Speak, Memory

Thats the kind of thing that makes me think of Charles Stross “alien corporate hive-mind” remarks. Is like you are getting a mangled conversation between an human and and entity that is not and doesnt fully understand what is important or not ab0ut human life, via a pod-person employed as tongue by said alien mind.

“You can’t do this to me! I’m a star class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency.”
Read the article in LRB and thought the name sounded familiar. Lo and behold, Pohl and Kornbluth had appropriated that name for their hilarious (and still relevant) “The Space Merchants” back in 1952.

As for making money on the Nazis the list is long and not too entertaining.
As for having to become a part of corporate entities with such pasts? Oh well, at least it’s not the BND.

Also, the difference in coverage of “The Kraus Project” in LRB and Harper’s was quite entertaining to behold.

“German business has Nazi past” is a dog-bites-man story. “What are you going to do about it that’s what I’d like to know,” in the words of Paul Simon.

The company was shut down by the Nazis in 1944. It didn’t exist again until a family member started a new company with the same name in 1947 …

Slave labor having been eradicated from the contemporary world right?
Except the awkward idea maybe of paying such shit wages that there’s no real substantive difference between having to feed your slaves minimal nutrition, and shelter them in shit conditions, or paying them just enough they can do that for themselves. But they aren’t slaves, because we’re paying them.
Burning Bangladeshi garment workers. Not slaves. Workers. Really completely different morally. Really.
FOXCONN suicidal workers, in the clean bright dormitories of 21c non-slavery workaround of exactly the same dynamic.
Nothing forgivable about Bertelsmann’s history, but it is a history, with different variables and victims, shared with an ungodly number of other corporate entities, who did, and are still doing, the same thing. Consuming the lives and well-being of people who can’t get away from the conditions without grave risk.
The only alternative to actual slavery is rebellion and beating and death, the only alternative to the modern version is refusal and hunger and death. The difference is only significant to the heartless.

“The difference is only significant to the heartless.” Um, I’m not sure if you’re writing in response to my comment before, or to another one up thread? If mine, I meant different, not excusable or anything close to that, if you’re pointing out that the extent and reach of globalisation is actually greater than imperialism and that therefore the evil crimes (some of which you note) while perhaps being of a different extent could not / ought not be considered in any way to be of a lesser extent – that’s a good point.

I’m not sure what is the story here–and I’m trying.

I’m a historian by training: continuity and change are… well, they are. That’s something that I use to understand the world.

Can we add some air and fuel to the brief spark of light, though? I’ll put in a plug for an outfit (no affiliation other than a friend works there) that aims to confront the past and learn from it, working with children to reckon with the past. Check out Facing History and Ourselves.

Neville Morley’s comment #10 is sharp, “Repentance is all well and good; compensation tends to be lower down the list.” But given that this whole thing revolves around corporations outliving humans–would we have Bertelsmann compensating Schocken? The heirs of the Schocken family? Wha? The families of the Latvian Jews?

Truth and reconciliation may be the best we can do.

There’s certainly irony there. I wouldn’t want to make any further claims though.

Actually Germany has been comparatively good at this compensation and reconciliation business – which is only right as it has caused terrible suffering as well. There is a certain irony to the US/UK lecturing others about these matters though.

‘Repentence’ is all well and good; ‘compensation’ tends to be lower down the list. The vast majority of Germans and German politicians weren’t even alive then, let alone complicit, and yet the majority continue to be willing to accept a burden of guilt from the actions of their ancestors; glib assertions that all Germans are Nazis are thus basically obnoxious. The companies were, in a meaningful sense, both alive at the time and complicit.

The story of Bertelsmann in the Nazi era was the subject of an extensive, critical history, commissioned by the company itself, by Saul Friedlander from UCLA, that the company puts up on its own website (conclusion here). And, Bertelsmann has paid into the billion-dollar slave labor compensation fund. Of course, that the history was done at all wasn’t simply a gesture of corporate goodwill, but the company has (a) opened its archives and itself commissioned an independent historical review of its practices that is very critical of the corporation; (b) paid large amounts of money into a victim’s compensation fund. That’s certainly at the better end of corporations recognizing their responsibilities for participation in historical atrocities — it doesn’t make the point about buying Random House less ironic, I suppose, but Bertelsmann has pretty clearly been at the better end of whatever spectrum of reasonableness we might expect from corporations that were part of awful regimes.

Bertelsmann has done nothing wrong when they bought Randomhouse and by extension Shocken books. Just like they did nothing wrong issuing that press statement in response to the usual Nazi screems. Berstelsmann does lots of other wrong stuff today, not just in the past – they are pretty ugly neoliberals. And of course the company behaved immoral during the NSDAP dictatorship (big surprise). Its just that those points have nothing to do with each other and should not be linked in a post for cheap emotional outrage. So whats the accusation ? That they didnt put up a long defense nuanced enough press statement with 100 we are sorry in response to Nazi screams? That would have been dumb and pointless.

@Robert Halford #23: thanks for that; I should have made it clearer that I was talking in very general terms, rather than saying anything specific to Bertelsmann. Actually I was thinking mainly of Doktor Oetker, where the Nazi past was properly discussed only this year (see http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/2013-10/oetker-ns-drittes-reich).

@In the Sky #14: of course no one currently working for these companies was complicit or even alive – that’s entirely beside the point.

“How in the world could you have gotten that from my post?”

From the epigram:

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

It seemed that you might be saying that the acquisition of Schocken revealed the reality of the relationship between Nazism and present-day Judaism.

Otherwise I couldn’t tell what you were saying. Just irony?

BTW, after moving to Palestine Salman Schocken bought the Haaretz newspaper, which is still majority-owned by family members and has been edited continuously by a Schocken since the mid-30’s. But the family sold 25% of the paper (since reduced to 20%) to another German publishing house with a Nazi past, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3292189,00.html

And when you get off the plane at Ben-Gurion Airport, the taxi you’ll ride in to your hotel will probably be a Mercedes.

Well, that reads very harshly upon reflection. I’m not really sure how to soften it really now, except in terms of admitting to my complicity also. maybe my reading of the quote is all wrong? Maybe that quote was not the best epigraph to orient us to the story you wanted to tell?

I have been thinking hard about this question lately after one of America’s own opportunities for reparations – after slavery – was discussed on the Diane Rehm show recently (you can find that here: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-10-31/moral-and-economic-costs-slavery )

It is curious to me how our common-sense feelings (which inform that American, and universal, value of separating “the sins of the fathers” from the children) inform very different feelings on the appropriateness of reparations when we move across time or generations. In some senses, individuals are a kind of reincarnation of their parents – especially in terms of continuing values and heritage. In other senses, we have strong common-sense notions that they are independent. We wouldn’t dream of imprisoning somebody for a murder committed without their knowledge or involvement.

Having one person return goods that they themselves stole is not controversial, and it’s also not controversial to restore actual goods stolen by a father, even though that inconveniences the blameless offspring. There’s also a pretty compelling account of the path from past injustices to current prosperity (referenced in the Rehm panel discussion, and seen elsewhere – I’ve also seen the headline of a recent study apparently holding that roughly 60% of a person’s chances are determined at the time of birth; or inherited).

The very problematic empirical and public policy aspects of attempting reparations aside, one thing I find curious here is how that prosperity continuing since the demise of slavery is shown as a continuation of the theft – even as it is explicitly stated that the form taken by the proceeds of slavery is in the offspring being educated, so we no longer have a concrete thing to grasp and restore to the aggrieved party, but a quantity of idea. The stolen item having been invested, the aggrieved party’s descendants have lost the returns of that investment – but is it correct to then say that a person who is educated should essentially trade places with a person who had an investment stolen, and that any returns from the investment of theft is forfeit? Do we seriously say that we should compromise on this, and just split the difference fifty-fifty? The concept of taking one person’s education and restoring it to another being both unjust and absurd, I am left wondering how reparations would actually work.

I think that this confusion isn’t necessarily unsolvable – rather I think the empirical, ethical, and policy complications of such an approach make direct reparations in all but the most direct cases inadvisable as a policy. It seems much preferable to simply use social science to attempt and study who is currently at disadvantage and target them for large social gains. I don’t think that giving money in an unfocused fashion, especially if it isn’t possible to specifically determine who should receive what and where the historical burden of responsibility actually lies (the empirical problems), makes for good public policy, and it also seems unhelpful if this obscures the obligations from common decency with the allure of a price tag. It certainly is easy to make many white people stop feeling brotherly sympathy for their fellow when you set American against American in this way, but income redistribution based on actual need is much easier to defend (and, if you’re an anti-government type, think of what motivates private giving at least).

@37 “Having one person return goods that they themselves stole is not controversial, and it’s also not controversial to restore actual goods stolen by a father, even though that inconveniences the blameless offspring”

“For I trace the beginnings of British foreign investment to the treasure which Drake stole from Spain in 1580. In that year he returned to England bringing with him the prodigious spoils of the Golden Hind. Queen Elizabeth was a considerable shareholder in the syndicate which had financed the expedition. Out of her share she paid off the whole of England’s foreign debt, balanced her Budget, and found herself with about £40,000 in hand. This she invested in the Levant Company –which prospered. Out of the profits of the Levant Company, the East India Company was founded; and the profits of this great enterprise were the foundation of England’s subsequent foreign investment. Now it happens that £40,ooo accumulating at 3f per cent compound interest approximately corresponds to the actual volume of England’s foreign investments at various dates, and would actually amount to-day to the total of £4,000,000,000 which I have already quoted as being what our foreign investments now are. Thus, every £1 which Drake brought home in 1580 has now become £100,000. Such is the power of compound interest!” Economic Possibilities forvOur Grandchildren 1930

Thank you for your reply Ed Herdman.

No, Keynes didn’t make that moral argument or have that intuition before the war, sadly. I’ve an idea I’ve read somewhere he was a supporter of eugenics also.

But he recognised that foreign investment was often stolen, and that its benefits and profits accrued to later generations.

No, I’m not naive enough to think money plundered remains in the same form. for instance, people built grand buildings and palaces and museums and libraries etc with it I think probably all those hygenic improvements to European cities were made with it – it wouldn’t be practical exactly to did up plumbing and pipes, and take running water from those that benefit from invasion down the track and give it to those to whom the dis benefits of being invaded accrue and dwell in slums and so on, would it?

The English economy since it began to invade distant countries, I think Virginia was the first, is intricately bound up with its wrongdoings. Or there’s how they changed their neighbours and took their languages and dress from them, and put them to work, or sent them, pressed them to want to go, overseas to invaded countries. And so forth. If you think that it is possible to extricate the benefits of all this to other factors of growth in the British economy, be my guest but i doubt it can be demonstrated through evidence and maths myself.

Yes it would be upsetting to the established order and would drag skeletons from closets, but that is no reason, or a poor reason, to argue against reconciliation and reparations in my view.

Bertelsmann is now the majority owner (53%) of Penguin Random House. Would that they had named the merged company Random Penguin.

@Ed Herdman

I think you are right regarding not having a sole focus on money and objects of consumer desire.

I think though that if knowledge and education happen to be the *sole* proceeds of the crime down the track, which I do think would be rare, the person who has accrued the benefits can quite easily spend all their time sharing their knowledge by teaching the children of those to whom the disbenefits accrued, teaching adult education, publishing open access articles and so forth. Education is one of the oldest things to be shared.