The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life

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Commemorating the Demise of the Iron CurtainBy UWE SIEMON-NETTO For students entering college this autumn, the Berlin Wall might seem like distant history. But to those in mid-career, who are still young from this writer’s perspective, the hope that this monstrosity would ever come down appeared audacious. Yet it happened. Twenty years ago, Germany was reunified. The Iron Curtain disappeared. To commemorate this exhilarating event, and to keep its memory alive among the next generation, the League of Faithful Masks and Concordia University Irvine are offering a unique Celebration of Freedom. We will celebrate this anniversary with a variety of events on the campus of Concordia. There will be a German Film Week. There will be a month-long exhibition of artifacts, documents and works of art pertaining to Germany’s division, to life in East Germany and to reunification. And there will be, on October 6, a rich conference featuring classical music and jazz, a brand-new documentary and, most importantly, the historical witness of fascinating persons who have experienced reunification from a variety of perspectives. You will find a wealth of details about our German Days, including programs and sidebar stories, on the “front page” of a special edition of The Mask. (www.germanday.org). The point of the present article is to explain why The League of Faithful Masks is doing this. The League’s stated mission is to champion the worldview of vocation, a worldview strongly shared by Concordia University. It holds that all humans are called to serve each other altruistically. It is hard to imagine any good-neighborly service more urgently needed than providing witness to history, for as the old adage has it: no history, no future. Five anecdotes of recent weeks might illustrate the exigency of a return to the appreciation of history and its twin, geography, to assure the survival of our civilization in this age of information, an age whose principal mark seems to be that it renders our contemporaries increasingly uninformed. For the sake of trans-Atlantic evenhandedness, I am taking my examples from four different countries. United States: As I was preparing the German Day program, a well-meaning American acquaintance with an M.A. degree cautioned me against referring to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), arguably the most brilliant mind in German cultural history. She insisted that a direct line linked Goethe to Hitler, and that the proximity between Weimar, Goethe’s place of work for decades, and the Nazi extermination of Buchenwald was “no coincidence.” France: At a dinner conversation, the name Martin Luther came up. Said a local politician at my table: “Martin Luther? Wasn’t that the black guy from Switzerland?” She confused Martin Luther with Martin Luther King, the U.S. civil rights leader, and with reformer John Calvin who, though born in northern France, spent the most important years of his ministry in Geneva. England: Again at a dinner, a British friend told me of a teacher he knew who had taken a class of English grammar school (high school) students to Dover. The teacher pointed to the English Channel and asked his pupils: “What lies beyond this body of water?” Some opined: “Perhaps the United States?” Others said, “No, no, it must be Africa.” It was news to all of them that by crossing the Channel they would soon reach France on whose shores perhaps their great-grandfathers had died. Germany: The features editor of a well-known newspaper proposed to his editor-in-chief producing a special issue commemorating the 450th anniversary of the death of Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), Luther’s most significant associate. The editor-in-chief, a man in his early thirties, rejected this idea outright. It turned out that he had no idea who Melanchthon was, the man educated Germans have venerated since the late 16th century as the “Praeceptor Germaniae” – Germany’s teacher. USA again: In a recent journalism class, students interviewed a 15-year old girl of Vietnamese descent. “What publications do you read?” they wanted to know. She mentioned The Economist, a British weekly magazine of high quality. “Why The Economist?” they asked. “Well,” she replied, “I don’t want to be a moron like the other kids in my class who don’t even know who the current President of the United States is. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent a postdoctoral year at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930, he was horrified by the cluelessness of the students he had to listen to in seminars. “They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria,” he wrote. This clueless verbosity Bonhoeffer observed 80 years ago has now become an all-Western property, much to the detriment of the young people who are so often deprived of the basic historical guideposts for their journey through an in increasingly dangerous and inscrutable world. The most tragic aspect of this is what has really been stolen from the younger generation: a historically grounded basis for hope. What happened in Germany in 1990 provided such a footing. Being hopeful seemed audacious for many of us. But then hope became a reality. This is why The League of Faithful Masks, Concordia University and their partners are inviting you to celebrate with us. The demise of the Iron Curtain, which looks like just a fact of distant history to some, has given all of us cause for courage.PLEASE NOTE MY NEW BLOG SITE www.uwesiemon.blogspot.com arrived at a period of my biological and professional life when rummaging through my archives and library seems in order. And so I am rereading books that were of formative value for my career as a journalist, especially as a war correspondent. The following passage I found on page 113 of The Two Vietnams by my late friend, the historian and social scientist Bernard B. Fall, probably the world’s foremost expert on the French and the American debacles in Indochina. Referring to Hanoi’s brilliant Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap who developed North Vietnam’s victorious strategies against France and subsequently the United States, Fall wrote: “Giap’s own best contribution to the art of revolutionary war was probably his estimate of the political-psychological shortcomings of a democratic system when faced with an inconclusive military operation. In a remarkable presentation before the political commissars of the (Communist) 316th Division, Giap stated: The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war…. “In all likelihood, Giap concludes, public opinion in the democracy will demand an end to the ‘useless bloodshed,’ or its legislature will insist on knowing how long it will have to vote astronomical credits without a clear-cut victory in sight. This is what eternally compels the military leaders of democratic armies to promise a quick end to the war --- to ‘bring the boys home by Christmas’ – or forces democratic politicians to agree to almost any kind of humiliating compromise rather than to accept the idea of a semi-permanent anti-guerilla operation.”* The Two Vietnams was first published in 1963. It lay on the bedside table of most respectable American and European reporters, diplomats and senior officers I met while working in Saigon. I have never ceased to wonder why so few of my illustrious colleagues took Bernard B. Fall’s warnings to heart. When I first met Fall, this Austrian-born Frenchman was a professor of Howard University in Washington, DC. Having fought valiantly in the French Resistance, he proceeded to record the West’s follies and blunders in dealing with Vietnamese Communism with greater penetration than any scholar whose work on this subject I am familiar with. Fall must have added the paragraphs cited above to the original 1963 edition of his seminal work on Vietnam shortly before his last journey to that country. On Feb. 21, 1967, while accompanying a platoon of U.S. marines in Thua Thien Province in the northernmost part of South Vietnam, 40-year old Bernard B. Fall stepped on a landmine and was killed along with Gunnery Sergeant Byron B. Highland. Thus Fall did not live to see the day when his warning and Gen. Giap’s prediction became bitter reality in America’s self-inflicted defeat in 1975 – self-inflicted precisely because many media stars and political leaders ignored Gen. Giap’s insight that the democratic system is not psychologically equipped to fight a protracted war, irrespective of how evil the foe’s designs. In The Two Vietnams pilloried the fallacious notion that Ho Chi Minh was but a righteous nationalist. To Fall, Ho was a Bolshevik. “The fact that this was not understood by naïve outsiders was certainly not his fault; his career as a Communist has been on record since 1920,” wrote Fall. Before me lies a Newsmax column by Edward I. Koch, the former mayor of New York. He cites a statement by Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, referring to the war in Afghanistan as “unwinnable.” This echoes CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s description of the Vietnam War after the 1968 Têt Offensive, a statement prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to day, “We have lost Cronkite, we have lost the Midwest.” In his column, Mayor Koch goes on to suggest that the United States and its allies declare defeat in Afghanistan and get out. Here again, I discern echoes of the Vietnam era. Without any consideration of the disastrous geopolitical and strategic consequences a Taliban return to power in Kabul will have, Koch concludes: “We have sacrificed enough dead, wounded, and treasure in a failed cause. Enough is enough.” Reading this and Bernard B. Fall’s warning from his grave on the very same hot summer afternoon in my home in southwestern France made my blood curdle. Surely, the Taliban and Al Qaida must have studied Gen. Giap’s analysis, which could have only led them to one conclusion: The way Western democracy has evolved since the mid-20th century, it is driven by suicidal urges. None other than the former Mayor of New York and the RNA chairman have just confirmed this just now. * Fall, Bernard B. The Two Vietnams. London: Pall Mall Press, 1963, 1964, 1967. A transatlantic tragedy: ignorance in an age of instant informationBy UWE SIEMON-NETTOAs the Western world wallows in multiple crises, prejudice dominates the airwaves. Exasperated by a talk show star’s malediction on American television that it was time for the plague to afflict Europe (population: almost 500 million), our correspondent found solace in a simple Paris bar.Phew! What a relief it was to plunk down at a small table outside a very modest Paris pub called Le Train de Vie, meaning train of life. Fourteen grueling hours in the air lay behind us. More than that, we crossed a transatlantic information gap rapidly dividing our continents.We came from southern California where we now live pleasurably and surrounded by friends. But as lovers of the United States, we feel increasingly uneasy, more so than ever before in the more than four decades in the country. What troubles us is having to listen every day to televised invectives against our home continent, to hear slurs spoken by stars who know nothing about Europe yet opine against it venomously nonetheless.This is what we mulled over as we comforted ourselves with fresh red wine from the Côtes du Rhône region served in half-liter carafes. Our minds wandered back to the latest apex of Europhobic hyperbole we had heard on Fox. “The problem with Europe is that there are too many Europeans,” one smart aleck quipped crudely, adding that a new plague would solve this problem. This prompted hilarity among his co-panelists but reminded us of the mindless things British bigots like to say about the French.This was supposed to be funny. Granted I am German, and for Germans, humor is no laughing matter, according to another Anglo-Saxon inanity. But then my wife, Gillian, is an Englishwoman, and she did not get the joke either. “Imagine the international hullaballoo if a French talk show host told his audience at prime time, ‘The trouble with America is that there are too many Americans; may they be decimated by an epidemic,’” she said. We needed another carafe of wine.At this point an inebriated Frenchman in his 60s stopped at our table. Staring distractedly above our heads, the stranger said, “I am wondering if I should have a nightcap before returning to my hotel room.” We invited him to sit down but no, he preferred to return to the bar. Bidding us farewell, he reached into a shopping bag and handed me a fistful of cherries, explaining, “They wouldn’t do me any good tonight after all the drinks I have had.” Then he staggered off.Ah, echoes of the France of our youth! So she is not dead, thank God! Our thoughts then focused on the daily dose of venom emitted against the French by American commentators lumping all Europeans together as a moribund bunch of unreconstructed socialists. Before I continue, let me come clean: I am not a left-winger, neither is my wife.In some respects, we are as conservative as TV hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. We affirm the sanctity of life and the institution of marriage; we prefer government to be small and defense to be strong. As Europeans, we might be forgiven for being less engrossed with the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms but surely that’s forgivable.The ceaseless prattle on American airwaves about “European Socialism” is getting on our nerves, though. Do American radio and television commentators not know that all major EU nations have currently conservative-controlled governments? Perhaps their daily abuse is just tit-for-tat, paying Europe back for eight years of anti-American agitation in the Bush years? Probably. If so, this would be childish given the contemporary condition of the world.We requested another carafe of Red.It seemed strange to us that televised American bile is focused first and foremost on the French and the Germans. Until now, the British have been spared such outbursts. Still, British pundits are also given to utter “tedious snobby sneers against the United States,” to quote Alex Singleton, a leader writer of The Daily Telegraph. Then Singleton labeled President Barack Obama “an idiot… hell bent on insulting [America’s] allies.”I have never been an Obama enthusiast but I didn’t write that; an Englishman did.On the following evening, Gillian and I returned to Le Train de Vie. At the table next to ours a solitary man ate his dinner. He turned out to be a middle-aged French journalist equally concerned with the state of the international media. Together we lamented the fact that biased postulations are increasingly taking the place of properly researched articles, and that rank prejudice is in the process of superseding fair and balanced reporting.We were both old enough to have learned a different kind of journalism than is often practiced now, he at a provincial newspaper in eastern France, I with the Associated Press in Frankfurt. We became journalists in an era filled with lingering memories of a fratricidal war. We thought that we had learned the principal lesson of that war: Never let stereotypical thinking govern your pen and your lips.We were taught as young men that our opinions were irrelevant. What mattered was the need of our readers to be comprehensively informed. This required legwork on our part, and it was precisely the excitement of this legwork that had made us choose our craft in the first place. We learned foreign languages. We were trained to go to enormous lengths to trounce clichés.In those days, all major American media outlets had posted foreign correspondents in France and Germany. These men and women were driven by the same professional ethos as we, and spoke our languages well. They knew our literature, our art, our strengths and foibles. They were wonderfully curious reporters. I am still corresponding with some of these colleagues who are now in the 80s and retired, and I know that they are just as troubled as we with the way many of today’s media foster ignorance.It told the Frenchman about a recent acrimonious discussion with the executive editor of the new breed in the United States. He could not understand my distress over the statement by a majority of journalism students that they had chosen this career to “make this a better world.” This, I explained to the editor, was what had motivated propagandists of totalitarian systems. In free societies, journalists had the calling to research and write, just as bakers had a vocation to bake. Wanting to “make this a better world” by telling their readers what to think reflects ideological hubris.The French reporter nodded gravely and ordered another carafe of Red.We then lamented the evident increase of ignorance as a product of our age of instant communication. I told him about a woman with a Master of Arts degree trying to persuade me recently that a direct philosophical line led from the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Hitler, and that therefore the proximity between Weimar in Thuringia, Goethe’s place of work, and Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, was no coincidence. She had clearly never read anything by Goethe but watched a program linking the 18th-century Enlightenment to 20th-century totalitarianism.There exists a serious school of thought making this connection, but it is much more complex, running via the anthropocentrism of the French Revolution; the German theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann argued that way. However, Goethe was neither an Enlightenment philosopher nor a revolutionary; he was a poet of classicism, a literary period that coincided with the French Revolution. He also told his friend Johann Peter Eckermann toward the end of his life that Christianity was the ultimate religion. Sadly, such details count little at an age of instant information dispersing ignorance in the form of packaged formulae.My drinking partner and I found some comfort in the discovery that at least some of our readers were wiser than we. In the recent Franco-German tiff over bailing out bankrupt Greece, the Berlin correspondent of the Paris daily Libération charged German Chancellor Angela Merkel with scheming to forge a “Holy Germanic Euro Empire.” Going through the readers’ blogs of the Parisian press, though, we discovered the emergence of a different consensus: If France had followed the German example of frugality and industry since the rise of the new and reconciled Europe following World War II, we might all be better off. That’s what French readers are writing.We left Le Train de Vie telling ourselves that the wall of clichés dividing nations and continents must not necessarily be permanent. If it has stopped separating France and Germany there is still hope, we thought, that the age of the instant media might also bear transatlantic fruit. The force that renders readers and listeners uninformed is the same that can make them wise. No, we do not need a plague to exterminate us. What we need is a wiser use of the gift of instant information.from The Atlantic Times, July/August 2010 editionyears ago this October, a momentous development in Europe stirred the world. Germany and the entire Continent were peacefully reunified after four decades of bitter division. The League of Faithful Masks (LFM) and Concordia University Irvine (CUI) will commemorate this anniversary with three inter-related presentations on CUI’s campus, bearing witness to history, culture and current affairs: 1. German Day at Concordia – A Celebration of Freedom on October 6. The public will experience a fascinating array of historical witnesses. They will discuss political, economic, military, artistic, religious, journalistic and personal aspects of Germany’s reunification. A brand-new documentary film will be shown; there will be superb music and a forum discussion between the presenters and the audience. Our partners in this venture include the German Consulate-General in Los Angeles, and the Wende Museum of Culver City, which specializes in the art and artifacts of the Cold War. 2. Images of Oppression and Liberation: a German Film Week on October 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, offered by the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles. Five feature films relating to the Christian resistance against the Nazi regime, to life in East Germany and reunification will be shown. 3. Traces of Division -- Signs of Unity, a rich exhibition of East German and Reunification memorabilia from October 2-31 presented by the Wende Museum on the CUI campus. For updates, please check www.faithfulmasks.org or Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto s blogsite www.uwesiemon.blogspot.com in regular intervals. you from France. It is written with a sense of foreboding. Just before leaving California, I called a friend in New York. He is a native Berliner of Jewish descent. In the early Nazi years he fled to Paris while still a teenager, and then fought in the French Resistance. “Make the best of your stay in Europe,” he counseled me. “By the time of your return we might be living in a totally different world.” This sounded plausible. You would have to be blind and deaf not to realize that a new era is upon us, and that this era is unlikely to be agreeable. We discern the bitter fruit of human hubris all around us – in the Gulf of Mexico, in economics, finance, in the shaky condition of governments on both sides of the Atlantic; in the deplorable failure of most media outlets to inform their audiences responsibly about world affairs; and in the state of the Church many of whose branches have either slid into rank heresy kowtowing to sexual deviance, or are offering feel-good fluff as a tonic to soothe the apprehension millions share with my New York friend. This morning I telephoned a former German government minister about the future of dollar, the euro and other currencies. He is a statesman with a reputation of financial wisdom. He said, “I frankly cannot predict where we are heading. I have just bought Norwegian bonds because the Norwegian money appears to be relatively healthy, but who knows? Tomorrow I could be proven wrong.” It cannot be the purpose of this column to list the plethora of indicators leading a neighbor of mine in France to compare the current time in history with the situation that prevailed in Europe just before World War I. “An insignificant event in an insignificant placed triggered that calamity,” she said, referring to the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914. As the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod approaches its convention in Houston in July, it must consider the present perils in national and world affairs. Confessional Lutherans know of course that theirs is not to offer amateurish advice in worldly matters. Bicker though they might among each other, the various parties within the LCMS have generally resisted the temptation to emulate other denominations in poaching in alien territory, meaning the secular realm. In fact, the opposite extreme is true and equally deplorable – an ostrich-like inclination not to concern itself at all with the likelihood of impending catastrophe. You don’t hear much from Lutherans about the Church’s role if and when disaster strikes. Four years ago, I taught a doctoral-level seminar at Concordia Seminary St. Louis on precisely this issue and received some brilliant papers from my students but could not find anybody prepared to publish them; they did not appeal to prevalent Lutheran tastes in America. But then how is the Church to react in the event of terrorist attacks with nuclear or biological devices; how will it function when the supplies of food and energy are disrupted, and when communications have broken down? How will it respond to severe persecution perhaps even in America and Western Europe? How will it minister to its faithful when they are cut off from their sanctuaries, and when pastors have lost contact to their scattered flocks? Are these unthinkable scenarios? It would be foolish to assume that they were – even in the United States. Take the word of a septuagenarian for this, a man who has spent his childhood in a country that used to be the most civilized in the world and was reduced to an antechamber of hell almost overnight. The time might soon come when there will be no mega churches with thousands of happy-clappy congregants; whoever among Lutherans believes that in periods of woe bestselling guidelines to a purpose-driven life can be put into action will be egregiously disappointed. What sustained me in air raid shelters and during months of starvation were not expressions of religious enthusiasm but the words and tunes of the Scripture-based liturgy I had memorized since Sunday school, and the unshakeable message that, whatever happened, I was a forgiven sinner and would therefore live eternally by virtue of Christ’s vicarious suffering, death and resurrection. This basic Christian truth is most clearly formulated in the Lutheran Confessions. However, they are a treasure sometimes too well kept by the LCMS; it makes no sense to hold these treasures jealously in reserve when millions of troubled Christians realize that they are staring at the abyss. I know of Lutherans outside the Missouri Synod praying that the LCMS will emerge from Houston “as a robust church ready to allow the treasures of its own tradition to bear fruit.” The man who said this was Thomas Schlichting, a canon lawyer and high-ranking official in the state-related “Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saxony.” Rev. Albrecht-Immanuel Herzog, a pastor in the regional Lutheran Church in Bavaria, told me about sizable groups of Lutherans in Germany who are not in communion with the LCMS but are yearning for confessional clarity. “Missouri could provide this clarity if only it surfaced and opened its treasure chest,” he said adding that particularly younger pastors and theologians felt that way. It is comforting to know that none of the major factions in the LCMS is inclined to follow the mainline Protestant trend toward apostasy. Yet even among Missourians the liberating Lutheran message is diluted by corporate numbers games, and drowned out by sets of drums that have replaced altars in many of our sanctuaries. And this message is: “You are forgiven. Now go and roll up your sleeves and engage this dangerous world.” This is what the Lutheran Church must proclaim more urgently than ever in times of foreboding, and this is why I have endorsed Rev. Matthew Harrison’s candidacy for the office of LCMS President. In my estimation he is the most likely man to open the Lutheran treasure chest for all to see. The moment to do this for the benefit of the whole Church of Christ is now.By UWE SIEMON-NETTO*From The Mask (www.faithfulmasks.org)My meeting with the executive editor of a regional newspaper did not go well at all. He very kindly gave me much of his time but then took strong exception to something I had written in the syllabus of my journalism course at Concordia University Irvine. I had pilloried the reason given by most contemporary journalism students for wanting to make a career in the media. They wish to “make this a better world.”Our disagreement on this point was generational and hence evidently insuperable. I am 73, and he was about two decades younger. If I were American, I would be considered a pre-baby boomer. He on the other hand was a post-boomer. Having been exposed to the calamitous consequences of ideological thinking, the axiom that the road to hell is paved with good intentions still resonates with me strongly. His view of good intentions, however, was evidently less jaded -- to the extent that he ended our collegial relationship there and then. I never heard from him again.Well, what Rudyard Kipling observed about East and West seems to apply even more forcefully to the rapport between “pre” and “post”-boom media people: ‘Ne’er the twain shall meet.” When I was a cub reporter half a century ago, my seniors told me that my opinions on any given matter were immaterial. My job as a reporter was to research and write as fairly and factually as humanly possible. In other words, as a journalist, I was to ask questions vicariously in the original sense of this word, which is rooted in the Latin vocable, vicarius, meaning: “in the place of…” A reporter is inquisitive in the place of his readers. Therefore, a reporter must not arrogate upon himself the role of “making this a better world,” as little as a baker would bake bread to “make this a better world.” He bakes to nourish. Period.Like bakers or plumbers or physicians or lawyers, journalists have the calling to serve their neighbors, and journalists do this by being relentlessly and – here we have that word again – vicariously curious. Tragically, this vicarious sense of wonderment that has lured me to journalism in the first place, and has remained with me ever since, has gone out of fashion in much of today’s journalism. Most reporters, though thank God not all, have had this sense of wonderment lobotomized from their souls by liberal arts professors, I expect. It is of course easier to “hit the beat” as a 22-year-old trying to tell his readers and listeners what to think, than to keep wondering on their behalf. I pity self-important media people of that ilk. They have no concept of what a tremendous vocation journalism can really be.Then again, perhaps by remaining relentlessly inquisitive, journalists could actually help protect this world from getting worse. In an email, I politely offered this notion to the editor as a compromise of sorts. He did not reply.*Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, an international journalist, is the executive director of The League of Faithful Masks. The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life has moved from St. Louis to Irvine, California. Therefore my blog site will eventually disappear from Concordia Seminary s website. Please note my new website: www.faithfulmasks.org, which provides a link to Uwe s blog You will also find my English-language texts on http://www.uwesiemon.blogspot.comGerman-language texts: http://www.uwesiemon-German.blogspot.comUwe Siemon-Netto, Ph.D. Twenty years after the Berlin Wall perished, a museum in California evokes the land that lay behind itBy UWE SIEMON-NETTO(From the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)Twenty years ago, Germany was reunified, and soon the remnants of the Berlin Wall disappeared. So did many of Communist East Germany’s weird features, it’s uniforms, banners, slogans and snooping gadgets. But there is one curious place where they have been amply preserved: the Wende Museum building close to the film studios of southern California.As I entered “Suite E” of the bleak office building on 5741 Buckingham Parkway in Culver City I was perplexed. There on a platform I spotted three rows of wooden jump seats reminding me of rural movie houses in decades past. It turned out that these chairs once accommodated the rears of East Germany’s leaders as they pondered political matters. They were part of the furniture of the now-defunct country’s “Staats­ratsgebäude,” or building of the Council of State, according to Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, the Wende Museum’s program director. “Wende” is the German word for turning point. The turning point this museum’s name evokes was the collapse of the East German Communist regime in November 1989, and then the creation of a unified Federal Republic of Germany on October 3, 1990. Wandering through this museum triggered diverse sensations in me; I remembered my childhood escape from Soviet-occupied Leipzig, my coverage of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 as an Associated Press reporter, my banishment from entering East Germany for many years, and then my return immediately after this hideous structure was breached. I imagined smells that weren’t there. As I stared at some of the museum’s 120,000 Cold War artifacts, the inimitable odors of the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR) seemed to return to my nostrils, odors that once hit me even before I handed my passport to GDR border guards whose uniforms, badges and medals are now on exhibit in Culver City. It was a peculiar cocktail of emissions from cars with two-stroke engines, of industrial disinfectants, of chickens broiled in stale oil, and lignite-fired stoves. Of course all of this was only in my mind, for even a young genius like Justinian Jampol, 32, the Wende Museum’s founder, would not have been able to ship the stench in containers across the North Sea, the Atlantic, Caribbean, the Panama Canal and up the Coast to Los Angeles. But the sight of a poster bearing the image of a helmeted East German soldier and the inscription, “Der Befehl ist Gesetz” (The Command is the Law) was sufficient to give me a dose of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I know what that slogan meant. I remember standing on the Western side of Bernauer Strasse, a Berlin street sealed off by men following a “command” elevated to “law.” I watched people jump out of windows just a few feet away, desperately trying to evade men executing this “law.” Some jumped to their deaths. I watched East German workers’ militiamen shoot over the heads of a family of nine escapees until a French military jeep with a mounted machine gun raced right up to the border and fired over the militiamen’s heads until they quit executing the “law.” Jampol, a Californian completing his doctorate in history at Oxford University, told me that a former border guard at “Checkpoint Charlie,” the key crossing point for non-Germans, donated the construction and maintenance plans for the Berlin Wall. I remember the early days of this checkpoint well; for a while I had my reporter’s observation post in a bedroom above a sleazy beer bar in the last building on the West Berlin side before the official border post. This wasn’t a pretty period in recent German history, but a memorable one it was nonetheless, and so it was a brilliant idea by Jumpol to preserve so many of its relics ranging from a 2.6-ton piece of the Wall to a “Minol” gasoline pump of the kind in front of which East German motorists sometimes lined up for hours to fill up their tiny “Trabant” cars whose bodies were made of plastic containing resin strengthened by wool or cotton. The Wende Museum’s exhibit is breathtaking, ranging from rows and rows of busts of Communist luminaries to the straw hat and last private papers of Erich Honecker, East Germany’s penultimate Communist Party chief, and his secretary’s office furniture; from Stasi (secret police) listening devices and other snooping paraphernalia to an impressive collection of oil paintings in the style of “Socialist Realism;” from artfully embroidered flags and banners of party front organizations to films concerning personal hygiene, and a collection of “Das Magazin,” a state-owned popular soft-porn publication. After the “Wende,” East Germans found out that Honecker himself preferred more salacious materials, as evidenced by his personal film collection. He also had grand architectural visions, namely the “Palace of the Republic” he had built in downtown East Berlin where the Kaiser’s castle once stood. East German wags called this glittering structure, which was razed two years ago, “Erichs Lampenladen” (Erich’s lamp store). It housed the country’s rubberstamp parliament, a cultural center and elaborate restaurants. Guess where their silverware and china marked with the letters “PR” (for Palast der Republik) in gold, and where their menus have ended up? Indeed: in Culver City. As a German with memories of the Nazi regime and its Communist successor I got goose bumps, though, when Jumpol told me about one of his eeriest items, the black robe of a judge in the National Socialist “people’s court” system in World War II, not the regular judiciary. This robe had a swastika embroidered to it. What makes this item so intriguing is that its owner later became a “Volksrichter” (people’s judge) under Communism, as Jampol said. How come a youngster from America’s surfers’ paradise developed such a consuming passion for artifacts, art and kitsch from the Cold War era particularly in the eastern part of Germany? Well, it’s hard to say. But when he was nine years old he already acquired an East Berlin policeman’s uniform of the 1950s. A young man with a love for history uncommon among most of his contemporaries, he briefly studied in West Berlin’s Free University and found it astonishing that almost nobody in Germany seemed to take much interest in collecting memorabilia of the vanished GDR culture. So he started collecting, at first randomly. “Soon people were bringing me their stuff,” he recalled. Then he found “scavengers,” as he called people scouting eastern Germany on his behalf. One of these “scavengers” was a man with perhaps a murky background making a living on flea markets. Jumpol was now a graduate student at Oxford University where things East German filled his dorm room. One night, he received a particularly urgent call from his scout, who had found an extraordinary “treasure” in the basement of a house near Dresden. This was in 2006 at the time of the huge Dresden flood when water from the Elbe River kept pouring into people’s basements threatening the “scavenger’s” find – ledgers containing the complete collection of the daily newspaper “Neues Deutschland,” the East German Communist Party’s central organ. “My scavenger could not rescue them from the water by himself,” Jampol told me. “So, as many times before, I took the first bus from Oxford to Heathrow, flew to Berlin and raced down to Saxony to rescue the ledgers before they were soaked.” They are now, he said, among his favorite items in his museum, which is funded primarily by the London-based Arcadia Fund whose key mission is the protection of endangered culture and nature. Peter Baldwin, Jampol’s former history professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and the earliest supporter of his collector’s passion, serves on the Donor Board of this international charity. And which of his artifacts renders Jampol particularly contemplative? “Well,” he said, “a former East German prison guard gave me the tools of his former trade, his handcuffs and electrical shock equipment, for example.” And how, I wanted to know, does this man earn his living in reunified Germany? Said Jampol: “He is still a prison guard.” By UWE SIEMON-NETTO (From thefirst edition of The Mask, the Web-based publication of the League of Faithful Masks) Above thefireplace in our apartment in Irvine, California, hangs one of my favoriteworks of art. It is a drawing by Josep Pla-Narbona depicting dancers hidingunder masks. Narbona hails from Barcelona in Spain and is therefore unlikely tohave had Lutheran theology in mind when he created this magnificent work.Still, it looks Lutheran to me.In Luther’s imagery, human beings are themselves masks behind which God hideswhile carrying out His concealed purposes in this world. Luther called God’sreign in the secular realm Mummenschanz, or mummery. As divine masks, humansare called to serve their neighbors out of love in everyday life.As we ponder our self-centered civilization, trying to remain faithful to ourdivine vocations is indeed a countercultural endeavor. Let it therefore beknown that League of Faithful Masks (LFM) has subversive goals. LFM has thelethal narcissism of our era in its crosshairs, and LFM’s web-basedpublication, The Mask, is meant to be on of its weapons in this combat.LFM is not a sect. We don’t want our fellow human beings to renounce theGod-given joys of life. With the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes wecheerfully proclaim: “Go eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with amerry heart for God has already approved what you do” (Eccl. 9:7). LFM promotesneither a redistribution of wealth, nor does it try to tell anybody, as afamous statesman recently did, that he or she has made enough money.Instead, the League of Faithful Masks has set itself the simple goal ofchampioning the Judeo-Christian worldview of vocation as an effective antidoteto narcissism and its destructive consequences; our foe is the “Me” culturethat has wreaked havoc in the Western world. It has devastated individuals,businesses and communities financially. It is threatening to unravel thiscountry’s social structure.The “Me” culture is killing millions of unborn children every year. It isimperiling the ethical standards in the economy, industry, education,jurisprudence, medicine, the sciences, the arts and the media. It has utterlyabandoned natural law, the universal moral code of which Christians believethat God has written it upon every human being’s heart, but which has also beenfundamental to any healthy civilization since time immemorial.In a way, the “Me” culture is more problematical to fight than murderousideologies of the past. Nazism and Communism were the creations of relativelysmall groups of totalitarians supported by either mindless or, more likely,terrified masses. Totalitarians could be defeated by military, political andeconomic means.You cannot fight the “Me” culture with M-16 rifles, mortars, bombs, economic orpolitical schemes, however well crafted. Like Nazism and Communism, the “Me”culture has its roots in a Zeitgeist, or spirit of time that over the last twocenturies has performed an ethical lobotomy on Europeans and North Americansalike. One of its authors was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the leading philosopher ofthe French Revolution, who “freed” legal thinking from internal constraintsthat limit vice.In other words, redirected man’s focus away from the neighbor to himself orherself, either in a singular or a plural sense. As Lutheran theologianDietrich Bonhoeffer wrote before being martyred by the Nazis, the FrenchRevolution was the “laying bare of the emancipated man in his tremendous powerand his most terrible perversity.” Bonhoeffer was convinced that “theliberation of man as an absolute ideal leads only to man’s self-destruction.”This is today’s reality. The finest army in the world is powerless against it.You can’t fight moral lobotomy with helicopters and drones. To mention just oneexample, the best soldiers in the world can’t turn around the minds of parentswho don’t discipline their kids, who threaten teachers with lawsuits if theydare to discipline their students. Even if you sent a million soldiers to theMexican border, they won’t he able to stop unsupervised American or Europeankids from becoming drug addicts. This is a market-driven economy, and as longas there is a huge market for narcotics, drug dealers will find ways to supplyit.I do not mean to single out parents but am using the pervasive disregard ofdivine calling by so many mothers and fathers as a paradigm for the causes ofgeneralized narcissism plaguing our society. Motherhood and fatherhood arevocations likes thousands of others, including the vocations of voters andpoliticians, of journalists and readers, of lawyers, nurses, physicians,scientists, civil servants, bakers, engineers, business executives and theirsubordinates. If their sense of vocation is absent, then the “Me” culture’slethal trajectory will progress with ever-increasing speed.This is why our group of Christian professionals founded the League of FaithfulMasks. The only powerful weapon we possess is our determination to mentor thosewho have lost the yardstick by which to lead a Christian life in their ownsecular vocations, and this determination is of courses rooted in our faith.Our weapons are non-lethal. We counsel. We lecture. We write. We teach. Wedon’t intend to kick off a revolution with banners carried by marching masses.But we do hope that our message will spread, and that regional LFM chapterswill spring up around in the United States and other countries. This Web-basedpublication will be one of our voices.The message of the Faithful Masks is simply this: In every phase of our liveswe have divine callings to serve our neighbors in love; even on our deathbedswe have vocations, for example the vocation to allow our caretakers to serve uslovingly. Again: No insurrection is planned, but we are committed to partakingin God’s masquerade by trying to be of service to others. Everybody sharing ourconcern is very welcome to join us. The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life has moved to Irvine California (see below). Therefore this blog site will eventually cease to exist. From now on, you will find my commentaries and stories at the following addresses:www.faithfulmasks.org (click on button uwe s blog ).English-language texts: http://www.uwesiemon.blogspot.comGerman-language texts: http://www.uwesiemon-german.blogspot.com.All the best, Uwe Siemon-NettoUwe Siemon-Netto, Ph.D., D.Litt.DirectorCenter for Lutheran Theology Public LifeConcordia University,Office: Old Administration Building, 312 A1530 Concordia WestIrvine, CA 92612-3203Direct line: 949-705-6550Home: 75 PergolaIrvine, CA 92612Phones:(worldwide): 314-862-1099(Mobile): 202-957-3044

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