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.”
20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by Sebastian Litta on November 11, 2009 in Opinion
I was born in a country that no longer exists: East Germany, that tiny socialist country where people wore grey clothes and worked in grey factories producing grey widgets that other grey people did not want to buy. But it was also a country where all of these grey people had colorful dreams of a future where they would be able to live without the fear of being imprisoned for listening to the wrong music, where they could vote for different parties and travel abroad.
Still, in January 1989, our grey-clothed leaders announced that the wall around our country would last for at least another 40 years. They were wrong. Less than a year later, on November 9, 1989, during a turbulent time of mass protest against the hated regime, a press conference changed the world. Socialist party official Günter Schabowski announced an ease of travel restrictions. When a journalist asked when this would take effect, Schabowski had no answer and simply remarked, “I assume it’s now.” Within hours, if not minutes, East Germans flocked to the border checkpoints and, before midnight, the specter of Communism was over.
How will Germany commemorate this event? While there are many success stories to be told, the general picture is less optimistic. Compared to other former socialist peoples, East Germans certainly enjoy a much higher standard of living now. Also, Germany is ruled by Angela Merkel who grew up in the East. And, more importantly, Michael Ballack, captain of the German National Soccer Team, is an Ossi – or East German – too.
However, there is no CEO of any major German company coming from the East. Most top politicians are from the West; even many governors in the East German Länder used to be Westerners. Merkel did not include a single Ossi in her new cabinet. But it is not just the lack of East Germans in the top echelons of German society that cause many people to be skeptical about the future. Other developments will likely be on the minds of many East Germans during the upcoming celebrations.
First, there are huge demographic problems: by 2020, East Germany will lose another 10 – 15 percent of its population given the declining fertility rates coupled with many young East German women migrating to the West in search of work.
Second, there are too few jobs to be found not just for women but for all East Germans. With the exception of a few highly subsidized technology companies, there are no major employers in East Germany. Unemployment is high, in some regions reaching 25 percent.
Third, this dire economic situation is very different from the Wirtschaftswunder times of the 1950s which allowed West Germans to appreciate democracy because of Coca Cola and steadily rising incomes. Many East Germans question the benefits of democracy. In a recent election in my home state of Brandenburg, the post-communist party earned almost a third of all votes.
Even more stunning was that the main candidate of the party was Kerstin Kaiser, who had worked for the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police that commanded a network of several hundred thousand people that spied on colleagues, classmates (as in the case of Kaiser), neighbors, or even parents or spouses. People are beginning to forget that East Germany was once a dictatorship; nostalgia is winning the subtle war against democracy.
Finally, history could not resist playing a little trick by allowing East Germans to have stormed the wall on November 9 of all days! This day is not only the day when Germany finally became a republic after World War I in 1918 but also the day when Nazis and their many supporters destroyed Jewish synagogues and shops in 1938. This makes November 9 an unlikely day for cheerful celebration.
In addition, Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided to make October 3 – the day in 1990 when reunification documents were signed in a rather sober ceremony – the new national holiday. Hence, this November 9 is likely to be a strange holiday. The heroes of 1989 are almost forgotten. And Germans are about to forget the tremendous achievements that this peaceful revolution has brought.
