anyone writing obit-
uaries now would do well to look at his
anecdotal style. He defended himself
against charges of being too fond of
minutiae by saying that what seemed
minute at the time could be of great
interest to readers a hundred years on.
The Times in the nineteenth century
was the place where obituaries began to
develop, and it maintained its supremacy
in the field for decades. As some people
privately disparage the House of Lords
while craving to become a member, peo-
ple (especially senior civil servants) hoped
they would deserve a decent obituary.
John Grigg, in the paper’s official his-
tory, tells the story of Sir William Haley,
the editor in the 1950s and 60s, answer-
46
Noel Annan
ing the telephone in his office late one
evening. “Good evening, sir,” said the
N oel Annan, perhaps more than any
other major twentieth-century in-
tellectual historian, understood how
voice at the other end. “This is Lord
much the century of total war had
Woodwood’s butler speaking. Lord
destroyed the Victorian world of Leslie
Woodwood presents his compliments to
Stephen, the subject of his first biogra-
the editor of The Times and would like
phy, written when he was a young don
him to know that he does not expect to
in Cambridge, but also the world of
survive the night.”
Stephen’s daughter, Virginia Woolf. Yet
Euphemisms abounded. Two of the
Annan knew how much of that world
best, and least known, came not from
had survived. In his esteem for institu-
The Times, but from the magazine of
tions—his school, Stowe; his college,
King’s College, Cambridge. “He died
King’s; his university, Cambridge; but
suddenly” was assumed by Kingsmen to
also the profession he had chosen for
mean that he had committed suicide.
“He died in Northampton” meant that
he had gone mad and died in the men-
himself—Noel Annan showed his true
character. His concern was always to
preserve and encourage intellectual
tal home of that town. Most frequent,
merit and distinction.
and still used by some newspapers
Though he held many responsible
today, “He died unmarried” or its vari-
administrative posts, served on innu-
ant “He was a confirmed bachelor” was
merable boards, commissions, and com-
the way of saying he was a homosexual.
mittees, I rarely heard him speak of such
In the mid-1960s, however, obituaries
matters, clearly believing them to be of
began to change partly because the
less importance than the ideas we were
Sunday newspapers and some weekly
discussing. In the House of Lords,
magazines were running long, lively, and
where he spoke frequently on govern-
often well-researched profiles of people
ment higher-education policies, which
still alive. The main difference between
he felt to be inadequate, he showed all
a profile and an obituary was that the
the passion that those who knew him
obituary gave a final assessment. It did
best, recognized and appreciated. His
not have to be unduly deferential. Obits
hand-written notes were a joy to
became a little more sprightly.
receive, scarcely surprising, given the
In the next few years, obituaries are
quality of his conversation and pub-
likely to change, particularly in the
lished works.
subjects chosen. It would be rash to
Noel Annan—Lord Annan as he be-
assume that in the twenty-first century
came—articulate, gentle, generous, and
more and more obituary space will nec-
witty, understood what he called “our
essarily be assigned to businessmen.
age,” that of the generation of men and
The continued decline of deference
women ten years younger or older than
should also eliminate some of the old stal-
himself. The phrase, as he explained in
warts and worthies. It is no longer clear
his celebrated work Our Age (1990), orig-
why a bishop deserves an obituary sim-
inated with Maurice Bowra, for Annan
ply because he was a bishop. This is not
recognized the importance of correctly
the end of history, but it poses the ques-
estimating the achievements and failures
tion: Is there life after obits? The answer
of his own times.
is yes, but they will have to change with
Annan, because of the positions he
the times and a changed society.
held as provost of King’s College, Cam-
The ideal obituary is indeed about a
bridge, vice-chancellor of the Univer-
prominent figure, and even here there is
sity of London, and one of the founders
room for some reduction of reverence. A
of Channel 4, was intellectually and
touch of the anecdotal in the Aubrey
socially prominent on both sides of the
manner is welcome. Above all, chronol-
Atlantic. If he was constantly chosen to
ogy is not enough. In the longer obituar-
give memorial addresses for those he
ies the author must evaluate what the
had known, it was not so much for his
subject achieved, for good or ill.
remarkable delivery, his sonorous voice,
 Necrology
or his magisterial appearance that he
was asked, though all were of course
important. Annan was a man who knew
how to express appreciation precisely
because he was incapable of feigning it.
Listening to him eulogize Lord Good-
man before a vast London congregation,
I asked Sir Isaiah Berlin whether the
speech was as impressive as I thought.
“My boy,” he answered, “I have already
commissioned him to give my own.” He
did so, some time later, brilliantly. He
was age 83 at his death.  ing, no one would ever dream of accus-
—Stephen R. Graubard
Francis Haskell
F rancis Haskell, the most important
historian of art of his generation,
died early this year at age 71. In an auto-
biographical sketch, he described how
he became an art historian at a time
when the discipline hardly existed in
England. His teachers were exiled
German scholars such as Nikolaus
Pevsner, who had brought the disci-
pline as a German specialty to England.
Today, art historians “speak English,”
not the least because of Francis Haskell.
Haskell studied art history at King’s
College, Cambridge, but always kept his
distance from the methodological de-
bates that wracked the field. He pre-
ferred to do empirical work, and his
path-breaking book, Patrons and Pain-
ters: A Study of the Relations Between
Italian Art and Society in the Age of the
Baroque (1963), would seem to have
offered little chance of affecting the pro-
fession profoundly, but it did in large
part because Haskell refrained from the-
oretical generalization. His book was an
argument on the relation of patron and
artist, to demonstrate the role of the
patrons in the formation of, and inter-
nal constitution of, a work of art.
This argument was developed more
fully in his lectures on Rediscoveries in
Art (1976), in which he presented a
striking, and original, history of taste, a
theme that had been neglected in
German studies. The histories of taste,
fashion, and collecting here intertwine
to form a picture of art as an institution,
a view that now predominates in the art
museums of the world. That an artist
should be forgotten and then rediscov-
ered is one of Haskell’s surprising con-
tentions. Much of this derives from the
argument that it is not the “intrinsic”
quality of a work that is foremost in the
judgment of a work, but the critical
interplay of patrons, collectors, inter-
preters, et al., in establishing the impor-
tance of a work. In retrospect this would
seem to be emphasizing the sociology
and social history of art, but in reading
Haskell on the impact of a specific paint-
ing him of “oversociologizing” art.
In his last and greatest book, History
and Its Images (1993), Haskell reviewed
the conflict among art historians on the
contrasting value of written and pictor-
ial sources, the birth of the history
museum and art museum, and the role
of such historians as Jules Michelet,
Jacob Burckhardt, and Jan Huizinga in
understanding modern culture. Though
Haskell would never have dreamt of
placing himself on that lofty plane, he
made it impossible to write the history
of art without analyzing the compli-
cated network of art as an institution,
and that in itself remains an extraordi-
nary achievement.  zuelan life rested to a great extent on his
—Michael Becker
Source: Henning Ritter, “Enthusiast des
Faktischen [An enthusiast for the actual],”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 20, 2000.
Luis Castro
L uis Castro was Venezuela’s most dis-
tinctive intellectual voice, one that
emerged from a confrontation between
the Latin American rhetorical register
and the understated irony he derived
from the English tradition.
Castro was the son of a Venezuelan
army officer and a Chilean mother. He
graduated in law from Universidad Cen-
tral de Venezuela in 1966, and then took
a doctorate in the philosophy of law at
the Sorbonne. But from his earliest
schoolboy reading, he had developed an
idealized image of England and this, as
much as soberer scholarly purposes, led
him to Cambridge in 1971 and a further
Ph.D. on “The Notion of Fact in English
Law,” a detailed study of the develop-
ment of the jury in the High Middle
Ages. It was remarkable that someone
from his background should grapple
with fourteenth-century legal records,
but in some ways still more remarkable
that he fell under the spell of the grace-
ful ironic prose of F.W. Maitland, the
greatest of historians of English law, who
became a constant point of reference.
Castro returned to Venezuela and set-
tled at the new Instituto de Estudios
Avanzados. His scholarly recognition
brought him to such posts as Cam-
bridge’s Simon Bolívar chair and two
periods as Tinker Professor at the Uni-
versity of Chicago.
Yet his skeptical grounding in Anglo-
Saxon thought also turned him into a
cultural critic, scrutinizing his coun-
try’s political icons, including the great
Bolívar himself. From the 1980s, he ar-
gued against a Venezuelan tradition in
which politics figured either as the
realm of transcendence or a theatre of
heroism. He expressed his views as a
columnist for El Diario de Caracas and
El Universal, reinforced by magnetic
television appearances, where his elo-
quence and wit were matched by charm
and good looks.
Castro’s unique influence in Vene-
style. His writing combined metaphysi-
cal meditation with everyday anec-
dotes, laced with an often outrageously
zany humor. His goal was nothing less
than the ethical education of his read-
ers. As he felt the political situation
becoming increasingly grave, his writ-
ing became increasingly urgent.
On the fortieth anniversary of the
birth of modern democracy in Vene-
zuela in January 1998, Luis Castro be-
came the first non-member of Congress
to address that assembly. His impas-
sioned speech, televised live, caused a
national sensation. He ringingly called
the political class to a sense of its re-
sponsibilities, urging it to address the
nation’s intractable social and economic
problems without succumbing to ata-
vistic absolutism, unfettered capitalism,
or mere cronyism. He declared that the
country’s long-term stability depended
on the rule of law and the alternation of
parties. He went on to become an out-
spoken critic of the populist Hugo
Chávez, the leader of a failed military
coup who was elected president in
47
 Necrology
December 1998. Castro’s gloomiest pre-
dictions of the outcome of Chávez’s vic-
tory are already being borne out.
Luis Castro was 56 years old when he
died in 1999. 
—Stefan Collini
João Cabral
J oão Cabral, one of the century’s most
distinguished poets in the Portu-
guese language, died in Rio de Janeiro
in October 1999 at age 79.
In a career that spanned more than
fifty years, Cabral earned a reputation
as a cerebral, even difficult writer who,
in collections such as The Dog Without
Feathers and Museum of Everything, de-
monstrated an unflinching cinematic
eye but showed little patience with
romanticism or sentimentality.
Mr. Cabral’s poetry was never widely
known in the English-speaking world,
though the Wesleyan University Press in
1995 published his Selected Poetry, 1937-
1990. But many American poets admired
him, including W. S. Merwin, who trans-
lated many of his poems, and Elizabeth
Bishop, who lived in Brazil for many
years and knew Cabral well. In An An-
thology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian
Poetry, which she edited with Emanuel
Brasil, Ms. Bishop described Mr. Cabral
as Brazil’s most important poet of the
postwar generation, whose work has the
greatest coherency of style of any Brazil-
ian poet, work “characterized by strik-
ing visual imagery and an insistent use
of concrete tactile nouns.”
His most popular work among his
countrymen was undoubtedly The Death
and Life of Severino, about the desolate
existence of a peasant from the poor
northeastern region, where Mr. Cabral
was born. Ms. Bishop rendered one mov-
ing passage into English this way:
We are exactly alike: exactly the
same big head
That’s hard to balance properly,
The same swollen belly on the
same skinny legs,
Alike because the blood we use
has little color.
And if Severinos are all the
same in life,
We die the same death, the same
Severino death.
48
Millions of Brazilians can recite at
least some of the verses of the poem. It
was made into a play, put to music by
Chico Buarque de Hollanda, filmed in
1977, and more recently made into a
television drama.
Mr. Cabral was born in January 1920
into a distinguished family: one of his
cousins was the sociologist Gilberto
Freyre. Like many Latin American intel-
lectuals of his generation, unable to earn
a living as a writer, he entered the Bra-
zilian diplomatic service in 1945, serving
in posts on four continents until his
retirement in 1990. In the late 1940s, Mr.
Cabral became a friend of the Catalan
painter Joan Miró. The two collaborated
on a book about the artist, with Cabral
writing the text and Miró contributing
whimsical engravings. A complete edi-
tion of Mr. Cabral’s poems was published
in Rio de Janeiro in 1994.  tion. He had been Dean of the Law
Source: Abridged from the obituary by
Larry Rohter in the New York Times,
October 23, 1999.
Emanuel R. Piore
I f anyone shaped U.S. government sup-
port for basic research, it was Eman-
uel Ruben Piore. As the first civilian
head of the Office of Naval Research after
World War II, he initiated the policy of
giving federal support to scientists,
mathematicians, and linguists, irrespec-
tive of the relation of their work to the
navy. In that role, too, he helped estab-
lish the National Science Foundation. He
carried the philosophy over to I.B.M.
where he became chief scientist in 1965,
and helped shift I.B.M. from a business
machine firm to computer technology.
Dr. Piore served on the Science Ad-
visory Committees of Presidents Eisen-
hower and Kennedy, and was treasurer
of the National Academy of Science.
After retiring from I.B.M., he founded
the New York City Hall of Science which
was located on the old 1939 World’s Fair
grounds in Queens.
Emanuel Piore was born in Vilnius,
Lithuania, and came to the U.S. with his
mother at age nine. He graduated from
the University of Wisconsin in 1930 and
received his doctorate in physics in 1935.
He was 91 at his death in May 2000. 
Edward H. Levi
E dward H. Levi was a man who sym-
bolized, nay, restored probity to an
American political life marred by the
Watergate scandals—disgraces where
two attorneys general in the Nixon
administration were convicted of felo-
nies and one, John Mitchell, served time
in jail. Mr. Levi was appointed to the
post of attorney general in 1975 by
President Gerald Ford. Later, Justice
Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court,
who had been a senior official under
Mr. Levi, said that he could not have
had a tougher job in Washington for the
entire executive branch was in disarray;
and that Mr. Levi “brought the depart-
ment through its worst years.”
Edward Levi was one of the great legal
scholars and law teachers of his genera-
School and then President of the
University of Chicago. Ironically, he had
not intended to be a lawyer. Edward
Hirsch Levi was born in Chicago on
June 26, 1911 to Gerson B. Levi, a rabbi
who came to the United States from
Scotland, and Elsa Hirsch Levi. His
maternal grandfather, Rabbi Emil G.
Hirsch, was a leader of Reform Judaism
in America.
After graduating from the University
of Chicago, Edward Levi began study-
ing for a doctorate in literature, but
dropped out of the program. Years later
he explained that a friendly professor
had told him that he would never be
given a position in the humanities de-
partment at Chicago, or any leading
institution, because he was a Jew. He
recalled this in an essay in Newsweek,
during the nation’s bicentennial cele-
bration in 1976, to demonstrate how
much the country had changed. He had,
after all, become the first Jewish dean of
a major law school. And when he be-
came president of the University of Chi-
cago in 1968, he said he believed he was
the first Jewish president of a major pri-
vate university, other than one with a
Jewish identity such as Brandeis.
His slim book, An Introduction to Le-
gal Reasoning (University of Chicago
Press, 1949), was a foundational text for
students, with its emphasis on analogy
as the logic of legal reasoning. As a law
 Necrology
teacher, his student Robert Bork re-
called, “He was the most dazzling class-
room performer any of us had ever
seen.” And as Dean of the Law School,
Mr. Levi introduced the law and econo-
mics movement as a major development
of legal education, founding the school’s
Journal of Law and Economics.
Although appointed by a Republican
president, Mr. Levi never considered
himself to be a political partisan. Robert
Bork, who was solicitor general under
Mr. Levi, called him simply the greatest
lawyer of his time. Mr. Levi served as
President of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences from 1986 to 1989. He
was 88 years old at his death.  crusade against President Clinton. And
Sources: Obituaries by Neil A. Lewis in
the New York Times, March 8, 2000, and by
Robert H. Bork, in the Wall Street Journal,
March 13, 2000.
C. Vann Woodward
C. Vann Woodward, who died on
December 17, 1999 at the age of
91, was one of the best American histo-
rians and the best historian ever of the
American South. He excelled as an
interpreter, a scholar who asked big and
original questions and then dug deep
into the sources and his own imagina-
tion for the answers. His findings trans-
formed the study of the South—and
thus, of course, of the United States.
Woodward’s prose was spare and ele-
gant, befitting his taste for ambiguity
and paradox. The best way to under-
stand the South, he believed, was
through its ironies. Those ironies could
be biographical, as in the career of the
Georgia populist-turned-racist Tom
Watson, the subject of Woodward’s first
book, published in 1938. They could be
institutional, as in the case of Southern
segregation—a curse that, as Woodward
showed in his pathbreaking book The
Strange Career of Jim Crow, arose as
much from planters’ and businessmen’s
fears of lower-class whites as from their
fears of blacks. There were larger ironies
as well, which rendered the South a pow-
erful exception to the great American
myths of innocence and invincibility.
Woodward wanted these ironies to
humanize his readers and to teach us all
an “un-American” lesson about the
frailties and follies of human endeavor.
Yet he never retreated into the hopeless
conservatism or the droll cynicism that
have so often captivated disillusioned
modern American intellectuals. Wood-
ward’s liberalism made him a public
writer as well as a scholar. Apart from
W.E.B. Du Bois and John Hope Frank-
lin, no twentieth-century American his-
torian made greater intellectual and
political contributions to the cause of
racial equality. At age 90, his body fail-
ing but his mind still sharp, he spoke
out as an historian and citizen against
the constitutional dangers raised by the
earlier, in the wake of American Stalin-
ism and McCarthyism (and later of
George Wallaceism and the late-60s New
Left, which he disliked), when it be-
came fashionable among liberals to be
disenchanted with popular dissent,
Woodward would not comply.
The ironist expected, of course, that
his own labors would one day be sur-
passed and possibly forgotten. And if, in
the fullness of time, Vann Woodward’s
interpretations prove vain—which they
will not be—his example of moral seri-
ousness and integrity will continue to
inspire, as will his devotion to the histo-
rian’s craft. On December 16, 1999, home
at last from a long hospital stay and
eager to get back to work, he asked to be
helped to his desk, which had been
moved upstairs from his study. There, at
his desk, he died the next day.  sance. The English departments, he
—Sean Wilentz
Source: Adapted from the New Republic,
January 10, 2000.
Walter Jackson Bate
W alter Jackson Bate, one of the
great literary historians of his
generation, died in Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, on July 26, 1999, aged 81.
Bate concentrated a lifetime of schol-
arship on an early book, From Classic to
Romantic (1946), a study of how English
writing changed from the heroic cou-
plets and balanced prose of eighteenth-
century neoclassicism to the Romantic
styles of the first half of the next cen-
tury. His John Keats, published in 1963,
won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the study of
a quintessential Romantic poet who
made a transition from the lush poems
of his youth to a tragic sense of life.
But it was with Samuel Johnson that
Bate had the greater affinities. When he
lectured at Harvard on the harrowing
fantasies and nightmares of the great
lexicographer, students felt as if their
teacher had momentarily become Dr.
Johnson. No doubt that it was this ele-
ment of identification that made his
biography of Samuel Johnson the great
critical success in 1977, winning the
Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award
and the National Book Critics Circle
Award in the same year.
His political sympathy with Samuel
Johnson plunged Bate into the cultural
wars in the university departments of
literature that began in the late 1960s.
He declared himself to be a classic
humanist with conservative views,
themes he had expressed in his books:
Criticism: The Major Texts (1952) and
The Burden of the Past on the English
Poet (1970), a work that anticipated
Harold Bloom’s book on the anxiety of
influence. But it was his polemical essay,
“The Crisis in English Studies,” that
became the focus of a national debate.
In that essay, Bate described the situa-
tion in the humanities as “the worst
since the modern university was formed
a century ago.” He accused the new aca-
demic theorizing as abandoning the
humanistic ideal of literature that had
prevailed in the West since the Renais-
declared wryly, were not “countries for
old men.” Bate grasped, as few did in
1982, that the changes in education
were epochal and that the organization
of knowledge would never be as it had
been, before the onset of the modern
research university.
Yet Bate’s own magisterial works
brought him personal recognition. At
Harvard, his university, he was named
a university professor, the highest rank
in the faculty, then a select position for
the few, and elected to the British
Academy and the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences.
—Mark Krupnick
Source: Adapted from an obituary in the
Guardian, August 2, 1999.
49
 Necrology
In the period after World War II, American universities exploded in completely unprecedented ways. Not only was there a
huge expansion of students, created by the G. I. Bill of Rights, which gave free schooling to those who had served in the armed
forces, there was the transformation of graduate schools to focus on research, and the creation of “area studies” to provide spe-
cialists for the United States in its new role in world society. One significant feature of this transfiguration was the entry of new
faculty—many of them émigrés, or children of émigrés, many of them Jewish—who had been denied positions in the university
before the war. Many of these became leaders of their disciplines. That postwar generation, alas, is now passing. We present here
some notices, regrettably short, of some of the most distinguished of that generation.
Benjamin Schwartz
B enjamin Schwartz was probably the
foremost scholar of Chinese intel-
lectual history, who had an encyclope-
dic range from the ways of thought in
ancient China to the political ideas of
Mao Zedong.
Ben Schwartz was born in December
1916 in East Boston, of a poor working-
class family. He graduated from Boston
Latin, the city’s premier high school for
talented youths, and entered Harvard
College in 1934 as a scholarship student.
He graduated magna cum laude, special-
izing in romance languages, and ex-
pected to become a high-school teacher
or rabbi. But during the war he served
in the army as a cryptoanalyst, break-
ing Japanese communication codes, and
one night, while on duty in the White
House, he received the communiqué
from the Emperor announcing the sur-
render of Japan.
Returning to Harvard, he took a Ph.D.
in history and Far Eastern languages.
His doctoral dissertation in 1951 on
Chinese Communism and the Rise of
Mao, was the first work to demonstrate
that Mao had swerved from Soviet doc-
trine and established the peasantry as
the base of his revolutionary force. It
remains a key source today. A second
book, In Search of Wealth and Power:
Yen Fu and the West, was about a mem-
ber of the traditional gentry of the late
Qing dynasty (1644-1912) who was the
first to translate European works into
Chinese in order to understand the
secret of Western power. In 1985, reach-
ing back further into the past, Schwartz
published his magisterial book, The
World of Thought in Ancient China.
Ben Schwartz, as his Harvard col-
league Roderick MacFarquhar remarked
in a eulogy, was a man of gentle spirit
and genuine intellectual humility. A
50
Academe
story is told of his being presented a T-
shirt by his students, inscribed on the
front, “On the One Hand,” and on the
back, “On the Other Hand.” Ben
Schwartz’s comment was that there was
always a third possibility.  Association. In his presidential address,
Zvi Grilliches
Z vi Grilliches was a leading econome-
trician and had he lived, a leading
candidate for the Nobel Prize. He died
in November 1999 at age 69.
Zvi Grilliches was born in 1930 in
Kaunas, Lithuania. With the arrival of
the Germans in 1941, the Grilliches fam-
ily was ordered into the ghetto, and
eventually into the work camp in Dachau
in Bavaria. Grilliches was not yet fifteen
when, after losing both parents, he was
liberated by the American troops led by
General Patton in 1945. Traveling under-
ground through Europe, he was on a
boat for Palestine that was intercepted by
the British, and interned for seven
months in Cyprus. He arrived in Haifa in
1947, joined the Israeli army, and became
a student at the Hebrew University of the
great skeptical historian Jacob Talman, a
disciple of Karl Popper.
In 1951, Grilliches won a scholarship
to the University of California at Berke-
ley in agricultural economics. Later, at
the University of Chicago, working with
Theodore Schultz, he became a leader in
the field of economic measurement. His
work on the diffusion of hybrid corn
launched a wave of research on the eco-
nomic incentives to technical change, at
the time a highly neglected field. His
work on automobile model changes
produced the “hedonic” price indexes
which became standard for estimation
of quality changes in products. At
Harvard, with his colleague Dale Jor-
genson, he became the leader in the
measurement of productivity. In 1966,
he was awarded the John Bates Clark
medal given every two years to the best
economist under age forty.
In 1993, Grilliches was elected presi-
dent of the American Economics
he tearfully and truthfully described his
gratitude to this country for permitting
a young refugee to rise to such a posi-
tion of prominence.
In recent years, Grilliches was the
founder of the Moscow School of Eco-
nomics and had begun work on a care-
ful history of the rise to minor fame in
the nineteenth century of the Grilliches
engravers in the court of the Czars. 
Raymond Vernon
I f anyone invented the academic field
of global economics, it was Ray Ver-
non, who died in August 1999 at age 85.
Vernon was a member of the team that
designed and implemented the Marshall
Plan for the reconstruction of Europe
after World War II. He was instrumental
in the development of the International
Monetary Fund and the General Agree-
ment on Tariffs and Trade, known as
GATT. In 1965, he began the major re-
search on multinational corporations,
work that produced Sovereignty at Bay:
The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enter-
prises, and Storm Over the Multination-
als: the Real Issues, both of which have
been translated into Japanese, Italian,
Spanish, Russian, Swedish, and French.
Born in September 1913 in New York
City, Ray Vernon was one of four children
in a family of Jewish immigrants from
Russia. His father drove a truck deliver-
ing seltzer water to restaurants and bars.
The family name was Visotsky, but the
children changed their name to Vernon
since the eldest said that a name change
would improve his chances of being
accepted to medical school. All four of
 Necrology
the siblings earned doctoral degrees.
Ray Vernon received a bachelor’s
degree from the City College of New
York in 1933, and a Ph.D. in economics
from Columbia in 1941. From 1935 to
1946, he worked at the S.E.C. and from
1946 to 1955 in the State Department,
where he brought Japan into the GATT
trade system. In 1956 Vernon joined the
faculty of the Harvard Business School
and then held a second, joint appoint-
ment at the Kennedy School.
Slim and wiry, Vernon was an athlete
until almost the last year of his life. An
avid oarsman, he rowed daily at dawn on
the Charles River in a single scull. In his
eighties, he set a world record for his age
group in a class of “indoor sprints” row-
ing machines with odometers attached.
Though he helped shape the postwar
system of international trade and influ-
enced thinking about the global econ-
omy, Vernon believed in markets, but he
also saw their weaknesses, particularly
in relation to the developing countries.
He felt that state-owned enterprises
could not compete efficiently with
investor-owned multinationals, said
Daniel Yergin, the co-author of the book
The Commanding Heights, and his
research became part of the push to pri-
vatization in the 1980s.  Weiner’s stature that a book so critical of
Myron Weiner
I n June 1999, Myron Weiner, one of
the foremost Western scholars of
Indian politics since the Second World
War, died at age 68. Weiner was a highly
respected figure in American political
science; his productivity was breathtak-
ing, writes Ashutosh Varshney, a former
student, now teaching at the University
of Notre Dame, in the Times of India of
June 12, 1999. Together with his wife
Sheila, a scholar of Indian art, and their
children, he lived in India for several
years and made short research trips vir-
tually every year.
Born in a family of Jewish immigrants
of modest means in New York, Weiner
went to City College and began the
study of India as a Ph.D. student at
Princeton in 1952. He authored thirteen
books, edited nineteen others, and
wrote innumerable articles on India and
comparative politics. He began his
teaching career at Princeton, but most
of his academic life was spent at M.I.T.,
beginning in 1961, until 1999, when he
retired as Ford International Professor
of Political Science.
His award-winning book, Party Build-
ing in a New Nation (1968), dealt with the
reasons for the success of the Congress
Party, its compromise with local party
structures, and its decline with the ero-
sion of internal democracy and the
excessive reliance on personalities.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Weiner
challenged “modernization” theory
which predicted the erosion of reli-
gious, caste, linguistic, and tribal iden-
tities as the countries “modernized.” To
the contrary, he argued in Sons of Soil
(1978), as groups organized for eco-
nomic gain and political power, mod-
ernization could be expected to reacti-
vate and intensify ethnic conflicts.
His most recent work, The Child and
the State in India (1992), challenged the
notion that child labor would disappear
as India became richer. He pointed out
that the caste system would continue the
division between the menial work per-
formed by children from the lower
castes and the skilled work by those
from the upper castes. It was a tribute to
India’s policy makers and elites was read
so widely by intellectuals and govern-
ment officials. As a comment in The
Hindu of June 27, 1999 put it: “Myron
Weiner will be remembered as the
scholar who did for political science,
what Amartya Sen has done for develop-
ment economics—make the discipline
more practical and less esoteric.”  study of Soviet foreign policy to the rise
Adam Ulam
A dam Ulam, one of the world’s lead-
ing authorities on Russia and the
Soviet Union, died in April 2000, at age
77. He was a member of the Harvard fac-
ulty from 1947 until his retirement in
1992. He taught thousands of undergrad-
uates and graduate students, including
Robert Kennedy and Henry Kissinger.
Henry Rosovsky, the former Dean of
the faculty of Arts and Sciences at
Harvard, wrote: “Adam Ulam was an
old-fashioned professor in the best
sense of the word. The life of the mind
was his primary occupation. Research
and students were his main concern.
The Russian Research Center was his
home—quite literally—for many
decades. He really was one of the giants
in a rich generation of refugee scholars,
most of whom—alas—are gone.”
Ulam was born in April 1922 in what
was then Lwow, Poland, now part of the
Ukraine. He emigrated to the United
States in 1939 with his older brother
Stanislaw. The brothers left the country
two weeks before Germany attacked Po-
land. Stanislaw was one of the most emi-
nent mathematicians of the twentieth
century. His invention of the “Monte
Carlo” method of estimation played a
crucial role in the development of the
thermonuclear bomb. Their experiences
together are recounted in Stanislaw’s
autobiography, The Adventures of a Math-
ematician, and in Adam’s own memoirs.
Ulam wrote eighteen books, many of
which are classics in the field. His study
The Bolsheviks (1965) remains one of the
definitive treatments of the Communist
Party under Lenin. His massive 760-
page work Stalin: The Man and His Era,
was acclaimed not only as a biography
but as a “morally as well as historically
definitive” book.
His crowning work, the magisterial
account of Soviet foreign policy, Expan-
sion and Coexistence, published in 1967,
was regarded as the most influential
book to have appeared on the subject,
and with several subsequent editions
became the standard text in the field.
His sequel, Dangerous Relations, pub-
lished in the early 1980s, completed the
of Mikhail Gorbachev.
His colleague Edward Keenan, Direc-
tor of the Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library, described Ulam as “a gentle,
playful Galician cosmopolitan, a prodi-
gious reader and an enormously fluent
writer. A narrative historian by inclina-
tion and practice, he was somewhat out
of place in a department he thought to
be increasingly influenced by vaporous
abstractions and models.” 
 Illustrations in this issue are by
Gavarni, Honoré Daumier, Katsukawa
Shunsho, and Torii Kiyonaga.
51
 A Report to Our Readers
THE COMMITTEE ON
INTELLECTUAL CORRESPONDENCE
is an international project spon- Continuing Our Work
sored by the Suntory Foundation
This is Issue No. 6 of the twice-a-year Correspondence, a project of the Committee on
(Japan), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Intellectual Correspondence. The committee was initiated by Masakazu Yamazaki,
Berlin and the American Academy Wolf Lepenies, and Daniel Bell, and the organizations they represent, and funded by
of Arts and Sciences. the Suntory Foundation. With Issue No. 5, the Council on Foreign Relations joined as
publisher. We now have a circulation of over seven thousand to academic and public
Directors figures in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and to all the members of the Council. Much of
Daniel Bell Correspondence appears in Japanese in the periodical Asteion of the Suntory Foundation.
Wolf Lepenies Our intention has been to create a cultural milieu which reduces the insularity
Masakazu Yamazaki between countries and the increased specialization within disciplines. One of our
ways is to focus in each issue on a significant or neglected topic. In the past, this
Editor has been the digital age, history revisited, and translation. Here we take up the world
press and the Internet, and the vicissitudes of language in the global village.
Daniel Bell
As the publisher, the Council on Foreign Relations also states the following:
Managing Editor The articles in Correspondence do not represent any consensus of beliefs. We do not
expect that readers will sympathize with all the opinions they find here, but we hold
David Jacobson that Correspondence can do more to inform public opinion by a broad hospitality to
divergent ideas than it can by identifying itself with one school. While we do not accept
Associates responsibility for the views expressed in articles that appear in these pages, we do accept
Japan the responsibility for giving them a chance to appear.
Masayuki Tadokoro
Germany
Michael Becker Contributors to this Issue
U.S. ■ K. Anthony Appiah is Professor of Afro-American Studies and of Philosophy
Mark Lilla at Harvard University, and author of In My Father’s House, a study of African
Alexander Stille identity. ■ David A. Bell is Professor of French History at Johns Hopkins
University. ■ Stefan Collini is a Reader in Intellectual History at Cambridge
Intern University. ■ Brendan Dooley is Associate Professor of History at Harvard and
Catherine Pitt author of The Social History of Skepticism. ■ Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior edi-
tor of the New Yorker. He was a speech writer for President Jimmy Carter and
Graphic Designer the editor of the New Republic. ■ Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao is Professor of
Sociology at National Taiwan University. ■ Georges Khalil heads the group
Glenna Lang Modernity and Islam at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. ■ Nina Khruscheva is
a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School. ■ Walter Laqueur
U.S. Address: is editor of the Journal of Contemporary History. ■ Paul Lemerle served as the
CORRESPONDENCE French Minister to the U.N. on economic and social matters. ■ Jacques Lesourne
c/o Council on Foreign Relations was managing director of Le Monde from 1991 to 1994. ■ André Liebich teaches
58 East 68th Street at the École des Hautes Études Internationale in Geneva. ■ David Lipsey, a recent
New York, New York 10021 Labour peer, was political editor of the Economist and author of The Secret Treasury.
■ Sonja Margolina writes on Russia for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Telephone: (212) 434-9574 ■ Ryan McKittrick is a freelance theatre critic in Boston. ■ Darrin McMahon is

FAX: (212) 861-0432
E-mail: cic@cfr.org

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

52