In Franz Kafka's short story Der Heizer (published in English as The Stoker) the protagonist Karl Rossmann arrives in New York harbor on a steamship and watches as the Statue of Liberty becomes visible through the fog. But instead of a torch lady liberty is holding a sword.
President Bush, in his inaugural address, mentioned the words freedom and liberty at least 40 times. Why aren't European observers rejoicing this vision of freedom triumphantly spreading throughout the world? Isn't this the culmination of the ideals first developed in the Enlightenment, and then exported to the new world? Or does freedom have different meanings? I agree with erphschwester that the protesters at the inauguration parade may have been puzzled by Bush's repeated mentioning of Freedom:
Während Mister B. über Freiheit und Demokratie sprach, wurden draußen die Demonstranten, die augenscheinlich eine andere Vorstellung davon haben als Mister B., mit Schlagstöcken und so´m Pfefferzeugs von Mister B.´s Art von Demokratie und Freiheit überzeugt.
Is it a coincidence that President Bush gave this paean to Freedom in Schiller Year? It is unlikely that Bush ever read Schiller - or even heard of him. But maybe he should before he throws out the word freedom over and over again, for no other poet-thinker thought as much about freedom as Schiller. This is from his great poem Der Spaziergang :
Seine Fesseln zerbricht der Mensch. Der Beglückte! Zerriss' er
Mit den Fesseln der Furcht nur nicht den Zügel der Scham!
Freiheit ruft die Vernunft, Freiheit die wilde Begierde,
Von der heilgen Natur ringen sie lüstern sich los.
Ach, da reißen im Sturm die Anker, die an dem Ufer
Warnend ihn hielten, ihn faßt mächtig der flutende Strom,
Ins Unendliche reißt er ihn hin, die Küste verschwindet,
Hoch auf der Fluten Gebirg wiegt sich entmastet der Kahn,
Hinter Wolken erlöschen des Wagens beharrliche Sterne,
Bleibend ist nichts mehr, es irrt selbst in dem Busen der Gott.
Schiller watched the ideal of freedom in the French Revolution turn into arbitrary terror, and came to believe that only through art could the impulse for freedom (Spieltrieb) achieve moral completion. In the Bush doctrine freedom becomes the legitimizing principle for preemptive war (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and abuse of human rights (Guantanamo).
Orlando Patterson has an interesting piece in the New York Times where he points out that most Americans have a different understanding of the concept of freedom - one that would have been completely alien to Schiller:
But most ordinary Americans view freedom in quite different terms. In their minds, freedom has been radically privatized. Its most striking feature is what is left out: politics, civic participation and the celebration of traditional rights, for instance. Freedom is largely a personal matter having to do with relations with others and success in the world.
Freedom, in this conception, means doing what one wants and getting one's way. It is measured in terms of one's independence and autonomy, on the one hand, and one's influence and power, on the other. It is experienced most powerfully in mobility - both socioeconomic and geographic.
In many ways this is the triumph of the classic 19th-century version of freedom, the version that philosophers and historians preached but society never quite achieved. This 19th-century freedom must now coexist with the more modern version of freedom. It does so by acknowledging the latter but not necessarily including it.
So perhaps it this private consumer ideal of freedom that President Bush was referring to his speech. If so, Kafka with his image of the sword was amazingly prophetic.
Der Heizer ist auch Teil des fragmentarischen Romans "Amerika", das von Max Brodt - gegen den Willen Kafkas - posthum veröffentlicht wurde. Lesenswert, kafkaesk halt.
Posted by: denkpass | January 25, 2005 at 05:51 AM
So this is basically an kick-the-US blog, is it? Boring.
Posted by: Sean | February 11, 2005 at 08:04 PM