Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tram and Rail, 1914

This is the second in a series of excerpts from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, which have been translated into English for the first time by Susan Bernofsky, and just published in a new edition by New York Review Classics. The first excerpt can be found here. —The Editors

Riding the “electric” is an inexpensive pleasure. When the car arrives, you climb aboard, possibly after first politely ceding the right of way to an imposing gentlewoman, and then the car continues on. At once you notice that you have a rather musical disposition. The most delicate melodies are parading through your head. In no time you’ve elevated yourself to the position of a leading conductor or even composer. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.

Meanwhile you have rolled yourself a cigarette, say, and inserted it with great care between your well-practiced lips. With such an apparatus in your mouth, it is impossible to feel utterly without cheer, even if your soul happens to be torn in twain by sufferings. But is this the case? Most certainly not. Just wanted to give a quick description of the magic that a smoking white object of this sort is capable of working, year in and year out, on the human psyche. And what next?

Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the “electric.”

People do, after all, tend to get somewhat bored on such trips, which often require twenty or thirty minutes or even more, and what do you do to provide yourself with some modicum of entertainment? You look straight ahead. To show by one’s gaze and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with a quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn’t that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead.

It is prohibited for the conductor to converse with the esteemed passengers. But what if prohibitions are sidestepped, laws violated, admonitions of so refined and humane a nature disregarded? This happens fairly often. Chatting with the conductor offers prospects of the most charming recreation, and I am particularly adept at seizing opportunities to engage in the most amusing and profitable conversations with this tramway employee. It pays to ignore certain regulations, and summoning one’s powers to render uniforms loquacious helps create a convivial mood.

From time to time you do nonetheless look straight ahead again. After completing this straightforward exercise, you may permit your eyes a modest excursion. Your gaze sweeps through the interior of the car, crossing fat, drooping mustaches, the face of a weary, elderly woman, a pair of youthfully mischievous eyes belonging to a girl, until you’ve had your fill of these studies in the quotidian and gradually begin to observe your own footgear, which could use proper mending. And always new stations are arriving, new streets, and the journey takes you past squares and bridges, past the war ministry and the department store, and all this while it is continuing to rain, and you continue to behave as if you were a tad bored, and you continue to find this conduct the most suitable.

But it might also be that while you were riding along like that, you heard or saw something beautiful, gay, or sad, something you will never forget.

1908

Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky

Madrid, Fundacíon Collecíon Thyssen-Bornemisza

George Grosz: Metropolis, 1916-1917

Over the next few days, we will be running several excerpts from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, which have been translated into English for the first time by Susan Bernofsky, and just published in a new edition by New York Review Classics. Walser arrived in Berlin from Switzerland in 1905 and wrote hundreds of short reflections about the city’s charms. As Bernofsky writes in her introduction, “The chirpy delight some of his narrators take in the city’s hum and bustle also reflects his own status as an outsider who enjoys blending in with the crowd.” The story that follows is drawn from a longer piece. —The Editors

A city like Berlin is an ill-mannered, impertinent, intelligent scoundrel, constantly affirming the things that suit him and tossing aside everything he tires of. Here in the big city you can definitely feel the waves of intellect washing over the life of Berlin society like a sort of bath. An artist here has no choice but to pay attention. Elsewhere he is permitted to stop up his ears and sink into willful ignorance. Here this is not allowed. Rather, he must constantly pull himself together as a human being, and this compulsion encircling him redounds to his advantage. But there are yet other things as well.

Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each dawning day brings with it a new, agreeably disagreeable attack on complacency, and this does the general sense of indolence good. An artist possesses, much like a child, an inborn propensity for beautiful, noble sluggardizing. Well, this slug-a-beddishness, this kingdom, is constantly being buffeted by fresh storm-winds of inspiration. The refined, silent creature is suddenly blustered full of something coarse, loud, and unrefined. There is an incessant blurring together of various things, and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding.

The excellent gentleman from the provinces, however, should by no means imagine that here in the city there are not lonelinesses as well. The metropolis contains lonelinesses of the most frightful sort, and anyone who wishes to sample this exquisite dish can eat his fill of it here. He can experience what it means to live in deserts and wastes. The metropolitan artist has no dearth of opportunities to see and speak to no one at all. All he has to do is make himself unpopular among certain arbiters of taste or else consistently fixate on failures, and in no time he’ll have sunk into the most splendid, most blossoming of abandonments.

The artist who is crowned with success lives in the metropolis as if in an enchanting Oriental dream. He hastens from one elegant household to the affluent next, sits down unhesitatingly at the opulently laden dining tables, and while chewing and slurping provides the entertainment. He passes his days in a virtual state of intoxication. And his talent? Does an artist such as this neglect his talent? What a question! As if one might cast off one’s gifts without so much as a by-your-leave. On the contrary. Talent unconsciously grows stronger when one throws oneself into life. You mustn’t be constantly tending and coddling it like a sickly something. It shrivels up when it’s too timidly cared for.

The artistic individual is nonetheless permitted to pace up and down, like a tiger, in his cave of artistic creation, mad with desire and worry over achieving some output of beauty. As no one sees this, there is no one to hold it against him. In company, he should be as breezy, affable, and charming as he can manage, neither too self-important nor too unimportant either. One thing he must never forget: he is all but required to pay court to beautiful, wealthy women at least a little.

After approximately five or six years have passed, the artist—even if he comes from peasant stock—will feel at home in the metropolis. His parents would appear to have lived and given birth to him here. He feels indebted, bound, and beholden to this strange rattling, clattering racket. All the scurrying and fluttering about now seem to him a sort of nebulous, beloved maternal figure. He no longer thinks of ever leaving again. Whether things go well with him or poorly, whether he comes down in the world or flourishes, no matter, it “has” him, he is forever under its spell, and it would be impossible for him to bid this magnificent restlessness adieu.

Michael Tomasky

The Real Romney
by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman

Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics
by R.B. Scott

Mitt Romney; drawing by John Springs

Mitt Romney; drawing by John Springs

George Wilcken Romney, the former automobile executive who became the centrist Republican governor of Michigan in 1963, was considered a presidential possibility leading up to the 1964 election. Moderate Republicans around the country were getting awfully nervous about this Goldwater fellow and seeking out plausible alternatives. But Romney, a tall and square-jawed man with impressive hair, had made a commitment to the voters of ...

Julian Barnes

The Iron Lady
a film directed by Phyllida Lloyd

Alex Bailey/Pathé Productions Ltd/The Weinstein Company

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady

Alex Bailey/Pathé Productions Ltd/The Weinstein Company

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady

In the spring of 2001, at the Conservative Party Conference in Plymouth, Margaret Thatcher made a joke. She was then seventy-five, and had been out of office for more than ten years, much of it spent as the hectoring conscience of her party. Now she told the faithful that on her way to ...

Richard Dorment

The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination
by Fiona MacCarthy

The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement
by Allen Staley

Edward Burne-Jones: The Hidden Humorist
by John Christian

The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement in Britain, 1860–1900
an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, April 2–July 17, 2011; the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, September 12, 2011–January 15, 2012; and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, February 18–July 17, 2012

The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900
edited by Lynn Federle Orr and Stephen Calloway, assisted by Esmé Whittaker

Laing Art Gallery/Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Newcastle upon Tyne

Edward Burne-Jones: Laus Veneris, 1873–1878

Laing Art Gallery/Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Newcastle upon Tyne

Edward Burne-Jones: Laus Veneris, 1873–1878

Created a baronet by William Gladstone, friend of Sarah Bernhardt, and idol of the Symbolists, by the time of his death in 1898 Sir Edward Burne-Jones was the most celebrated English artist in the world. To his admirers, his art represented the culmination of a literary tradition in painting that stretched back to the ...

Charles Rosen

Liszt as Transcriber
by Jonathan Kregor

Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Juergen Liepe/Art Resource

Josef Danhauser: Franz Liszt at the Piano, 1840. Seated are Alexandre Dumas Sr., George Sand, and Marie d’Agoult; standing are Hector Berlioz, Nicolò Paganini, and Gioachino Rossini. On the piano is a bust of Beethoven by Anton Dietrich,and on the wall is a portrait of Byron.

Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Juergen Liepe/Art Resource

Josef Danhauser: Franz Liszt at the Piano, 1840. Seated are Alexandre Dumas Sr., George Sand, and Marie d’Agoult; standing are Hector Berlioz, Nicolò Paganini, and Gioachino Rossini. On the piano is a bust of Beethoven by Anton Dietrich,and on the wall is a portrait of Byron.

The bicentenary of Franz Liszt (1811–1886) follows hard upon those of Berlioz, Mendelssohn ...

Adam Kirsch

“Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
by Herbert Leibowitz

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
by Wendell Berry

By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959
by William Carlos Williams, compiled and edited by Jonathan Cohen, with a foreword by Julio Marzán

Lisa Larsen/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

William Carlos Williams at his house in Rutherford, New Jersey, 1954

Today it would be hard to find a reader of poetry who would not acknowledge William Carlos Williams as one of the major American modernists, a peer of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound. His place in anthologies and on college reading lists is secure. Possibly no modern American poem is more widely known than Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” that tiny epiphany:

Lisa Larsen/Time Life Pictures ...

Andrew Hacker

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank

The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics
by Thomas Byrne Edsall

Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others
by James Gilligan

Columbia Pictures/Photofest

Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made man, at his rich fiancée’s house with her brother Ned (Lew Ayres) and the butler (Thomas Braidon), in George Cukor’s Holiday, 1938

Columbia Pictures/Photofest

Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made man, at his rich fiancée’s house with her brother Ned (Lew Ayres) and the butler (Thomas Braidon), in George Cukor’s Holiday, 1938

Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner looming over America’s economy, drawing dollars from its bottom to its upper tiers. Using US Census reports, I estimate that since 1985, the lower 60 percent of households have lost ...

Richard Bernstein

A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia
by Aaron L. Friedberg

Imaginechina/Corbis

A ceremony in Sichuan Province, China, sending off an engineer battalion of the People’s Liberation Army on a peacekeeping mission to Lebanon, January 2011

Imaginechina/Corbis

A ceremony in Sichuan Province, China, sending off an engineer battalion of the People’s Liberation Army on a peacekeeping mission to Lebanon, January 2011

The day after the Russian parliamentary elections in early December, the Chinese publication Global Times, an English-language newspaper and website managed by People’s Daily, the official organ of the Communist Party official, ran an editorial on how little credit the West gave ...

with Klaus Regling and Sami Zeidan

Thierry Monasse/Polaris

Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility, and Evangelos Venizelos, Greece’s finance minister, during a meeting of eurozone ministers in Luxembourg, October 3, 2011

Thierry Monasse/Polaris

Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility, and Evangelos Venizelos, Greece’s finance minister, during a meeting of eurozone ministers in Luxembourg, October 3, 2011

This interview with Klaus Regling, the head of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), took place on December 17, 2011, and was broadcast on Al Jazeera. The interviewer was Sami Zeidan. A revised and updated version of the interview follows ...

Corey Robin, reply by Mark Lilla

Mark Peterson/Redux

Tea Party supporters at the Washington Monument, April 15, 2010

Mark Peterson/Redux

Tea Party supporters at the Washington Monument, April 15, 2010

To the Editors:

Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it ...

Nairi Petrossian, reply by Orlando Figes

To the Editors:

In his review of a play about Mikhail Bulgakov [“A Double Game with Stalin,” NYR, January 12], Orlando Figes claims that The White Guard by Bulgakov was the favorite novel of Stalin. The latter adored the Bulgakov play The Turbin’s Days, which had been performed in the Moscow Art Theater. It was the first Soviet drama staged in that renowned theater, an important point scored by ...

Arien Mack

On Wednesday, February 22, the Center for Public Scholarship at the New School presents an inaugural lecture in the Public Voices series by Russ Feingold. Former US Senator (D-WI) Feingold will discuss his new book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, and former Senator Bob Kerrey will moderate. The event is free and begins at 6:00 PM and will be followed by a ...

Michael Dirda

Jude Law as Watson and Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes in the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes

It’s been a particularly busy season for admirers of the world’s first and greatest consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street. In November, with the explicit approval of the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, Anthony Horowitz published his The House of Silk, held back for years by Dr. Watson as one of those cases “for which the world is not yet prepared.” Ever since The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), Laurie R. King has been chronicling the later adventures of Holmes and his young American partner—and wife!—Mary Russell, and in last year’s Pirate King the duo found themselves caught up in a mystery set during the production of a silent-film epic. King also teamed up with Leslie R. Klinger—editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes—to bring out A Study in Sherlock, a collection of new stories about Holmes from distinguished writers, including one by Neil Gaiman (“The Case of Death and Honey”) that has just been nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

In a more academic vein, Doylean scholars Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower, along with Rachel Foss of the British Library, have just overseen the publication of Conan Doyle’s long-lost first novel, The Narrative of John Smith. Laid up with gout, its protagonist reflects on life, literature, and the people around him. Highly autobiographical, the result is fascinating, but it won’t dislodge The Hound of the Baskervilles as anyone’s favorite Conan Doyle novel.

All these books, meanwhile, were overshadowed by the two recent reimaginings of Holmes and Watson for the screen. The BBC Sherlock series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman brilliantly translates the stories into the present. (The second set of three episodes has just concluded in Britain and will be aired on PBS this spring. Notoriously, Irene Adler—“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”—is portrayed as a leather-clad dominatrix.) In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the sequel to the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law continue their transformation of the Victorian duo into gritty, steampunk action heroes. The movie’s many explosions, elaborately choreographed fight scenes, and double-entendres recall modern superhero comics far more than cerebral mysteries of the hansom-cab era.

Naturally enough, talk about the two filmed versions of Sherlock Holmes dominated the cocktail chatter at January’s meeting of the mysterious Sherlockian literary and dining club, The Baker Street Irregulars. Most Irregulars felt that the screen versions would renew interest in the original adventures and bring younger people to the “Sacred Writings,” that is, the fifty-six short and four long cases also known as “the canon.” Nonetheless, some felt disgruntled by the many liberties taken, and shuddered to think that today’s twelve-year-old would visualize Holmes as either an Aspergerian sociopath or a nineteenth-century version of Indiana Jones. Of course Irregulars have been arguing about every aspect of Sherlock Holmes for more than seventy-five years—from the finest Holmes story (“The Redheaded League”? “Silver Blaze”? “The Final Problem”?) to the best screen interpretation of the detective (Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett both have their ardent supporters). But there’s no denying that the BSI welcomes the resurgence of Holmes and Watson: the new interest reminds everyone—and especially a younger generation—that Sherlock Holmes still lives for all those who “keep green the memory of the Master.”

Founded in 1934 by the novelist and critic Christopher Morley, who had virtually memorized the canon during his Baltimore childhood, The Baker Street Irregulars takes its name from the street urchins who sometimes assist the detective because, as he says, they can “go everywhere, see everything, and overhear everyone.” About three hundred invested members—lawyers, doctors, writers, librarians, booksellers, teachers, and businesspeople from all over North America and Britain, not to mention Europe, Japan, Australia—belong to the group, which each year meets in Manhattan in early January. Why January? Because intensive analysis of the stories reveals that Holmes was almost certainly born on January 6, 1854.

Sherlockian “scion societies” exist in most big cities—e.g. The Speckled Band of Boston, The Red Circle of Washington, DC—and welcome anyone with an interest in the sleuth of Baker Street. But investiture in the national organization is reserved for the most active or distinguished followers of the Master. Over the decades members of the BSI have included the mystery novelists Rex Stout and Frederic Dannay (one half of Ellery Queen), two presidents (Roosevelt and Truman), and, more recently, the former chief technical officer of Apple, a retired judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, and the longtime head chef of the Culinary Institute of America. Invested members sport distinctive ties or rosettes containing blue, purple, and mouse (a kind of grey), colors associated with Sherlock Holmes’s various dressing gowns.

They also each receive a name drawn from the canon, usually chosen to allude to a person’s personality or profession. Mine is “Langdale Pike,” a newspaper gossip columnist who appears in “The Three Gables.” At one point in that adventure, Holmes exclaims, “Watson, this is a case for Langdale Pike, and I am going to see him now.” Shortly after my investiture in 2002, I naturally produced a spoof metafiction in which I traced Pike’s involvement in many of the scandals and mysteries of the Victorian and Edwardian era. In “A Case for Langdale Pike,” I was, in effect, “playing the game.”

The “game”? As everyone in the BSI recognizes, Sherlock Holmes actually lived (so far as we know, he is still currently in retirement on the Sussex Downs, keeping bees and working on his masterwork, The Whole Art of Detection); his friend Dr. John H. Watson recorded actual historical events; and Arthur Conan Doyle merely served as Watson’s literary agent. While there may be confusions or discrepancies in the published accounts of the various cases, Irregular scholarship can fill in the gaps and harmonize the apparent inconsistencies. For example, to explain why Watson sometimes refers to being wounded in the left shoulder, and sometimes in the leg, at the battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan, Laurie King determined that the home made bullets used in Jezail rifles had a tendency to split apart. Hence one shot could produce wounds in two places.

A Frederic Dorr Steele drawing of Sherlock Holmes from Collier's

For me, this year’s 2012 BSI Weekend began on Thursday, January 12, when a small group met at The Players for “The Lunch of Steele,” a casual three-hour get-together in honor of Frederic Dorr Steele, the American artist who, early in the last century, gave us the most familiar images of Sherlock Holmes in his illustrations for Collier’s Magazine. That evening, Dr. Lisa Sanders, who writes the Diagnosis column for The New York Times and serves as a technical advisor to House, the Holmesian television series partly inspired by her column, delivered a lecture titled “Is Holmes Crazy Like a Fox, or Just Plain Crazy?” She explained that her early admiration for the detective’s logical reasoning led to her fascination with medical diagnosis. Later that night, at a “Special Meeting,” I was asked to speak about On Conan Doyle, my own new book about the Sherlock Holmes stories and his creator’s many other works.

That was just Thursday, a mere hors d’oeuvres for the continuous eating, drinking and conversation of the next two days. The main focus of the weekend remains the Irregulars-only black tie banquet (other Sherlockians attend the concurrent “Gaslight Gala”). Held this year at the Yale Club, the evening began when Michael Whelan—called “Wiggins” after the leader of the original Irregulars—announced and introduced “the woman” for 2012, a tradition dating back to the days when the BSI was all male. Nowadays “the woman” is often the surprised spouse of a particularly active male Irregular. But the first acknowledged recipient of the honor, back in 1943, was none other than Gypsy Rose Lee. This was in the same risqué era when mystery novelist Rex Stout—whose overweight detective Nero Wolfe just might be the son of Irene Adler and Holmes’s portly and smarter brother Mycroft—notoriously argued, amid much audience participation and outrage, that “Watson was a woman.”

This year’s dinner, by comparison, was a more sedate affair, though the drink did flow steadily during various toasts to Holmes’s landlady Mrs. Hudson, to Mycroft, to the second Mrs. Watson, and to Holmes himself. These were followed by the reading of the BSI’s constitutional “Buy-laws”—so spelled—which famously conclude: “Article 4. All other business shall be left for the monthly meetings. Article 5.”—and here everyone raucously joins in—“There shall be no monthly meetings.”

In the course of the evening, there were musical interludes, including a rendition of the BSI’s much-revered if unofficial anthem: “We Never Mention Aunt Clara.” The complete lyrics, relating naughty Aunt Clara’s sexual conquests, are always included in a special souvenir packet for each member attending the dinner. In this year’s I found, along with much else, the following: a ballpoint pen engraved with the phrase “This pen has been stolen from Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” An “Irregularly Shaped” crossword compiled by Dana Richards, the bibliographer of polymath Martin Gardner. (Gardner’s closest boyhood friend, John Bennett Shaw, was the greatest of all collectors of Sherlockian memorabilia.) A reprint of an American Philatelist article by Robert A. Moss about stamps honoring Holmes and Conan Doyle. The Christmas annual of “The Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota.” A postcard asking support for the campaign to save Conan Doyle’s former home Undershaw. A drawing by C.A. Meyer of “The Poodle of the Baskervilles.” And a small pin, in memory of Tsukasa Kobayashi, co-author of Sherlock Holmes’s London, displaying the address “221B” against a green background.

People sometimes wonder why I belong to The Baker Street Irregulars. The answer, of course, is elementary: friendship, collegiality, fellowship. For a few days, all that matters is one’s devotion to the great detective and his world. But it isn’t just Sherlock Holmes that we cherish, it is the memory of the pleasure we all received as children and teenagers when we first discovered those immortal adventures, when we first copied out the cipher of “The Dancing Men,” when, best of all, we first heard Dr. Mortimer murmur that most thrilling sentence in all of twentieth-century literature: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

N.B. Authorized information about The Baker Street Irregulars may be found at the website of The Baker Street Journal. The Baker Street Blog is a good source for the latest Sherlockian news and comment.

Tim Parks

Herbert List/Magnum Photos

Naples, 1949

This is the fifth in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

What would it mean for a country to change profoundly? What real news would we get of that and how would it feel to its citizens? Would it necessarily be a good thing? A few months ago, when the Greek crisis made it clear that being a member of the eurozone did not mean having access to unlimited credit on equal terms with countries like Germany and France, Italy was suddenly in trouble. Snoozing for years in a debt-funded decadence, all at once the country found lenders demanding unsustainable interest rates, as if this were some shaky third-world economy trying to borrow in a foreign currency. Very soon something would have to give. The consequent change of government and drastic budgetary measures have been described well enough in any number of newspapers. What interests me more than the numbers or the markets is the question of how these developments might actually change, over the long term, the way Italians relate to each other and to the state.

When I first came to Italy thirty years ago, there was a lot of talk about change. It was always located in the very near future, but never quite in the present. The paradigm almost everybody accepted was that of an “abnormal” and in some respects archaic society on the brink of becoming normal and modern, falling into line, that is, with the powerful democracies of Northern Europe—as if there were something natural about their models.

We can list some of the qualities that made and still make Italy seem “special”: a tradition of regional rather than national loyalties (exacerbated by the fact that government is actually strongly centralized); a high level of organized (but not ordinary) crime; the power of the family in every sphere of life, but notably the economy; the melodramatically assertive tone of the labor force in all professional, commercial, and unionized sectors, whether they be taxi drivers, pharmacists, or steelworkers; a flare for making life complicated through bureaucracy and then for overcoming complication through evasion and petty corruption; a multitude of political parties with strong ideological or regional leanings; a Church with a propensity to undermine rather than reinforce people’s loyalty to the state; a tendency in general to foment and then thrive on a gap between the official version of events and their actual course, between rules and practice, appearance and reality: a foreigner seeking to participate in Italian life—buying a house, starting a career at the university, bringing up children in the state school system—soon appreciates that this is a country for initiates. It is never enough to read the instructions on a form to understand how it should be filled in. You need someone with inside knowledge beside you.

Looking at our list as a whole, it’s not hard to spot an underlying pattern and appreciate the sort of difficulties it creates. Circumscribed collective identities (families, political parties, work associations, local pride, religious groups), while admirable in themselves, undermine the nation’s capacity to establish a hierarchy of priorities for the common good, if only because government itself is rarely more than a patchwork of factions. It is never easy to legislate against vested interests; in Italy it is well nigh impossible: there are simply so many groups whose existence depends on things remaining as they are. To a greater extent than in other countries, individual Italians feel diminished and despondent if those groups are put in jeopardy.

All the same, the world is constantly changing and sooner or later we have to change with it. For the Italians, then, the anxious question is, how can we accommodate change in such a way that everything remains essentially the same, in other words, in such a way that my community of reference continues to survive? In macroeconomic terms, the pattern in Italy over recent decades has been as follows: restrictive practices, red tape, and generous but by no means uniform or fair social policies (notably pensions), led to low productivity, rising public debt, and trade imbalances, negative effects that were then “corrected” throughout the 1970s and 80s by regular devaluation combined with inflation-indexed wages and pensions; in this way exports were given a boost while all major trade associations maintained their respective positions.

Then came European Monetary Union and eventually the Euro. To remain at the heart of a privileged group of European trading partners, Italy would have to accept a currency over which it had no sovereignty, a currency that could not be devalued. Some new way of squaring the circle would have to be found. In the early 2000s labor laws were reformed in such a way that all acquired privileges were left intact, above all rock-solid job security for employees with regular contracts, while employers were now free to offer short-term contracts and very low wages (or none at all) to the young entering the market. The new arrivals, that is, would offer the flexibility and productivity that the status quo were not willing to accept. The consequence, ten years later, is 30 percent youth unemployment and a generation whose experience of the workplace has been one of constant frustration if not humiliation. Even so, their sacrifice wasn’t enough. No sooner had the international credit crunch begun than Italy was identified as a risky borrower, with a stagnating, low-productivity economy, and above all as a nation that had lost its way.

In November 2011, with things looking increasingly desperate, the aging ex-Communist president, Giorgio Napolitano, called in the Jesuit-schooled economics professor Mario Monti and a great experiment began: a government supported by cross-party votes but whose ministers are not politicians or members of parliament but simply experts in their fields—and who hopefully, since not seeking reelection, are immune to the lobbies. In short, the plan is to do something for the public good.

None of this is new. One of the pleasures of spending all your adult life in a country you hardly knew on arrival is the slow accumulation of history and culture necessary to get a handle on the world you are seeking to adapt to. Reading, translating, teaching, writing, you begin to sense of how it all links up; at the same time you become so involved yourself that you can no longer pretend to be an objective outsider. Doing the research to write Medici Money (2006), a book about the Medici bank in the 15th century, I discovered how many of the patterns in contemporary Italian society were already present in Republican Florence: brief and divided governments, extreme ambiguity as to the real centre of power, an obsession with sharing out patronage equally between different trade guilds and geographical areas, extreme difficulty collecting taxes, and so on. Later, translating Machiavelli, I came across the principle that unity in Italy is only be achieved when the country as a whole faces a serious threat from without. In August 1480, the Papal States, Naples, Florence, and others, broke off their internal wars to face a Turkish attack on the southeast coast of the country that left 12,000 dead and 10,000 in slavery. Such unity, however, is always understood as short term and must not be exploited by one group to assert power over others after the emergency is over. Many of Italy’s politicians have demanded that ministers in the present government of experts pledge not to stand at forthcoming general elections.

Will the trick work this time? Monti has about a year and a half before the end of the current legislature’s term and an enormous amount to do. He began with the kind of cuts and fiscal action that might calm the markets: robust pension reform and a tax on home ownership. Now he is seeking to break down a score of cartels—needless to say, lawyers, doctors, truck drivers, taxi drivers, and pharmacies are all announcing strikes. Then there will be the more radical and deeper reforms: labor law, the electoral system. All this is to be accompanied, we are told, by a serious attempt to make people pay their taxes. At present huge numbers of the self-employed are clearly declaring less than a third of their income; so evident is the gap between lifestyle and declared earnings that the situation could only have developed with a certain official collusion. Monti seems determined to do something about that.

What all this amounts to is an invitation to Italians to change mentality, to commit to the state. In Io ti assolvo (I Absolve You) published in 1993, Giordano Bruno Guerri collected the responses of priests to his confession of a wide variety of sins, including tax evasion. On more than one occasion priests suggested that he could make up for his crime by donating some money to the Church. This perception that if I keep my money from the state to give it to some other good collective—my political party, my trade association, my family (though evidently much just goes into the individual’s pocket)—then I am not in the wrong is one of the core beliefs that the government is seeking to change.

Could that happen? Is it possible, for example, that a meritocracy could develop in Italy? That one might begin to a believe that a colleague has been employed because he or she is good at his or her job, that the whole process of trying to figure out who each person’s “protector” is might one day come to an end? I’m fascinated. And even if that doesn’t occur, an equally fascinating question arises: how can Italy compete in the increasingly open world if it remains attached to these patterns of relation?

Those who have read my recent articles on world literature and translation may think that this piece is entirely unconnected. Not so. In a work of literary criticism, Romanzo mondo (The World Novel), published in 2010, Professor Vittorio Coletti speaks of a homogenization of the novel across Europe in the second half of the twentieth century coming as a consequence of the fact that “the similarities between many nations gradually became greater than their differences”; he goes on to claim that “the moment was approaching when a story told in Berlin wouldn’t be very different from one set in Lisbon.”

My own suspicion is that such homogenization as has occurred arises more from the authors’ desire to address an international public than because events and personalities in the Parliament in Rome, for example, are truly similar to those in Paris or London. Italians have their own form of individuality and their own ways of relating to each other and to the groups they move in.

So will novelists be telling how Italians were changed by globalization, the debt crisis, and the Monti revolution, or indeed of how they resisted change and continued to behave as they always have? And will any such novels be addressed to Italian readers as part of an ongoing national debate—as was, say, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Gattopardo—or will they rather use the national Italian narrative to entertain an international public, who can then smile and wonder at Berlusconi’s harem, or at the townsfolk of the notorious Francesco Schettino, Captain of the Costa Concordia? Responsible for one of the most stupid shipping accidents of all time, not to mention the death of thirty or so passengers, Schettino was nevertheless greeted in his home town of Meta di Sorrento (on the south side of the bay of Naples) by a crowd waving banners in his favor and complaining, priest included, that the man’s bad press was the result of a general prejudice against their community. “Every Italian,” Giacomo Leopardi dryly remarked in 1826 “is more or less equally honored and dishonored.”

The question of address in a novel is important: Italians will understand the sentiments of Schettino’s fellow citizens, their own local allegiances are challenged; readers in other countries may simply be amused.

Ian Johnson

This is the fourth in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

Ian Johnson

Chang Ping

Chang Ping is one of China’s best-known commentators on contemporary affairs. Chang, whose real name is Zhang Ping, first established himself in the late 1990s in Guangzhou, where his hard-hitting stories exposed scandals and championed freedom of expression. As censorship has tightened in recent years, Chang’s pleas for openness and accountability have put him under pressure. The 43-year-old is currently living with his wife and daughter in Germany at the former country home of the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, which has been converted into a refuge for persecuted writers.

Chang’s travails began in 2001, when he was removed as news director of Southern Weekend, then a daring weekly that had won readers across the country. He became deputy editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, but was removed in 2008, and subsequently banned from print, after publishing an editorial questioning government censorship of that year’s Tibetan uprising. One year ago, he was finally fired by the newspaper, with an editor saying his work was “inappropriate.” Last March, Chang joined a newly launched Hong Kong-based magazine, iSun Affairs, as chief editor but was denied a visa and has not been allowed into the former British colony.

Ian Johnson: You grew up in the 1970s; did you experience anything of the Cultural Revolution?

Chang Ping: My father was a low-level official in our hometown in Xichong County (in rural Sichuan) and got caught up in the factionalism of the Cultural Revolution. When I was young I attended an elementary school that was located on the side of the road. If you entered or left the village you passed it. I remember one day he was standing outside the window looking in at me. That afternoon I went home and said to my mother: “Dad was very strange. Dad was outside the school window staring at me.” My mother started crying and said, “Dad has gone and we don’t know if he’ll ever return again.” He had fled to a neighboring county to escape violence. We couldn’t visit him but we would get letters from him and my mother would read them to us. I was about eight years old.

Soon after this, reform and opening up started. We studied the Four Modernizations (a project to develop the fields of agriculture, industry, defense, and research and development) and were told that they would be realized by 2000. We wrote so many essays about how to achieve the Four Modernizations. I remember very clearly in 1984, at the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, how the students at Peking University said “Hello Xiaoping!” to Deng Xiaoping when he drove by at a rally. It was on the radio and I was really moved. I thought: China has got such hope, such a bright future.

So you thought everything was great. You heard about the developments in Beijing and were excited.

Yes and I was doing well in school too. When you’re personally successful, you tend to think that things are going well. You’re optimistic. I thought things were going well but in some ways I was an angry youth. There’s no contradiction there. You believe, but you want to improve things. During the 1986 student movement, people like Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, and Wang Ruowang criticized the party and Deng Xiaoping. I remember hearing about it on the radio and felt in my heart that they were heroes.

At the time I loved literature. In the 1980s, literature was at a peak. I subscribed to a lot of magazines like Harvest and People’s Literature. I remember reading Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum and thinking, Wow, someone can write like that. I remember vividly that I was sitting outside and was so moved by that story. I didn’t quite understand everything but was influenced by it. Also Yu Hua’s short stories, for example. But you know that at that time I was still a complete believer. The books I wanted to read the most were the original works of Marx and Engels. I wanted to learn German to read them.

I went to college in 1987. Until then I’d been reading the classics of world literature, and contemporary Chinese fiction. But then at Sichuan University (in Chengdu) I read a series of books called Moving Toward the Future (??????). It was an edited series introducing the great thinkers in other fields. This was a start for me and afterwards I read a lot of western literature, philosophy, and history. The series was really influential in the 1980s and if you look at the editorial staff, they all suffered after June 4 (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). I guess from today’s point of view you’d say they had intellectual property rights problems—they just translated or cribbed from foreign publications. But for us it opened a world of psychology, sociology, and literature. One book I have to mention is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. We’d just read these books so fast and share them. Everyone was fascinated by Western philosophy especially. It didn’t matter what your major was, you were interested in Western philosophy, like Heidegger or Sartre.

How did you experience June 4? In Chengdu, you were quite far away from Beijing, the center of it.

A lot was going on in Chengdu. We had protests all the time. People came from Beijing with news and we’d put them up in our dorm rooms and share their information. There were dialogues and demands to negotiate with the government. I helped organize protests.

But I didn’t really join the main student protest committee. Ever since high school I made one of Confucius’s sayings my motto: “The superior man is dignified, but does not wrangle. He is sociable but not a partisan.” So I did not want to join any movement. In high school I was in the Communist Youth League and wanted to leave. They said, you can’t leave; there is no mechanism to leave. But I didn’t join the party. I didn’t want to be a member of anything, so in 1989 I wasn’t in the student committees. Still, I organized protests and was seen as a leader. I got arrested after June 4. However, during the protests many students had been on a hunger strike and I had opposed that. For that I think they let me out of jail earlier. I think some students opposed me for opposing the hunger strike but that was my view: a hunger strike was pointless. I thought it was good to propagate democracy in factories and in the countryside.

So you’re a pragmatist?

Actually, many people think I’m more of an idealist. I still think China needs democracy, that it needs to change. I really oppose several arguments [that are commonly made] about why China can’t have democracy, such as the argument that China is unique—that Chinese people need to wait because their “quality” [a Chinese term, suzhi, that implies everything from educational level to manners] isn’t high enough and other ridiculous things like that. Some people said that democracy wasn’t part of Chinese culture, and then Taiwan became democratic. Then they said that Taiwan was a special case. Now look at Wukan. They had their own elections. People say it’s special, but in fact Wukan is really typically Chinese. It’s a Chinese town but they organized everything. So what argument are you left with? If Wukan can have democracy so can other parts of China.

I’m not saying that China should have western-style democracy. In fact, there’s not a single western model. What do they mean? Germany didn’t copy America and America didn’t copy Britain. The issue isn’t copying. It’s do you or don’t you want democracy? Of course democracy has a lot of problems but it’s a way forward.

Since the 1980s, Chinese have been pragmatic. The question since the Cultural Revolution has been: can it work? This was Deng Xiaoping’s biggest influence on Chinese people. They ask if it’ll work or not. Now China has the world’s second-largest economy and could overtake the US. So in terms of market economics it’s been successful and I support this. What we lack is justice. There is no justice in the current system. It’s a practical issue. We need justice. Democracy is a way to bring justice. This is why democracy is necessary.

The government doesn’t discuss rule of law much anymore. It’s become more and more a hooligan way of ruling. They just arrest people and throw them in jail or mental asylums. So the past decade has seen a hooliganization of the political system. Many of the old virtues are destroyed by this. The virtues of humanism, responsibilities of the government—the bottom line is things are disappearing. That’s why we’ve had these terrible events of recent years, like Yue Yue.

Yue Yue is the little girl who was run over by a van and no one stopped to help her. One recourse to this perceived spiritual vacuum has been that people are getting more and more interested in religion.

Many are interested in it. Scholars hope that this will help develop more virtues in society or provide some moral guidelines. There is a spiritual vacuum. I really respect religion, but I believe in the special importance of democracy, civic spirit, and freedom in politics, society, and culture for solving the spiritual crisis.

What about your new magazine?

It’s run by iSun Cable Television from Hong Kong. Right now we’re a new media organization. We offer on iPad, Android and are planning a Kindle version too. You can also get copies as a pdf. But we are going to print too. We have a staff of twenty. We have 6,000 subscribers on iPad, mostly on the mainland. We also have more than 10,000 who get it as an email. We’ve been able to report on taboo topics in China, such as [jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner] Liu Xiaobo, press controls, and the trend of independent candidates running for office.

Obviously the authorities knew about the project before it started. You haven’t been able to get a visa since you applied last March and Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Donald Tsang, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

According to the Hong Kong authorities’ own rules they should have answered my application within a month, but they haven’t approved or rejected the application. It’s already been nine months, so this is why people are talking about influence from the mainland.

The magazine was one of the first to cover several recent key political events, like the Wukan uprising. You have had by far the most comprehensive coverage of it. But you also have much on culture. Over the past year cultural figures in China have become embroiled in politics. How do you see the role of people like the artist Ai Weiwei?

The original work of the popular and famous artists was all political—many of them were influenced by people like Andy Warhol. They dealt with issues in society. But after a while when they sold so much that they became super rich and didn’t care much for social issues. To be honest, they just repeated themselves a lot. I have respect for Ai Weiwei because he is concerned with society. He is involved and engaged. It’s not his fault that he’s become more and more popular in the West. It’s the same with Liu Xiaobo or Vaclav Havel. This criticism isn’t fair.

What about the writer Han Han’s recent blogposts arguing that democracy may not be well suited to Chinese people? This seems to echo some of the other critics who say that China isn’t read for democracy.

He mentions that people have a “low quality” and that democracy could become a problem because it could lead to violence. This is a view the government has propagated for a long time. It’s like saying you can’t practice swimming until you can swim and you can’t swim because you can’t practice. Also, the arguments aren’t new. Many were made publicly last year, around the time of the centenary of the 1911 revolution.

But he influences a lot of people so his bringing it up is interesting. It shows how restricted China’s political system is. I think that what we’re seeing is the loss of hope by a lot of people in change taking place, so they’re making excuses about why it can’t happen. The decline in morals has lead to an increase in violence—violence against opponents, protesters, and others—not because we’re having a revolution but because we are not.

Elizabeth Drew

A still from King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town, a video released by Winning Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich for president, which attacks Romney for firing people from their jobs while he was head of the private equity firm Bain Capital

Beneath the turbulent political spectacle that has captured so much of the nation’s attention lies a more important question than who will get the Republican nomination, or even who will win in November: Will we have a democratic election this year? Will the presidential election reflect the will of the people? Will it be seen as doing so—and if not, what happens? The combination of coordinated efforts underway to manipulate the election and unlimited amounts of unaccountable money from private or corporate interests involved in those efforts threatens the democratic process for picking a president.

Amy Knight

This is the third in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev attend the session of the State Council in the Kremlin in Moscow, December 26, 2011

Judging from his outburst last week during a televised meeting with Russian media chiefs, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is getting rattled by the increasingly vocal opposition to the Kremlin. In a tense exchange with Aleksei Venediktov, editor of the radio station Ekho Moskvy, a key forum for the opposition, Putin recounted how he had listened to the radio during a ski trip with President Dmitry Medvedev and was shocked to hear a broadcast that was favorable to the planned US missile defense system, which the Kremlin vehemently opposes. Although Venediktov remained calm and deferential, Putin then blurted out: “I see that you are upset with me. I see it in your face. Why? I do not take offense when you pour diarrhea on me day in and day out, and yet you have taken offense.”

This is not the first time that Putin has reverted to scatological language when angry and defensive. (Who can forget his public vow, made after the September 1999 terrorist bombings in Russia, for which Chechens were blamed, that Chechen rebels would be “wiped out in their outhouses?”) But it offers some indication of the blackening mood inside the Kremlin as it contemplates the March 4 presidential election, now less than six weeks away. As recently as late November, Putin’s smooth return to the presidency for six and perhaps twelve more years seemed virtually assured; then there were the December 4 Duma elections, marred by allegations of widespread fraud, and everything changed, with demonstrators taking to the streets by the tens of thousands.

For the moment, polls suggest that Putin still has a good chance of winning the presidency in the first round of elections. Even though his popularity has declined, Putin’s carefully cultivated image as a strong and decisive leader who defends Russia’s national interests appears to have retained him support across a broad swath of Russia’s population, and no viable alternative to him has emerged thus far. If unexpectedly large numbers turn out for the opposition protests scheduled for February 4, however, it could undermine his candidacy and force him into an unpredictable second round. This is a situation the Kremlin wants to avoid at all costs.

But how to do it? For much of the past decade, Putin’s Kremlin was able to consolidate and maintain its power by providing enough economic benefits for middle-class Russians to keep them quiet and marginalizing the democratic opposition through its control of the mainstream media. With the sudden surge in protests on the street and on the Internet, however, the old formula may no longer work. Which leaves two possibilities: a vigorous reform effort, or more drastic steps to insure the election outcome.

Certainly Kremlin leaders recognize that they must give some credence to the protesters. This may explain why, for the first time in five years, the leading democratic oppositionist Boris Nemtsov was interviewed in mid-January on a Kremlin-controlled television channel. And just a few days after Putin’s meeting with the media, President Medvedev, always the nice guy, invited a group of 15 Russian news editors, including the maligned Venediktov, to a private dinner on January 21 in the Russian resort of Sochi, on the Black Sea. The gathering was supposed to be secret, but Venediktov and other participants later wrote about the meeting in their blogs. They said that Medvedev discussed the protests against the Duma elections in Moscow and other cities, and also the issue of missile defense, which has badly strained relations between the US and Russia. (The decision of the new American Ambassador, Michael McFaul, to meet with members of the opposition just after his arrival last week doubtless has added further to the tension by reinforcing the Kremlin’s claim that the US is fomenting Russia’s domestic opposition.)

According to one guest, Medvedev seemed to have been deeply affected by the protests and took them seriously. Indeed, in his annual address to the Federal Assembly on December 22, Medvedev proposed significant electoral reforms, including the reinstatement of direct elections for regional governors and a simplification of the procedure for registering political parties and candidates. But the bill on election reform, which Medvedev just submitted to the Duma, contains provisions that dilute its impact considerably; and in any case, it is not scheduled to be passed until May, so the proposed reforms will not affect the March presidential elections.

These limitations seem to reflect the reality that Medvedev has relinquished his political future to Putin by giving up the possibility of a second presidential term last September, and is unwilling or unable to stick his neck out too far. This week, he postponed a meeting with his human rights council for the fourth time, citing a busy schedule. Members of the council, including the veteran democratic activist Lyudmila Alekseyeva, had hoped to discuss with the president their 400-page report arguing that the prison sentence of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was illegal. In the view of Alekseyeva, “the President has more important things to do than to protect the rights of his citizens.”

Medvedev’s conciliatory gestures may merely be cover as the Russian leadership prepares a different kind of response to the precarious situation. Andrei Illarionov, who served as Putin’s chief economic advisor from 2000 to 2005 and is now a supporter of the political opposition, has predicted that if people continue to take to the streets, Putin will “take revenge” by instituting a major crackdown, including a state of emergency that would muzzle the media and prevent demonstrations.

Ominously, Illarionov says that a terrorist attack or an assassination would justify such actions on the part of the Kremlin. Far-fetched as this possibility might seem, it is useful to recall that Putin’s rise to power was largely a result the above-mentioned bombings in September 1999 (bombings that many attribute to Putin’s security services, the FSB), which also served as the justification for the second war in Chechnya. And the tragic terrorist attack at the school in Beslan, North Ossetiya in September 2004 (where again FSB involvement was suspected) led to a marked strengthening of Putin’s power because he used the attack to put an end to elections for regional governors and to direct elections for part of the Duma.

Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a judo training session, St. Petersburg, December 22, 2010

Whatever Putin’s intentions, his recent tough talk could encourage elements within the FSB to take their own initiative. (As one observer noted of Putin’s comments at the media session, “with language like this flying around in a semi-public gathering, one can only imagine the conversations taking place in the prime minister’s entourage.”) Although Putin and his supporters in the Kremlin have formal authority over the FSB, their control over this notoriously corrupt agency is by no means absolute, as evidenced by the problems Putin has had in preventing conflicts within the FSB from leaking out in public. And the FSB has an especially strong political and financial stake in keeping Putin in power.

Hopefully such extreme measures will be avoided and Russia’s political future will not be determined by violence and bloodshed. But it seems likely the Kremlin will do what it can to manipulate the outcome of the election. Indeed, it has already been taking steps in that direction. This week, Russia’s Central Election Commission ruled that Grigory Yavlinsky, co-founder of the democratic Yabloko Party, had too many invalid signatures to be allowed on the ballot. Also Golos, the independent group that monitors elections, has reported that the owners of the building where it rents offices in Moscow have ordered the group to move out, apparently because of pressure from Russian authorities. And Russia’s courts, notorious for taking orders from the Kremlin, have tossed out the many complaints of election fraud filed against Putin’s United Russia Party after the December parliamentary vote. Whether or not Russian authorities go so far as to arrest leaders of opposition protests over the next few weeks, as they did in December, is another question.

As Michael Bohm of The Moscow Times observed recently, Putin cannot afford to give up power because he and his cronies would end up being jailed for corruption: “The best, and perhaps only, guarantee of securing immunity for Putin—and dozens of his friends and colleagues who have become millionaires and billionaires over the past 10 years through their Kremlin-connected businesses—against possible corruption and other criminal charges is to remain in power.” Whatever strategies the Kremlin adopts and whatever the response on the part of the Russian people, it is unlikely that Putin, a judo champion in his youth, will exit the political stage quietly.

Eyal Press

This is the second in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

Shark de Mayo/thelawfilm.com

Justice Meir Shamgar

In 1979, a group of Palestinian farmers filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice, claiming their land was being illegally expropriated by Jewish settlers. The farmers were not Israeli citizens, and the settlers appeared to have acted with the state’s support; indeed, army helicopters had escorted them to the land—a hilltop near Nablus—bringing along generators and water tanks. The High Court of Justice nevertheless ordered the outpost dismantled. “The decision of the court… proved that ‘there was justice’ in Jerusalem and that Israel was indeed ruled by Law,” exulted one Israeli columnist.

But the frustration of the settlers did not last very long. As revealed in The Law in These Parts, an engrossing new Israeli documentary making its American debut at the Sundance Film Festival, just hours after the ruling was handed down, Ariel Sharon, a keen supporter of the settlement project who was then Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, organized a meeting to discuss how to circumvent it. Alexander Ramati, then a legal advisor to the West Bank military command, raised his hand to tell Sharon about an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire. “With or without your rooster, be at my office at 8:00 in the morning,” Sharon told Ramati, who was soon crisscrossing the West Bank in the cockpit of a helicopter, identifying tens of thousands of uninhabited acres that could be labeled “state land” and made available to settlers, notwithstanding the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on moving civilians into occupied territory. In the years that followed, a string of new settlements was built on this territory, eventually prompting another challenge before the Israeli High Court. This time, the Court denied the challenge, ruling that settlement construction was permissible while Israel served as the temporary custodian of the territory. This provided a legal basis for land expropriation that has since enabled hundreds of thousands of Israelis to relocate to the West Bank.

Surprisingly little is known about the legal apparatus that has enabled and structured the occupation. Filmed in nine days but based on years of archival research, The Law in These Parts aims to expose it. Even before the 1967 Six-Day War, the film reveals, officers in the army’s legal corps drew up guidelines for a separate system of laws that could be applied to territory under IDF control, rules they were convinced could strike a balance between order and justice. But by the time the first Palestinian Intifada erupted in 1987, detention without trial and convictions based on secret evidence had become standard operating procedure in the military courts entrusted with this task. One reason Israel did not simply extend its own laws to the West Bank and Gaza Strip was that doing so would “imply certain things you may not want,” an official in the film explains – in particular, that Palestinians living in the occupied territories were citizens with the same rights as Israelis. (In contrast, Jewish settlers in places like Hebron were spared the military justice system and granted access to civilian courts in Israel.) Director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, an Israeli known for his meticulously researched documentaries, initially planned to make these Palestinians the film’s protagonists. Instead, the documentary focuses on the handful of Israeli legal officials who, working largely in the shadows, set the ground rules for an occupation now in its forty-fifth year.

The architects of this parallel justice system believed that what they were designing was enlightened and progressive, a sentiment some viewers of the film may initially be inclined to share. At the insistence of Meir Shamgar, an elderly man with an august bearing who served as Israel’s Military Advocate General from 1963 to 1968, it was agreed soon after the Six-Day War that Palestinians could appeal cases to Israel’s High Court of Justice. Shamgar, who later served as the High Court’s president, notes that international law did not require Israel to grant Palestinians such access and expresses considerable pride in this. “I hope other countries will emulate the practice,” he says.

Shark de Mayo/thelawfilm.com

A scene from The Law in These Parts

Like all the people interviewed in the film, Shamgar is seated in a black leather chair set behind a desk that is mounted on a stage, an arrangement that makes it easy to imagine him in court, with the gavel – and the power to mete out judgment – in his hands. In the film, of course, this power actually rests with Alexandrowicz, a deft interviewer who patiently draws out his subjects but is not shy about airing his opinions – as, for example, after an exchange with Shamgar about a High Court case in which a Palestinian living near Hebron challenged the expropriation of so-called “state land.” It was Shamgar who presided over the case and who ruled that while international law barred Israel from assuming ownership of the territory, building temporary outposts was permissible. Half-a-million Israelis now live in these “temporary” settlements, notes Alexandrowicz. “Look, I don’t think this is connected to Supreme Court rulings,” says Shamgar, attributing what happened to politics. But Alexandrowicz points out that international law “clearly forbids transferring population from the occupying state to the occupied area.” He asks Shamgar, “Why didn’t the court see this as something it needed to stand up against?” Shamgar glances to the side, a trace of exasperation ruffling his face. “That is a question after the fact,” he says.

“Justice Shamgar doesn’t see the connection between Supreme Court rulings and our settlements in the occupied territories,” Alexandrowicz then says in a voiceover. “But I, the person documenting, see a connection, and I present the rulings and events as I understand them. Because in the world of the film, I rule on what reality is.” As the statement suggests, The Law in These Parts makes no claim to being objective: as the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that the film is putting its subjects on trial before the audience. In another scene, Alexandrowicz interviews a former military judge about a case involving a Palestinian arrested without being told what he’d done wrong. To protect Israel’s sources in the territories, Palestinians often could be shown only a “paraphrase” of the charges against them, the judge explains. And what if the security forces made unreliable accusations? “As a rule, I didn’t doubt what they said,” says the judge. This revealing admission was extracted from an interview that lasted more than three hours. “The viewer is only hearing a ‘paraphrase’ of my interview,” says Alexandrowicz. Here as elsewhere, he slyly anticipates (and thus potentially defuses) the charge that his view is biased, while implicitly raising the same question about the supposedly neutral officials who held sway in courtrooms where the disparity in power, and the absence of objectivity, was far more glaring.

Alexandrowicz’s unsparing inquiry is targeted at Israelis and foreign observers, who trumpet the achievements of Israel’s democracy and the High Court’s willingness to restrain abuses even at the occasional expense of security. The Law in These Parts does not deny that the High Court has successfully put a stop to some abuses in the territories—most notably in a 1999 ruling that barred various methods of physical interrogation (shaking, hooding, and shackling detainees) practiced for years with impunity. Like the 1979 decision on settlements, it infuriated some Israelis on the right, particularly since it came a few years after a wave of suicide bombings. On other occasions, the High Court has issued rulings—requiring, for example, that Israel re-route its security barrier to expropriate less Palestinian land—that the army has refused to enforce. But the film disquietingly suggests that these occasional displays of independence may only serve to foster the illusion of justice even as separate laws for settlers, house demolitions, restrictions on free movement and a host of other unjust policies obtained “a legal seal of approval,” as Ilan Katz, who served as Deputy Military Advocate General from 2000 to 2003, puts it in the film. The Knesset could easily have passed a law barring Palestinians from petitioning the High Court, notes Katz. Why didn’t it? “Because many times the Supreme Court is convenient for the security forces,” he says.

The Law in These Parts appeared in Israel during a period in which many of the organs of an independent civil society – including the civil court system – have been under attack. The repressive climate may explain why the film has generated enormous interest in Israel, screening in more than 100 locations and receiving the prize for best documentary at the 2011 Jerusalem Film Festival. Of course, the warm reception also underscores a paradox: while many Israelis seem open and even sympathetic to critical examinations of the occupation, no political constituency has emerged to challenge the creeping colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has continued to advance under the Netanyahu government. The film’s subjects have been more sparing with their praise – with one notable exception, a former military judge named Jonathan Livny who has attended some screenings and spoken admiringly about it. At one point in the film, Livny is openly critical of the military courts: “As a military judge, you don’t just represent justice,” he says. “You represent the authorities of the occupation, vis-à-vis a population that sees you as the enemy… It’s an unnatural situation. As long as it’s only temporary, fine. But when it goes on for 40 years? How can the system function? How can it be just?”

It is the closest any of the film’s subjects come to admitting to a troubled conscience, and it made me wonder whether the experience of being cross-examined in the studio had forced Livny to grapple with the compromises he’d made. “Yes,” he told me when I reached him recently by phone, “it’s become an educational moment in my life. It enabled me to sit for three hours and really look inwardly and go through a process of understanding and come to grips, through the questioning, with my emotions, my feelings, with trying to understand the role I played.” I asked him if he ever looked back and thought he should have followed the lead of the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the occupied territories. “Never,” he said. “Because I realized that if I wouldn’t do it and somebody else would be in my place, that person would not even have the qualms that I showed.” Many of his colleagues viewed the settlements favorably, he told me. Some even lived in them. Few understood Arabic, which he spoke fluently. Still, he said, he regarded the system in which he’d served as a place where cultivating respect for the rule of law was impossible. “It is a kangaroo court.”

We spoke in early January, a week after Israel’s High Court ruled on a petition challenging the right of Israeli companies to mine in eight quarries situated across the Green Line. The materials are sold overwhelmingly to Israelis —“looting the West Bank,” in the words of Dror Etkes, a researcher formerly with the organization Yesh Din, which submitted the complaint—in seemingly clear violation of a provision of the Hague Convention requiring an occupying power to serve only as the “administrator” of such resources. The High Court rejected the challenge, ruling that the occupation has gone on for so long that the situation has acquired certain “unique characteristics.” About this, at least, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz might agree.

The Law in These Parts will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26 and 27.

George Soros

Gero Breloer/AP Images

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Berlin, January 11, 2012

My new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, tries to explain and, to the extent possible, predict the outcome of the euro crisis. It follows the same pattern as my other books: it contains an updated version of my conceptual approach and the application of that approach to a particular situation, and it presents a real-time experiment to test the validity of my interpretation. Its account is not complete because the crisis is still ongoing.