Three and a Dozen Years
Wolf Lepenies
In 1984, I came to "Princeton on the Spree River," as the newspapers called it, from Princeton, where, after an initial stay in 1979/80, I had been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study since 1982. The Institute there had been founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner, the great university reformer who had been greatly influenced by his experiences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore-for Flexner, the most German of all American universities. The loss Germany suffered by driving out Jewish scholars, and the richness America thereby gained, was manifest in the presence of academics like the historian Felix Gilbert and the economist Albert O. Hirschman, for whom Princeton had become a second home. At Princeton I realized how necessary and appropriate the task was that the Wissenschaftskolleg's founders had undertaken: wherever possible, to restore ties to the scholars and scientists driven out of Germany in the Nazi era.
The Wissenschaftskolleg was familiar to me: In May 1982, I had been appointed a member of the Academic Advisory Board. I had known Peter Glotz, the founding senator, since my days as a student in Munich: he had been one of my first academic instructors. I had the privilege of experiencing the high point of the first Fellow class: Gershom Scholem's lecture on Kabbalah on November 6, 1981. In 1984, I transferred to the Wissenschaftskolleg as a Permanent Fellow; the work on the book I had begun in Princeton, 'Die drei Kulturen' (The Three Cultures), was completed in Berlin.
In 1986, I was elected Peter Wapnewski's successor as rector. I can hardly better express my respect for what he achieved and my gratitude for a collegiality that soon became friendship than to quote Karl Gutzkow: "Here you get ahead if you were someone else's representative for a while."
I would like to divide the retrospective of my three periods in office as rector (1986-91, 1991-96, 1996-2001) into four sections: (1) Research on Science, (2) Focus on Central and Eastern Europe: Building Institutions with Ideas, (3) Modernity and Islam, and (4) The Wissenschaftskolleg as an Example: The Europeanization of National Institutions.
1. Research on Science
At the Wissenschaftskolleg, every Fellow, no matter what his discipline 'at home,' becomes a temporary anthropologist. For one year he lives among the natives of a tribe that is simultaneously familiar and alien to him: the tribe that consists solely of anthropologists. One of the goals of the institution accommodating this tribe is to create a climate of mutual challenges and inspiration in a milieu of differing individual temperaments, national theoretical traditions, and disciplinary orientations. Each individual Fellow should use this climate optimally. We thereby strive for a productive unsettling: a reevaluation of what one has taken for granted in the research one has pursued so far. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who set up the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, formulated the corresponding question: "What does one actually do when one does what one always does?" This unsettling can go very far. During a stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg, it is equally legitimate and desirable to write a good book-or at least to refrain from writing a bad book.
One could interpret it as an expression of productive unsettling that the work reports that the invited researchers are asked to submit after the end of their fellowships usually contain a great deal of self-irony. This self-irony reveals not only something about the character of the individual researcher, but also about the working and living contexts in which he or she spent one year. In the Wissenschaftskolleg's multi-disciplinary milieu, one has to assert oneself differently than in a mono-disciplinary organization: discipline-specific self-irony thereby provides greater chances of recognition than the specialist's attempts to impress.
For the researcher on science, the Kolleg is an exciting field for observation. To take up the observation of increased self-irony, it is an institution where the individual Fellows-renowned artists and writers are the exceptions-cannot live on the reputation they bring with them. The sociologist doesn't know the mathematician, and the theologian's name is Greek to the economist. So it is fascinating to observe how in each class at the Kolleg individual and collective reputations are made: not only the perception of individual colleagues changes, but also the image of whole disciplines and groups of disciplines. There is nothing forcing the individual Fellow to engage in this process of reflection, but it is hardly possible for him to elude it: the Wissenschaftskolleg regards itself as an institution that seeks to promote not only research, but also thinking about research.
Long before I was called to the Wissenschaftskolleg, research on science was among the emphases of my own work as a sociologist, with issues in the history of disciplines in the foreground. A small 'invisible college' of historians of the humanities and behavioral sciences, situated on the periphery of individual disciplines, had developed into professional institutions where research was continuously conducted on the history of disciplines. This interest could be traced to a changed view of the history of science, to the intra-disciplinary shifting of thematic fields and research interests, and to changes in self-image and the image of others, especially in the social sciences, reflecting the processes of political and economic change in the Western industrial countries.
As the traditional history of science has depicted it, especially for the natural sciences, the continuity of disciplinary development supposedly required no sociological analysis; the currently valid cognitive standards of the respective discipline were considered sufficient to separate the wheat from the chaff, the few predecessors from the many who went off the track in the discipline's prior history, which moved on a narrow but straight path to the truths of the present. Like parts of the discipline of history, to which it otherwise displayed only loose connections, a history of science thus conceived created the deep-seated prejudice that it could do without a theory of science and even more so without a sociological analysis of the process of science.
Only gradually did the insight prevail that the development of the sciences is characterized more by fractures than it is guided by a steady expansion of disciplinary historical knowledge. This led to socio-historical, transdisciplinary studies of the production, selection, and storage of scientific alternatives. Institutional self-thematizations increased in all cultures of knowledge and, often triggered and usually intensified by the massive politicization of the social and behavioral sciences since the 1960s, effected substantial changes in the spectrum of theories and far-reaching shifts in research priorities, curricula, and organizational structures.
Yehuda Elkana played a central role in the Kolleg's early decision to emphasize the area of research on science. His disciplinary background in physics turned out to be as great an advantage as his context-related curiosity, which did not shy away from any discipline. Research on science became important to all of us, because, in a kind of self-evaluation, it questioned things long taken for granted. The sociology of science tried to correct the idea of the self-guidance of the science system by documenting its political controllability right down to the details of research planning; the history of science reminded us that the development of individual disciplines is not a smooth striding forth, but a survival of errors, a series of revolts and revolutions, and thus also a history of forgetting and suppression; the theory of science, finally, in its most radical form, relativized the knowledge-guiding power of Western rationality, previously seen as universal. In this context, Elkana spoke of a rethinking of the premises and conclusions of the Enlightenment.
In the Kolleg, planned and unplanned focus groups formed from year to year that were concerned with issues of research on science; but more important was the fact that such issues became a constant motif of our work. It thereby turned out that the individual Fellows' willingness to continuously and critically deal with their own disciplines' self-understanding and to keep tabs on such self-investigation in other disciplines had its limits. The call for constant reflection also created resistance, and in the transdisciplinary seminar 'Comparative Epistemology,' for example, we learned how rapidly a common thread can become a provocation: dissidents seceded and conducted a contrasting program underground, in the cellar, focused on reading the Latin original of Tacitus' 'Germania.' This also made it clear that the opportunity for transdisciplinary contact is given above all when a specialized competence, secure in its own field, gives one the courage and desire to move across boundaries.
In research on science, the emphasis is increasingly shifting from an individual-oriented to an institution-oriented history of disciplines. At the Wissenschaftskolleg, the development of the focus also remained connected with the names of outstanding individuals-both Fellows and guests. A case study in research on science was the May 1987 seminar 'The Institutionalization of Philosophy,' which I organized together with Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Rorty, two scholars who had expressed and would continue to express themselves very influentially on the self-understanding of their own disciplines (sociology, philosophy).
In the thematic focus conceived years later, 'Economics in Context,' for which Permanent Fellow Jürgen Kocka (1990-2000) took responsibility, Albert O. Hirschman came several times to the Wissenschaftskolleg and convincingly embodied the alternative to a scientistically overdetermined science of economics. Albert Hirschman has remained an outsider in economics and at the same time has become a classic in his own lifetime, with great influence even in economics' more distant neighboring disciplines. His thinking is shaped by the sense of possibility, the refusal to resign oneself to established realities, his principled and somewhat roguish arguing against the grain, and an eye-twinkling pleasure in trying things out in action. Against the triumphant "This is how it is!" of the great theory builders so overabundant in the social sciences, he poses a modest-sounding but endlessly effective question: "Is this how it is?" And then comes his challenging exclamation point: "Well, we'll see about that!" For Albert Hirschman, the world is one big field of surprises. His presence was significant to the Kolleg in many ways. The fact that scholars like Albert Hirschman, born in Berlin but forced by the Nazis to flee, regularly accept the Kolleg's invitations and return to Berlin helped us fulfill the Kolleg's tasks, as set down in our charter, which expressed the spirit and conviction that still suffuse and will continue to suffuse our scientific work.
Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) visited the Kolleg in spring 1989. He held a chair at the Sorbonne and, as Gaston Bachelard's successor, had pointed the history of science and epistemology in new and promising directions. In the framework of a Foucault seminar organized by our Fellow François Ewald, Canguilhem spoke about his own work, and it was an unforgettable experience to see how students and young researchers were impressed by the precision and passion of a great scholar.
In collaboration with the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris and supported by the VolkswagenStiftung (which at the time was still called the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk Hannover), the Wissenschaftskolleg developed a stipend program for German social scientists and humanities scholars as part of its practice-related research on science. Joachim Nettelbeck was deeply involved. This too would become an institutional founding: the Maison Suger, to this day a preferred home for German researchers working in Paris. The administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme was Clemens Heller (1917-2002), who, with the help of the Ford Foundation, had energetically advanced the social sciences in France after World War II. Heller became an important advisor with whom we regularly consulted about the Kolleg's external activities. From him one could, for instance, learn the advantages of weak institutionalization and understand why one should avoid bilateral arrangements in foreign cultural and research policy: (at least) tres faciunt collegium.
The decisive institutional consequences of our activities in the field of research on science emerged in Berlin.
One year after I took office, the Berliner Forschungsverbund Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin Research Association for the History of Science) was founded in close collaboration with the Wissenschaftskolleg, the Freie Universität and the Technische Universität. One aim of the association was to promote the internationalization of the field, including the history of technology, in Germany. Invaluable here were the suggestions of Tom Hughes (Fellow 1983/84), who continuously supported the work of the association. In 1990, the research association set up the Walther Rathenau Scholarship Program for young researchers and, as an overture, organized a colloquium devoted to Rathenau; among its participants were Jürgen Kuczynski (1904-1997), who had known Rathenau personally. The main building of the Wissenschaftskolleg is in immediate proximity to the intersection of Koenigsallee and Wallotstraße, where Reich Foreign Minister Rathenau was assassinated on June 24, 1922. More than any other in the first German republic, Walther Rathenau-whom Tom Hughes called the "shaper of the system"-embodied the connection, specific to modernity, between economics and politics, technology and science, mind and power.
The Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) was founded in Berlin in March 1994. The two founding directors (Lorraine Daston and Jürgen Renn) had previously been Fellows at the Wissenschaftskolleg-along with Lorenz Krüger, whose early death the same year kept him from beginning work at the institute. Later, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger was appointed the third director-he too was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg.
A look back makes it clear that the Kolleg's typical inspiration to disciplinary self-reflection has led to disciplinary re-orientations in one's own and in others' disciplines. In part, the consequences are only now becoming visible-with surprising continuity. I'll provide two examples:
Today, the theme imagery and visuality, which runs through all disciplines, is one of the Wissenschaftskolleg's thematic foci. The project of an image science is closely tied to the names Hans Belting (Fellow 1994/95 and 1999/2000), Gottfried Boehm (Fellow 2001/02), and Horst Bredekamp (Fellow 1991/92, now Permanent Fellow). The molecular biologist Gunther S. Stent (Berkeley) came to the Kolleg with me in 1994. Stent was born in Berlin in 1924; he attended the private Waldschule Kaliski in the district of Dahlem before the United States became-as was inevitable-his new home country. Stent remained affiliated with the Wissenschaftskolleg as a Permanent Fellow until 1990 and, as Rüdiger Wehner's predecessor, devoted his special attention to the biological sciences. In June 1987, he gave a lecture at the Wissenschaftskolleg entitled 'Wahrheit des wissenschaftlichen Weltbildes' (The Truth of the Scientific View of the World). It was a report on a research project "with the goal of identifying the network of cells in the nervous system of the leech responsible for the undulating swimming motion of this simple animal." In the lecture, Stent availed himself of Leonardo da Vinci's investigations and illustrations. He described it as "one of the most interesting discoveries about the function of the nervous system. . . . it interprets sensual impressions on the basis of hermeneutic principles." This led to the plan for a thematic focus on the hermeneutics of image-forming procedures. This could not be realized because the medical scientists crucial for this undertaking could not take the time for longer stays at the Wissenschaftskolleg. But the issues, which Stent developed for his own discipline, have meanwhile been fruitfully taken up in other fields. And image science, or a preliminary stage of it, is connecting as a matter of course with systematic and historical issues in the biological sciences.
In 1994, impressed by the "provisorium" of the old Dahlem Museum landscape, where the Art Museum and the Anthropological Museum coexisted in exciting proximity, the art historian Hans Belting and the Malian anthropologist Mamadou Diawara asked, "How does one exhibit foreign cultures and how does one exhibit cultures, period?" The two explain: "The question led directly to an examination of whether our museums are still entitled to their monopoly on the presentation, and incidentally, the representation, of other cultures. . . . After a year spent together at the Kolleg, it was easy to compare the museum thus described to Western science, which all of us, more or less with conviction, carry out in this place. We would like to secretly ask ourselves: What changes when experts from other cultures, rather than experts on other cultures, come together for common discussions at a Western science center?" Belting and Diawara thereby took up the catchphrase of "research with, rather than research on," which had played a central role in my deliberations on founding the Working Group Modernity and Islam. Today the program outlined by Belting and Diawara is recognizable in the concept of the Humboldt Forum, which intends to transform the heart of Berlin, where East and West have merged, into a new intellectual center.
2. Focus on Central and Eastern Europe: Building Institutions with Ideas
Berlin was named European Cultural City of 1988. Our contribution to the celebratory year was the Summer University, organized together with Berlin's universities in the Glienicke Jagdschloss, a historic hunting lodge. One hundred students from twenty-two countries took part. The Jagdschloss was located directly beside the Berlin Wall, which not only cut through, but also surrounded the city. East German border guards patrolled demonstratively, and at night, one heard the barking of the bloodhounds trained to hunt down fugitives from the republic. For the cultural program of the Summer University, we won Luigi Nono, whose 'Prometeo' was performed in the Philharmonic, and Gisèle Freund of Paris, who was once friends with Walter Benjamin and whose incomparable portrait photos mirror modern literature since the 1930s.
In one point, however, we had no success. We were determined to win students from East Germany as participants in the Summer University. Friedrich Dieckmann arranged a visit to Manfred von Ardennes' huge private research institute in Dresden's Weißer Hirsch quarter, where von Ardennes promised to put a word in for us with the politburo of the communist rulers, but even this did not help. The participation of one East German student from the Technische Hochschule (University of Applied Science) in Dresden was pledged, but cancelled at the last minute. All the more conspicuous and pleasing were the many contacts that Fellows established with colleagues at the Humboldt Universität in East Berlin and with institutes in other East German cities. In May 1987, the rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg was invited to give a speech before East Germany's Akademie der Wissenschaften (Academy of Sciences), thanks in part to the efforts of Günther Kröber, one of the directors of its Institute for the Theory, History, and Organization of Science.
Was it in the winter of 1988/89 that heavy snowfall in Eastern Europe greatly delayed the high-speed Moscow-Berlin-Paris train? A sign, handwritten with chalk, stood at Zoo train station: "Yesterday's train runs tomorrow!" At any rate, that was the last academic year in which the routine abnormality of the city of Berlin shaped the work of the Wissenschaftskolleg. Changes were in the offing: finally we were able to invite the first Fellow from East Germany to the Wissenschaftskolleg, the psychologist Friedhart Klix.
After the collapse of Communism, it seemed natural to us to maintain our contacts with the colleagues from East Germany with whom we had collaborated before 1989; in this, the advice of a jurist, our Fellow Hasso Hoffmann (1989/90), was especially useful. Scientists from East Germany whose work in teaching and research had been suppressed and hindered then came to the Wissenschaftskolleg and criticized us for continuing to cultivate our contacts with the former 'official' researchers. It became clear that there was not only an East-West problem, but also, and above all, an East-East problem. It was not soluble-especially not for those of us in the West. Although we had been involved, we had hardly been affected. All the more intolerable was the self-righteousness of many Western individuals and institutions that wanted to clean up the East. 'The Story of Mr. K.' was the name of a speech about a true incident (involving a former Fellow) that I delivered to ministerial officials in Bonn, then still the German capital: "In Germany, we are in the process of delegitimizing the biographies of Mr. K. with no ifs, ands, or buts; we are debasing a life history, and we are doing injustice. The delegitimization of biographies blocks future prospects. It can hardly be justified; correspondingly far-reaching sanctions could be compensated for only if the one German state had at its disposal attractive offerings for a new, strong identity based on common effort. But we don't currently have such an offering in Germany."
The revolutionary changes in Central and Eastern Europe and the implosion of East Germany's communist regime increasingly shaped life and work at the Wissenschaftskolleg. The Fellows were fascinated by these changes; many were swept up in the processes of change; and some of them temporarily changed their field under the pressure of events. Scientists became journalists, book projects had to give way to commentaries and columns. Historians and sociologists soon knew their way around Bitterfeld as well as they did around Berkeley. Among the Fellows, Robert Darnton (Princeton) wrote a Berlin diary ('Der letzte Tanz auf der Mauer: Berlin-Journal 1989-1990,' Munich, Hanser, 1991 [Last Dance on the Wall: Berlin Diary 1989-1990]), and Friedrich Dieckmann, our second East German Fellow, saved us from viewing the fall of the Wall and its consequences solely from a Western viewpoint.
In collaboration with the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, in September 1989 Robert Darnton and I organized the first 'East-West seminar in eighteenth-century studies,' which brought together at the Wissenschaftskolleg young researchers from East and West.
In the fall, Iván Berend, president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, visited the Kolleg. "Why don't we found a Wissenschaftskolleg in Budapest, too?" we asked at his departure. One day later, Berend called up from Budapest and answered in the negative my question as to whether the Hungarian government would have a "problem with (West) Berlin"? With varying degrees of stubbornness, the Warsaw Pact countries had maintained the thesis of the special political unit of West Berlin, which made it difficult and in some cases impossible to invite Fellows from certain Eastern European countries. For the same reason, a few years earlier it would have been impossible for a (West) Berlin institution to conduct institution-building activities east of the Iron Curtain in collaboration with institutions from the Federal Republic of Germany. Berend's answer meant that all these problems were no longer an issue-just as, later, the cutting of the border fence between Hungary and Austria marked a de-facto end to the East-West division of Europe.
And thus began the exciting, many-chaptered adventure of 'building institutions with ideas.' The difficulties were greater than I could ever have imagined-and even greater was the joy in finally being able to overcome most of the difficulties, in close collaboration with Joachim Nettelbeck. I will never forget the walks we took with the intention of discontinuing at least two projects, as a rule returning with ideas for three new ones.
At the end of the adventure of 'building institutions with ideas' stood the Collegium Budapest, the New Europe College in Bucharest, the Bibliotheca Classica in St. Petersburg, and the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) in Sofia-"sites of intellectual exchange," to paraphrase Jacob Burkhard, who knew what was special about such institutions: "There people have something to say to each other, and they make use of it."
In Budapest and Bucharest, in St. Petersburg and Sofia, success stories were written-but of course there were also failures. In Prague, various projects foundered on the resistance by government offices; in Warsaw, in a Saxon-French collaboration made logical by history and supported by George Soros, it was possible to foster the Institute for Sociology at the Academy of Sciences for a limited time, but we did not manage to expand these activities.
After the fall of Communism, dealing with fractures and delicately balancing differences in mentality became one of the great challenges for both European politics and the social sciences. I used the expression "politics of mentalities" to underscore that what was needed was no longer the application of well-oiled processes for solving short-term problems, but, in the long term, the development of a new set of tools to answer questions not previously posed. In the spirit of this politics of mentalities, the Wissenschaftskolleg began to help build new and restructure existing institutions in Central and Eastern Europe.
Our primary goal was to strengthen local cultures of knowledge. On the one hand, as Gottfried Keller once pointedly told his ill-humored contemporaries, it is "better not to hope anything and to achieve what is possible than to wax rhapsodic and do nothing." On the other hand, we aimed to erect ivory towers-constructions from which one can see a great distance, if one only climbs high enough.
In the following, I would like to name some principles that we followed in our institution-building activities.
a) Take local contexts seriously
Glocality is a horrible word, but it adequately describes an important fact: In a world that is growing together, localities are becoming ever more important. Precisely under the conditions of globalization, personal and group identities are increasingly produced in regional contexts. Every attempt to form institutions in the areas of science and culture must take this into account. The point is to strengthen local cultures of knowledge.
b) Cultivate a desire to learn
We learned that cultures of knowledge survived under the conditions of shortage and hardship in Eastern Europe and that styles of research had evolved that were worth preserving. We recognized that there is no reason why traditional forms of scholarship must stand in the way of a necessary modernization. Rather, they can often contribute more to their promotion and acceleration than any up-to-the-minute excessive conformity of scientific styles of thinking and forms of activity. Unlike the German (and also the French) cultural foreign policy, we did not support existing institutions (and thereby the old elites), but tried to develop new structures.
c) No condescension
Important is a stance that works toward strengthening local cultures of knowledge. Almost as disadvantageous as doing nothing is a demonstratively condescending charity that gives those whom one wants to help the feeling of being backward and that increases their feeling of inadequacy. Our motto was not "We will help you!" but "We need each other!"
d) Avoid bilateral agreements
Never for a moment did we think of founding German-Hungarian or German-Romanian institutions, and we have continued to resist related ideas. Cultural and research policies are in no way the innocent variants of the high-level politics that the French call politique politicienne. On the contrary, in cultural policy, prejudices are especially strong and suspicions arise quickly. Every bilateral initiative spurs the jealousy of the neighbors, and while it is otherwise true that competition enlivens business, in cultural and research policy, competition among institutions often uselessly ties down powers and wastes resources. Multilateral engagements, by contrast, usually produce a highly desirable effect: national prejudices neutralize each other.
c) The Olympics as a model
Our goal was to help establish European/international institutions in the metropolises of Central and Eastern Europe. The Latinized name Collegium Budapest, for example, took up the thread of a common European heritage spanning East and West, one that goes back to the Middle Ages. It was important that what was founded in Hungary's capital was not a Collegium Hungaricum. The Collegium Budapest's name unmistakably expressed that it was being founded as a European institution in Budapest, not as a national institution. In this way, institutes for advanced study are comparable to the Olympic Games, which are also not held in countries, but in cities. Urban or local contexts, not national milieus, shape them.
f) Public-private partnerships
We have always focused on achieving a mixture of public grants and private donations in financing our projects. Public-private partnerships have proven to be extraordinarily effective and exemplary, not least in Central and Eastern Europe. They make it possible to show, almost in passing, what the essence of democracy consists in: state institutions working together with civil society institutions.
g) The principles of Matthew and Paul
In research, too, one must respect the weak, but here the primary aim is to make the strong even stronger, wherever possible: "to make the peaks even higher," as James B. Conant once formulated it. Nowhere is the culture of shareholder value more justified than in research. Nonetheless, gazing at the peaks sometimes seduces one into overlooking developments on the somewhat lower slopes, developments that are innovative and could become tomorrow's top achievements. So one must orient oneself not only to the St. Matthew principle: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. . ." (Matthew 25, Verse 29). One must also follow the principle of St. Paul: ". . . now at this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want: that there may be equality. . ." (2 Corinthians 8, Verse 14).
h) Catch up and overtake
One of the biggest mistakes of Western research (assistance) policy in Central and Eastern Europe was to provide institutions with second-rate equipment, as if following the motto: "They had nothing at all, so hand-me-downs are good enough for them." Nothing could be more mistaken. Precisely in processes of modernization, one must immediately provide opportunities to overtake-and accept the possibility that one will be overtaken.
i) Form networks
The institutions in whose founding we take part are linked in personal and organizational networks. This results in unimagined amplification effects-not least in the attempt to expand local fields of influence to include whole regions.
Collegium Budapest was officially opened on December 15, 1992. Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker represented Germany at the ceremony in Buda's old city hall, a wonderfully renovated Baroque edifice. The jurisprudence researcher Lajos Vékás became the first rector; it was possible to win over the renowned economist János Kornai as a Permanent Fellow. Our initiatives to found and support institutions in Central and Eastern Europe had reached a first stage and were to serve as models for further endeavors.
The donors who together wrote this "unique European success story" (Ralf Dahrendorf) come from six countries: Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Germany-or more precisely, the German states of Baden-Württemberg and Berlin. Among them are state institutions as well as public and private foundations. Among the latter are Switzerland's Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis & Gyr, the fund of the Swedish Riksbanken and the Wallenberg foundations, the Dutch lottery, Germany's Fritz Thyssen Stiftung (Cologne), the VolkswagenStiftung, the Krupp-Stiftung, and the Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft, along with the Boehringer Stiftung and the Stiftung Preussischer Seehandel. The Académie Française and Berlin's publishing house Walter de Gruyter generously outfitted the Collegium Budapest's library.
Finally, at our suggestion and after extensive preliminary work in Brussels, a new support area was taken up in the European Commission's Fifth Framework Program: Centers of Excellence in Central and Eastern Europe. This initiative supported thirty-four institutes in Central and Eastern Europe; an evaluation ranked Collegium Budapest second among them. Without the founding of the Collegium, such an initiative would have been hard to launch.
When the Wissenschaftskolleg was founded, two American institutions were the primary models: the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto, (Stanford/California). After the founding, there were soon also contacts with the National Humanities Center (NHC) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Added to these, as older European sister institutions, were the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Wassenaar and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS) in Uppsala, for which the Wissenschaftskolleg had already served as a model. An informal meeting of the six directors led to an informal association: SIAS (Some Institutes for Advanced Study). We agreed to meet once a year at one of our institutes to discuss our experiences with programs and persons.
In the early years of SIAS, we were all especially interested in the question of how we could contribute to providing better working conditions for our colleagues in Central and Eastern Europe, after the end of Communism in the Warsaw Pact states. The result of our discussions was the New Europe Prize. It carried a 75,000-deutschmark purse and was awarded each year to two winners, each of whom had been a Fellow at one of our institutes. The prize was awarded to a person, but the purse was to go to the winner's home institution or serve to establish a new institution.
It was not common for European and American institutions to collaborate this closely in regard to the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe; joint European-American funding of such a prize was highly unusual. Among the fostering institutions were, in Europe, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the Swedish Council on Higher Education, and the Dutch Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen and, in America, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The same year, a stipend program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation began; it made it easier for the Wissenschaftskolleg to invite excellent younger researchers from Central and Eastern Europe to be Fellows.
The New Europe Prize was awarded for the first time at a ceremony at the Wissenschaftskolleg on November 11, 1993. The prize winners were the classical philologist Alexander Gavrilov of St. Petersburg, who had been a Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Romanian art historian and religious studies scholar Andrei Plesu, who had been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg.
Plesu expressed his thanks and at the same time underscored how much the erstwhile dictator Ceausescu would have approved of the name New Europe Prize. For Andrei Plesu, who had had to live for decades under communist rule and in part in exile, the term 'new' was redolent of a dictatorship and was thus hopelessly compromised. Dissidents had been jailed in the name of the 'new policy'; preservation of cultural tradition had been blocked with reference to the 'new cultural policy'; buildings and villages had been destroyed in the name of the 'new settlement policy.' Plesu came up with a name for a fictitious prize he would have preferred to receive: the Old Europe Prize.
This speech was not the only thing that made the inauguration of the New Europe Prize unforgettable. In the November 19, 1993 edition of the weekly newspaper 'Die Zeit,' Klaus Hartung wrote: "One thing is not hard to predict: If the situation in this part of the world takes a civil turn, then this Berlin inauguration will be a legend in a few years. . . . The initiators of the prize have enough experience with Eastern European conditions, at any rate, to distance themselves from traditional research management and to choose the alternative: the reconstruction of the republic of scholars."
3. Modernity and Islam
The Wissenschaftskolleg was founded in memory of Ernst Reuter; the foundation in which it is embedded bears the name of the unforgotten mayor of Berlin, who spent several years in Turkey as an emigrant from Nazi Germany. In fall 1989, the Kolleg wanted to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of its name-giver. Through the good offices of Peter Glotz, I went to Bonn in the spring to ask Willy Brandt to deliver the speech at the ceremony. Brandt agreed. When I asked him what theme he would speak on, he replied, "I like to pick very general themes. That makes it easier later to respond appropriately to current events." And so Willy Brandt spoke at the Wissenschaftskolleg on December 11, 1989, one month after the Berlin Wall had fallen. His address was entitled 'Political Reactions to Global Changes.' And the listeners thought he had chosen the topic in response to the events of November 9.
Willy Brandt's lecture will remain unforgettable to all who attended. He spoke-how could it be otherwise?-about his Ostpolitik and his policy toward East Germany, but he did so surprisingly briefly. Germany was the occasion but not the focus of his speech. The focus was not East-West, but North-South problems. In 1977, the Independent Commission on International Development Issues proposed by Robert S. McNamara, president of the World Bank, had begun its work. Willy Brandt assumed the chair of the body, which became known as the North-South Commission. The Brandt Report it presented led to a turnaround in international development policy.
At the Wissenschaftskolleg, at a moment when, in the words of Berlin's governing mayor, Walter Momper, the Germans were the happiest people on earth, Willy Brandt exhorted his listeners to remember not only Europe, but also and especially the Third World. Especially moved by Willy Brandt's lecture was our African Fellow, Sunday Petters, an excellent geologist from Nigeria. Immediately after November 9, 1989, overwhelmed by the German-German jubilation and impressed by Europe's optimism, he said in a circle of Fellows: "Soon you will no longer speak about Africa-or will you?"
We constantly strove to invite African Fellows. The stay of the Malian historian and ethnologist Mamadou Diawara (1994/95) had institutional consequences. The institute within 'our' group with undoubtedly the most beautiful name, Point Sud. Muscler le Savoir local, was founded in Mali's capital, Bamako. The founding of this institute was tied to the hope that we had thereby found a contact point from which it would be easier in the future to attract Fellows from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Wissenschaftskolleg. From today's standpoint, we must admit that these hopes have not been fulfilled to the degree we would have desired. For us, as for so many other Western institutions, Africa is still an unknown continent. But Mamadou Diawara's appointment as professor at the Institute for Historical Ethnology at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Universität in Frankfurt has resulted in the pleasing institutional development and stabilization of Point Sud. Through the mediation of researchers like Mamadou Diawara, we perceive Africa as a kind of darkroom in which problems develop that are or will be our own.
In the middle of the 1990s it became clear that, in the future, ethnological issues would play an increasingly important role in the Wissenschaftskolleg's work and intellectual orientation. A European institution in Germany would have to make it clear that the time of Eurocentrism was over for good-which does not rule out critical reflection on the leading, universalizable ideas of European thinking, in particular those of the Enlightenment, but which lends this reflection more conviction and stability. In Berlin, a city that is often overly fixated on itself, one goal should thereby be to contribute to knowledge of other parts of the world, which a metropolis urgently needs. Researchers from Islamic countries were increasingly guests at the Kolleg in the next years. The Wissenschaftskolleg thereby sought to contribute, within the broader area of cultural and research policy, to making a change in the orientation of intellectual drive that is urgently needed in the West. More than before, it was necessary to not always play the schoolmaster to non-Western cultures, but also to learn from them.
The Fellow at the top of the alphabet in the first year of my rectorship (1986/87) was a scholar of Islamic Studies, Mohammed Arkoun, director of the Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Paris III. He described the goal of his very extensive project as "to bring back together under historical viewpoints an Islamic thought that has been fragmented, maimed, and falsified by ideological and apologetic use and thereby simultaneously to anchor this thinking as a part of modernity as a whole." With this, the key words were named that appeared again in 1994 in the first memorandum on the founding of the Working Group Modernity and Islam. From it grew an emphasis of intellectual orientation that molds the Wissenschaftskolleg to this day.
The precursor to this was another research project, whose members took up their work the same year. I had worked especially closely with Yehuda Elkana in projects and focus groups on topics in research on science. I had become a member of the board of trustees of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which Elkana headed. One couldn't help but admire the degree to which he saw it as his task in this research institution to contribute, from the side of science and research, to easing political tensions in the region by collaborating with Palestinians in the occupied territories and with Arab Israelis. Yehuda Elkana and I conceived a research project called 'Europe in the Near East,' whose funding was later provided by the VolkswagenStiftung. The goal was to create a context for discussion that, in the long term, would bring young Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans together, initially in Jerusalem and perhaps later in cities like Ramallah. To this end, we designed a kind of detour strategy: the discussion should not start with debate about local and current problems, but with a view of historical problems from a universal perspective. The participants would conduct research together on what the heritage of Europe, in particular the European Enlightenment, meant for the regions of the Middle East.
The historian of science Rivka Feldhay, who had been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in 1988/89, became one of the project heads; the other was Azmi Bishara, an Arab Israeli who had taken his doctorate in philosophy at Berlin's Humboldt University and who had a leading function as research director at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. To this day, Bishara is highly visible and stridently involved in Israeli politics as a founding member of the National Democratic Assembly and as a member of the Knesset. At the Wissenschaftskolleg, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus oversaw the project, which raised great hopes and expectations. On January 7, 1999, under the title 'The New Palestinians,' Edward Said reported in the 'London Review of Books' on his visit to a group of young Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem: "For the first time in six years of direct intellectual exchange with Arabs and Jews on the politics of Palestine and Israel, I was suddenly aware that we had crossed the rhetorical barricades and had entered relatively new territory of common interest to Israeli Jews and Palestinians." Edward Said, not exactly an optimist by temperament, wrote this after a meeting with the 'Europe in the Middle East' project group. The second Intifada brought an end to the project, at least for the time being. Above all, it was no longer possible to realize the plan to coordinate the project's second phase from an institution in the Palestinian territories. Our hope remains that the close German-Israeli-Palestinian contacts that developed in the 'Europe in the Middle East' project and the network that thereby arose can become effective again in the future.
In the framework of the Working Group Modernity and Islam (AKMI), conceived in 1994 and founded in 1996, an attempt was made to bring existing Berlin institutions in the area of Islamic and Oriental studies into a fruitful working context and into more intense contact with colleagues from Muslim countries. Later we attached special importance to collaboration between disciplines like history and sociology, on the one hand, and regional disciplines, on the other. The Working Group was to pursue less traditional issues, as well, without restriction to a specific disciplinary direction.
The Working Group Modernity and Islam set itself four emphases:
First, it intended to break the West's monopoly on modernity and Islam's monopoly on crises. It set out to reveal elements of modernity in Islamic societies and states, and to address symptoms of the crisis of modernity in the West.
Second, it aimed to treat these issues comparatively wherever possible. Research on Islam would be conducted for an imaginary ethnographic museum, but consciously in relation to extra-Islamic experiences.
Third, we had the intention of renewing and strengthening the historical-philological traditions dominant in Germany in the past by adding to them social scientific, political scientific, and ethnological approaches.
Fourth, we wanted to conduct research in a way that was conducive to making a connection with scientific discussion in the Arab and Islamic countries. A research with, not (only) research on, would have to take cognizance of the extensive scientific literature produced in the Islamic world that, due to language barriers, has been inadequately received in the West.
The founding of the Working Group was prepared for with a conference in which, with few exceptions, all well-known German scholars of Islamic Studies and some researchers from outside the country took part. In Berlin, the relevant institutes of the universities and research institutions collaborated. Instruments of the Working Group were: a Berlin Seminar that, transcending disciplinary boundaries, brought together primarily young researchers; postdoctoral stipends for Western scholars of Islamic Studies and researchers from Muslim countries; and a Summer Academy that was to be held alternately in Berlin and at a research institution in the Middle East or North Africa.
The research association was generously supported with startup funding from the Körber-Stiftung, then later from the Berlin Senate and the German federal government. Impressive, especially in retrospect, was the swiftness with which institutions in the state of Berlin and the country as a whole decided to contribute to this support. In Berlin, Senator for Research Manfred Erhardt, and in Bonn, 'Future Minister' Jürgen Rüttgers played a decisive role. Minister Rüttgers came to the Wissenschaftskolleg for the opening of the Working Group and made our standpoint his own: that it must be possible, primarily in academia but also in politics, "to find our way from an attitude of schoolmasterliness toward supposedly pre-modern non-European civilizations back to a culture of learning."
In October 2005, Tim Müller, who had reported regularly in the 'Süddeutsche Zeitung' on the Working Group's activities and events, wrote in retrospect: "The AKMI at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin is a rare stroke of luck, scientifically, intellectually, and politically; it has become an essential interface between the Orient and the Occident-it is simultaneously Europe in the Middle East and the Middle East in Europe. It offers the intellectual shelter that a scientifically advanced treatment of this complex relationship requires. In times when the Islamic world is the focus of international tensions and the West declares that it is tying its survival to the political and societal reshaping of the Middle East, is it even necessary to underscore the foresight of the founders of the AKMI?
When the first plans were made for the later Working Group, neither September 11, 2001, nor the terrorist networks of Islamic radicalism, neither the Iraq War nor the latest hopes for a democratization of the region had moved into the focus of Western public attention. Nor had they been declared the fused, omnipresent, fateful theme of our age. Ten years later, the difference in perception can hardly be reconstructed; what remains is only the diagnosis of a break in mentality. A research strategy that, from today's perspective, is downright breathtakingly prescient pursued at that time the establishment of such an astonishing institution."
In this volume, Navid Kermani provides a detailed resume of the activities of the Working Group Modernity and Islam, especially in its second phase, titled AKMI II, which met from 2001 to 2006. It expanded these activities to include the artistic realm (exchanging authors; events in Berlin theaters). In close collaboration with the Arabist Angelika Neuwirth, he brought together Israeli-Jewish and Arab-Muslim scholars in the AKMI subproject 'Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Criticism.'
When our Fellow Ulrich Haarmann (1995/96) was appointed director of the newly founded Zentrum Moderner Orient (Center for Modern Oriental Studies) in 1997, a daring, almost utopian-seeming perspective was tied to this: the idea of having the center evolve in the course of the coming years into a kind of school of Oriental and African studies on the London model. Ulrich Haarmann's premature death in June 1999 prevented the realization of this plan. At the moment, however, the restructuring of Berlin's research landscape is creating new opportunities; but it cannot yet be said whether they can be realized, considering the city's financial straits and the federal government's paucity of funds.
Navid Kermani and I developed a plan to found a Jewish-Islamic academy in Berlin and published a manifesto to this end in the 'Süddeutsche Zeitung' on June 10, 2003. The idea was utopian, but it nonetheless proved to be a useful catalyst to continue the activities of the Working Group Modernity and Islam in a newly conceived program for the period from 2006 to 2011.
In February 2006, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung in Cologne, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin announced an agreement for a five-year joint research program entitled 'Europe in the Middle East-the Middle East in Europe.' The Fritz Thyssen Stiftung provided more than two million euros to fund it.
The guiding idea of the program is to investigate the political, social, religious, and cultural interconnections between Europe and the Middle East, both past and present. The research program is organized into four subprojects and a forum:
1) The Koran as the Text of a Common Antiquity and Shared History
2) Mobile Traditions: Comparative Perspectives on the Literatures of the Middle East
3) Cities in Comparison: Cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean and Neighboring Regions
4) Political Thinking in Modern Islam: Middle Eastern and European Perspectives
5) Forum: The Tradition and Critique of Modernity: Secularism, Fundamentalism, and Religion from Middle Eastern Perspectives
Taking part in the program are researchers in philology/literary studies, history, Islamic studies, and sociology/political science from Berlin's three universities, the Zentrum Moderner Orient, and the Zentrum für Literaturforschung (Center for Literary Research), as well as researchers from other German and European universities. They will collaborate with colleagues from the countries of the Middle East.
At the center is a postdoctoral program: Between 2006 and 2011, fifty young researchers from the Middle East will be invited to work for one year each at Berlin research institutions. They will devote themselves to projects of their own design and at the same time take part in a Berlin seminar to be held every fourteen days, which will bring together instructors and students from Berlin's universities and research institutions. Each year, a Summer Academy will be held, preferably at a university or research institution in the Middle East. The next one will take place in Beirut.
4. The Wissenschaftskolleg as an Example: The Europeanization of National Institutions
Since 1991, in his studies of the origin of German idealistic philosophy, Dieter Henrich has developed a method he calls constellation research. As a member of the Fellow class of 2000/01, Henrich spoke again in his Tuesday colloquium about the meaning of constellations in the history of philosophy.
Constellations of persons and institutions-non-coincidental coincidences-were initially instrumental in enabling the Collegium Budapest, the first institute for advanced study in Central and Eastern Europe, and then the other mentioned institutions in Bucharest, St. Petersburg, and Sofia, to become reality. Thus, in 1989-1990, our Fellow Iso Camartin brought the business manager of the Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis & Gyr, Heinz Hertach, to dinner at the Kolleg as his guest; this developed into a long-term Swiss engagement for our projects that finally comprised the foundation's enthusiastic president Hugo Bütler, the foundation itself, the canton of Zug, and Bern's Foreign and Interior Ministries. In Berlin, the envoy Paul Widmer proved to be an invaluable sympathizer. Heinrich Ursprung, president of the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich (1973-1987), who had been a member of our Academic Advisory Board (1982-1987), became state secretary for research (1990-1997) in Bern and remained a member of the Foundation Council of the Wissenschaftsstiftung Ernst Reuter (Ernst Reuter Foundation for Advanced Study) until 1997. As successor to Heinrich Ursprung, Charles Kleiber gave the Swiss involvement a continuity that has always been characterized by efficiency and an unbureaucratic stance.
In 1986, I spoke at the opening of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS) in Uppsala; this was the first foreign institution for which the still-young Wissenschaftskolleg served as a model. Its director, Björn Wittrock, has remained our partner and comrade in arms to this day, and the same is true of Dan Brändström, the managing director of the Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. It was only logical that Switzerland and Sweden become institutional partners and supporters of the Wissenschaftskolleg in 1999-2000.
This involvement was part of the guiding idea of a Europeanization of national institutions. The Wissenschaftskolleg was also to become a European institution in its institutional constitution. On December 12, 2000, the groundwork was laid by the agreement between Switzerland and the Wissenschaftsstiftung Ernst Reuter:
"On the stage of Central and Eastern Europe, the history of the last decade has taught us something: In the East and in the West, there are no cultural, social, or political givens whose substance and recognition cannot be endangered. The unity of Europe is no longer a utopia, but it is a project that can still fail-also in the West, also among us. But Europe must not play out solely in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Frankfurt. The sciences can also contribute to the overdue crystallization of a European public realm. Part of this is an intensified Europeanization of national institutions. Here a European science and research policy can launch a test activity with far-reaching consequences."
On June 27, 2001, Sweden followed suit: The foundation Riksbanken Jubileumsfond and the Wissenschaftsstiftung Ernst Reuter signed a corresponding agreement. The foundation, together with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, has been our partner in almost all the Wissenschaftskolleg's foreign projects. The generous support of the three Wallenberg foundations made it possible to build the residence hall for the Collegium Budapest, which now bears the name of Raoul Wallenberg.
In four chapters, I have tried to sketch the contours of my three terms as rector. They cannot come even close to capturing the richness and diversity of the experiences I have had in my three and a dozen years at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Among these experiences are two additional years as a Permanent Fellow before my first rectorship-and five years in that same capacity after retiring from the office of rector.
Foreign activities played a large role in these fifteen years, but the always fascinating, always extraordinary everyday life at the Wissenschaftskolleg was what shaped them as well. 'A Community of Scholars' is what the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton titled the commemorative publication with which it celebrated its fifty-year anniversary in 1980. Living and working in the community of scholars of the Wissenschaftskolleg was a decisive experience for me as well.
"The one side sits, the others stand. The ones speak extempore, the others read from their notes. The ones never quote, the others only quote." That is how a Fellow of the class of 2000/01 described the difference between natural scientists and scholars in the humanities. Of course, this dichotomy is rife with prejudices: The slightly heroizing description of the erect natural scientists who have their knowledge in their minds, not on paper, and who are not dependent on outside help in their investigation of the world comes from a natural scientist. The somewhat stinging character of his description of the humanities scholar solidly sitting in his chair, reading aloud the ideas of other humanities scholars, can be explained by the fact that the taxonomist-our Permanent Fellow Raghavendra Gadagkar-is a specialist in the social life of wasps.
The social scientist, who tends to count himself as part of a third culture, a culture marked less by intellectual certainty than by intellectual uncertainty, a culture of compromise-he sometimes walks, he sometimes sits, he often speaks informally, but he reads his quotations aloud from paper-the social scientist is not sure whether he should feel pained by these slight pinpricks. After a moment's thought, he recognizes that this is a kind of intellectual acupuncture: The pinpricks mark nerve centers of intellectual life.
C. P. Snow's dichotomy between the two cultures is quite old now. It is imprecise, prejudicial, and impudent in its discipline-specific attribution of mistaken political acts. But the world will not stop permitting us different ways of knowing it. The program of a unified science is not only inappropriate; worse still, its realization would be the victory of boredom.
However one may view life at the Wissenschaftskolleg, it is not boring. This is precluded by the temperaments of the many individual researcher who gather each year in the district of Grunewald, the many national intellectual traditions that confront each other here, and the diversity of the disciplines whose representatives try to understand one another. The freedom of removing the burden of everyday concerns and routines creates great expectations as well as the pressure to achieve. The Wissenschaftskolleg is an experiment in understanding, a hermeneutic exercise that lasts for a whole year. At the end there is no limitless understanding of each other, but in every case the individual researcher's astonishment that his intellectual activity is not a matter of course for the representatives of the other fields. The Wissenschaftskolleg is a field of surprises.
Translated by Mitch Cohen