About Hannes

Hannes with Former President Jimmy Carter and    Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter    ©The Carter Center

Hannes Artens, from Vienna, Austria, holds MAs in Political Science and History from the University of Vienna and in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent. He was associated with the Carter Center in Atlanta and a Hamburg based, academic think tank advising the German Parliament on U.S. foreign policy. The Writing on the Wall is his debut novel.

Hannes was born in the country that benefited most from Marshall-Plan aid, grew up among a people deeply molded by their parents high-risk flight from the police state of Soviet occupation to the personal freedom of the American military zone – remember Anna from Graham Greene’s The Third Man? - and came of age in the midst of a conservative society in which the liberating spirit of the ’68 movement barely gained traction. In Austria, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe before the Iron Curtain fell, the image of America and how Americans wanted their nation to be seen abroad, were one.

Hannes, though, has always gone foreign. A restless traveler dreaming of becoming a permanent tourist –impelled by a Franz Boas-like curiosity for other cultures and societies rather than by desire to evade taxes (as if his temperamental spirit of contradiction had ever allowed him to owe much to be taxed) – who experienced the ideological and societal confinement of his home country, a comfy, yet mind-throttling straightjacket. Wherever he went, whether trekking in the Colombian jungle, guiding tours in Namibia, or hitchhiking through Eastern Anatolia, he was confronted with blatant, passionate, and all reason-corroding anti-Americanism long before President Bush invaded Iraq.

Years in Africa

For most Americans, the CIA cuddling with drug cartel-hired assassins to eliminate Colombian union leaders, or U.S. support of Apartheid SADF’s scorched earth policy, or beefing up Saddam’s regime while he was gassing Kurdish villages were mere footnotes in the heroic epic of their country winning the Cold War. Yet for every Colombian, Namibian, or Kurd, these were defining strokes of fate from which they have yet to recover. It is their sole association with the Star Spangled Banner, the policies responsible for their peoples’ past and current adversities, which they cannot forget or forgive. This ambiguity led Hannes to study U.S. foreign policy and history from an unusual perspective. He came to know America by how she is perceived from abroad, through the eyes of those she liberated from the worst regime ever spawned, and those she had forced under the yoke of tyranny in order to free the world from a greater one.

His Austrian heritage not only bestowed upon him a natural disdain for blind obedience towards authority and nationalist xenophobia, the root causes of fascism, but also the sterling tradition of the café-literati. At the fin de siècle and during the roaring twenties, Viennese coffeehouses served as urban retreats and gatherings for such writing titans as Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Friedrich Torberg, Stefan Zweig, and Arthur Schnitzler. In whiling away the day over cups of coffee – what a life this would have been for the Gilmore Girls! – observing customers, debating peers, taking notes, and tirelessly fine-tuning manuscripts, they created spellbinding biographies of the end of an era, vivid descriptions of the collapse of an empire and its political and economic order, and peerless portrayals of a society morphing from war-euphoria to deathbed to cradle.

With my friend Fayrouz in Petra, Jordan

A professing Humanist and venerator of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Hannes, like Stefan Zweig, for whom the café constituted “the best educational establishment for everything new”, spent his schooldays there and drew out his university studies by operating a travel agency in Southern Africa and counseling indigenous Himba tribes on ecological tourism – certainly not an asset for his CV but years of maturation and character molding he’d never want to miss. After finally graduating in International Conflict Analysis as an expert on mediation and negotiation techniques, he accepted a post at the Atlanta-based Carter Center, where he accompanied a reconciliation process among antagonistic Cuban American organizations with the aim to collectively influence U.S.-Cuba policy. Incapable of assimilating into the ivory tower, gobbledygook, and debauching in estranged-from-reality theories of German academia, he soon abandoned his Ph.D. in Hamburg and embarked on an extended tour through post-Iraq shaped Anatolia, Syria, and Jordan. The impressions he gained on these trips induced him to draft The Writing on the Wall, with which he’d like to invite the audience to his café table for debate.