The New York Review of Books

Aschinger

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:52:26 +0000

This is the third in a series of excerpts from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, which have been translated into English for the first time by Susan Bernofsky, and just published in a new edition by New York Review Classics. The other pieces in the series can be found here and here. —The Editors

Rudolf Schlichter, Damenkneipe (Ladies' Dive) (1923)

A lager please! The tap man’s known me for ages. I gaze at the filled glass a moment, take it by the handle with two fingers, and casually carry it to one of the round tables supplied with forks, knives, rolls, vinegar, and oil. I place the sweating glass in an orderly fashion upon the felt coaster and consider whether or not to fetch myself something to eat. This food-thought propels me to the blue-and-white-striped cold-cuts damsel. I have this lady serve me a plate of assorted open-face sandwiches and, thus enriched, trot rather indolently back to my seat. Neither fork nor knife do I use, just the mustard spoon, with which I paint my sandwiches brown before inserting them so cozily into my mouth that it is perhaps tranquility itself to witness this.

Another lager please! At Aschinger, you quickly adopt a familiar food-and-drink tone of voice; after a certain amount of time there, a person can’t help talking just like Wassmann at the Deutsches Theater. Once you have your fist around your second or third glass of beer, you’re generally driven to engage in all manner of observations. It is imperative to note with precision how the Berliners eat. They stand up as they do so, but take their own sweet time about it. It’s a myth that in Berlin people only bustle, whizz, and trot about. People here have a nearly comical understanding of how to let time flow by; after all, they’re only human. It’s a sincere pleasure to watch people fishing for sausage-laden rolls and Italian salads. The payment is extracted mostly from vest pockets, almost always just a matter of small change.

Now I’ve rolled myself a cigarette, which I light at the gas flame beneath its green glass shield. How well I know it, this glass, and the brass chain to pull on. Famished and satiated individuals are constantly swarming in and out. The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the mercantile air, each generally with a briefcase beneath his arm, a letter in his pocket, an assignment in his brain, firm plans in his skull, and in his open palm a watch that says the time has come. In the round tower at the center of the room reigns a young queen, the sovereign of the sausages and potato salad—she’s a bit bored up there in her quiver-like surrounds. An elegant lady enters and with two fingers skewers a roll spread with caviar; at once I bring myself to her notice, but in such a way as if being noticed were of no concern to me at all.

Meanwhile I’ve found time to lay hands on another beer. The elegant lady is somewhat hesitant to bite into the caviar marvel; of course I immediately assume it to be on my account and none other that she is no longer fully in control of her masticatory senses. Delusions are so easy and so agreeable. Outside on the square is a racket no one really hears: a tumult of carriages, people, automobiles, newspaper hawkers, electric trams, handcarts, and bicycles that no one ever really sees either. It’s almost unseemly to think of wanting to hear and see all these things, you’re not new in town. The elegantly curved bodice that was just nibbling bread now quits the Aschinger. How much longer am I planning on sitting here anyhow? The tap boys are enjoying a calm moment, but not for long, for here they come rolling in again from out-of-doors to throw themselves thirstily upon the bubbling spring.

Eaters observe others who are similarly working their jaws. While one person’s mouth is full, his eyes can simultaneously behold a neighbor occupied with popping it in. And they don’t even laugh; even I don’t. Since arriving in Berlin, I’ve lost the habit of finding humanity laughable. At this point, by the way, I myself request another edible wonder: a plank of bread bearing a sleeping sardine upon a bedsheet of butter, so enchanting a vision that I toss the whole spectacle down my open revolving stage of a gullet. Is such a thing laughable? By no means. Well, then. What isn’t laughable in me cannot be any more so in others, since it’s our duty to esteem others more highly than ourselves no matter what, a worldview splendidly in keeping with the earnestness with which I now contemplate the abrupt demise of my sardine pallet.

A few of the people near me are conversing as they eat. The earnestness with which they do so is appealing. As long as you’re undertaking to do something, you might as well set about it matter-of-factly and with dignity. Dignity and self-confidence have a comforting effect, at least on me they do, and this is why I so like standing around in one of our local Aschingers where people drink, eat, talk, and think all at the same time. How many business ventures were dreamed up here? And best of all: You can remain standing here for hours on end, no one minds, and not one of all the people coming and going will give it a second thought. Anyone who takes pleasure in modesty will get on well here, he can live, no one’s stopping him. Anyone who does not insist on particularly heartfelt shows of warmth can still have a heart here, he is allowed that much.

1907

—translated by Susan Bernofsky

How Democracy Can Save Europe

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:39:07 +0000

Timothy Snyder

Carl De Keyzer/Magnum Photos

European parliament, Strasbourg, 2005

This is the sixth in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

The European crisis, which we process from headline to headline as a matter of currencies and bailouts, is really a test of large-scale democratic capitalism. The disintegration of the Eurozone would be nearly as disastrous for the US as it would be for Europe; the result would almost certainly be a global financial meltdown that will make the events of 2008 look like, well, a tea party. But it is not only a matter of distant economic events that might have consequences for the US. The deeper issue is whether institutions of continent-wide democracy, European or American, can keep pace with the twin threats of global financial instability and national populism.

Some of the EU’s fundamental problems are very much like our own: the Greek crisis begins with rich people not paying taxes, hardly an unfamiliar situation. Just as Americans tend to see the federal government as an agent of distant interests, so too Europeans are coming to see Brussels as the trojan horse of a corrosive globalization. As with the US government’s approach to failing banks and a slumping economy, the attempts by European leaders to resolve the euro crisis raise some crucial political questions: Who gets to allocate wealth in times of economic difficulty? Who should be bailed out, and why? Is the austerity reflex sound economic reasoning or inertial politics? And how can such decisions, which affect hundreds of millions of people, be made democratically?

Two outstanding European thinkers are trying to get to grips with such questions. For much of the past twenty years, the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has been engaged with the internal tensions within and between liberalism and democracy. In the opposite corner of Europe, the prolific British historian Brendan Simms came to politics as an observer of failure of the EU to intervene in the Balkans. Krastev is a piercing though always sympathetic critic, whereas Simms is conservative idealist. His starting point is not the post-Communist experience of democracy, as with Krastev, but rather the long British-American experience of union and constitution.

In an article that will soon be published in The American Interest, Krastev argues that the European financial crisis is but a symptom of a deeper malaise of European political culture. Europe is troubled, he says, by insecure majorities, the national populations of EU member-states who believe themselves to be threatened both by globalization in the streets (immigration) and globalization in the law (Brussels). As Krastev puts it, national governments have politics but no policy, since important decisions are made by the EU; the EU has policy but no politics, since decisions are not made by elected representatives. Sovereignty becomes a symbol: precisely because national politicians have yielded authority to the EU, they cling to the identity and comfort provided by traditional national states. This is true not just of small and weak states, but also of the major European powers, such as Germany.

European integration has always depended upon a certain kind of historical brinksmanship. Each major step forward has contained the seeds of a future problem, which can only be solved at some future point by another step. Krastev likens this gradualist approach to crossing a wild river by jumping from rock to rock, with the next rock only becoming visible after each jump. But what, he asks, if the rocks only go halfway across the river? The failure of the common currency was not only predictable but predicted. Everyone knew that something like the situation now faced by Greece would happen at some point. Everyone knew that a unified monetary policy (the interest rates set by the European Central Bank) without a unified fiscal policy (the ability of some recognized central authority to spend more money to revive the economy) could not endure. The hope was that a debt crisis, when it came, would by necessity produce a unified fiscal policy. But this seems to be the rock that does not exist. All that can be seen ahead of us now is the roaring river.

This is because fiscal policy is at the very core of a democratic system, and the EU is not yet democratic. People wish to know that they are paying taxes to a government they voted into office, with the institutions and powers that go with that task (a treasury, an elected executive, an accountable legislature); and that these revenues are then being spent on themselves and on people with whom they identify and share a political community. But, despite recent increases in the authority of the European Parliament, the EU does not have an elected executive that can make fiscal decisions, nor a treasury that might carry out such policy.

At the moment the EU is veering between two possible responses to the crisis, each of which forces fiscal policy away from the populations of its member states. Either European leaders will find some stopgap to further centralize revenue and expenditure, without consulting their citizens. This might alleviate the crisis in the short term, but will eventually cause the populations of the wealthier members to rebel, as indeed the Germans and Finns already seem to be doing. Or, more likely, the EU will continue to edge towards a system in which a fiscally sound German-Polish-Baltic-Scandinavian core dictates to a more shaky periphery, which will likely bring popular rebellions there. At the moment Greek voters can change the parties who rule them, but cannot change fiscal policies. These are decided in Berlin. Thus we have the emergence of pantomime republics.

What the EU states should be doing instead, as Simms maintains in a recent essay for Chatham House, is exploiting the crisis to take the bold step of creating a European democracy that would function as a great power. Historically, Simms argues, successful political unions among states are established not in good times but in bad, by people conscious of earlier failed attempts to build them and determined to do better next time. He cites the old Holy Roman Empire and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as examples of dysfunctional entities with weak central institutions and odd voting laws from which the American Founding Fathers learned when they designed their Constitution. Europe is now experiencing—if only Europeans would realize it!—the same sort of salutary shock that the Founders confronted in the late eighteenth century: an unregulated relationship between the parts and the whole, while the enemies are drawing near (Simms has in mind a resurgent Russia, a global China, and a nuclear Iran).

Thus Simms concludes that the solution must be a new Constitutional Convention, whose members are invested with the authority to begin again from the foundations and produce a lapidary statement of basic institutions and rights—rather than the ponderous EU treaties Europeans tend to vote down when given the chance in national referendums. Simms is likely right that gradualism has played itself out; a new beginning may be the only way forward. But it is unclear how to get from a group of democracies to one democracy, especially when the citizens of those democracies do not know what is in it for them. Simms imagines a new “Party of Democratic Union” that will win future elections, control the European Parliament, and thus force action from the ground up. But for all the reasons Krastev gives, the chances of this are slim.

A more plausible alternative is to encourage the European elites to propose a new constitution themselves. If not likely, such an approach is at least possible. The creativity will have to begin in Berlin, since at this point only Germany is important enough within the EU for its own national elites to double as European elites. This is not a part German leaders have embraced. In the current crisis Prime Minister Angela Merkel has played a brilliant tactical game, allowing the problems of others to fester to the point where only Germany can determine the solution. This narrow approach indulges German voters in the dangerous fantasy that European imitation of German austerity would solve the problem.

Germans are now behaving a bit in European politics as red staters do in American politics: they profit from the larger union they think they want to undermine. The German boom of the last decade depends precisely on the euro and the market it provides for German exports in countries such as Greece, and on the fact that the euro in international markets is likely cheaper than any German currency would be. Merkel’s approach, consistently pursued, will emphasize the symbolic character of non-German sovereignty by producing more pantomime republics. Eventually, domestic politics in Germany and on the European periphery would undo the European system that has given Germany such political and economic power.

As the Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski noted in an impressive speech in November, Europe cannot do without German leadership. And this means nothing more dramatic than realizing that, without a major political reform of the EU, Germany will find itself with far less world power and far less reach into European and global export markets. What might such a constitution look like? Symbolic sovereignty and pantomime republics would be replaced by a dual democracy, with executive and parliamentary authority and revenue collection located at two distinct points, the European capital and the national capitals. A convention of European elites would have to decide, and set down in a brief constitution, which sorts of authority, and how much taxation power, would be located in each. The new arrangement would have to endorse a clear “giveaway-takeaway” mechanism, so that voters would know that they cannot be taxed for the same policy at both levels of government.

Just where those lines would be drawn would have to be decided by Europeans (although I agree with Simms that European solidarity without a European army will be difficult). The arrangement would have to be endorsed, country by country, in a referendum. Since it would be a new beginning rather than just another treaty, however, it would have to start with Berlin. The German lead would have to be followed by other countries that are fiscally sound and growing, which at this moment means a new core around the Baltic Sea. Countries that vote it down would simply be left out, with the option of revoting later, rather than being allowed to torpedo the entire project (as happened with the earlier attempt at a European constitutional treaty in 2004-2005). Governments would have to inform voters that they would not be giving away sovereignty, but endorsing sovereignty at two levels, confirming national power at home while gaining democracy at a higher level.

Europe cannot simply turn around, as Americans sometimes imagine, and hop backward rock by rock to the other shore of the river, becoming again a collection of nation-states That was where this journey began, let’s remember, with the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust. The whole purpose of European integration was to make such events impossible, a goal in recent decades emphasized by the growing demilitarization of Europe itself and the Europe-wide commemoration of the tragedy of Europe’s Jews. There is no way back, only a way forward: either with or without a constitution.

But a viable constitution is unlikely to emerge from either a democratic process or from the blueprints of analysts, however brilliant, from European peripheries such as Bulgaria and Britain. There will have to be a German who will pick through their ideas and those of many others, and rally German elites toward a European solution. For Americans this is no mere spectator sport: the consequences of a European failure will reach us soon enough. If the Europeans cannot get the balance between global finance and domestic politics right, that is bad news for democratic capitalism around the world.

In the Electric Tram

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:00:39 +0000

Robert Walser

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tram and Rail, 1914

This is the second in a series of excerpts from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, which have been translated into English for the first time by Susan Bernofsky, and just published in a new edition by New York Review Classics. The first excerpt can be found here. —The Editors

Riding the “electric” is an inexpensive pleasure. When the car arrives, you climb aboard, possibly after first politely ceding the right of way to an imposing gentlewoman, and then the car continues on. At once you notice that you have a rather musical disposition. The most delicate melodies are parading through your head. In no time you’ve elevated yourself to the position of a leading conductor or even composer. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.

Meanwhile you have rolled yourself a cigarette, say, and inserted it with great care between your well-practiced lips. With such an apparatus in your mouth, it is impossible to feel utterly without cheer, even if your soul happens to be torn in twain by sufferings. But is this the case? Most certainly not. Just wanted to give a quick description of the magic that a smoking white object of this sort is capable of working, year in and year out, on the human psyche. And what next?

Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the “electric.”

People do, after all, tend to get somewhat bored on such trips, which often require twenty or thirty minutes or even more, and what do you do to provide yourself with some modicum of entertainment? You look straight ahead. To show by one’s gaze and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with a quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn’t that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead.

It is prohibited for the conductor to converse with the esteemed passengers. But what if prohibitions are sidestepped, laws violated, admonitions of so refined and humane a nature disregarded? This happens fairly often. Chatting with the conductor offers prospects of the most charming recreation, and I am particularly adept at seizing opportunities to engage in the most amusing and profitable conversations with this tramway employee. It pays to ignore certain regulations, and summoning one’s powers to render uniforms loquacious helps create a convivial mood.

From time to time you do nonetheless look straight ahead again. After completing this straightforward exercise, you may permit your eyes a modest excursion. Your gaze sweeps through the interior of the car, crossing fat, drooping mustaches, the face of a weary, elderly woman, a pair of youthfully mischievous eyes belonging to a girl, until you’ve had your fill of these studies in the quotidian and gradually begin to observe your own footgear, which could use proper mending. And always new stations are arriving, new streets, and the journey takes you past squares and bridges, past the war ministry and the department store, and all this while it is continuing to rain, and you continue to behave as if you were a tad bored, and you continue to find this conduct the most suitable.

But it might also be that while you were riding along like that, you heard or saw something beautiful, gay, or sad, something you will never forget.

1908

—translated by Susan Bernofsky

Berlin and the Artist

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:21:13 +0000

Robert Walser

Madrid, Fundacíon Collecíon Thyssen-Bornemisza

George Grosz: Metropolis, 1916-1917

Over the next few days, we will be running several excerpts from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, which have been translated into English for the first time by Susan Bernofsky, and just published in a new edition by New York Review Classics. Walser arrived in Berlin from Switzerland in 1905 and wrote hundreds of short reflections about the city’s charms. As Bernofsky writes in her introduction, “The chirpy delight some of his narrators take in the city’s hum and bustle also reflects his own status as an outsider who enjoys blending in with the crowd.” The story that follows is drawn from a longer piece. —The Editors

A city like Berlin is an ill-mannered, impertinent, intelligent scoundrel, constantly affirming the things that suit him and tossing aside everything he tires of. Here in the big city you can definitely feel the waves of intellect washing over the life of Berlin society like a sort of bath. An artist here has no choice but to pay attention. Elsewhere he is permitted to stop up his ears and sink into willful ignorance. Here this is not allowed. Rather, he must constantly pull himself together as a human being, and this compulsion encircling him redounds to his advantage. But there are yet other things as well.

Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each dawning day brings with it a new, agreeably disagreeable attack on complacency, and this does the general sense of indolence good. An artist possesses, much like a child, an inborn propensity for beautiful, noble sluggardizing. Well, this slug-a-beddishness, this kingdom, is constantly being buffeted by fresh storm-winds of inspiration. The refined, silent creature is suddenly blustered full of something coarse, loud, and unrefined. There is an incessant blurring together of various things, and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding.

The excellent gentleman from the provinces, however, should by no means imagine that here in the city there are not lonelinesses as well. The metropolis contains lonelinesses of the most frightful sort, and anyone who wishes to sample this exquisite dish can eat his fill of it here. He can experience what it means to live in deserts and wastes. The metropolitan artist has no dearth of opportunities to see and speak to no one at all. All he has to do is make himself unpopular among certain arbiters of taste or else consistently fixate on failures, and in no time he’ll have sunk into the most splendid, most blossoming of abandonments.

The artist who is crowned with success lives in the metropolis as if in an enchanting Oriental dream. He hastens from one elegant household to the affluent next, sits down unhesitatingly at the opulently laden dining tables, and while chewing and slurping provides the entertainment. He passes his days in a virtual state of intoxication. And his talent? Does an artist such as this neglect his talent? What a question! As if one might cast off one’s gifts without so much as a by-your-leave. On the contrary. Talent unconsciously grows stronger when one throws oneself into life. You mustn’t be constantly tending and coddling it like a sickly something. It shrivels up when it’s too timidly cared for.

The artistic individual is nonetheless permitted to pace up and down, like a tiger, in his cave of artistic creation, mad with desire and worry over achieving some output of beauty. As no one sees this, there is no one to hold it against him. In company, he should be as breezy, affable, and charming as he can manage, neither too self-important nor too unimportant either. One thing he must never forget: he is all but required to pay court to beautiful, wealthy women at least a little.

After approximately five or six years have passed, the artist—even if he comes from peasant stock—will feel at home in the metropolis. His parents would appear to have lived and given birth to him here. He feels indebted, bound, and beholden to this strange rattling, clattering racket. All the scurrying and fluttering about now seem to him a sort of nebulous, beloved maternal figure. He no longer thinks of ever leaving again. Whether things go well with him or poorly, whether he comes down in the world or flourishes, no matter, it “has” him, he is forever under its spell, and it would be impossible for him to bid this magnificent restlessness adieu.

—translated by Susan Bernofsky

Willard Mitt Romney