BesondersWeg


What does it mean to be a historian?
December 30, 2009, 11:22 pm
Filed under: Meta-Bloggery | Tags: , ,

Peter Novick:

“If there is, to use a pretentious word, any wisdom to be acquired from contemplating an historical event, I would think it would derive from confronting it in all its complexity and its contradictions; the ways in which it resembles other events to which it might be compared as well as the ways it differs from them.”

Greg Dening (Through a Glass Darkly, Page 6):

“I have always felt that the great privilege of a historian has been to be guardian of the signatures everyone desires to leave. I feel honored to have been invited to introduce to you the selves that the historians in these pages have saved.”

Robert Musil (author of the most frustrating book ever?):

“Die berühmte historische Distanz besteht darin, dass von hundert Tatsachen fünfundneunzig verloren gegangen sind, weshalb sich die verbliebenen ordnen lassen, wie man will.”

“The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.”



Neues Museum, Berlin

I went to the recently reconstructed Neues Museum in Berlin today. The centerpiece of the museum is Berlin’s controversial collection of Egyptian art, but it shows a range of antiquities from Rome, Greece, Celtic cultures, and even Neanderthal skulls and flints.

The museum was heavily damaged by bombing in 1943 and 1945. Although the most important objects had been moved to secure flak towers before the war began, many of the remaining objects–by some counts nearly half of the collection–were destroyed or looted at this time. Some of the crates hidden in the flak towers were taken by the Soviet Union at the end of the war and remain in Moscow today.

The ruins of the museum were left to decay by East Germany, with a plan for reconstruction only put into place after reunification in 1997. British architect David Chipperfield was appointed for the project, and the museum finally re-opened in October of this year.

Let me say this: I’m not usually impressed by antiquities, but the new building is a transcendental experience and the best example of site-specific museum architecture that I have ever been privileged to visit.

Chipperfield has left the scars of the building’s destruction visible and framed them with minimalist brick, glass, and wood. The ancient art makes you marvel at the beauty of the culture that humans have managed to create and to preserve while the visible destruction of the architecture that surrounds it reminds you of how easily and how often we have destroyed that same culture.

I could feel my mind stretching to accomodate the extremes of human persistence and of human fragility, of human creation and of human destruction.

This (extremely critical) review of the museum actually has a pretty decent set of photos of the renovation, including photos of what it looked like before and after the war, and I’ve added some more thanks to my father.

The magnificent entrance hall.

Simple modern brickwork contrasts with the faded beauty of the 19th-century wall paintings.

Through the arch you can see a copy of Ghiberti's Doors of Paradise.

Pieces that didn't fit into any of the reconstructed rooms are displayed in a "Fragmentarium."

My brother and I looking at a sarcophagus.

Fragility and persistence, creation and destruction.

A preserved inscription from Sophocles: "Staunliches waltet viel und doch nichts Erstaunlichres als der Mensch," in English "There are many wondrous things, and yet nothing more wondrous than Man."

Evidently the new building came under a lot of criticism from people who wanted to see a more complete restoration of the original, pre-1940 architecture (see the review I linked above) and who likened Chipperfield’s patchwork approach to a second bombing of the museum.

But I respect Chipperfield’s conviction that the bombing is also a part of the museum’s history, and that erasing the memory of that destruction might in itself be a destructive act. I was certainly more moved by the palimpsest approach to history–how appropriate for an archeological museum–than I would have been by a slavish reconstruction of the museum circa 1900.

I wish the architectural sensibilities had extended to the museum’s curation. The historical context for the pieces was spotty and often confusing and mildly controversial archeologist Heinrich Schliemann was praised to the high holy skies. Most troublesome, the continued insistence that Russia took some of the museum’s artifacts (most notably Priam’s Treasure) illegally at the end of World War Two and is in violation of international law was not matched by any sort of acknowledgment of the dubiously legal context under which many of the artifacts were taken to Berlin in the first place.

I agree with the museum’s directors that Russian looting and the original assembly of the collection are different issues from a legal standpoint, but I’m not sure about a moral standpoint. I just keep thinking of the people who took the Elgin Marbles saying “We didn’t trust that Greece would keep them safe–look at all the things they’ve destroyed!” If anybody had the right to say the same thing about Germany, it was the Soviets in 1945.

But that’s a quibble when compared to the stunning architecture. This is a must-see museum, with the potential to offer a deeply spiritual experience to anyone who cares about the past.



Novick on Moral Lessons
December 27, 2009, 9:51 am
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , ,

This is the first of several posts on Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, which was the big-punch-to-the-gut-book that I read this year. It traces the history of Holocaust memory in the United States, and argues that Holocaust memory has been deployed for specific political purposes.

This quote seems relevant to the Demjanjuk case I was talking about the other day:

“If there are, in fact, lessons to be drawn from history, the Holocaust would seem an unlikely source, not because of its alleged uniqueness, but because of its extremity. Lessons for dealing with the sort of issues that confront us in ordinary life, public or private, are not likely to be found in this most extraordinary of events. There are, in my view, more important lessons about how easily we become victimizers to be drawn from the behavior of normal Americans in normal times than from the behavior of the SS in wartime… the notion that lessons derived from [encounters with the Holocaust] are likely to have any effect on everyday personal or political conduct seems to me extremely dubious on pedagogic grounds” (13).

He also writes eloquently about how making the Holocaust the benchmark of evil can actually blunt our moral senses by desensitizing us to lesser atrocities, and this passage was particularly pertinent in light of everything I ever complain about:

“The identical talk of uniqueness and incomparability surrounding the Holocaust in the United States performs the opposite function: it promotes evasion of moral and historical responsibility. The repeated assertion that whatever the United States has done to blacks, Native Americans, Vietnamese, or others pales in comparison to the Holocaust is true–and evasive. And whereas a serious and sustained encounter with the history of hundreds of years of enslavement and oppression of blacks might imply costly demands on Americans to redress the wrongs of the past, contemplating the Holocaust is virtually cost-free: a few cheap tears.

So, in the end, it seems to me that the pretense that the Holocaust is an American memory–that Americans, either diffusely, as part of Western civilization, or specifically, as complicit bystanders, share responsibility for the Holocaust–works to devalue the notion of historical responsibility. It leads to the shirking of those responsibilities that do belong to Americans as they confront their past, their present, and their future” (15).



Apropos

I meet a lot of Germans who do American Studies here, which is awesome, definitely preferable to the experiences where everyone wants to kick America off the syllabus, because I feel like we have something in common.

Most of the time we high-five about this, but sometimes I express enthusiasm and they express suspicion.

There’s the blatant dismissal of “I study America because it’s big and important… you can’t say that about Germany,” where I’m just left to sputter about how this was not true. Then they went on to clarify, to say “Well, I was always hearing about America growing up, so it’s not surprising that I wanted to find out what it was really like. But you never heard about Germany. Why are you here?”

I’ve actually started claiming that I’m interested in Turkish migration to Germany because I’m interested in comparing it to Latin American migration to the United States (plausible, since I speak Spanish, and maybe even true) just because it’s a tidy explanation and I like to feel tidy sometimes.

(Maybe I should stick to queer history, since nobody ever says “So why are you volunteering at this museum about queer history, you girl-with-short-hair, you?” In fact, maybe I actually should move to queer history if I’m looking for public acclaim, because everyone at the museum always tells me that they assume that I’m working on the next great work about early lesbians and they can’t wait to see it.)

I was at a lecture once (ironically about American history) where somebody started telling me that Germans were perfectly justified in learning about American history, because they had already interrogated their own, but Americans hadn’t really confronted their own history yet, so it was “ein bisschen überheblich” [overbearing/presumptuous] for Americans to be thinking they could say anything useful about German history.

One lesson here is that I need to learn how to say “Fuck you” and walk away more often.

The other lesson is that maybe this is sometimes in part an anti-American thing, and I guess I can understand the dynamics of that intellectually even if they make me upset.



Learning Lessons

I’ve been following the John Demjanjuk trial with some interest, and I’m still very confused about my own opinions on the whole business.

One thing I am sure of is that it’s a difficult trial to write about well. This Esquire article is probably the best thing I’ve read.

Today I hit my head over these bizarrely self-congratulatory excerpts from German newspaper editorials, which make one wonder which one takes precedence when the goals of “justice” and “making Germany feel good about itself” come into conflict.

There’s also this editorial from a Dutch newspaper, which claims that “a guilty verdict may make others think twice before committing similar crimes, as a sentence – even a symbolic one – would as well… punishment, even if merely symbolic, may prevent similar crimes in the future.”

Seriously? Seriously? Sometimes people assume that every other bad thing that has ever happened in the world can be mapped onto the Holocaust, and I think that in making that analogy they forget about how distinct historical events are actually experienced, and I think that makes them say stupid things.

Which is my own poorly-phrased way of saying that if anybody anywhere in the future is a prisoner-of-war, and his captors offer him safety in exchange for serving as a guard, and he thinks “I’d better not do this, because they got that guy John Demjanjuk,” I will eat my hat.



Identity Crisis, Just In Time for the Holidays
December 25, 2009, 10:25 pm
Filed under: Fulbright Stuff | Tags: , , , ,

I still don’t know where to look for material on “identity-imposter-syndrome.” That’s my name for my nagging feeling that an American woman of largely British (and a wee bit German!) descent who decides to study Turks in Germany must be doing something morally suspect.

I can repeat to myself again and again that doing the imaginative work of trying to understand another culture is an important task and that if more people did it our world would be better off, but that doesn’t get rid of the voice that says it’s arrogant and presumptuous, and it doesn’t get rid of the constant reminders from the outside world that it’s suspicious at best.

I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read that started out “People ask me why I chose to write about Turkish migration, and the answer is, I myself am an immigrant…” These introductions always cause me to panic just a little bit. How am I ever going to narrativize my interest that appropriately?

A few weeks ago I was sitting with another of these worrying introductions, laughing to myself about how anxious they make me, when it occurred to me that this question of “how-do-I-respectfully-engage-with-the-other” isn’t a new preoccupation.

I wrote a senior project in high school that was entirely about justifying my interest in outsider art by exploring the relationship between artist and audience. Let me quote a little bit of eighteen-year-old me: “The myth of outsider art insists that it is created in a cultural vacuum filled only by the artist’s personal vision. I responded to the power of that idea initially, but the more I thought about the disturbing implications of wanting to shut people up in boxes to keep them pure, the more I wanted to probe the myth.”

I wanted to understand how I could process my intense emotional response to these works. How did I learn to distinguish between the subjective and the objective elements of my own analysis? How could I respond to the radical “outsider” quality of these works without fetishizing it, but also without downplaying and ignoring it?

One of the things I read for that project was Edward Said’s Orientalism so that I could understand all the pitfalls that come with studying something that you identify as “other.” I learned that there were a lot of pitfalls but not much about how to avoid them. I still love outsider art and I still feel anxious about it.

In the throes of this connection, I picked up a political science text about Turks in Germany, and that text tipped me off to the following: not everyone has my particular anxieties about studying the “other,” and one of the reasons for that is that not everyone wants the kind of knowledge I want. A lot of people want to know statistics and facts and public policy recommendations.

But I want an experiential knowledge, a narratival knowledge, a knowledge of culture and identity. I want to know what it’s like to be an outsider artist (Henry Darger, mostly), and I want to know what it’s like to be a Turkish migrant to Germany.

I acknowledge that these are knowledges that I can never possess first-hand, but I want them anyway, and my research, which asks questions like “What was it like to write a book about schizophrenic art in 1922? What was it like to move from Antalya to Germany in 1969? What was it like to be a German living next to the person who had just moved from Antalya? What was it like to remember the Holocaust as a German, as a Jew, as a Turk, as an American?” aims at the goal of approaching that knowledge, of contextualizing it, and of making it accessible.

Which does go against some of the things I’ve been taught about letting other people tell their own stories, about the sacred qualities of the authentic voice, but which is also something I’ve been working on for a long time. I used to want to be a novelist. Then I wanted to be a journalist. Now I want to be a historian. Is my desire to understand other people’s stories just me practicing some sort of bizarro-world second-hand post-modern orientalism? “I don’t want to categorize you, I just want to be able to narrativize as you, I just want to understand experiences as you’ve lived them.”

I’m not sure. I’m lucky to have this problem. I just know that I already know what it’s like to be me, that being me is incredibly interesting in some respects and sort of useless in others, that the idea of settling for that knowledge makes me restless, and that most of the things I’m proudest of in my life have come from trying to figure out what it’s like to be other people, although to be fair, those people have mostly not been dead Germans.

(Does anybody else agonize over this stuff like I do? I just want to know how other people get through the sentence “I study X” without reflexively adding “and I’m sorry if you think that’s presumptuous.”)



What does “besondersweg” mean anyway?

On one level, it just means “particularly far away,” which is certainly an appropriate title for a blog about spending time in a foreign country.

But the real reason I picked this name is because it puns on one of the central concepts in German historiography, the  Sonderweg, the concept of Germany’s “exceptional path” into modernity.

The term was first used in the 19th century by German elites who were proud of their state, which to their minds had avoided the pitfalls of both decadent and weak-willed France and autocratic Russia. A unique path for German authoritarianism.

The Sonderweg came back with a vengeance after 1945, when everyone was searching for an explanation for Nazi Germany. A number of authors, famously William Shirer in America, believed that flaws in the German national character were to blame, and wrote books complaining about the Germans all the way back to Martin Luther.

In the 1960s, German historians gussied up the theory by explaining that Germany’s problem was that it had modernized in an unnatural and stunted manner.

When the liberal Revolution was crushed in 1848, Prussian authoritarianism and militarism had taken hold of a country that would consequently fail to develop proper democratic institutions, particularly a liberal middle class.

Without a strong bourgeoise, then, Germany limped into the twentieth century with modern technology but premodern values and attitudes, and an authoritarian catastrophe could hardly be avoided.

This pre-occupation with finding out how Germany was different and flawed still continues in some German history today, but after two Marxist historians from Britain (who now teach in the United States) debunked the “special path into modernization” thesis in 1984, and after attention turned towards explaining similarities between the Holocaust and other genocidal acts, as well as towards forms of history other than political history, the word Sonderweg largely fell out of favor

When you see it today, it’s mostly used as an attack on another historian’s approach–”Why are you trying to make everyone who lived before 1933 a proto-Nazi? That’s so Sonderweg of you.”

(A more detailed and less flippant description of the concept can be found here.)

Besonders is an adverb that means things like “especially/exceptionally/particularly,” and it’s often found in the expression nichts besonderes, “nothing to get excited about/nothing to write home about.”

You put them together and you get besondersweg, not the “special path” into modernity, but my own special path through German history–the things that I get so excited about that I just have to write home about them.

I hope you all appreciate the blog more now.

(And David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, if you’re reading this, I so called the term first. You rock though.)



i can do nothing for dachau
December 18, 2009, 4:30 pm
Filed under: Literature | Tags: , , ,

Here’s another poem by Pazarkaya from the same collection, this one more obviously related to my own area of interest.

There’s a lot of ambiguities in the text that I didn’t really capture, so again my apologies for not being trained as a literary translator. I think the ideas manage to come through anyway.

(If it’s depressing, I promise to post about beer later this weekend.)

für dachau kann ich nichts

im touristenstrom
kam ich nach dachau—
totes abbild des entsetzens
welche vergangenheit welche gegenwart
leben wollte ich
einhauchen in die toten dokumente
tot die dokumente tot alles leben
vergebens
tot bleibt tot
und das leben geht unverschämt weiter:
1200 jahre dachau
besucht die kulturstadt dachau—
visit dachau
visite bei der schamlosigkeit

das kz
wurde umbenannt
zur gedenkstätte—
der bilder gedenken ist zu viel
der toten gedenken zu wenig
ich gedenke der lebenden:
der minderheiten der verfolgten
der verfemten der ausgebeuteten
ich gedenke der ausländischen arbeiter
in neuen lagern

unerwartet kamen menschen
und sind nun keine mehr
in miserablen baracken
in betrieben die ihr blut lecken
verklebt auf fliessbändern

dachau—gedenkstätte der verbote
schreien möchte ich—verboten
an die wände möchte ich
meine wut meinen ärger pinseln—verboten
mein hohngelächter
verboten
über den ausbeuterischen slogan
visit dachau—die kulturstadt

i can do nothing for dachau

in the stream of tourists
i came to dachau—
a dead image of horror
which past which present
did I want to live
to breathe life into the dead documents
the documents dead all dead
all for nothing
dead stays dead
and life goes on unashamed
1200 years of dachau
visit dachau the city of culture—
visit dachau
visit shamelessness

the concentration camp
was renamed
a memorial
it’s too much to think of the pictures
it’s too little to think of the dead
i think of the living;
the minorities the persecuted
the ostracized the exploited
i think of the foreign workers
in new camps

people came unexpected
and now there are no more
in miserable barracks
in factories that lick their blood
stuck to assembly lines

dachau—memorial of the forbidden
i would like to scream—forbidden
on the wall i would like to
paint my rage my resentment—forbidden
my scornful laughter
forbidden
about the exploitative slogan
visit dachau—die kulturstadt



german love of animals
December 18, 2009, 4:06 pm
Filed under: Literature | Tags: , , ,

I’ve been reading a few collections of Turkish-German poetry this week, and I wanted to share a few poems by Yüksel Pazarkaya, who was born in Izmir in 1940 and moved to Germany in 1958. This collection came out in 1989.

(My translations are very literal and workmanlike, to say the least. Apologies.)

deutsche tierliebe

die uns bestellten zur arbeit—
wollt ihr uns wirklich?
vielleicht verstehen wir eure sprache nicht
jedoch eure gebärden
keine paläste wollten wir
jedoch ein dach überm kopf
für uns brauchen wir keine schulen
jedoch für unsere kinder
und seht
auch wir leben bislang mit haus und familie
die wir gerne hier bei uns hätten

ein irrglaube
uns von unserer arbeitskraft zu trennen:
für euch unsere kraft
und zum teufel mit uns selbst
damit wir den herren nicht lästig werden

die uns bestellten zur arbeit—
wusstet ihr nicht
dass nur tiere oder menschen
arbeitskraft haben
die ihr uns nicht für menschen haltet
haltet uns doch zumindest für tiere
die ihr so sehr liebt mit euren sanften herzen
und euren tierschutzvereinen

german love of animals

those of us who were commissioned to work—
did you really want us?
perhaps we don’t understand your language
but your gestures
we didn’t want palaces
but a roof over our head
we don’t need schools for us
but for our children
and look
we have also lived with a house and family up to now
that we would like to have here with us

a false belief
to separate us from our labor-power
our power for you
and to the devil with ourselves
so that we won’t become a nuisance to the masters

those of us who were commissioned to work—
didn’t you know
that only animals or people
have labor-power
since you don’t consider us to be people
consider us at least to be animals
that you love so much with your soft hearts
and your animal protection societies



Neoconservatives Don’t Like Naps

When I fall asleep instead of doing my Turkish homework, the ghost of Samuel P. Huntington comes to my desk and slams his fist on my textbook.

He informs me that I have been enlisted as a top secret historian-agent, to write a compelling history of the twentieth century in which modern Turkey appears as a European country.

My historiographical labors will be the key factor in convincing the EU to accept Turkey, he says, and this is a good thing, because if the EU doesn’t accept Turkey, then Islam’s bloody borders will spread to Berlin, and ultimately it will be the downfall of Western civilization.

For this reason, he shouts, “You need to take your participles more seriously! GET BACK TO WORK!

I wake up very frightened.

(And yet, being enlisted in the clash of civilizations is something of a comforting narrative for a girl so uncertain of her own purpose. It certainly encourages one to study one’s participles.)