The Economist explains its research from March 2013 -- Keep reading!
Language study
Johnson: What is a foreign language worth?
JOHNSON is a fan of the Freakonomics books and columns. But this week’s podcastmakes me wonder if the team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt aren’t overstretching themselves a bit. “Is learning a foreign language really worth it?”, asks the headline. A reader writes:
My oldest daughter is a college freshman, and not only have I paid for her to study Spanish for the last four or more years — they even do it in grade school now! — but her college is requiring her to study EVEN MORE! What on earth is going on? How did it ever get this far? … Or to put it in economics terms, where is the ROI?
To sum up the podcast’s answers, there are pros and cons to language-learning. The pros are that working in a foreign language can make people make better decisions (research Johnson covered here) and that bilingualism helps with executive function in children and dementia in older people (covered here). The cons: one study finds that the earnings bonus for an American who learns a foreign language is just 2%. If you make $30,000 a year, sniffs Mr Dubner, that’s just $600.
But for the sake of provocation, Mr Dubner seems to have low-balled this. He should know the power of lifetime earnings and compound interest. First, instead of $30,000, assume a university graduate, who in America is likelier to use a foreign language than someone without university. The average starting salary is almost $45,000. Imagine that our graduate saves her “language bonus”. Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe (a statement dubiously attributed to Einstein, but nonetheless worth committing to memory). Assuming just a 1% real salary increase per year and a 2% average real return over 40 years, a 2% language bonus turns into an extra $67,000 (at 2014 value) in your retirement account. Not bad for a few years of “où est la plume de ma tante?”
Second, Albert Saiz, the MIT economist whocalculated the 2% premium, found quite different premiums for different languages: just 1.5% for Spanish, 2.3% for French and 3.8% for German. This translates into big differences in the language account: your Spanish is worth $51,000, but French, $77,000, and German, $128,000. Humans are famously bad at weighting the future against the present, but if you dangled even a post-dated $128,000 cheque in front of the average 14-year-old, Goethe and Schiller would be hotter than Facebook.
Why do the languages offer such different returns?
It has nothing to do with the inherent qualities of Spanish, of course. The obvious answer is the interplay of supply and demand.This chart reckons that Spanish-speakers account for a bit more of world GDP than German-speakers do. But an important factor is economic openness. Germany is a trade powerhouse, so its language will be more economically valuable for an outsider than the language of a relatively more closed economy.
But in American context (the one Mr Saiz studied), the more important factor is probably supply, not demand, of speakers of a given language. Non-Latino Americans might study Spanish because they hear and see so much of it spoken in their country. But that might be the best reason not to study the language, from a purely economic point of view. A non-native learner of Spanish will have a hard time competing with a fluent native bilingual for a job requiring both languages. Indeed, Mr Saiz found worse returns for Spanish study in states with a larger share of Hispanics. Better to learn a language in high demand, but short supply—one reason, no doubt, ambitious American parents are steering their children towards Mandarin. The drop-off in recent years in the American study of German might be another reason for young people to hit the Bücher.
And studies like Mr Saiz’s can only work with the economy the researchers have at hand to study. But of course changes in educational structures can have dynamic effects on entire economies. A list of the richest countries in the world is dominated by open, trade-driven economies. Oil economies aside, the top ten includes countries where trilingualism is typical, like Luxembourg, Switzerland and Singapore, and small countries like the Scandinavian ones, where English knowledge is excellent.
There are of course many reasons that such countries are rich. But a willingness to learn about export markets, and their languages, is a plausible candidate. One study, led byJames Foreman-Peck of Cardiff Business School, has estimated that lack of foreign-language proficiency in Britain costs the economy £48 billion ($80 billion), or 3.5% of GDP, each year. Even if that number is high, the cost of assuming that foreign customers will learn your language, and never bothering to learn theirs, is certainly a lot greater than zero. So...of course greater investment in foreign-language teaching would have other dynamic effects: more and better teachers and materials, plus a cultural premium on multilingualism, means more people will actually master a language, rather than wasting several years never getting past la plume de ma tante, as happens in Britain and America.
To be sure, everything has an opportunity cost. An hour spent learning French is an hour spent not learning something else. But it isn’t hard to think of school subjects that provide less return—economically, anyway—than a foreign language. What is the return on investment for history, literature or art? Of course schools are intended to do more than create little GDP-producing machines. (And there are also great non-economic benefits to learning a foreign language.) But if it is GDP you’re after, the world isn’t learning English as fast as some people think. One optimistic estimate is that half the world’s people might speak English by 2050. That leaves billions who will not, and billions of others who remain happier (and more willing to spend money) in their own language.
I am always interested to read this British publication's articles about its neighbor and in many ways, still its nemesis, Germany. -rsb
ECONOMIST - Charlemagne
Once the language of Schiller and Goethe, then of Hitler, German is hip again
-- It used to take an introduction to this old script to decipher German. Hitler did away with that.--rsb
SUCH was the status of German in the 19th century—for Europeans
generally and for Jews in particular—that Theodor Herzl, the founder of
Zionism, once proposed making it the official language of a future state
of Israel. In the event, devotees of Hebrew won out. After the
Holocaust, German was particularly despised. But times change. Israeli
14- to 15-year-olds going back to school after the summer holidays now
have the option of German as a foreign language for the first time at
five public schools, to be followed by more.
German is also becoming popular among adult Israelis, and not only
the more than 20,000 who have moved to Berlin in recent years. This
reflects a broader shift in perceptions.
Fifty years after Germany and
Israel established diplomatic relations, 70% of Israelis have a positive
view of the country, according to a poll by the Konrad Adenauer
Foundation, a German think-tank. Many find Germans honest and
trustworthy. With the possible exception (at least lately) of Greece,
people elsewhere agree, polls show.
This suggests a big gain for Germany in “soft power”. Joseph Nye of
Harvard University, who coined the term in 1990, defines it as the
ability of a country to hold international sway not by brandishing hard
(military) power but by getting others to want what it wants. It is the
value of being attractive culturally, commercially, gastronomically,
ideologically, or indeed linguistically.
Germans, who are forever coping with their dark past, are thrilled by
any suggestion that they are popular. They have come to distrust hard
power since 1945 (to a fault, if you ask Germany’s partners in NATO).
The country’s political dominance in Europe during the euro-zone crisis
discomfits many Germans. Economic prowess and soft power is (almost) all
they will allow themselves. And now they have it. Monocle,
a British magazine, ranks countries by soft power and had Germany as
the surprise winner in 2013 and runner-up in 2014, wedged between
anglophone America in first place and Britain in third.
In a chicken-and-egg way, language both reflects and generates soft
power, says Ulrich Ammon, author of “The Status of the German Language
in the World”, published this year. German ranks tenth in the number of
native speakers. But it is fourth in the economic output produced by
them (including Austrians, Belgians, Liechtensteiners, Luxembourgers,
Swiss and others). German is also fourth by number of learners, trailing
English, Chinese and French and roughly tied with Spanish, according to
Mr Ammon. Some 15.5m people now study German, 4% more than five years
ago.
In the slow-moving world of language, that is a steep rise, says Mr
Ammon.
The overall increase is especially impressive since teaching of
German is collapsing in Russia, where privileges given to German over
English during the cold war have been phased out. Interest is growing
fastest in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe, with the Balkans a hotspot.
Many learn it mostly to boost their careers. Some hope to get a job in
Germany, where certain industries are short of labour because the
population is shrinking. Others want to engage Germany’s prodigious
exporters. An interest in German culture develops along the way.
Germany’s government tries to promote the trend. But compared with,
say, China, which is aggressively pushing its Confucius Institutes,
Germany seems shy about it. It does not share France’s prickly obsession
with defending the national tongue. And when France talked of a school
reform that would have the (unintended) consequence of reducing German
teaching, officials in Berlin merely muttered. German is hardly ever
taught as a first foreign language in schools anywhere. Officials simply
hope to make German the second or third on offer in more places.
Moreover, ordinary Germans seem blasé about pushing their language on
others. Linguistically ambitious expats in Germany complain that many
locals prefer to reply in English. And even when Germans speak Deutsch,
it is so littered with Anglicisms that purists fret about a spreading
patois called Denglisch. (Beware false friends, foreigners: Handy is not an adjective but a mobile phone.)
An even older gripe is that German is too hard to bother with. In
1880 Mark Twain complained in “The Awful German Language” that the
treatment of gender—so that “a young lady has no sex, while a turnip
has”—borders on perverse. And nouns “are not words, they are
alphabetical processions”. Twain sensibly suggested the language should
be “trimmed down and repaired”.
The Germans have not heeded his advice, in fact, changes to
spelling in the 1990s, many think, made matters worse. Fortunately,
however, the task is not as futile as Twain suggested. With its
predictable spelling and pronunciation, German can be mastered, whereas
English, with its protean spelling and word order, may seem easy but
prove treacherous.
Cunning linguists?
It is obviously beneficial to a country if more people speak its language. At best, that language becomes a lingua franca,
as English is. German never will be. But its growing use still helps.
It equips more people around the world to work in Germany, which the
country needs as it ages.
Proficiency lets more foreigners understand how Germans think. It may
convey, for example, the moralistic approach Germans have towards debt (Schulden), which is etymologically close to guilt (Schuld). The word for nipple (Brustwarze,
or “breast wart”) may point to export limitations in the romantic
genre. But no other language matches German’s capacity to describe Fahrvergnügen
(driving pleasure). And though many languages have polite forms of
address, the awkwardness over when to switch from the formal Sie to the informal du says much about German social norms. Even as German power grows, more may see in each German the whole human, or rather the Mensch.
ECONOMIST Johnson Language Feb 7th 2013, 2:19 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
THE debate around immigration in America often touches on language. The fear of nativist Americans is that immigrants do not learn (and maybe do not want to learn) English. If many of them speak the same language (say, Spanish) and cluster geographically (in, say, Los Angeles or San Antonio) they threaten to make America de facto bilingual. If this happens, so goes the concern, they will inevitably make demands for more legal recognition of other languages, threatening English's status as a unifying force behind America's motto, e pluribus unum, "out of many, one".
Americans know that this is an immigrant country. So why, in this narrative, did previous waves of immigration not threaten English, while today's does? In the traditional story, immigrants back in the good old days wanted to, and did in fact, learn English. But this is not really so.
Immigrant languages probably persisted longer in America a century ago than they do today. And one language in particular persisted in large, coherent pockets in America for more than half a century: German. German immigration to America peaked from around 1840 to 1880. Like most immigrants, Germans came to towns where their co-nationals had settled, so they built up big communities in cities like Milwaukee, Cincinnati and St. Louis.
So what did this immigrant community look like? Hard-working English learners who quickly dissolved in the great melting pot? Hardly. This fascinating short paper by Miranda Wilkerson and Joseph Salmons looks at just one town in southeastern Wisconsin, called Hustisford. They focus on the year 1910; German-speaking plunged fairly quickly in America after the first world war (1914-1918), for the obvious reasons. But before the war, German monolingual communities persisted for many decades after immigrants' arrivals.
Almost a quarter of Hustisford's population (over ten years old) was monolingual in German in 1910. Of that share, a third were born in America. Of the German monolinguals born abroad, a majority had been in America for more than 30 years, having immigrated during the height of the German wave. In other words, in small-town America a century ago, it was perfectly possible to grow up, or to live there for decades after immigrating, without learning English.
Was this because Germans were isolated, in pockets in town or perhaps on the outskirts? No; Ms Wilkerson and Mr Salmons' map shows them interspersed among Anglo-Americans. Were they simply undissolved lumps in an Anglo-American pot, though? No again: the scholars find many mixed households, and English and Irish names among the parishioners at German churches. Perhaps the Germans still felt somehow really German, not American? Here, the story is nuanced; German-Americans were certainly proud of their German heritage, but a 1917 cover of Die Deutsche Hausfrau, a ladies' magazine, featured prominent flags and the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner"—in German translation. This was just before America's entry into the war.
German was the single biggest and most concentrated foreign language on American soil after independence—until today. Almost five decades of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries has recreated something like the German situation. Some people, like the late Samuel Huntington, a political scientist, feel that America's "Anglo-American core" is threatened like never before. But for many reasons (hard to rank in importance), it is nearly impossible today to grow up in America without learning English. One study of more than 5,000 children in the Miami and San Diego areas (thick with Spanish-speakers) found that 94.7% of Latino middle-schoolers who had been born in America spoke English well. The authors concluded that "knowledge of English is near universal, and preference for that language is dominant among most immigrant nationalities. On the other hand, only a minority remain fluent in the parental languages."
As with most stories of "the good old days", the stories of the "good old immigrants" who learned English in contrast to today's layabouts are just that: stories. Their point is emotional, not educational. The purpose is to elicit fear of change, through reminiscence for an age that never existed.
(Wilkerson-Salmons paper via Mr. Verb. The headline is "Proud to be an American" in German. I'd quite like to see Lee Greenwood sing it in German.)
Featured comments
MKE_Hornet Feb 8th 2013, 15:42 As a native Milwaukeean and German-American myself, I can certainly vouch for the persistence of German culture and language even to this day in a city that used to be called the "Deutsch-Athen". It's considered quite the gig to play a show at Turner Hall downtown, and there are monuments not far from the Germania building to the Iron Brigadiers of the Civil War, many of whom could hardly speak English beyond announcing proudly that "they were going to fight mit Sigel!" (General Franz Sigel). Frankly I don't think current nativist nonsense directed at Hispanic Americans and Arab Americans holds much more water than the kind that said America would be overwhelmed by socialist Germans 100 years ago.
Michael Watsonin reply to Ingenieurwissenschaftler Feb 8th 2013, 02:17 Lieber Ingenieur, Isn't it extraordinary what nonsense and ignorance is so often expressed in so many of these comments in The Economist? Most Americans fail to realise that citizens of acknowledged German ancestry are the largest, measurable group in the US at about 50 million, i.e. more than Irish or African-American. (I understand that it is problematic to determine the number of citizens of English ancestry since they have been there so long that they consider themselves 'indigenous'.) It is in official records that significant numbers of Germans began arriving in America from 1670 onwards, initially mainly in New York and Pennsylvania (the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch were not Dutch but Deutsch, i.e., German). They brought with them the traditions of the Christmas tree, the hot dog and the hamburger. There are innumerable famous US citizens of German ancestry, e.g. Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, President Eisenhower, John Steinbeck, Meryl Streep, etc. What seems not to be realized by a great number of Americans is that there is no official language in the US - English is simply its de facto language. Today, Illinois State publishes a driver's manual in German just as Cincinnati does in Ohio. I mention these facts to counteract the absurd xenophobia concerning citizens, or potential citizens, whose mother tongue is Spanish. The pattern is always pretty much the same, especially since radio and talkies and TV and the Internet came along to homogenize and distribute the language everywhere. The first people, who came here as adults, will almost never be fluent. Their children are truly bi-lingual. The next generation is monolingual, and the only words you can be sure they know in the old language are foods and swears.
JUST twenty years ago, a language student removed from live
practice or in-person classes had to rely on books or cassette tapes.
Those were tough times: learners needed exceptional motivation, and got
little feedback on their progress. Later on, websites providing
textbook-style grammar lessons would pop up, making access easier but
still giving little in the way of interaction. Starting in the
mid-1990s, Rosetta Stone (whose latest incarnation Johnson reviewed in
January) added a bit of interactivity to the learning process, if at
steep prices. As software like Rosetta Stone’s improved and added more
online functions, free and low-cost services started to appear to
compete with it. Unlike older rote grammar websites, the best among
these sites have focused on interaction and personalised feedback. Livemocha,
for one, pairs far-flung learners on its forums and encourages users to
trade languages. Livemocha and its 16m subscribers were swallowed up by
Rosetta Stone in April, filling out Rosetta Stone’s once-vacant online
forums.
For those who lack the patience for forums or the pockets
for pricey services, there are (of course) apps for that. Two in
particular stand out as excellent. The first is Duolingo, which I have been using to learn French for eight months now. The other is Babbel, where I’ve been picking at Dutch for the past two months.
Duolingo,
unlike Rosetta Stone, Livemocha or Babbel, is free. (The company makes
money by charging for text translations, crowdsourced from users. That
corner of the site isn’t entirely smooth yet, so it’s a distraction for
most learners.) Lessons are available for English, French, Spanish,
German, Italian and Portuguese. Much of the learning happens in the form
of rapid-fire quizzes, which switch frequently between testing
speaking, listening, and writing. High scores unlock further lessons.
You can compare your progress with your friends’ through Facebook, a
successful use of "gamification". Duolingo’s free smartphone app offers
nearly all the same content as the website, too. I was surprised at how
good the app was, since most language apps have tended to be spartan,
buggy or both. Duolingo’s speaking quizzes on the app seem particularly
magical considering the voice recognition tech behind it was nearly
unusable just a few years ago on other software.
It’s a joy to use
Duolingo, in part because its phone app is not only convenient to use
but full of new content. But while it’s a great start, it’s not perfect.
For now, its lessons are deep—I haven’t even spotted the end-mark of my
French lessons—but the language selection is small. I also suspect that
Duolingo’s clientele is limited by its style of teaching. The quizzes
focus on mastering structural blocks, like relative pronouns or a
particular class of nouns. It doesn’t really teach conversational
skills. If I didn’t already know the basics of French conversation, I’d
be helpless in France. The focus is great for serious beginners or
long-term learners, but much less useful for casual learners or
tourists.
Babbel fills in some of those gaps. It isn’t free: it runs from $7.45 to $12.95
a month. This is still far cheaper than Rosetta Stone ($239 for an
annual subscription, or $25 a month, with frequent sales and discounts).
I needed a Dutch class before I left for the Netherlands, and Babbel
stepped up with one of the very few online Dutch courses out there. In
addition to the six languages also offered by Duolingo, Babbel has
Swedish, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Indonesian, Norwegian and Danish.
They’re not all as well developed as Spanish or French, but many
learners will be grateful that they exist at all.
Babbel’s
lessons, unlike Duolingo’s, first focus on building basic conversational
skills. For a Dutch learner like me, more interested in speaking than
reading, Babbel works well. (I suspect that most learners are first
interested in learning how to communicate, anyway.) Babbel will also
occasionally set off immersive lessons by explaining grammatical
concepts at length. As a linguistics enthusiast, I particularly enjoyed
the little tutorials. It’s a nice contrast to the technique of, say,
Rosetta Stone, which emphasises total immersion much more than rote
grammar.
Babbel’s interface is clean but still a little buggy.
It’s hard to repeat slides or audio recordings without going through an
entire lesson twice. The microphone tech didn’t like my Dutch
pronunciation (which could be entirely my fault), and repeating yourself
six or seven times to get it just right is wearying. I
suspected that the issues were limited to the still-new Dutch syllabus,
but I found many of the same problems in the French section. Babbel’s
phone apps (one for each language) are good, but not great. It works
without an internet connection, a plus. It’s perfect for reviewing
vocabulary. But it doesn’t offer all of the same functionality of the
website (unlike Duolingo), a shame considering it’s a paid service. But
Babbel's focus on speaking, the wide selection of langauges and the
modest price make it competitive with both the free Duolingo and the
sophisticated but pricey Rosetta Stone.
For students learning
English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German or Italian, Duolingo and
Babbel might actually work quite well in concert, filling in the other’s
gaps. I, for one, plan to continue using both. Duolingo and Babbel are
two exceptionally good sites. Given that they’re competing quite
vigorously with each other and with Rosetta Stone, their services can
only get better. Language learners can expect some exciting developments
in free and low-cost services in the next few years.
WAS SIND STOLPERSTEINE?
Künstler Gunter Demnig, aus Köln, bekommt 2005 im Schloß Charlottenburg vom Bundespräsident Horst Köhler den Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschlands.
Wie viele Stolpersteine gibt es jetzt?
Wo sind die alle? (OBEN IM LINK GIBT ES EINE MARKIERTE LANDKARTE)
STUMBLING OVER THE PAST
iPHONE Ap: 2012
In Berlin, more and more victims of the Nazis are being remembered with Stolpersteine—brass plates, embedded in concrete, in the streets where they lived. Andreas Kluth traces the stories behind the stones
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/June 2013
ON A HOT July evening in 2012, Menasheh Fogel, his wife and three
children were returning from a favourite haunt, the sandy beach at
Wannsee, one of the lakes on the western outskirts of Berlin. Fogel,
still in his beach clothes, parked near their home on Bamberger Strasse,
a charming street of old buildings with high ceilings. As he unloaded
their beach toys, his wife started chatting with an older man on the
other side of the street. "He was just talking in English to anybody
walking by," Fogel recalls. "He came off as a bit loony, but he was just
emotional." So Fogel, still in his flip flops, walked over and started
to listen. The half-hour chat that followed changed the way he relates
to his street and city, its past and his present.
The man outside Bamberger Strasse 3 turned out to be Howard Shattner,
from Santa Rosa, California, about an hour from Berkeley, where the
Fogel family had lived until a year earlier. Like Fogel, Shattner is
American and Jewish. And this address was where his family had lived
before the war. In 1938, Shattner’s father and two uncles fled Germany.
But his grandfather Chaim and aunt Jente stayed. In September 1942, the
Nazis came to this building and took them away.
Twelve days before he met Fogel, Shattner had commemorated his grandfather and aunt by embedding two Stolpersteine—"stumbling stones"—in
the pavement at Bamberger Strasse 3. He had come back on this day to
talk to residents and passers-by about them. They are brass plates
sitting on concrete cubes of ten centimetres on each side. Printed into
each plate are the details of one victim of National Socialism—Jewish, gypsy, homosexual or other—who
had his or her last address at this spot. The information is
deliberately kept terse.
The stone for Shattner’s grandfather reads:
HERE LIVED CHAIM SHATTNER BORN 1867 DEPORTED 22.9.1942 THERESIENTSTADT MURDERED 20.12.1943
There are now almost 40,000 such Stolpersteine in several European
countries, most in Germany, thousands in Berlin alone. Some streets that
used to be centres of Jewish life teem with them. My own street, in
elegant Charlottenburg, is one. In front of my own front door are five
Stolpersteine, and they were among the first things that my kids and I
noticed when we first came to look at the place. We bowed down and I
read the inscriptions out loud. My seven-year-old daughter wondered what
this might be about. Since she asked, I began to tell them, for the
first time, about the Holocaust. As I did so, some of our
neighbours-to-be paused and joined us and an ad hoc conversation arose—all before we had even moved in.
In the same way, Fogel had also noticed Stolpersteine in the streets
almost immediately after moving to Berlin. There were already several in
his own neighbourhood, Bayerische Viertel (Bavarian Quarter) in
Schöneberg, not far from Charlottenburg. Built by and for the
bourgeoisie in the years just before the first world war, this was and
still is a well-to-do area. Most of the streets are named after Bavarian
cities, hence the name of the quarter. But so many Jews once lived
there, Albert Einstein among them, that its other nickname was "the
Jewish Switzerland".
Berlin, and all Germany, has many memorials and monuments to the
Holocaust. But for Fogel these small blocks in the sidewalk made
remembrance concrete and therefore more touching, immediate, even eerie.
"You can go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington or to the Holocaust
Memorial here in Berlin and it’s kind of impersonal and abstract. But
this is one person, in one place, and you can imagine what his daily
life was like."
At first I assumed that the Stolpersteine were a government project,
organised by the city. Fogel had thought so too. Then, during one of his
German lessons, his language teacher told him that they were a private
initiative run by an artist, Gunter Demnig, who was born in Berlin and
now lives in Cologne. "When I learned that the Stolperstein project was
actually a private art project and not something done by a public
agency," Fogel says, "I actually got a little upset. I realised that
while there are quite a few Stolpersteine throughout Berlin, the streets
would be literally covered in them if all of the victims were
memorialised. It really made me realise how many people could easily be
forgotten."
And so the Stolpersteine dredged up every conflicted feeling that
Fogel, as a Jew, had about living in Germany. Nobody in his own family
died in the Holocaust. On his father’s side, he is 4th-generation
American; on his mother’s side, he is 5-generation. But he is still
Jewish. And not only does he now live in Germany, but he works there –
in information technology—for Bayer. Today, Bayer is known
predominantly for Aspirin, which it invented. But during the Holocaust,
Bayer was part of IG Farben, a chemical conglomerate that made, among
other things, Zyklon b, the gas used in the death chambers.
Fogel had made a sort of peace with his mixed feelings about his
career move. As a tech guy, he is the linear and logical type. "My left
brain overrides my right brain," he says. "I have nuanced feelings
because Germany has dealt with the Holocaust so openly and modern
Germany has some of the most progressive politics in the world—environment, governance, companies and all that."
And yet, the past is always there, sedimented into every place. Take
that sandy beach at the Wannsee, where the Fogel family had been
swimming just before they met Shattner. On a warm day, there are kids
splashing in the shallow safe area, bigger kids tumbling from the water
slide farther out, and off to the right the nudists are enjoying
themselves. But looking diagonally left from the beach, one can see,
just across the water, a grey mansion. This is the Villa Wannsee, where
15 leading Nazis met on January 20th 1942—nine months before Chaim Shattner was deported—to decide the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
WHEN
FOGEL TALKED to Shattner that day, he realised that sponsoring a
Stolperstein was an uplifting way of acknowledging and embracing those
unnerving links between past and present. Doing so is surprisingly
simple, as Shattner explained. Private individuals—Germans
who are curious about what transpired in their building, schoolchildren
doing a project, surviving relatives of a victim, anybody who is
interested—conduct their own research about a victim at a specific
address. They submit this to the artist, pay him a small fee (€120) and
then wait for their installation date. (Such is the demand, the wait is
currently about 6 months.) Demnig usually lays the Stolperstein
himself, often giving a talk as well.
But how to start? At Yad Vashem, the centre for Holocaust research in
Israel, one begins with a name. But Fogel was starting with an address,
and had to find out if any victims had lived there. He began by asking
his landlord what he thought of the idea. The landlord, whose
grandmother was deported by the Nazis, was enthusiastic, and they
started their research together.
Registration records, old phone books, government databases—information
started piling up but yielded little. Two things helped, says Fogel,
who has a goatee and dark-rimmed glasses and would blend perfectly into
Silicon Valley. First, he is methodical and tech-savvy. A Google Docs
folder was soon up and running, keeping family trees and other records
organised. Second, as he says, "I don’t give up that easily."
He compared address books from the years 1936-43. Any name at his
address that did not appear in a following year could have been a
victim. He then ran these names through the Memorial Book of the Federal
Archives, a German database of victims. At last, this produced one
match: Max Nartelski.
The victims’ archive also listed other Nartelskis at different Berlin
addresses. Fogel’s search took him further. Slowly, an entire family
began to emerge on his computer screen. It was a clan of victims,
survivors and descendants. One day, a fortuitous Google search pointed
Fogel to an American website raising funds for Alzheimer’s research, and
thence to one Evelyn Nartelski. Now living in Michigan, she turned out
to be Max Nartelski’s great-niece. This led to his first live
conversation with a relative of the man who had lived in his house, who
had perhaps slept in his own bedroom. Evelyn Nartelski’s recollections
brought his database work to life.
Even so, Fogel says, "all I really know about Max is that he was
unmarried and drove around in a big white car. I think he was a fabrics
supplier for suits, in business with his brother, maybe gay, in one of
these huge beautiful apartments, maybe mine." Fogel thinks he has
identified Max in the one grainy family photo that he has come across.
The picture shows a wedding party in a stately room with a high ceiling—the
men wearing evening dress and sporting the moustaches fashionable in
Germany at the time, the women in their finery, the tables well stocked
with wine, the air one of bourgeois sophistication. The room could have
been in Fogel’s flat.
MAX NARTELSKI, WHO turned 50 in 1938, was one of nine brothers and
sisters, most of them born in Königsberg, East Prussia (today’s
Kaliningrad). At some point, the family moved to Berlin, settling mostly
around the Bayerische Viertel. An older brother, Jacob, lived around
the corner on Regensburger Strasse, in a gorgeous building above what is
now an Italian restaurant. It probably looked the same then as now,
Fogel says. Most of the quarter was destroyed during two nights of
apocalyptic bombing in March 1943 and another two nights in November of
that year. Beginning in the 1960s, the streets were restored to their
former style, with stucco colouring the stately arches and turreted
windows. Today, middle-class families bustle about on the street,
pushing prams in and out of courtyards. Fogel imagines the Nartelskis
walking there in just the same way.
Jacob Nartelski, his wife and one son escaped Germany before they
could be deported, and died in America. Two other sons, Lothar and
Günther, were sent to Auschwitz but survived, and also died in America.
Günther’s wife, Paula, and daughter, Rita, died in Auschwitz, but with
his second wife he had Evelyn, who now lives in Michigan. And so it goes
for every branch of the clan, as for millions of other families: some
died, some survived, some now have living relatives. And of the living,
many have lost their connection—to one another, and to the places they
came from.
Set in stone: the Stolpersteine show the victims' date of birth, deportation and death
GUNTER
DEMNIG REMEMBERS one installation where people from four countries came
together, knowing nothing about one another, and found they were all
related. Sometimes they come from as far as New Zealand or South
America, to some particular spot where their family had once lived. At
one installation near Bremen, where Demnig laid stones for a whole
family, including two daughters who had survived, “those two daughters
showed up for the ceremony, and were unbelievably happy to be reunited
in this way with their parents.” They finally felt that they had closure
and could come back to Germany in peace.
Demnig calls his project "a decentralised monument" or,
alternatively, "a social sculpture". He looks like a middle-aged version
of Indiana Jones, often wearing a Fedora and safari shirt that
stretches slightly around the waistline. But his voice has no bravado;
it is high, almost timid, like that of someone who spends his life
questioning and thinking.
As the artist, he retains control over every part of the process.
Each Stolperstein is handmade because, he says, any form of
mass-manufacturing would remind him of the mechanised and bureaucratic
murder at Auschwitz. But to grow, the project relies on the initiative
of volunteers who grasp that, as a rabbi in Cologne once told Demnig, "a
human being is only forgotten once his or her name is forgotten."
Remembrance has been one theme of his art career. Born after the war,
in 1947, he remembers rummaging through his attic as a boy and finding a
photo of his father, in Spain during the civil war, sitting in swimming
trunks on a cannon that jutted out "like an erect penis" between his
legs. Demnig had never really talked to his father about the war years,
but now realised that he had fought for Franco. He was distraught. Like
many in his generation of 68’er Germans, he sought outlets to express
his complicated feelings, in rebellion and in art.
Demnig began laying Spuren—"traces" or "tracks" or "evidence"—of
the past as art. In 1981 he drove from Kassel to London, printing on
the street a 4cm-wide and 680km-long line of animal blood (250 litres,
procured from butchers).
In 1990, on the 50th anniversary of the Nazis’
first mass deportation of gypsies, he walked with one of his strange
printing-wheel contraptions through Cologne, chalking the words "May
1940—1,000 Roma and Sinti" on the pavement. When the chalk
began to wash off, he tried to make parts of that Spur permanent with
brass. And that’s when he had the idea for the Stolperstein project.
At
first it was purely conceptual since, as he says, "laying 6m
Stolpersteine in Europe seemed an absurd notion". Then he talked to a
priest who said, "Well, you can’t lay 6m, but as a symbol you could
start small." In 1996 he laid the first Stolpersteine in Berlin,
illegally. Three months later, the plates—51 of them, all along one street—came
to the attention of the authorities when the stones impeded
construction work. They wanted to remove them, but the workers refused.
Bureaucrats came to inspect the stones, and they were retrospectively
legalised.
By 2000, Demnig was laying Stolpersteine legally. But they were never
uncontroversial. Every now and then, he meets resistance from landlords
who would rather not have remembrance thrust upon them. And right-wing
extremists hate the very notion: Demnig says he has received three death
threats.
Even among those who want to remember, not all like the approach.
Most notably, Charlotte Knobloch, who was president of Germany’s Central
Council of Jews between 2006-10, feels that the Stolpersteine are
undignified because pedestrians are in effect trampling on a victim’s
name. Knobloch still leads the Jewish community in Munich, where she
survived Kristallnacht as a six-year-old girl, so that city is among the
few that, so far, do not allow Stolpersteine in public spaces, though
some residents put them in their private pavements.
Sometimes people suggest that Demnig should instead place plaques on
walls. He never liked that idea. It would mean getting the consent of
every landlord piecemeal, which would slow the project down. And he
feels that people rarely look up to the plaques that are already on
buildings (and there are many in Berlin), whereas they constantly look
down at the ground.
He also perceives the act of stepping on a nameplate quite
differently from Knobloch. "The more people walk over a Stolperstein,"
he argues, "the greater the honour to the person who lies there." His
original vision was that pedestrians polish the brass plates just by
walking over them, thereby "refreshing the memory each time". Instead,
it turns out, people usually step around the plates, perhaps associating
them with gravestones, which they are not. This means that the metal
oxidises and turns brown or even black, which in turn, ironically, makes
it look as though the Stolpersteine were left untended. Often,
residents then polish them the old-fashioned way. A lady in my building
regularly lights candles and strews white roses around the Stolpersteine
in our street.
There is also the idea of stumbling across something unexpected, as
implied in the name. Demnig feels this was put best by a boy aged about
14 or 15: "You’re not stumbling physically, you’re stumbling with your
head and with your heart." For children especially, Demnig says,
stepping over the name of a victim in their own street day after day
makes the Holocaust concrete as nothing in their formal education could
do. And, he adds, "one of the most beautiful pictures, I find, is this
aspect that, when you want to read, you have to bow, before the
victim." I sometimes look out of my own window and see pedestrians doing
just that in front of my door.
THE DAY HOWARD SHATTNER'S stones came to Bamberger Strasse 3, Demnig
was laying stones in another country, so two apprentices came to do the
installation. Spontaneously, Shattner asked if he could lay the stones,
took the hammer and did it. When Demnig returned to Berlin, Shattner was
still there and asked to accompany him for a few days, with a
cameraman, to make a documentary. He also brought along a rabbi, Walter
Rothschild, and they went around Berlin, looking at one installation
after another.
"My feeling about Germany changed completely after my experience this
summer," Shattner says, on the phone from his home in Santa Rosa.
"People were friendly and helpful. On the one hand I still have these
fantasies—that the person on the train, the S-Bahn, at
another time he could have killed me." But on the other hand, he found
his actual contacts with Germans to be healing. In his documentary, he
shows one installation where the tenants in a building had got together
to sponsor a stone. "One of the most special moments for me was talking
to that group of Germans. I was so moved by the fact that they had no
connection to the person remembered, other than that he lived in their
building, so they researched and wanted to have that memorial. It’s much
more meaningful to me that people are doing this from their heart."
Before he knew it, he was giving each of them a long, deep hug. There is
little body contact in German culture, but these embraces came quite
naturally.
So this is yet another connection that the Stolpersteine help to
make: not only between residents and the places they live, between
schoolchildren and a past that their ancestors were responsible for but
that seems unfathomable to them now, or between random pedestrians
pausing to reflect and striking up a conversation—but also between Germans and Jews.
"As a Jew living in Berlin," Menasheh Fogel says, "I felt the need
to connect personally to the Holocaust. Nothing felt any more personal
than sharing the same space as someone who had been deported." His
research is now nearing completion. Soon he will get a calendar date for
the ceremony of laying the Stolperstein he is sponsoring.
It will say: HERE LIVED
MAX NARTELSKI BORN 1888 DEPORTED 15.08.1942 RIGA MURDERED 18.08.1942
Andreas Kluth is the Berlin bureau chief of The Economist and author of "Hannibal & Me" Photographs Mustafah Abdulaziz Picture: Menasheh Fogel in his flat on Bamberger Strasse
At
first it was purely conceptual since, as he says, "laying 6m
Stolpersteine in Europe seemed an absurd notion". Then he talked to a
priest who said, "Well, you can’t lay 6m, but as a symbol you could
start small." In 1996 he laid the first Stolpersteine in Berlin,
illegally. Three months later, the plates—51 of them, all along one street—came
to the attention of the authorities when the stones impeded
construction work. They wanted to remove them, but the workers refused.
Bureaucrats came to inspect the stones, and they were retrospectively
legalised.