Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

Barack Obama will speak to an anticipated crowd of 100,000 people in Berlin tonight, and the city is brimming with anticipation. Pretty much every newspaper and magazine has featured him on its cover or front page. A few weeks ago, the story was where he would speak. At the Brandenburg Gate? Angela Merkel (Christian Democrat) opposed a foreign politician making a campaign speech at such a historic site; her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democrat) didn’t see the problem; and Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit (Social Democrat), seemed to be looking forward from the start to a photo op with Obama anywhere in the city. But the Obama campaign, loath to create friction, decided on a different location: the Siegessäule or Victory Column. Not that the Siegessäule doesn’t have its own issues: as many have pointed out, it’s a monument to Prussian victories over Denmark, Austria and France, and the Nazis liked it too; they even made it taller. Berlin’s like that, though—there’s hardly a spot in the city without some problematic history, be it Prussian, Nazi or Communist. It’s sometimes hard to remember, with surveys showing a majority of Germans opposing Bundeswehr participation in Afghanistan, but Germans weren’t always pacifists...

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg announced a decision in a German case, Gäfgen v. Germany, that is relevant to the “war on terror,” even though the case itself had nothing to do with terrorism. In 2002, a German law student, Magnus Gäfgen, kidnapped and killed an 11-year-old child. In the course of subsequent ransom demands, he was caught by the police, who, at the time, believed the child was still alive. Under orders from a superior, a police officer threatened Gäfgen with great pain if he didn’t tell them where the boy was (they were prepared to follow through on the threat, though this never happened). Gäfgen thereupon confessed, and the boy’s body was found. Later, after being informed that the coerced confession could not be used against him, he repeated it. The German courts found him guilty, based on the later confession; Gäfgen then appealed to Strasbourg, claiming his rights to freedom from torture and fair trial had been violated. The police officer and his superior, meanwhile, were found guilty of coercion and instruction to coerce. Because their motive was saving the child’s life, however, and the situation was one of great pressure, the German court found mitigating circumstances and suspended their sentences—in effect finding them guilty but refraining from punishing them. The case set off a countrywide debate in Germany about the legitimacy of torture, obviously playing into broader concerns with the use of torture in the “war on terror” and the revelations from Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay.