Lectures by Eisenman, Dietz, Steinmetz

In his lecture “Memory and Memorial,” current Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of ’58 Professor, architect and Cornell alum Peter Eisenman spoke to students in Sage Chapel about his work designing the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Eisenman spoke about the four-year process required to make the memorial happen, including the metamorphoses of the design through three phases of contests, the complications caused by artistic differences with design partner Richard Serra, the political ramifications of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s failed campaign for reelection, pressure from the Jewish community, and the representation of the project in the press. Eisenman foregrounded the difficulty of trying to represent in physical form the scope and horror of the Holocaust, as well as that of navigating the complicated politics of the subject and meeting the expectations of groups who would visit the site. Additionally, he discussed his decision to make the experience of visiting the memorial a disorienting one, a design reflected in the varying heights and angles of the 2,711 pillars, as well as the decision to include an information center underneath the memorial field. Eisenman related how Jürgen Habermas visited the memorial and praised it for including spaces for different types of memory: for the unrepresentable (the field) and for the archival (the information center). Finally, Eisenman previewed his newer proposals for a Museum of Nazi History on the former site of Hitler’s Braunhaus in Munich, and presented several student drafts of potential designs and their significance.
(Megan Eaton)

In his lecture entitled “Der Streit um das Prinzip Menschenwürde” Alexander Dietz (Universität Heidelberg) gave an overview of current debates in Germany over the concept of human dignity. In part a reaction against the atrocities that resulted from National Socialism, Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the 1949 German Basic Law codified the concept of human dignity. Since then, many discussions in Germany over ethics, government policies, and civil lawsuits have referenced human dignity, in attempts to determine whether a particular practice violates this basic principle. Dietz held that there had recently been an inflation in such debates trivializing the concept and raising the question whether human dignity might be violable in particular ways and in certain contexts. Dietz then turned to recent interventions into the debate by contemporary German philosophers, who have introduced some provocations. Franz Josef Wetz, for instance, argues that the concept of human dignity is often instrumentalized as a discussion stopper, trivialized and rendered cliché. He suggests that the concept of human dignity might not be a good legal and/or philosophical category, arguing that it favors the human species over others, and is a product of western cultural imperialism. Despite these shortcomings of the concept of human dignity, Dietz held that it would still be worth maintaining. He argued this on the grounds that the concept of human dignity implied the following indispensable values: the human claim to be recognized and treated as a person and not as mere instrument, the right to live, the right to autonomy, and the inseparability of the concept of human dignity from human rights.
(Gizem Arslan).

In his talk, “The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa,” George Steinmetz (University of Michigan) addressed two interconnected questions – how to make sense of the diversity of German colonial practices in the 19th century, and how to understand the disciplinary formation of sociology against the backdrop of empire. Interpreting the colonial state as a field in Bourdieu’s sense, Steinmetz reviewed previous interpretations of the wide range of German colonial policy, which included the Herero genocide on one end and the deliberate preservation of the traditional Samoan ways of life on the other. A Marxist account would attribute this to economic interest, but colonial projects often run counter to economic interest. Turning to a cultural studies account, Steinmetz quoted Said’s claim that “from travelers’ tales ... colonies were created,” or “The Devil’s Handwriting thesis.” Namely, one should expect a correlation between ethnographic depictions of a people and colonial policy towards them. Indeed, this is borne out in the cases of Southwest Africa and Samoa but founders in the case of Qingdao, where the variety of colonial representations of China proves too polysemous to uphold the thesis. However, a closer inspection of the case of China, where sinophilic academics competed for ethnographic capital with sinophobic merchants, indicates a way to account for German colonial practices in general. Across the German colonies, native policy intended to restrict the colonies to a less fluid conceptualization of their own identities in an active process of cultural stabilization. Different social groups in the colonial power structure held different, often opposing, views of the local population, which informed divergent colonial practices. Steinmetz pointed to the example of the competing policies of Leutwein and Von Trotha, who each based their decisions on their own understanding of the Herero, and suggested that had von Trotha not been locked into a struggle for symbolic capital with Leutwein, he may not have escalated his campaign to a genocidal level.
Steinmetz then emphasized the need for an analysis that would both reverse the prevailing causality thesis in order to account for the influence of colonial practice on metropolitan culture and include a field analysis that would account for the relative autonomy of fields. Turning to the rise of sociology and the example of Max Weber, he asked why Weber, in his analysis of China, ignored most of the material that was available to him, thus coming to a narrowly cultural interpretation of China’s lack of full-scale rationalization. The reason for this, Steinmetz suggested, can’t be seen as stemming purely from Weber’s social position, but must be understood in the context of his attempt to mediate between two major camps in contemporary German academic life.
(Carl Gelderloos)