German Conference Highlights Global Issues
by Sebastian Litta on March 10, 2010 in HKS News, News
From East German resistance to defense of the arts, the Harvard German conference held from Feb. 19-20 offered a unique chance for students to think about global challenges of the coming decade with new perspectives.
While the conference was originally founded to make use of Harvard’s vast amount of intellectual resources to discuss solutions to German policy challenges, Lukas said he and his fellow organizers strived to make the 2010 conference “relevant not only to Germans studying across the US but to students from all over the world united here at Harvard.”
This combination of global issues and German approaches was visible in a panel organized by Kathrin Bimesdörfer and Joe Aylor, MPP2s, on the lessons of Berlin 1989. They moved beyond just having German politicians recount their role in the peaceful revolution by inviting Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, an Iranian-American journalist whose blog follows current events in Iran.
Vera Lengsfeld, one of the leading figures of the East German resistance, mostly tried to canonize the role of civil society activists in the Fall of the Wall. Charles Maier from Harvard’s history department embedded 1989 in the context of global events. Golnoush Niknejad, meanwhile, focused mainly on Iran. The discussion ended with a somewhat dissatisfying sense that all revolutions are different, but it offered one common lesson: For any peaceful revolution to be successful, it needs support from the outside.
Other panels covered the situation in Afghanistan, the role of innovation, the future of science and research, the design of health care systems, and renewable energy. The German Ambassador to the United States outlined ten priorities on the transatlantic agenda, and the former head of McKinsey Germany discussed various global challenges for the next decade. Claus Kleber, Germany’s Tom Brokaw, gave a vibrant dinner speech on Friday, talking about misunderstandings between Germany and the US. He was thanked with a Harvard tie, which he wore a week later during his daily news broadcast.
Saturday night brought a bit of Berlin club life into Cambridge. A German DJ and fine electronic music turned the Faculty Club into a bizarre version of a Berlin-Mitte underground lounge. And if you considered the time zone difference, ending the party at 1 am was actually 7 am in Berlin, adding to the realism.
Before the party, Kent Nagano, conductor and artistic director of the Bavarian State Opera, and Jürgen Partenheimer, one of Germany’s leading visual artists, discussed the relationship between “the artist and the state,” highlighting the many differences between the state-funded German model and the philanthropic model in the U.S. For Christopher Vorwerk, a German research fellow from Yale, this was the best part of the conference. “It gave an insight on how a global language such as visual art or music is faced with different structures of support not only on both sides of the Atlantic but also in other countries [like] China.”
Maestro Nagano gave an elaborate answer defending the arts, but left it to policymakers to decide how to prioritize arts funding over reducing poverty, improving education or providing health care. For Caroline Blanch, a first-year MPP from Australia, the arts talk was an unexpected feature of the conference. “Even though I’d come to hear about the hard-edged realities of technological and commercial innovation, I thought that Kent Nagano’s eloquent and deeply heartfelt reflections on the arts were the highlight of the day. At the Kennedy School we are so busy trying to solve problems that I think we sometimes forget there are people out there who genuinely live for art for art’s sake.”
Lukas Streiff and his co-organizers are now turning to other tasks, including their PAEs, but Lukas is already thinking ahead: “Hopefully the word will spread that the German Conference features an innovative program and great speakers so that even more of our friends here at Harvard will join us next year.”
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