My cabin I liked to call — imagine that! — CASA MINIMA—The Minimal House. It had belonged to Irma Brandeis, whose grave is next to Hanna Arendt’s, another legendary lover guilty for having fallen in love with a word craftsman. Casa Minima was incomparably larger, brighter, and more hospitable than the monastic cell Kafka had rented close to the castle in Prague in order to protect his solitude and writing. The woody Bard College muffled the darker overtones of an East European past, offering a rejuvenating new homeland to a suspicious stranger who had never enjoyed one before. Eventually, the exile no longer came to see his estrangement as a handicap, but rather as beneficial uprooting.
This little independent Liberal Arts College was becoming ever more cosmopolitan via the international students who came from thirty different countries, along with staff joining its faculty from the most exotic corners of the planet. Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Roy Lichtenstein, Ralph Ellison, Arthur Penn, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Danniel Mendelsohn, Ismail Kadare, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Edna O’Brien, Peter Sloterdijk, and Cynthia Ozick, have all been here. Chinua Achebe, the great master and mentor of its academic Glass Bead games Leon Botstein, John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach, Ian Buruma, Mary Caponegro, Robert Kelly, David Kettler, Elizabeth Murray, Stephen Shore, Francine Prose, William Tucker, Peter Hutton, Brad Morrow, and Joan Tower were in my proximity.
The campus itself has changed over the past twenty years, sprouting many new buildings that establish a dynamic and provocative dialogue between the present and the past. The history of American architectural styles over the past two centuries can be viewed in the array of buildings with their artful features set in stone and wood, as well as in steel and glass. Earlier examples include the fanciful Gate House. Today housing the Institute for International Education, it was designed in the first half of the nineteenth century by Alexander Jackson Davis, the architect and thinker who first promoted the Romantic idea of dwelling in close harmony with nature. The Protestant chapel was built around 1860 by Frank Wills who is also responsible for the Episcopalian Cathedral in Montreal. The Ludlow building that houses administrative offices today, along with the edifices in its immediate vicinity, was designed by Richard Upjohn, architect of the famous Trinity Church that stood next to the ill-fated Trade Center in New York. The architect’s trademark can easily be seen in the cloistered austerity of the Anglican colleges built before the Civil War. The Library building, completed at the end of the nineteenth century, is named after Charles F. Hoffman, a major patron. As the college’s Parthenon, it is naturally situated on top of the hill, Greek-fashion. Architect Venturi’s more recent enhancements, especially the fanciful arabesques of its front windows, have added a contrasting postmodern touch to this classic temple of knowledge. A temple of music has sprung up at the edge of the campus in the past few years, whose walls of concrete and glass designed by Frank Gehry make it comparable with Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. Recently I saw the completion of a state-of-the-art Science Center based on architect Rafael Vinoly’s plans, with glass walls reminiscent of the giant window in Irma Brandeis’ little house, which both separated me from, and drew me closer to, the forest.
To me, the day of 9 July 1989 feels like yesterday, yet it is already in a past millennium. Since my arrival here almost twenty years ago, the spectacular changes on campus have proudly reinforced its modernity. As I was beginning to “settle into” this new world, time itself seemed to moderate its fluctuations in a benevolent, accommodating complicity — that is, until 2006, a year of a landmark birthday that ought to have granted me the mark of wisdom. But this is not what happened; time suddenly grew restless, and very unwisely so. When the college decided to rebuild and extend my place of refuge in order to bring it up to date to match the standards of the new millennium along with those of the freshly minted American citizen that I had recently become, I went through a severe cardiac shock. It came as a warning that coincided with and was in sharp contrast to the beneficial changes meant to turn my improvised home into a real residency.
A convoluted personal history has accustomed me to accept the strange ways in which fate has played itself out in space and in time. The wanderer has now come to tick off the days on his sedentary calendar in a permanent, optimal dwelling place, fully aware of how ironic this late accomplishment may be, yet accepting gratefully every moment of his reprieve.
Translated from the Italian by Abitare, October 8, 2007
MONUMENTS OF SHAME: TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE BERLIN WALL*
When asked to evaluate the French Revolution, a Chinese dignitary famously said: “it’s too early to judge.” Twenty years may be a much shorter period in history but I don’t think we risk sounding presumptuous if we deem the events of 1989 the crossroads in the development of contemporary Europe.
Some historians consider the year 1989 as the de facto end of World War II; others see the events of that year as actually marking the end of the twentieth century, with our twenty-first century starting out, in fact, on September 11, 2001. If the bleak and bloody twentieth century did indeed end in 1989, a brief look back may be in order.
On August 2, 1914, Franz Kafka wrote in his Diaries: “Germany declared war against Russia. In the afternoon, swimming.” Despite his apparent detachment from the immediate unreality of that day, the reclusive and visionary Central European writer is the man who gave the name “Kafkaesque” to his century.
World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Nazification of Germany, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the atomic bomb, the proclamation of the State of Israel, the Cold War, India’s Independence, the Chinese Revolution, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the decolonization of Africa and Asia, the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring and the Solidarity Movement, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall — a kind of Chinese wall around the penal colony of the Soviet bloc. Each of these historic dates, and all of them together, marked significant changes in the world and new phases of the modern age. But they also announced today’s postmodern, centrifugal present time, where the supremacy of the computer, the speedy and depersonalized daily life, the deterioration of the environment, the globalization of exile, as well as the spread of religious, political, and even cultural terrorism have assumed an unpredictable shape and intensity.
*This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Centre de Cutura Contemporània de Barcelona in the spring of 2009 and at the New School for Social Research, New York, in November 2009.
World War II replaced the most important European power, Nazi Germany, with the communist Soviet Union. It was a war inscribed in the cruel history of humanity with its horror symbol called Holocaust, a terrible, eternal emblem and a frightening point of reference for all the other genocides that have happened or may yet happen.