On the Other Side of the Berlin Wall
East Germany and the fall
It was a colleague, Jonathan Bach, who discovered that Trebor Scholz and I, both currently associate professors at the New School, happened to be serving in the German military 25 years ago — but on opposite sides of the wall! As such, he brought us together for the Enter Ghost Symposium, giving us an opportunity to reflect on our experiences in …
Hannah and Me: Understanding Politics in Dark Times
Contrary to the suggestion of my informal title, I did not study with Hannah Arendt, nor were we ever colleagues, although I missed both experiences only by a bit. I was a graduate student in the early 1970s in one of the universities where she last taught, the University of Chicago, and my first and only long term position, at the New School for Social Research, was her primary American academic home.
An Uncanny Era of Post-revolution (1989-2014)
Today’s post comes to us via the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies blog. -J.G.
On November 10, 2014, TCDS, partnering with the Polish Cultural Institute, hosted An Uncanny Era of Post-revolution (1989-2014) at The New School. Second in the series of events marking the 25th anniversary of the dismantling of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, An Uncanny Era was the launch of two books and a three-way discussion between Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies at NSSR, who presented her new book An Uncanny Era: Conversations between Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik; Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton University, editor of a recent collection of Michnik’s essays on the era, The Trouble with History; and Adam Michnik…
The 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall
At the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall I noticed fear.
I did not find myself in Angela Merkel’s words who stated that “I had to wait 35 years for that feeling of liberty.”
I hear nervousness in The New York Times article that covers the implosion of the Socialist Republic through an exodus-misery frame. What are they afraid of? Why can’t they acknowledge that the contemporary U.S. or Germany can learn a thing or two from that past? The German Democratic Republic, the former East Germany, was hardly a quixotic place that I wish to reinstate, but I notice the willful erasure of any and all achievements of that short-lived social experiment; …
Climate Change and the New Synthesis
Is green the new red?
I completed my undergraduate studies at a small liberal arts college literally in the middle of a field somewhere between the bustling urban center of Cleveland and the depressed industrial ruins of my hometown, Youngstown. My alma mater was surrounded by acres of farmland, bodies of water, Amish communities, and the occasional rural-suburban housing development. Nothing much caught my eye during my commute except for the treacherous dips and twists along the sparsely populated main road I followed, which constantly threatened to re-route my aging Honda Civic into a tractor-dug ditch or a clutch of untouched trees.
Until one day, just crossing out of the corona of campus into the deep space of rural Ohio, I noticed a sign in a yard. “Green is the New Red,” it proclaimed, illustrated by a picture of a pleasantly green pine tree juxtaposed with an ominously red hammer and sickle. …