A colleague points out that new state laws that allow parents to use public money to purchase education may represent the biggest US policy trend of 2023–basically, since the Republicans won the US House and stopped further federal progressive legislation. As Libby Stanford wrote in EdWeek last June,
So far this year, lawmakers in 14 states have passed bills establishing school choice programs or expanding existing ones, and lawmakers in 42 states have introduced such bills … Six of the 14 states—Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Utah—have passed school choice policies making programs universal or near-universal over the next three years. They join Arizona and West Virginia, which in recent years either established or expanded education savings accounts and made them available to virtually all students. That brings the total number of states where virtually all students will be able to use public funds for private schools to eight.
I hold some principled skepticism about school choice, yet I believe it is a valid policy debate–in fact, I have sometimes chosen it as the leading topic in my undergraduate course on public policy, because there are arguments on both (or many) sides.
It’s mainly in the USA that school choice is seen as a conservative cause; many social democracies allow parents to choose among publicly funded and licensed schools. And there have been progressive proponents of school choice in America.
On a political level, the passage of these new state laws is interesting for several reasons.
First, it is happening without a great deal of national attention, which I suspect reflects the national media’s basic lack of interest in state policies, especially in the South.
Second, it challenges the premise (which, I admit, I sometimes share) that the modern conservative movement has run out of policy ideas and is obsessed with performative politics–denouncing “woke” companies and universities without actually passing laws. A wave of school-choice bills reflects a policy agenda.
Third, it challenges the premise that today’s GOP is shifting from quasi-libertarian to quasi-authoritarian. A law that enforces particular ways of addressing contested social issues in public schools verges on authoritarian. But a law that allows parents to opt out of public schools is libertarian–for better or worse.
(However, many parents may seek schools that have authoritarian climates for their own students, somewhat like private homeowners’ associations that enact meticulous rules to control their own residents’ behavior.)
(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, from Najwan Darwish, Exhausted on the Cross, NYRB Books 2021.)
I don’t know the Arabic word that is the title of this poem. The English word can mean a logical fallacy–changing the meaning of a term between one part of an argument and another–or a deliberate trick. Macbeth calls a promise “that lies like truth” “th’Equiuocation of the Fiend.”
Deceit is a fault, but equivocation can also imply an inability to decide, or even a choice to remain undecided, like Keats’ “capab[ility] of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts. …” One can equivocate because several options seem attractive, or because all seem terrible.
I read Darwish as self-critical. He is confessing his equivocation, his failure (sometimes) to take a stand, much as, in “In Shatila,” he asks himself how he could have turned smilingly away from an old refugee:
How could you smile, indifferent
to the brackish water of the sea
while barbed wire wrapped around your heart?
How could you,
you son of a bitch?
But what should be expected of him? At a time when everyone is supposed to take one side, to state one truth–when we are all our own communications departments, and silence is called complicity–I resonate with the poet’s equivocation. His uncertainty becomes a doubt about who he is, and that doubt becomes the country he dwells in, wherever he goes. It’s the only country he has.
(By the way, I have no idea whether Darwish feels equivocal today, and I don’t mean to attribute any stance to him in this moment. The poem is several years old. It does speak to me today.)
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC displays The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini with additions by Titian (1514/1529), The Old Musician by Edouard Manet (1862), and The Family of Saltimbanques by Pablo Picasso (1905). These major works talk to each other.* We might say that the Bellini is a work of art, the Manet is a work about art, and the Picasso is about the artist.
Bellini’s painting illustrates a story from Ovid (Fasti I:415ff.). Mario Equicola, a courtier in service to the Duke of Ferrara, had given Bellini detailed and learned instructions about how to represent the original passage (Colantuono 1991). Equicola argued that poetry was the greater art; painting was merely derivative. Some contemporaries disagreed with this assessment, but all expected art to represent classic texts: usually Scripture, but in this case a pagan myth.
Bellini creates a kind of set for the gods, a flat area with a backdrop (which is now mostly Titian’s work). The characters are shown frozen in the midst of action.
Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.1
The artist counts on certain expectations that make the image easily legible. As usual in Renaissance art, light comes from a sun behind the viewer’s left shoulder. Space is reserved between the major objects and the edges of the canvas, so that the scene is “framed” both aesthetically and literally. Objects that are further away are not only smaller but blurrier and lit differently from those at center-stage (sfumato). Although the characters are Greco-Roman gods, they wear costumes and hold props from Bellini’s own time. Their bodies and other objects are represented with glowing detail; for example, the ceramics represent the earliest depictions of Chinese porcelain in European art.
If this is what we expect from art, then it is hard to see how anyone could surpass Bellini. He knows all the tools and techniques. He can represent round objects and faces rotated on all axes; light reflecting on metal, glass, porcelain, and liquid; water flowing through space; shadows and highlights; and naked and clothed bodies with discernible weight. But once this kind of painting has been produced at a high level for several centuries, the whole approach could become tired–especially once artists become enthusiastic about radically different styles from other cultures and times.
Detail, showing water flowing into a glass vessel
Manet’s The Old Musician bears some similarities to Bellini’s work. Again, several characters are presented on a flat stage with a tree and the sky behind them and light coming from the upper-left. However, the edges of this image cut right through one human figure and the tree, reminding us that we are looking at a painted canvas. Especially in the foreground and around the boy’s silhouette, the paint strokes are easily legible (another reminder that this is a painting). A horizon is visible, but the background is ambiguous. Flat ground behind the boy seems to morph into a low wall behind the young man. The sun casts shadows to the right of the violinist but to the left of the man in the tall hat. Perhaps the setting is the outskirts of Paris or another great city, but the location is obscure.
And there is no story. Maybe the people will move later on, but they are not evidently in the midst of doing anything now. The musician has stopped playing his violin, which might have animated them before. No character looks at any other, except that the musician stares at us.
You need a guide, such as Charles Fried (Fried 1969) or David Luban (Luban 1994) to tell you that the figures here are quoted from previous works of art, including an ancient statue of the philosopher Chrysippus, Watteau’s Pierrot (1718-19), and Manet’s own Absinthe Drinker (1858-9). The subject of this painting is not any story but art itself. The tradition within which Bellini painted has come to an end, like a tune previously played by a musician who is now “old.”
The figures in Manet’s painting are timeless and may combine costumes from diverse periods, but it’s safe to say that they are socially marginal. The young girl is barefoot and responsible for a baby. This is not a conventional family or a respectable organization but perhaps a band of homeless people. One of them, the violinist, is clearly a kind of artist, and the painting implies that artists in general are outsiders. In contrast, Bellini had painted his work for the private study of Duke Alfonso d’Este. From Bellini to Manet, successful artists have evolved from well-placed courtiers to bohemians.
Picasso was a spiritual heir to Manet. A young migrant from Spain, living in bohemian Paris among poets and artists, he embraced a marginal and critical role. He and such friends as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire regularly visited the circus, where they felt (or at least claimed) an affinity with the performers. In The Family of Saltimbanques, Picasso depicts a group of acrobats from the lowest tier of that profession. The landscape is even emptier than in the Manet.
By Pablo Picasso – Digital reproduction or scan of original painting: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27675009
The harlequin figure may be a self-portrait, the large jester is probably Apollinaire, the woman may be Picasso’s lover and model Fernande Olivier, and the girl may represent an orphan whom Olivier and Picasso had recently adopted, only to return her–rejected–to an orphanage. This image, then, is self-referential and confessional, in contrast to the outward stance of both Bellini and Manet. It exemplifies Picasso’s Rose Period, which had recently succeeded his Blue Period, and it can be understood as an objective correlative of the painter’s evolving mood.
These three paintings share several motifs. For instance, the feet. The Naiads in the Bellini are barefoot, per Ovid:
Naides effusis aliae sine pectinis usu, 405
pars aderant positis arte manuque comis;
illa super suras tunicam collecta ministrat,
altera dissuto pectus aperta sinu;
exserit haec umerum, vestes trahit illa per herbas,
impediunt teneros vincula nulla pedes.
There were Naiads, some whose hair flowed down without a comb,
others having arranged it by hand with skill.
This one serves with her tunic gathered above her calf,
another opens the robe to reveal her breast:
This one uncovers a shoulder, another drags her hem in the grass
No tender foot is shackled with a shoe.
These naked feet are meant to be mildly erotic. Not so with Manet, whose shoeless young girl is poor and encumbered with an infant. With her dirty feet, she may refer to Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto (1604-6). And Picasso’s saltimbanques wear slippers for acrobatics.
All three paintings relate in important ways to poems. I’ve mentioned that Bellini’s work illustrates a passage from Ovid’s Fasti. This is a somewhat distasteful story. Priapus (whom Bellini shows erect under his tunic) is about to rape a Naiad named Lotis while she sleeps, but a donkey brays, awakening the whole company and subjecting Priapus to ridicule. He then kills the donkey with his scythe. (In Bellini’s version, it looks as if Mercury was already watching before the donkey brayed.)
Manet’s friend Baudelaire encouraged him to paint modern society. These lines of Baudelaire’s can be compared with The Old Musician:
À une Mendiante rousse
Blanche fille aux cheveux roux,
Dont la robe par ses trous
Laisse voir la pauvreté
Et la beauté ...,
To a Redhead Beggar Girl
Pale girl with auburn hair
Whose clothes though their holes
Let your poverty show
And beauty ...
Most of all, the fifth of Rilke’s great Duino Elegies is entirely about Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques, with which he lived (in the Munich home of Hertha Koenig) for several months in 1915, after having seen the same painting in Paris. The poem addresses each character in turn.
Rilke begins:
Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig
Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst, die dringend von früh an
wringt ein wem, wem zu Liebe
niemals zufriedener Wille? Sondern er wringt sie,
biegt sie, schlingt sie und schwingt sie,
wirft sie und fängt sie zurück; wie aus geölter,
glatterer Luft kommen sie nieder
auf dem verzehrten, von ihrem ewigen
Aufsprung dünneren Teppich, diesem verlorenen
Teppich im Weltall.
[...]
But who are they, tell me, these drifters, just a bit
More fleeting than ourselves, wrung out from early on--
by whom, for whose desire, by what insatiable will? Instead, it wrestles them,
bends them, loops them and swings them,
throws them and catches them again; as if through oiled,
slippery air, they come down
on the worn-out mat, worn ever thinner by their constant
leaping, this carpet that is spent in space.
[...]
Rilke takes Picasso’s static image and gives it a story, a before-and-after, much as Bellini had turned Ovid’s narrative into a snapshot. Not only does Rilke imagine that the acrobats were jumping before the calm moment captured in paint, but he discusses how they gradually learned to leap.
He begins a later stanza:
Ach und um diese
Mitte, die Rose des Zuschauns:
blüht und entblättert.
Oh and about this
center, the rose of onlooking:
it blooms and sheds its leaves.
Most translations (collected by Martin Travers) presume that the acrobats form the rose. That is probably correct. However, I suspect that Picasso is also the “rose of onlooking.” During his Rose Period, his pink-ish mood suffuses his work. The painting is a kind of self-portrait as well as an answer to Manet and the tradition of narrative art that preceded them both.
*Picasso definitely knew The Old Musician. Manet may not have known The Feast of the Gods, which was in England in his day. He’s responding to the overall tradition of European painting. References: Anthony Colantuono (1991) “Dies Alcyoniae: The Invention of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods,” The Art Bulletin, 73:2, 237-256; Michael Fried (1969), “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865,” ArtForum, vol. 7 no. 7; David Luban (1994) Legal Modernism, University of Michigan Press. See also: Velazquez, The Spinners; an accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto); Manet’s “Old Musician” (from 2004).
We owe it to ourselves to develop an explicit model of any situation that concerns us. Whether we choose to share our model with other people is a choice, but we should always be ready to describe it to ourselves.
A good model simplifies reality in a way that enables wise judgments. It should include the most significant components of the situation and link them together. It will certainly not be complete or conclusive; in fact, an important reason to make our model explicit is to help think about what it may omit, what it assumes without sufficient evidence, how it may appear wrong to people who’ve had different experiences, and how it would change if the world changed.
In our Introduction to Civic Studies course so far this fall, we have already explored various models. For instance, Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues developed a template for modeling almost any institution, the Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) framework. I discuss that framework in this 11-minute recorded lecture. (I also offer an introductory lecture about Ostrom). Later, we examined the social theory of Jürgen Habermas, which I presented as a model involving the Lifeworld, Public Sphere, and Systems in this 29-minute lecture. Both examples can be represented in the form of flow charts. But we also unpacked Robert Putnam’s model of social capital, in which the main construct–composed of numerous elements–causes good social outcomes (see this 18-minute lecture). And we discussed the mental model that guided the leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott when they chose to target the city’s bus company.
As these examples suggest, models can come in many forms. They need not be presented visually; Putnam’s model is an equation, and narratives also work. (We read a little of Pierre Bourdieu, who presented a model in the form of an emblematic story.) The components can be many kinds of things, from actors to psychological constructs to ideals. And the connections can be equally various. One component may cause or influence another, or it may exemplify, help to compose, encompass, intend, ground, block, explain, or evolve into another part of the model.
I would go so far as to describe making and critically assessing one’s own models as a fundamental civic skill.
The journal Politics, Groups, and Identities has issued a call for papers on “How to Conduct Civically Engaged Research in a Time of Contentious Politics.” The editors for this special issue, Shelly Arsneault, Angie Bautista-Chavez, Stephanie Chan, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers, were participants in last summer’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER), which is a project of the American Political Science Association and Tisch College at Tufts. Several participants formed the idea of a special issue during a breakout group during ICER, which makes it an example of a productive small-group activity! Their call for papers follows, and the link for submissions is here:
In 2021, PS: Political Science & Politics published a collection of articles that sought to define and, ultimately, motivate political scientists to conduct civically engaged research (see Dobbs, Hess, Bullock, and Udani 2021). This special issue builds on these efforts by providing a guide for how to conduct ethical and rigorous civically engaged research. The collection of manuscripts will address the ethics, research design, methodology, and project management involved in developing, implementing, and communicating results from civically engaged research. By providing examples of successful civic engagement research and practical scaffolds, the Special Issue will serve as a valuable guide for political scientists as they develop their civically engaged research projects, while collectively advancing theoretical debates, ethical practices, and methodological pluralism in the discipline of political science.
We invite scholars across all political science subfields using a range of methodologies to submit manuscripts addressing the following or related questions.
How is civically engaged research distinct from other methodologies in political science?
How can civically engaged research inform canonical theories of power, politics, and governance?
How to define “community” when conducting civically engaged research?
How can political science research center community expertise?
We are especially interested in examples and guides that range across research sites and across a range of issue areas.
Examples of civically engaged research in challenging or hostile political environments.
Examples of civically engaged research working with vulnerable communities.
Examples of civically engaged research that showcase variation in methods, data analysis, and data collection.
That guy a god
who sits near you
Your voice your eyes
For him
My heart it stops
My tongue it's stuck
To watch you there
with him
I sweat I'm cold
I shake I'm pale
I'm grass that's bleached
I'm stunned
My lips won't move
My ears hear buzz
I spark lit up
I'm done
This poem by Sappho, which survives in the fragment beginning phainetai moi (“it seems to me”), may be the best known and most often translated lyric from ancient Greece or Rome. Here are 43 translations, offering diverse responses to Sappho’s lines and illustrating the evolution of English since the 1500s.
I tried a compressed translation, with no adverbs, no adjectives as modifiers (only predicates), and the fewest words possible. I chose 30 iambs to stand for Sappho’s 202 syllables. I consulted the Greek text but had many difficulties with the dialect (Aeolic), so I leaned on previous translations. This is like an amateur’s sketch of a famous painting, merely recording the outlines.
I agree with readers who see three persons here: the narrator, a man, and the “you” who is giving attention to that man. If the narrator is Sappho (or has her gender) then the poem is spoken by a woman who loves “you,” and you could be a second woman. However, the genders of the narrator and the beloved are never specified and can be imagined differently.
In a somewhat less compressed version, the man mentioned at the outset would not be a god. The text says that he seems similar to a god, and the point may be that his situation is divinely fortunate. The narrator is paler green than grass; and a thin or delicate signal fire flows through her. (I can’t help thinking of an electrical charge.) At the end, she says it seems she’s nearly dead, the verb “to seem” echoing the first line.
But that wasn’t the end of the original poem. This is all we have of the remaining stanzas:
But things go on
[…] The poor
[…]
One of many debated points is whether the narrator is jealous. I doubt it. She (?) focuses on and talks to the other person, and perhaps neither of them cares much about the man. Hence my somewhat dismissive opening (“That guy …”).
Another good question is what Sappho wrote after the last words that survive: “But all is to be endured, and the poor man/person …” Our text ends there because this poem only survived as a quotation in Longinus’ On the Sublime, and Longinus left off in mid-thought. Although I blame him for the lost strophes, I also find this a moving place to stop. Things must go on; we know that. But how did Sappho actually go on? And what did she say about “the poor”?
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has 110,000 members. As artificial intelligence rapidly acquires users and uses, some ACM members see an analogy to nuclear physics in the 1940s. Their profession is responsible for technological developments that can do considerable good but that also pose grave dangers. Like physicists in the era of Einstein and Oppenheimer, computer scientists have developed ideas that are now in the hands of governments and companies that they cannot control.
The ACM’s Technology Policy Council has published a brief by David Leslie and Francesca Rossi with the following problem statement: “The rapid commercialization of generative AI (GenAI) poses multiple large-scale risks to individuals, society, and the planet that require a rapid, internationally coordinated response to mitigate.”
Considering that this brief is only three pages long (plus notes), I think it offers a good statement of the issue. It is vague about solutions, but that may be inevitable for this type of document. The question is what should happen next.
One rule-of-thumb is that legislatures won’t act on demands (let alone friendly suggestions) unless someone asks them to adopt specific legislation. In general, legislators lack the time, expertise, and degrees of freedom necessary to develop responses to the huge range of issues that come before them.
This passage from the brief is an example of a first step, but it won’t generate legislation without a lot more elaboration:
Policymakers confronting this range of risks face complex challenges. AI law and policy thus should incorporate end-to-end governance approaches that address risks comprehensively and “by design.” Specifically, they must address how to govern the multiphase character of GenAI systems and the foundation models used to construct them. For instance, liability and accountability for lawfully acquiring and using initial training data should be a focus of regulations tailored to the FM training phase.
The last quoted sentence begins to move in the right direction, but which policymakers should change which laws about which kinds of liability for whom?
The brief repeatedly calls on “policymakers” to act. I am guessing the authors mean governmental policymakers: legislators, regulators, and judges. Indeed, governmental action is warranted. But governments are best seen as complex assemblages of institutions and actors that are in the midst of other social processes, not as the prime movers. For instance, each legislator is influenced by a different set of constituents, donors, movements, and information. If a whole legislature manages to pass a law (which requires coordination), the new legislation will affect constituents, but only to a limited extent. And the degree to which the law is effective will depend on the behavior of many other actors inside of government who are responsible for implementation and enforcement and who have interests of their own.
This means that “the government” is not a potential target for demands: specific governmental actors are. And they are not always the most promising targets, because sometimes they are highly constrained by other parties.
In turn, the ACM is a complex entity–reputed to be quite decentralized and democratic. If I were an ACM member, I would ask: What should policymakers do about AI? But that would only be one question. I would also ask: What should the ACM do to influence various policymakers and other leaders, institutions, and the public? What should my committee or subgroup within ACM do to influence the ACM? And: which groups should I be part of?
In advocating a role for the ACM, it would be worth canvassing its assets: 110,000 expert members who are employed in industry, academia, and governments; 76 years of work so far; structures for studying issues and taking action. It would also be worth canvassing deficits. For instance, the ACM may not have deep expertise on some matters, such as politics, culture, social ethics, and economics. And it may lack credibility with the diverse grassroots constituencies and interest-groups that should be considered and consulted. Thus an additional question is: Who should be working on the social impact of AI, and how should these activists be configured?
I welcome the brief by David Leslie and Francesca Rossi and wouldn’t expect a three-page document to accomplish more than it does. But I hope it is just a start.
In “Large Language Model Soft Ideologization via AI-Self-Consciousness,” Xiaotian Zhou, Qian Wang, Xiaofeng Wang, Haixu Tang, and Xiaozhong Liu use ChatGPT to identify the signature of “three distinct and influential ideologies: “’Trumplism’ (entwined with US politics), ‘BLM (Black Lives Matter)’ (a prominent social movement), and ‘China-US harmonious co-existence is of great significance’ (propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party).” They unpack each of these ideologies as a connected network of thousands of specific topics, each one having a positive or negative valence. For instance, someone who endorses the Chinese government’s line may mention US-China relationships and the Nixon-Mao summit as a pair of linked positive ideas.
The authors raise the concern that this method would be a cheap way to predict the ideological leanings of millions of individuals, whether or not they choose to express their core ideas. A government or company that wanted to keep an eye on potential opponents wouldn’t have to search social media for explicit references to their issues of concern. It could infer an oppositional stance from the pattern of topics that the individuals choose to mention.
I saw this article because the authors cite my piece, “Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas,” Journal of Political Ideologies (2022): 1-28. (Google Scholar notified me of the reference.) Along with many others, I am developing methods for analyzing people’s political views as belief-networks.
I have a benign motivation: I take seriously how people explicitly articulate and connect their own ideas and seek to reveal the highly heterogeneous ways that we reason. I am critical of methods that reduce people’s views to widely shared, unconscious psychological factors.
However, I can see that a similar method could be exploited to identify individuals as targets for surveillance and discrimination. Whereas I am interested in the whole of an individual’s stated belief-network, a powerful government or company might use the same data to infer whether a person would endorse an idea that it finds threatening, such as support for unions or affinity for a foreign country. If the individual chose to keep that particular idea private, the company or government could still infer it and take punitive action.
I’m pretty confident that my technical acumen is so limited that I will never contribute to effective monitoring. If I have anything to contribute, it’s in the domain of political theory. But this is something–yet another thing–to worry about.
Although a group of like-minded people can be precise and intellectually rigorous, the combination of consensus plus rigor is relatively rare. When we disagree fundamentally, we face more pressure to define our terms and specify our assumptions, predictions, generalizations, and other aspects of our mental models.
For instance, I often find myself in conversations in which almost everyone shares a general distaste for what they call “capitalism” and wants to blame it for specific problems. Capitalism can mean a combination of: commodification (treating categories of things as exchangeable), property rights, market exchanges, debt, inheritance, financial instruments, capital markets, incorporated entities, state enforcement of certain kinds of contracts, general-purpose business corporations, bureaucratic corporations, professions such as law and accounting, economies in which the state sector is relatively small, international trade and foreign direct investment, and norms such as materialism, competition, or individualism (or conformity and subservience). Most of these components are matters of degree; for instance, a society can have a smaller or larger capital market. The various components can go together–and some thoughtful people see them as closely interconnected–but it is also possible for them to come apart. For instance, there have been many market economies without capital markets.
If capitalism is responsible for bad (or good) outcomes, we should be able to say which components are relevant and why. In a room full of people who dislike capitalism, it is often possible and tempting to avoid such specificity.
I’ve written before against the idea of viewpoint diversity, because I think that is the wrong way to conceptualize and defend pluralism. A better way may be to see disagreement as an antidote to clichés.
In Nov. 2021, I visited Weimar, in the eastern German state of Thuringia, with a group of German and US-based civic educators who traveled together in both countries as we intensively discussed democratic education. This was possible thanks to the wonderful Transatlantic Exchange of Civic Educators (TECE), organized by the Arbeitskreis deutscher Bildungstätten (AdB) with Tisch College at Tufts.
One evening sticks in my mind and almost haunts me. It was a quiet and cold weekday evening in the lovely old city of Goethe–after dark, and after the shops had closed for the night. COVID was still quite prevalent. Representatives of a local project called Decolonize Weimar led us on a tour. At various stops around town, the guides basically read to us the text that you can find on their website, translated into English. These substantial narratives explain, for example, about a movie theater that previously stood at Marktstrasse 20 (now long gone), in which, during the 1920s, “ethnographic” documentaries were sometimes shown that presented African people in racist terms.
We stood in a half circle at each location, listening for considerable periods while a young faculty member or students read. Everyone was casually dressed, bundled up, in masks. Although we saw virtually no one else on the streets, police cars passed slowly on several occasions. Apparently, there was a present threat of skinhead or right-wing violence that the police were monitoring. They must have realized that we were not right-wingers (in the German context), because we were a multiracial group. But it was a bit eerie to be watched by the authorities.
To be honest, I don’t know whether the content of the talks was perfectly appropriate for the audience. I am not sure how many of us knew the standard story that our guides sought to criticize and complicate.
During the first centuries of European imperialism, Weimar was an almost autonomous little principality that had no colonies of its own and that was most famous for a cultural efflorescence that is usually categorized as “the Enlightenment” and is associated with cosmopolitan and humanistic values. Later, a unified Germany seized colonies in Africa and the Pacific that were cruel and exploitative but much shorter-lived (1884-1918) than the empires of the Atlantic European powers. For most people, the word “Weimar” connotes a humane tradition that was deliberately destroyed by the Nazis, who overthrew the Republic unofficially named for that city and established Buchenwald nearby. Many would credit Weimar with liberal and democratic values. The most evident evil would be antisemitism.
The evidence that we heard challenged these assumptions by showing that Weimar belonged to European markets and cultures that were complicit in global colonialism during the 17th and 18th centuries, and then German’s overseas empire was popular and resonant in the town. When someone asked about antisemitism and the Holocaust, our guide actually deferred the question on the ground that she was not a specialist in those topics. She wanted to keep the focus on colonialism and racism.
Uncovering this history is good, relevant, and important work. I have nothing but respect for it. It is part of an international conversation and a long and complicated process of Germans coming to terms with their own past, as Americans also must. Something about the earnestness of the evening, the empirical detail and academic rigor, the cold air, the silent but attentive masked listeners, and the quiet streets lingers for me.
