Last month the poet Tasos Leivaditis was tried in the five-member Court of Appeal for his work The Wind at the Crossroads of the World and Andreas Pagkalos for his translation and publication of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. This trial has deeply moved the broader community because the work of the young poet, Leivaditis, has been widely read and loved by the Greek public. For this reason, many prominent figures in literature and the arts as well as ordinary members of the community hastened to follow the trial and to support the persecuted poet. Four members of the Governing Council of the Society of Greek Writers – Agis Theros, vice-president, and the writers Stratis Doukas, Leon Koukoulas and Christos Levantas – attended the proceedings as witnesses in support of Leivaditis and spoke in the most ardent tones about the peace-loving content of his book, highlighting also the need in our country for freedom of artistic expression. Mr Theros said of Leivaditis’ book that it is a ‘sublimely lyrical composition full of humanism’, and concluded with the observation: ‘There is no genuine democracy in Greece’. Subsequently, Mr Doukas noted that ‘by isolating particular verses and phrases you could make even the Gospels look like revolutionary texts’. Similarly, Mr Koukoulas and Mr Levantas described the work as a hymn to peace and expressed the desire of all cultured people that an end be brought to the suppression of thought and writing.

However, the most important aspect of the case was the Court's finding in favour of democracy and freedom, acquitting both the poet and the translator, and ordering the restoration of the banned works. In this trial of literature special attention must be drawn to two positive signs. Firstly, the awareness shown by the accused poet of the bearing of his case for the cultural and artistic life of the land, an awareness displayed by the humaneness, dignity and sense of intellectual responsibility with which he invested his defence. Secondly, the address made by the Appeal Court's Prosecutor Mr Laskaris, who in full consciousness of his lofty mission before a literary case of this sort, became the most authentic and fervent voice of a democracy which has suffered yet another blow with the illiberal persecution of a poet.

Making the Switch

Wilmer Cutler's relationship with CBS and the broadcast business generally, which had been so important to me over the years, began to peter out in the mid-1980s. The reasons for this were several. The first factor was FCC deregulation (as a result of the election of President Ronald Reagan), which substantially eliminated the threat of license challenges and other FCC regulations. This meant less legal business defending against the FCC. There was also management turnover at CBS. Those who fostered the relationship with Wilmer Cutler left the company or were demoted to lesser positions and were replaced by others less favorably inclined. This process began as early as 1969 when Jack Schneider and Dick Jencks (the latter a strong supporter of the firm) were scheduled to assume the positions of CEO and president, replacing Paley and Stanton, only to find at the board meeting to finalize the scheduled change that Paley had changed his mind. Schneider reverted to president of the Broadcast Group, and Jencks became the Washington representative, with far less influence over the legal work. Stanton, a champion of broadcasters’ First Amendment rights, retired in 1973, pushed out by Paley. Paley's ultimate failing was his inability to turn the reins over to Stanton and, thereafter, his unwillingness to plan for an orderly succession. At his core, he did not want to surrender his role as CEO. After a series of designated replacements either died or were fired, the control of the company passed to the Tisch family in 1986 with unhappy consequences for the company.

Even before Tisch took over, the new CBS management decided that the FCC was no longer a threat, and CBS News needed to stand on its own. In other words, CBS did not need to have an impressive news service as a defense to license challengers and other FCC regulation. Cost cutting became the order of the day—cost cutting that extended to CBS News’ outside legal fees. As a result of this emphasis on profit and belt tightening, there was a drastic turnover in CBS personnel, and my friends in management at the company departed, the last being Ralph Goldberg.

One of my mother's favorite stories was based on that old children's verse, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Mother's version begins with a little boy who loves the stars and wants more than anything else in the world to become an astronomer. Each night the young boy ventures out into the dark to gaze longingly at the heavens, saying, with awe and reverence, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.”

As the boy grows older, he studies the stars in school, goes off to college and majors in astronomy. He studies for a PhD at one of the top universities and writes a pathbreaking dissertation about the stars, one that puts him at the forefront of the profession and brings him great acclaim. The boy—now a young man—feels good about himself. He has done what he started out to do. So now each evening he strides proudly into the night and looks up confidently at the stars, pronouncing with great satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Now I know just what you are.”

The young man accepts a position in a top astronomy department and continues to teach and write about the stars, advancing the field with great brilliance. He becomes an accomplished teacher, nurturing many young scholars, and achieves great fame and many honors in the process of writing his awardwinning books and articles. He increasingly wears his celebrity lightly, however, driven always by his love for the stars and his desire to understand them better.

Just as the little boy grew into a young man, so the young man matures and ages. As the now distinguished but elderly gentleman nears the end of his life, he continues his nightly pilgrimages into the starry night, gazing up at the heavens and declaring, with great reverence and quiet respect, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are!”

Mother meant this, of course, as a folksy homily on the fact that we all think we know things only to learn later that perhaps we didn't know quite as much as we thought. Humility, Mother was telling me, comes with age.

I like to think of myself as a forgiving person. Only twice in my life have I ever drawn a line through someone's name in my emotional address book, and doing so did not make me feel good about myself. After all, it's better to forgive, isn't it? Holding onto an angry grudge will only trap you back there in the pain; isn't that what everyone says?

Thinking about two incidents when I did not forgive someone, however, made me revisit the whole concept of forgiveness, and now I’m not so sure it is always the right thing to do. Mostly I find forgiveness more complicated than I had thought before. We too easily confuse the essence of forgiveness—absolving the offending party for having done harm—with the act of relinquishing our own anger and resentment against the one who hurt us and then finding a way to craft an ongoing relationship with them.

The first story involves my friend Josie (not her real name). I’d been very close to Josie in college. I had been the one who introduced her to her husband while I was in grad school. And even though we lost track for much of the postgrad school years, we did keep in touch. So, when I moved to New York City, I reconnected with Josie, along with other mutual friends from Smith.

This was not the best time in my life. My only brother, Jamie, had been diagnosed with leukemia shortly before I began teaching at New York University (NYU). My second year there, Jamie's illness worsened and he died in December 1978. My father had died three years before Jamie got sick. Grandpa Bob died in July 1978, and my then boyfriend dumped me in January 1979, a month after Jamie's death.

The Christmas after Jamie died was bleak. I had no emotional energy to deal with anything except my mother's pain and grief from a wound so deep it went beyond anything words can capture. Losing a child must be the cruelest blow of all in life. When I returned to New York City after Christmas break, however, I called Josie to tell her about Jamie.

Overture

Following the genealogical investigation of architects mapped in the previous two chapters, and, more specifically, Mies van der Rohe's work, several questions related to the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto are raised in this chapter. For example, what is the genealogical index of his architecture? How does it amount to the “humanism” Kenneth Frampton has frequently attributed to Aalto? Furthermore, this also concerns the “humanism” that the organizers of the 2018 Venice Biennale associated with Frampton's vision of architecture. Whether Aalto's take on Humanism intersects with Frampton's is a subject that will be addressed later in this chapter. However, what concerns us in the first place is the possibility of reconstructing Aalto's later work in analogy to Frampton's reconstruction of late Mies in terms of the “monumentalization of technique,” and of Le Corbusier in terms of “monumentalization of vernacular,” discussed in Chapter 5 of this volume. Still, if we can contextualize Mies's late work after he migrated to America and Le Corbusier's after failing to establish the linguistics of civic architecture in modernity, how should we contextualize Aalto's architecture? This inquiry will shed light on the problematic notion of “humanization,” and the subject concerning Aalto's work as discussed in the following pages.

The postwar situation opened a vista for rethinking and challenging many modernist assumptions formulated during the late 1920s. However, this general observation should be indexed regarding the particularities of Aalto's work. For one, he subscribed to the idea of the “organic” that was also dear to Frank L. Wright. This line of theorization was dismissed by those involved in the institutionalization of International Style architecture (ca. the 1930s). However, after the war, Bruno Zevi took the idea to a different level. Aalto also gave ample attention to the notion of regionalism, another vital theme for immediately postwar architecture in the aftermath of Le Corbusier's early villas and his work in India. Regarding Le Corbusier's “monumentalization of vernacular,” it is helpful to differentiate the historicity of regionalism from that of vernacular. During the 1950s, emerging capitalism in America exported consumer and cultural goods and construction techniques, especially those instrumental for disseminating the modern language of architecture, to most countries then tagged as “Third World.”

Opening

The title of this chapter sums up, in a nutshell, Kenneth Frampton's project of critical historiography of Modern Movement architecture and beyond. Frampton has remained sympathetic to the humanistic and sociopolitical aspirations of modernity's project, which had significant repercussions for the intellectual labor of architecture produced between the two wars. Frampton penned most of the manuscript of Modern Architecture: A Critical History during the 1970s when he could not but share aspects of various criticisms launched against the International Style architecture. The language of this unique architectural tendency evolved during the first two decades of the past century in Europe, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) institutionalized it in the famous exhibition of 1932. Following this exhibition, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock co-authored a book celebrating the event. As stated in previous chapters, the scope of Frampton's intellectual work during the writing of his book was informed by many sources, including the English reformist concern for the social condition of the working class. However, unlike their German counterparts, the English reformers showed less interest in matters concerning theory and history. At another level of consideration, and as discussed in previous chapters, Frampton celebrated Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, Martin Heidegger's take on technology and “placemaking.” Equally important was Hannah Arendt's distinction between labor and work and her advocacy for the “space of human appearance,” the res publica. In contemporary circumstances, ushered in by global capitalism, the virtual network of communication has almost invalidated Arendt's idea, at least for now. What Frampton has taken away from the work of these three thinkers and their associates is a discourse of the critical, the scope of which includes the state of architecture in contemporary fully-fledged commodity form. If Benjamin is central to Frampton's historiography, the other two thinkers have assisted him in formulating a discourse of resistance detectable in Critical Regionalism.

In the preface to the book's second edition (1985), he dedicated a chapter to the subject. Frampton wrote:

He was a newspaper publisher, a state senator and a son of a bitch.

He was also my grandfather.

A relatively short man— 5ʹ6ʺ if memory serves— with a shock of gorgeous white hair and translucent blue eyes, J. O. was an attractive person, bright, intensely intellectual and interested in everything around him, gregarious, with the kind of charm needed by both politicians and newspapermen interested in ferreting out the story. Much of my knowledge of my grandfather comes from my mother who was not, I believe it is safe to say, her father-in-law's greatest fan. Mother's stories often carried a whiff of the Apocrypha but in this case, at least, her version of her father-in-law's life captures enough of what I personally knew to be true of my grandfather that I tend to believe it.

Whatever the case, it is verified fact that the Monroes came from southern Illinois, somewhere around Mount Vernon, Illinois, where they were what could only be termed poor dirt farmers. The original family came to what were then the American colonies around 1720, if family lore is correct. Somewhere in the DNA is a Spaniard, for when my uncle Karl developed a rare blood disease we were told it was odd to find it in him, given his background, since the disease usually affected Basques. We figured this possible link came from a Valentine Sevier, known as the Huguenot, who left southern France—somewhere near Navarre—in the late seventeenth century and fled to England, fearing religious persecution. This Valentine begat another Valentine, who apparently came to the new world and the Sevier family moved from its initial landing somewhere in Virginia. Eventually the Seviers came to rest in Tennessee, where a John Sevier became the first governor and supposedly fought a duel with Andrew Jackson. (One family tale has Sevier and Jackson both giving away the same land parcels to their followers; another version holds that Sevier insulted Jackson's wife. Both accounts end with the two good Tennessee gentlemen deciding to go have a few drinks before the duel and the whiskey doing in each of them.

Tasos Leivaditis came to prominence in 1952–53 with his first three poetry books, presented here in translation as a ‘triptych’, seeing as all three arose from and address similar experiences in war-ravaged Greece. By this time Leivaditis’ youth was over (he was 30 years of age when the first of the three books came out in 1952), and any inexperience or naivete was also long gone, driven away by the winds of terror and torture which scarred the bodies (both physical and literary) of all leftist intellectuals of that generation. After the publication of his third book, in late 1952, Leivaditis was hailed by the left, in both Greece and abroad, as one of the greatest new talents to have appeared in recent years, and at the same time he was being persecuted and imprisoned by the police state – a polarity in the reception of Leivaditis’ work that mirrored the deep divisions in Greece and Europe at large in the early Cold War years.

While the Cold War is only of historical interest today, Leivaditis’ triptych continues to be widely read and loved: it is not unusual for lines or passages to be recited by heart, or set to music in popular festivals, or spraypainted on walls in Athens. Even commentators and critics, until fairly recently, tended to concentrate on Leivaditis’ early and more ‘political’ writings, commonly drawing a sharp line between these writings and those that followed after Leivaditis’ so-called political deconversion. But if we are to better understand Leivaditis’ early work, and in particular his first three works, we need to delve into the context, both biographical and sociohistorical, out of which they emerged. This is what I shall attempt here, beginning with the bright and youthful Leivaditis and his relatively unknown first forays into the world of letters.

Days of Youth

Leivaditis was born in Athens on 20 April 1922, on the eve of Easter Sunday, which is in part why he was given the name ‘Tasos’ (short for ‘Anastasios’, derived from the Greek word for ‘resurrection’).

Bismarck supposedly quipped that when the end of the world came, he wanted to be in Weimar because everything happened 30 years later there. I feel the same way about Walnut.

When the terrorists hit the Twin Towers on 9/11and all the airlines were grounded, my oldest son had no way to return to college in Chicago. Even after the planes were allowed to recommence flying, we were apprehensive. Then I remembered that the train from California to Chicago ran through Princeton, Illinois. Using a logic only a frightened, muddled mother could embrace, I decided my son should return by train. Even in a national emergency, I figured he could get off the train, follow the tracks till he got to Princeton and then find someone to get him to Walnut. Once in Walnut, he would be safe.

The world could be falling apart. The United States could be invaded by terrorists who hated our way of life and would stoop to nothing to harm us, as the media kept intoning. But it would take them at least 30 years to find Walnut.

I’m not sure why I felt this way. Walnut was a little town, declining rapidly in population even when I knew it. The high school had been torn down, despite the best efforts of my mother and my uncle Marvin. But with the demolition of the high school, the heart would go out of the town. Or so my family feared.

Instead, the town endured. Just a few houses— how many? Maybe 200? 300?— surrounded by rich farmland. The Walnut Café (pronounced caff by the locals who would have no truck with fancy French words) flourished. The farmers still seemed to come to town— “come ta’ town” the locals said— for their midmorning coffee and pie. For a while the café owners served Greek salads and the Greek owners (new arrivals to town) would go home to get real feta cheese whenever my mother came to visit, Mother being one of the few people in Walnut who appreciated the real feta.

The movie theatre had long since closed, doubtless because of its policy of charging no admission for a movie on Tuesday evenings, when everyone— including my grandmother— would be sure to go.

On his thirty third birthday Nol narrowly escaped death. It was Sunday 23 February 1941 when he witnessed, from the window of his apartment, a raid to capture Jews: ‘The Germans blocked the bridge. They grabbed everybody.’ Fortunately, Nol had just returned home, when the Germans started to pick up Jewish men at random from the streets of Nol's neighbourhood. Hundreds were taken and carried off. Later Nol and Ter heard that the German action was a reprisal.

What had happened that warranted this retaliation?

Following the surrender of the Dutch army in May 1940 the expected pogroms failed to materialise, but the Germans did announce and implement anti-Jewish decrees. For example, in July 1940 Jews were removed from the air-raid defence service. More serious were their dismissals in business, broadcasting and the press. In addition, Jews were hard hit by some general measures. For instance, when ritual slaughter was outlawed. Or when German citizens in the Netherlands had to report at special alien registration offices. The common response of Jews to these measures at this stage was one of apprehension, but otherwise they were trying to carry on as usual and make the best of their lives, very much like the rest of the Dutch population.

This ‘wait and see’ attitude is understandable. From today's perspective it may seem as if the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands was stepped up in degrees – registration, segregation, isolation, deportation and extermination. However, until January 1942 the National Socialists did not execute a coherent plan for dealing with the Jews in Western Europe. The German authorities in the Netherlands took numerous measures, but for contemporaries there appeared to be little cohesion. The apparent lack of strategy was amplified by the competition between various service departments in the occupying forces and the Dutch National Socialists. This caused confusion among Jews, if not total incomprehension. It was therefore impossible for Ter and Nol to foretell the results of specific German actions and to judge in advance which reactions would have the best outcomes.

Nevertheless, the tide was rising. The first anti-Jewish measures were followed in October 1940 by the so-called Aryan declaration: public sector workers had to state in this document that they weren't Jewish.

The date of the wedding was 12 June 1940. Just over a month earlier German armies had invaded the Netherlands, which had remained neutral since war broke out in Europe in 1939. Despite the German occupation, Ter and Nol proceeded with their planned marriage. If you’d known Nol, you’d have expected an exuberant party, but we know nothing about the event. The couple look happy together on photos, but the atmosphere at the wedding was probably rather lethargic, because there was sadness, fear and insecurity in the couple's family and among their friends. This chapter introduces you to the main characters in this story and explains their trepidation.

Tertia Kolthoff was a quiet, pensive and sensitive woman, but she could be outspoken when she’d made up her mind. Talking about her family, she often mentioned ‘outside loos’, meaning that her people originated in the countryside where homes didn't yet have indoor toilet facilities. Her father, Eliazer, had been born in 1872 in Hoogeveen, a small town in the eastern province of Drenthe. He was the son of a local trader. Her mother, Cis, was half a year younger. She was the daughter of a grain merchant and cattle dealer from Vierlingsbeek, a village in the southern province of North Brabant. Eliazer and Cis had been married there in 1900, settled in Amsterdam and had three children.

Tertia was born on 5 January 1913, a late arrival, more than 10 years younger than her brothers Mark and Frits. The official Tertia became the everyday Ter. After the retirement of her father as chief accountant of a large general department store in 1937, Ter's parents moved from their flat in the Rubens Street in Amsterdam- South to a house in the Lemon Street of the well-to-do Fruit District of The Hague. They may have moved to The Hague because a brother of Cis, Fred van Oss – a retired magazine editor and publisher – lived there. By the time of the move, Ter had already left home and was training to become a nurse.

In December 1939 Ter had met her husband-to-be, Arnold Bueno de Mesquita, five years older, born on 23 February 1908.

The first deportation train left the Netherlands in the night of 14 to 15 July 1942. Its destination was Auschwitz. By September 1943, more than 93,000 Jews had been taken from the Netherlands. This figure rose to about 107,000 in September 1944. Only a few thousand survived. Most of the others were gassed in the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor, often on arrival after a gruelling train journey in locked goods wagons or cattle carriages that lasted several days. The remaining victims died quickly, mostly of hunger and disease in slave labour camps.

The German-Jewish friends of Nol and Ter belonged to the first group that was to be deported. In February 1942, the Jewish Council agreed with the planned transport of some 20,000 German and stateless Jews from the Netherlands to Poland. However, that wasn't enough for the Germans. At the end of June the Council was told that Dutch Jews would also be summoned for what was called Arbeitseinsatz (labour assignment) or the even more misleading Dutch term werkverruiming (increased employment) in eastern Europe.

The National Socialists were planning the deportation in regular – sometimes weekly – transports of thousands of people, spreading the uprooting over time. About a hundred of these transports were foreseen. The Zentralstelle in Amterdam-South sent out the deportation orders to each individual that was to be transported, first by mail, later the Dutch police delivered the notices. It was planned that those who were called up had to go to the office of the Zentralstelle to complete the required forms, and to hear when they would travel to the transit camp of Westerbork. However, sometimes they went straight from the Zentralstelle or another collection point to Westerbork or a different camp. From there they embarked on the journey to Poland.

This was a dark period for Nol and Ter. When the deportation from the Netherlands started, the news about the course of the war in general remained discouraging. The German armies had suffered a few military defeats, but they were still able to launch large-scale offensives. In the Soviet Union, the Germans withdrew from Moscow, but they continued the siege of Leningrad and were on the attack in Stalingrad.

It's easy to stand out in a flat country. And when that country is small and you’ve been noticed, hiding is hard. So, where could Ter and Nol go after they found the police on their trail in 1942?

On the eve of the Second World War, less than nine million people inhabited the Kingdom of the Netherlands on the western outskirts of the European continent, where the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt flow into the North Sea. About a quarter of the land fell below sea level. Large stretches in the north and west had been reclaimed from river estuaries and sea inlets. They were surrounded with dykes and, despite occasional floods, protected by an ingenious polder system powered by windmills, steam engines and electrical pumps. Agriculture, notably cattle breeding and milk farming, dominated the green landscape, where countless rivers, canals and ditches cut through the soggy soil. Foremost among numerous lakes was the IJsselmeer that had been created in 1932 by the completion of a dam with a length of 32 kilometres between the provinces of North Holland and Friesland to separate the South Sea from the North Sea. The horizon was broken up by church steeples in towns and villages. Much of the urban wealth was founded on trade, including a share of the transatlantic slave trade, and exploitation of colonies, involving the subjection of their native population and application of slave labour.

For centuries Jews had lived in the Netherlands, and by 1939 they were becoming an integrated yet still distinctive part of Dutch society. In 1930, at the last official population count before the outbreak of war, 111,917 persons were registered as a member of a Jewish religious congregation. That was a comparatively small group, forming just over 1 per cent of the total Dutch population. In addition, at the time of the census on 31 December 1930 there were about 30,000 persons who weren't officially counted as Jews because they didn't belong to a Jewish congregation, but who can be regarded as Jews. The Jews formed a declining population segment. In 1920 the census had counted 115,223 Jews – about 3,000 more than in 1930.