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Remembering Berlin
and looking at ourselves

Image courtesy Drawn and Quarterly Pub.

Free to Read, Reading for Free?

AHLEUCHATISTAS:
The Same and The Other

Cover of the new Aleuchatistas CD by Courtney Chappell

GET YOUR WAR ON, by David Rees

 

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Remembering Berlin
and looking at ourselves

By Nicholas Holt

Ballyvaughan, Ireland, Sept. 14 (AGR)-- Historical fiction can allow insight into the past in a way that touches the reader in a more penetrating fashion that straight history ever can. Jason Lutes’s Berlin, which observes the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis is a fascinating work, both in its detailed look at the historic progression of one of the most important cities in the world, as well as his de Lillo-like ability to detail the lives (both internal and external) of dozens of characters, and also like de Lillo to make the real people of history exist as seamlessly in his narrative as those of his own creation. What makes Berlin recommended reading for activists and the socially aware is that the moment of history targeted in Lutes’s ongoing epic depicts — the rise of a demagogic, anti-Enlightenment, expansionist empire whose claim to authority rests on a religious/nationalist mythology — poses disconcerting similarities to our own. Lutes took time from completing Berlin chapter 11 to be interviewed by email.

AGR: Why were you drawn to Weimar Germany as a subject for such long term project as Berlin?

JL: The original impulse was just that: an impulse. In 1994 I was sitting on the can reading a magazine when I came across an ad for a book called Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin. I didn’t know much about the Weimar Republic, but when I read the ad copy, I realized that that would be the subject of my next comics novel, and that it would be long. I ordered the book, but before I even received it I had settled on the structure of 24 chapters/issues of 24 pages each.

In retrospect, and having worked on it for close to ten years now, I know now that my interest in the subject has to do with trying to get outside of myself, to understand other people and cultures, to come to grips with our own place in history. Looking at significant events of the 20th century, like World War I, World War II, or the Holocaust, and the circumstances that allowed them to occur, I’m trying to understand how human nature comes into play, on a small and large scale.

AGR: Although the similarities are in many ways superficial, more than one observer has compared this moment in US history to Weimar Germany, which makes the subject a particularly potent one for historical fiction. Do you see these parallels, and do they influence your work in any way?

JL : I do see the parallels, and part of my motivation for starting the project in the first place was to explore them. While I think it’s somewhat simplistic and reductive to make many direct comparisons between the current political climate and that of the Weimar Republic, I do think you can go deeper, into basic aspects of human nature, and find exactly the same forces at work in our world today. It’s pointless and counter-productive to equate George W. Bush with Hitler, but I find it useful to examine exactly where things like fear, greed, and hunger for power come into play, and to acknowledge that we all have the capacity to feel these things in some degree.

AGR: One of your two main characters, Kurt Severing, though fictional, writes for a newspaper that was actually published in Weimar Germany.

JL: Die Weltbuhne (The World Stage) was published out of Berlin starting in 1905 and continued on a weekly basis through 1933. It can be loosely described as a nonpartisan pacifist political journal, but what made it truly great in my eyes was the unwavering critical perspective of its second and definitive editor-in-chief, Carl von Ossietzky. Ossietzky recognized the dangers posed by all of the dominant political ideologies, and was as likely to point out the hypocrisy and ignorance of the Social Democrats as the Communists or the National Socialists. Due to articles he published that exposed state-approved military and paramilitary actions that were in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles, he served several terms in prison for libel and treason, but remained undeterred. The morning after the Reichstag Fire (Feb. 28, 1933), he was arrested a third time and imprisoned in concentration camps: first Sonnenburg, then Esterwegen. In 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his lifelong work for peace, but was not permitted to leave the camp to accept it. He died in Esterwegen in 1938.

AGR: Why use historical fiction as your medium, and not biography or more straight-forward history?

JL: I’m more of an artist than a scholar — my imagination is my primary creative tool. When I started doing research for the story, I began to see the city of Berlin itself as a character, and realized that I would be working a lot of my own feelings about the world through this story. It’s no coincidence that the two main characters are a writer and an artist, and that comics is a medium born of words and pictures. In a work of fiction, I’m able to explore things that interest me about that time and place in ways that a straightforward history or biography wouldn’t allow.

AGR: Could you explain your decision not to include the swastika in your art work?

JL: In the book, I’m trying to create a sense of what it may have been like to be in Berlin when the National Socialists were one relatively small political faction among many. Every faction had its symbol, and the swastika had limited cultural resonance — most people equated it with simple-minded street thuggery not unlike the hooliganism that accompanies soccer matches today. Scary to be sure, but on a very small scale. Since World War II and the Holocaust, the swastika has become one of the most heavily-charged symbols in the western world. I chose to remove it from the story because I didn’t want readers bringing in their associations to the symbol — I wanted them to see the events unfolding without the simplifying shadow of the swastika looming over them. Ironically, it’s such a powerful symbol that numerous people who have read the book swear to me that there are swastikas in it, because they’ve mentally inserted them on their own.

AGR: One of the most striking things about Berlin is the number of characters, and the close examination of each, even if they only appear for a single page. Your approach to these people is really unusual for an American author. The Nazis and the “good Germans” are most often depicted in American popular culture as Raiders of the Lost Arc type cartoon villains or eccentric psychopaths, but never regular folks. Americans refuse to regard the historical and ongoing crimes of their country -- whether against African slaves, the people of Vietnam, Middle Easterners, or, in perhaps the closest parallel to the attempted “Final Solution” — the genocide of American Indians — in the same category as the Nazis’.

JL: Fear creates a desire for control, and history has shown that human beings will employ every tool at their disposal to either instill fear or establish control. When influenced by strong cultural ideals like nationalism or free market capitalism, it seems to me that these twin motivations do damage on a tremendous scale. Cultural stereotyping is one of the easiest ways to establish control over a large group of people. I believe that as soon as we say that someone is different from us — as soon as we deny someone’s basic humanity and call them “different” or “evil” — we pave the road to our own corruption. It’s a cliche, to be sure, but we all have a darkness in us, and only by facing it do we stand any chance of transcending it.

In the case of the denial that a lot of Americans may voice when it comes to our own grim history, I think it’s easy to understand. People don’t want to think that they, or their President, or their country, has done anything wrong, because to do so would be to relinquish control. And they don’t want to relinquish control because they are afraid of their own capacity for both cruelty and empathy. To acknowledge that all people are equal would necessitate letting in a lot of pain, and unfortunately, most people are afraid of pain to the point of denying life itself — their own, or that of others.

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Free to Read, Reading for Free?

By Stefania Milan

Rome, Italy, Sept. 13 (IPS) -- It might be taken for granted in Europe that the imparting of knowledge through books is available to all, regardless of their social status. But in reality, however, it is a different story.

The European Union (EU) is requesting all member states to introduce a ticket system for book lending in public libraries to pay for the “use” of the intellectual property of authors and publishers.

But civil society is incensed and is reclaiming the “social right” of all citizens to have access to knowledge and culture.

“This is an attack against the welfare [of all citizens] and cultural institutions are the first to be affected,” the director of Cologno Monzese (Milan) public library Luca Ferrieri told IPS. “This is against the idea of public libraries supporting the access of all citizens to culture.”

The Directive on Rental and Lending Rights and on certain rights related to copyright (92/100) was approved in 1992 by the European Parliament. While most member states have enforced it since 1994, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, France and Luxemburg did not apply or applied the law only partially.

This January, the European Commission opened infringement procedures over public lending rights against the six countries. It is the normal follow-up of any communitarian law, when it is not implemented by members in national laws. Only Luxemburg implemented it, in April 2004.

In July, the European Commission sent “reasoned opinions” to the five “outlaw” states explaining why they should adapt national laws to the com-munitarian legislation. Also, the five nations were given an ultimatum.

If they did not implement the directive within two months, the Commission could take the states to the European Court of Justice.

There are 64,000 libraries in Europe, according to the biannual publication “European Book World.” Until 1992, they were considered a case of “fair use” of works protected by copyright -- where copyright agreements usually allow intellectual works to be used for aiding research, news reporting and teaching.

But publishers and authors are continuously asking for more protection of their works. Balancing the conflicting rights of owners of literary works, while civil society reclaims the privilege to culture seems to be a never-ending battle. And at this stage the former are winning.

’”The concept of lending rights is not wrong. The cultural industry is an industry like the others and must be protected,’’ said the president of the Italian Publishers Association Federico Motta.

“But the introduction of a ticket would have strong negative consequences on library users especially in South Europe, where there are the low reading rates and a weak library system,” Ferrieri said.

Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece have the lowest reading rates within the European Union. The readership rate per year in Italy is only 0.98 books per person, while in Spain it is 0.77. The median for the whole of the European Union is 4.93 books per person per year, according to Italian Libraries Association (AIB).

In contrast, the average British person reads eight books a year, while each Finn manages to get by 19 books a year.

Ironically, however, Spain and Italy are the countries with the strongest reactions to Directive 92/100.

Several citizens’ groups are running a campaign to “free up culture’’ by promoting actions and collecting signatures to ask their governments not to make people pay to read.

“Everybody understands that this ‘ticket on culture’ can cause even more damages to a reading culture already so weak,” Ferrieri said.

Another controversial issue is who should pay publishers and authors their due earnings.

Librarians are strongly opposed to a “user tax” or to lending rights paid on libraries or local authorities’ budgets.

They think that the state has mainly to assume this question,

“The state could pay the intellectual property rights,’’ Ferrieri said. “This is what happens to the local and national governments of Denmark, Island and Germany.’’

According to Ferrieri if the libraries should pay the tax, then there will be a cut in the budget to buy new books.

“The library of Cologno Monzese -- a little town with 47,000 inhabitants -- lends more than 150,000 books a year. This means we would pay $184,000 a year,’’ he said. “That is exactly double the budget we have to buy books.’’

In European countries like the Netherlands, $1.20 is paid for each book borrowed from public libraries. In Sweden it is 14 cents and Britain 73 cents.

“If the government introduces a ticket of between 60 cents to $1.80 a ‘big reader’ who reads between 50 to 100 books a year would have to pay a minimum of 30 to 180 dollars,’’ said Ferrieri. “This will penalize book-lovers with meagre resources and spells doom to the public library mission.’’

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