Coming Home

We left Gdansk on May 30 on a train to Posnan, where we changed to the Warsaw-Berlin Express.  As happened regularly we were helped in our orientation to the train by a friendly Pole, who as so many there had worked for a couple years in the UK.  One lesson from all those cases is that with open immigration policies, many people move to work for a few years and then return to their home country.

We were fortunate to arrive in Berlin about 8:00 p.m. on a balmy evening.  Our hotel-hostel, the Meninger, is immediately adjacent to Berlin's new central train station.  After checkling-in, we had several more hours of daylight and, being close to the heart of the city, walked to the restored Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate.   The Reichstag, which was burned at the start of the Third Reich and therefore symbolizes the assault on German democracy, has been restored and sits by the stunning new chancellery and parliamentary office complxes that span the Spree River.

Rebuilt Reichstag

After going to the Brandenburg Gate, we walked down the Unter den Linden, old and new Berlin's grand boulevard.  We ate pizza at a cafe along the street.  It was a fitting end to our visit.  Sitting in an ethnically diverse, democratic capital of a nation that had caused and experienced so many of the events that resulted in the current international legal structure to control the worst abuses of human rights and the rules of war. 

Finally, on May 31, we boarded a flight for New York at Berlin's Tegel Airport.  At New York, after customs, we would fly on a domestic flight to Michigan.  One last contrast or lesson came at customs.  In contrast to our arrival in Madrid, where passport control was quick and without any custom check; the U.S. system seems to symbolize fear of the foreigners - or is it just fear?  As we waited in the long line to have our passports checked, the airport had TV monitors tuned to CNN.  Each news account as we snaked through the waiting area was - at its core - about fear.  One story was about the health studies that raised concerns about cell phones causing brain tumors.  Then they shifted to the current bizarre child murder case, providing sufficient dat to make the listener worry about any mother who might be encountered who is considering murdering her child.  Can't we show vidoes on these monitors about Yellowstone Park or even Central Park?  Must we welcome people with strtange and frigtening news?   Having said all this, our ICE agent was jovial and did provide a human welcome home. 

Now we need to get busy to build on what we learned and experienced. . .

Fun at the Beach

While we often had important meetings or spent time moving between site visits, we had some tome for fun, as when we took a tram in The Hague to the North Sea late in the afternoon after visiting the ICC.

Celebrating Alma's 20th Fulbright in Germany

While in the midst of the travel in Europe, we learned that Chelsea Clark, who had come as a student on the 2009 visit, and now was with us as a senior scholar, had just won a Fulbright Award to work in Malaysia.  The entire Alma delegation toasted Chelsea in a Nuremberg beer hall.  Most of the recent Alma Fulbright winners have participated in the Public Affairs program.

Solidarity and Gdansk

On Sunday, May 29, we arrived in Gdansk, the beautiful and famous Baltic port city. While we liked seeing this old Hanseatic League city, with its spectacularly restored Royal Way, our real reason for making the long journey here was to meet with the leadership of Solidarity, the famous Polish trade union and democratization movement. Upon our arrival, we placed a traditional bouquet of flowers at the memorial by the old Lenin Shipyard to the martyrs of Solidarity.

                                              One of Alma students holding Solidarity flag at
                                                       Roads to Freedom center in Gdansk

Our original schedule, including a meeting with the head of the Solidarity Foundation, Jerzy Borowczak was changed at the last moment as a result of President Obama's visit to Poland. In Warsaw, on Saturday, the President met with the leaders of Solidarity and honored the past work of the movement in bringing democracy but urged them and other Poles to take up the cause of further democratization in Eastern Europe, especially Belarus and Ukraine.

Public Affairs Class at Roads to Freedom Exhibit

Gdansk, May 29, 2011

The President said: "The kind of repressive actions we're seeing in Belarus can end up having a negative impact over the region as a whole and that makes us less safe and less secure." The President specifically praised Solidarity, and how it inspired the American people in the 1980s, "I remember at that time understanding that history was being made because ordinary people were standing up and doing extraordinary things with great courage and against great odds. Your actions charted a course for freedom that inspired many on this continent and beyond." Relating the Polish experience to current reform in the Middle East, Mr. Obama added, "Part of being a serious actor is adding value internationally, and the Poles rightly feel that they can add value on democracy promotion and democratic transition, given their own success since 1989."

Our group felt honored to be in the midst of such important events and gladly accepted a change in our schedule.  However, we were more than rewarded for our wait. On Monday morning we had the opportunity for a small informal meeting with Mr. Borowczak, who not only directs the Solidarity Foundation but is a member of parliament (the Sejm). Mr. Borowczak, was one of the three original organizers of Solidarity. At age 22, which he pointed out is nearly the same age as our students, he and the others organized the confrontation with the Communist authorities. At the start of the strike, the previously fired worker, Lech Walesa, climbed over the shipyard wall and joined in the leadership of Solidarity. Within a few weeks they forced the government to recognize their union and began an effort at social change in Poland. After a little over a year, pressure from other Communist countries in Eastern Europe led to Mr. Borowczak's arrest and martial law.

Of course, the story ended positively. Mr. Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize, Communism eventually collapsed in Poland and Solidarity's candidates won the first free elections after World War II and ushered in the collapse of dictatorships in Eastern Europe. Walesa went on to become President of Poland and Borowczak won a seat in Parliament.

However, Solidarity has not rested on its laurels. It runs a series of programs, not only in Poland, on democratization and free trade unionism. Additionally, it supports popular democratization education, including the well respected Roads to Freedom Exhibit in Gdansk, which we visited. In 2013, that exhibit is moving into new, larger, and more high-tech quarters. Already, guidebooks give it top billing as a site to visit in Europe.

                                           Alma students placed a bouquet at the feet of the
                                                     statue to slain Solidarity workers.
The good news for our human rights program at Alma is that Mr. Borowczak committed to co-sponsoring our December conference in Washington, pledging to send several professors from Poland, and one or more current leaders of Solidarity and perhaps democratization leaders from neighboring countries.
Now our work begins to make the conference a stellar success.

Dresden (and Guernika)

May 26 began in Dresden. We walked to the center from our hotel near the main train station. The entire distance, through what once was the core of old Dresden, was filled with new buildings, as a result of the old center being destroyed in the 1945 fire bombing. Only as we approached the Elbe River and the old palace of the Saxon kings, the Semper Opera House, the catholic Cathedral and the Frauenkirche did old buildings appear, and most, if not all of these were a result of rebuilding.

                                                   Pieta (made partially of rubble from 1945
                                                   firebombing) in Dresden's Catholic
                                                   Cathedral.  Dates etched into altar 30-1-33
                                                   and 13-2-45 note start of Nazi rule and night
                                                   of bombing.

Our visit to the old heart of the city started at the palace of the Saxon monarchy. It is a glorious place, with a porcelain museum housed there today. It reflects the power and wealth of old Saxony, which made it both a power and a prize I the unification of Germany. As a result of the power and local creativity, Dresden came to be known as the Florence of the North, with beautiful public buildings, churches, and the famed balcony of Europe, the promenade that follows the Elbe through downtown.

After the palace and opera, we walked to the Catholic Cathedral. While Saxony was a home of Lutheranism, as the kingdom came to include major areas of Catholic settlement,the monarchy bu8ilt the Cathedral and celebrated Catholicism to win the support of these populations. The Cathedral was heavily damaged by the World War II bombing Now rebuilt, one of the side altars houses a modern pieta, carved from ruins. Also, while there, we saw a display celebrating the sacrifice o f one of the priests who served the Cathedral parish and who died in the “priest bloc' [barracks] at Dachau. As so much in Dresden, the Cathedral and its contents reminds one of the horrors of Nazism and war generally.

                                                              Fauenkirche, Dresden

However, the biggest symbol of the horrors of war is the Frauenkirche, the huge Lutheran church. The Frauenkirche, survived the bombing, seeming to rise above Dresden's doom on Ash Wednesday 1945. However, the churches greatly weakened support structure then failed. The ruins of the collapsed church were allowed to sit as a pile of rubble until after the end of the Cold War. Only in the 1990s was rebuilding begun, to be completed a few years ago. Now the church is a symbol of hope, assembled from many fire scared and some clean new stone. We climbed to the church's towering coupala where the whole city lay beneath us.

The prime reason for coming to Dresden was to see one final World War II victim of incendiary bombing, the technique refined at Guernika by German pilots. First drop large explosive bombs that make fire fighting difficult and open holes in structures. Then the incendiary bombs were dropped next, starting massive and uncontrolled fires. The final step, which apparently came the next day, on Ash Wednesday was strafing the fleeing inhabitants with machine gun fire. As at Guernika, where the bombing took place on Market Day, when the city would be most full of people; the Dresden bombing took place on the night of shrove Tuesday, when the city would witness crowds celebrating before the start of Lent.

                                          Conducting a class discussion in the Baroque palace
                                                   of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden

This approach was described by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, excepts of which we have read. As Vonnegut says, in his usual off-hand way, of the machine gunning of civilians along the Elbe, "The idea was to hasten the end of the war.” Of course, the issue for us to consider is how can we place controls of nations and their leaders, so they do not endorse indiscriminate fire bombing again. Yet, long after Dresden, the U.S., as others, practiced bombing that seemed to grow from this technique.

Related to the institutional leadership theme of so much of our course, Dresden in so many ways reminds us of the link of churches to foreign and military policy. First, many churches have raised fundamental, if not often ignored, criticism of military policies. Some church leaders, as the many priests in the priest bloc at Dachau, paid with their lives. Yet, also there is the problem of churches blessing national military policy. How can we build the type church that promotes peace and the rule of law and not the one that has contempt for the rule of law and accepts defense of the fatherland as a Christian duty.

Visiting The Hague and the ICC

On Monday, May 23, we had the opportunity to receive an orientation to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and sit-in on part of the trial of Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo. Mr. Gombo is accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the Central African Republic. We received substantive orientation from Eleni Chaitidou, an attorney who works for one of the ICC's 18 judges and Antonia Percira de Sousa of the Prosecutor's Office. We also were impressed when on the way through security, the Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo walked up behind us and declined the guards offer to jump ahead of us. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said, “I don't want to chest!”

Ms. Chaitidou provided a quick overview of both the court's limited jurisdiction to serious crimes committed in member states or by their subjects since the court became active, with the exception of referrals from the U.N. Security.Council. Her review of the court's efforts to protect witnesses became good preparation for the trial we were to observe, since the entire time we wee in the court room, the witness was shielded by curtains.

Ms. de Sousa provided a great overview of some current cases facing the court, including Libya and Sudan. Coincidently, our visit came as news arrived that Sudan troops became engaged in military action against the south. The attacks, organized by the leadership already indicted by the ICC confirms the ICC is attempting to address the right problems.

In the afternoon, we met with staff of the Committee for the ICC. We discussed the continuing need to work to win the best possible U.S. support for the work of the ICC. The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Court of Appeals decision NOT to review rendition cases on the grounds of protecting national security, makes clear the great need in the U.S. to consider renewal of the country's earlier leadership role in support of human rights. It is the goal of this class to find ways to restor that leadership. We need to resume the tradition of the founders, as reflected in the inclusion in the Constitution of the power to enforce the Law of Nations [and confirmed when the first Congress passed the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA)]. Of course, the nation's leadership at Nuremberg and later in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights built on that stellar legacy. Now we see the country embarrassed by failures of the courts to prevent torture.

As we write this summary on Tuesday morning, May 24, the International Herald Tribune's lead editorial attacks the Supreme Court's failure in the rendition cases. Of the Appeals Court reasoning, the Tribune added, “[The Court] should not have allowed this nonsense to stand.” That decision makes all the more our ceremonial visit to Nuremberg on Tuesday. Americans need to celebrate and defend the legacy of that process. More after we visit Nuremberg . . .

Alma and Nuremberg

Today, May 25, we visited Nuremberg, the old imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire that became both a center of Nazism and, as a result of that, the place picked for the post-World War II trials of war criminals. Today the city bills itself as the “City of Human Rights.” Accordingly, the city has the Nazi Documentation Center focused on helping us understand how a nation of well educated people could “fall for” Adolf Hitler.

                                                 Entrance to Nazi Documentation Center,
                                                 with entrance slicing through Hitler's old
                                                                  Congress Hall

This is really an important question, since there clearly have been a number of other modern leaders who, while seldom approaching Hitler's brutality, have used similar methods to win support or delude large groups into supporting or accepting horrendous regimes. Since all of us should be on-guard against the use of techniques of propaganda and mass mobilization to do harm, we need to understand the phenomena that brought so much support for Hitler, especially in this picturesque old city.

The Documentation Center also has an item related to the success of an Alma education. In a display of media (newspapers and magazines) that criticized the rise of Hitler, they had a copy of the Chicago Daily News, the paper published by Frank Knox, the later Secretary of the Navy for Franklin Roosevelt. As those of us from Alma know, Knox, who was in the class of 1898 and became a leading Republican (running against the Roosevelt ticket in 1936), by the late 1930's became a supporter of Roosevelt's criticisms of the rise of dictators in the 1930s (especially the Quarantine Speech of 1937).

Knox in the 1930s challenged the isolationism being promoted in Chicago by the rival Tribune. We can be proud that his foresight was exemplary enough to be singled out at this center which demonstrates the need to confront totalitarianism. Hopefully our little group of people from Alma College will follow in his footsteps and continue to provide needed leadership to oppose such tendencies in the modern world, especially currently in America with our fear of “terrorism,” tendencies that claim we do not any longer have the “luxury” of refraining from torture or universally defending international law (including against Americans who break that law).