"Chuck Norris finishes his degree in the prescribed time frame."
Spotted on the elevator at the university U-Bahn stop. Evidently students don’t like the fact that you are expected to finish your degree in a certain number of semesters. I know that some universities if you go over the expected number of semesters (usually 6 for a Bachelor’s degree, 10 for a combined Bachelor’s and Masters’) you have to pay extra tuition for the rest of the semesters, which does seem like a nasty thing to do.
Still, I wish somebody would sit me down and explain German university politics to me in a way that would make me sympathetic. I’m never going to be empathetic, really, because Americans pay for their higher education, and Germans don’t, and this fact makes it really hard for me to understand a lot of their complaints.
For example, on Tuesday, some of the students in my politics seminar made a big stink about the fact that our course reader cost 17.80 Euros. American students, let me ask you, did you ever get away with paying only 17.80 for textbooks for one of your classes? Because I know I didn’t. So part of me is like “Yes, intellectually, this makes sense, we also complained about our $200 books for our classes…” but another part of me thinks “What the hell is wrong with you?”
(Especially when, after a ten-minute argument about the course reader, and another ten minute argument about how much reading there is (the reading for the entire semester amounts to two, maybe three weeks of readings from a seminar at home, and they only have to write two papers, and short papers at that, no tests), somebody asks if we can have more readings about Canada. Not if you can’t handle what we already have, sweetie.)
Same deal with finishing your degree in the regulation amount of time: in America, the number one politically viable reason people take a long time is because they’re working part-time to pay off the cost of the degree, right? Does the same situation exist in Germany, where degrees don’t cost as much?
I asked a few Americans I knew who had spent a longer time here than I had, and all of them said “I’ve never met a German who was working part-time during their studies,” and true, those Germans are probably harder to meet than non-working Germans, but still, where are they? What are their stories? How can I as an outsider find out what’s going on? I wish there were a seminar on that.
Filed under: Holocaust Stuff | Tags: history on film, holocaust education, israel, victims and perpetrators
On Sunday I had the opportunity to see the documentary film Stalags, about a short-lived genre of Israeli erotica from the early 1960s. “Stalags” featured American or British pilots kept captive in German prisoner-of-war camps being raped and tortured by beautiful women of the SS before getting their own brutal revenge. The titles often claimed to be “true stories” and translations from English into Hebrew, but they were really inventions on the part of Israeli writers.
These booklets were ridiculously popular in early-1960s Israel, selling up to 80,000 copies per title. We missed the five minutes of the film where they talk about the end of the stalag craze because of technical difficulties with the film projector, but I gather that one stalag–I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch–crossed the line of acceptability by featuring a female victim instead of a male victim, and then there was an obscenity trial and the whole genre was condemned.
The first thing I wanted to do when I heard this information was ask a lot of questions about gender in Israeli society and the gender dimensions of revenge fantasies, but the movie avoided questions about gender-in-the-stalags entirely and decided to mount a critique on the Israeli memory culture instead.
For example, the last part of the film focused on one of the most famous Holocaust memoirs: Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls, which actually appeared in 1955 and was an inspiration for the stalag writers. I’ve actually never read the book, but it claims to be a truthful account of “Joy Divisions” of Jewish women kept for the sexual pleasure of German soldiers. The film claims that House of Dolls is a pack of pornographic and exploitative lies, but the Israeli high school curriculum teaches it as absolute truth.
The reality, is, of course, somewhere in the murky-in-between. There was forced prostitution in Nazi Germany, but it seems that women from Poland and the East were forced into prostitution rather than Jewish women.
Using this claim that House of Dolls is total bullshit, and arguing that the stalags were a direct result of the popularity of House of Dolls, the film-maker argues that the stalags were symptomatic of an Israeli memory culture that ignored and even demonized the experiences of actual Holocaust survivors in favor of juvenile and pornographic comic-book revenge fantasies.
It was a version of Holocaust memory appropriate for an up-and-coming nation of heroes. Young male Jews who felt insecure about their place in the world could read these books and imagine themselves raping and killing the beautiful SS guards, and that made them ready to go fight for Israel rather than waste time feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the tragedy.
(Like I said earlier, the topic is begging for a gender analysis that didn’t happen in the movie, which meant that I left the theater feeling incredibly self-righteous: what do young Jewish women who feel vulnerable do to reclaim their sense of security? Why did everyone laugh at that scene where the Israeli guy talked about having degrading sex with his German girlfriend? Isn’t there anything problematic about displacing revenge fantasies on the bodies of women, even if they are fantasies?)
In the meantime, actual survivors were themselves criticized and silenced, because there wasn’t time for the reflection their stories demanded. First they were blamed for not having been smart enough to get out in time–”We emigrated once Hitler came into power, why didn’t you?” Then the victim-blaming took another disgusting turn: it was assumed that anybody who had survived the camps had done something terrible: for men, perhaps they had been Kapos, and for women, especially attractive women, well, they must have been whores.
That part of the movie was the most striking and emotionally painful for me. Why do humans always feel the need to be terrible to people who have just been through terrible things? Is it a way for you to feel superior and not have to acknowledge your own vulnerability? Why does the same dynamic keep appearing?
One of the women interviewed said at the end of the film that she hoped the story of the next Holocaust would be told in simple words, without embellishments, and of course I thought of Adorno’s “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
Did Adorno know about Holocaust pornography? Would it have blown his mind? It nearly blew mine, and I think poetry has its place.
Representing the Holocaust in a morally acceptable manner is always going to be a difficult proposition, but this film stretched my ideas about how it could and couldn’t be done. I would recommend that anyone with an interest in these topics see it (it’s much less explicit than The Night Porter), but be prepared to be really angry at humanity, frustrated with incomplete critiques, and, okay, maybe completely overwhelmed with despair and pain afterwards.
I still liked it better than The Night Porter.
Filed under: Turkish Stuff | Tags: freie universität, language learning, multicultural germany, turkish
Somebody handed me a flyer at lunch today telling me to go to this website, which is the home of a campaign demanding that the president of the FU step down because he’s some sort of autocratic elitist who runs the university like a business.
Most of their complaints I definitely don’t have the background to understand (the Bologna Process? what’s that? and why are you complaining so much about Germany saying your university was an excellent university? I need to read that part again), but I understand this well enough: evidently in 2005 he made an iffy comment about the intelligence of Turks when asked to explain a recently published study that showed Turkish children were doing poorly on German IQ tests.
“Das Problem besteht nur bei türkischen Kindern und nicht etwa bei Kindern aus arabischen Familien. Möglicherweise sind Sprachdefizite verantwortlich für die Intelligenzdefizite, aber das ist nicht erwiesen. Ein Zusammenhang zwischen sozial schwacher Herkunft und mangelhafter Intelligenz besteht nicht.”
["The problem exists in Turkish children but not in children from Arab families. It's possible that speech deficits are responsible for the intelligence deficits, although that hasn't been proven. There is no correlation between having a socially improverished background and poor intelligence."]
And then he made some comments about how Turkish parents needed to help their kids learn better German. He doesn’t put it very well, but it kind of seems like to me that he’s pointing out something very obvious: if you don’t speak German well, and you take a German-language IQ test, you’re going to do poorly. How do you learn to speak German better? You grow up in a home where the German language is used. He doesn’t say Turks are stupid, he says they need to speak more German.
Which is obviously opening up ten more cans of worms about language and culture and implied assumptions, but without launching into a radical critique of the IQ test, the guy had two options: to say “Yes, isn’t that funny, Turks are dumb,” or to say “Hey, Turks aren’t dumb, they just don’t speak German, if they spoke German better they would do better” and I think we can all agree the second is better than the first.
He doesn’t go all the way to saying “The IQ test doesn’t measure intelligence, it measures German-language competency,” but I guess I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until I see more evidence that he’s racist.
(On a somewhat related note, the university really should have Turkish-for-Heritage-Speakers classes. Well, okay, there’s probably not enough Turks around for that yet, given that some miniscule percentage of them go on to university, but there are more than I would have expected in my Turkish class. The city should get some German-as-a-Second-Language teachers, put them in the elementary schools, and then wait ten years and have Turkish-for-Heritage-Speakers classes.)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: history on film, imposter syndrome, kurrentschrift, michael haneke, victims and perpetrators
Yesterday I went to see Michael Haneke’s new film, Das weisse Band [The White Ribbon] in the theater. At the beginning of the film, the title appears, and then the subtitle is written beneath it, just like on the film poster.
The women behind me couldn’t figure out what the subtitle said. One of them said loudly that it had been eighty years since anybody in her family had written like that, and the other said said she suspected it started with “eine,” but after that it was anyone’s guess.
I, on the other hand, spent a large chunk of the spring of 2008 with this workbook for just this reason, so that I could relish a few moments of feeling competent at the movies.
(Great film, too. You should go see it when it comes out. Very elegant, restrained, I already want to go back and see it again now that I’m looking for clues to the unexpected parts of the ending. Which I won’t say anything about.)
Filed under: Holocaust Stuff, Theories about Trauma | Tags: hannah arendt, holocaust education, peter esterhazy, the european idea, victims and perpetrators
Don’t let me forget to write about this lecture.
“In his speech in Frankfurt’s St. Paul’s Church, Peter Esterházy negatively summed up the status quo of European memory: “What was supposed to be united has been torn apart in self-hatred and self-pity… Besides the untruth of the exclusive perpetrator, there is the untruth of the exclusive victim, and the unspoken ‘we’ of the national memory lies hidden beneath both… A common European knowledge about ourselves as both perpetrators and victims is not yet in view.” “
I think one of the strongest arguments for developing complex stories about the past is that it also develops our sense of empathy and of self-awareness, our sense of ourselves as simultaneously potential victims and potential perpetrators. What a perfect quote.
It makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the Judenräte, Jewish councils that served as liaisons between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish communities. Raul Hilberg uncovered their role in having compiled lists of Jews and Jewish-owned property, in having kept order in the Jewish communities, and in having followed Nazi directives to pick groups of Jews for slave labor.
Arendt criticizes the Judenräte for having cooperated at all, saying that if they had chosen a different strategy, like a strategy of resistance, certainly Jews would have died, and those Jewish leaders may have been the first ones to die, but the final death toll would have been nowhere near six million. It’s something she can do with the benefit of hindsight, but she makes a valid point about the mechanics of the Holocaust (and you can make the same argument not just about Jewish leaders, but about the leaders of most of the Nazi-occupied governments–more French Jews would have survived if the Vichy government hadn’t handed over files listing all their names).
That’s one of the primary reasons that she was condemned as a “self-hating Jew” in the Israeli and American press–because she wasn’t holding up the story of Jews as perfect victims.
But the more you learn about this, the more you realize there are no perfect victims. The Arendt argument doesn’t blame the Judenräte for the Holocaust–how could it?–so much as it uncovers one of the primary mechanisms of Nazi force, and I would argue of a lot of other types of force: that of terrorizing your victims into being complicit in their own destruction.
There are also, and I can’t decide which of these is harder to swallow, but there are also no perfect perpetrators. We don’t have super-villains who drop from the sky in this world, we have individual people who feel like victims, often because they are victims, and who turn that sense of victimization into a desire to punish and to victimize others. I shouldn’t have to cite any statistics here, although I’ll try and turn up a nice punchy article about victimization-myths-in-fascist-movements for you soon.
Having a “sense of empathy,” for me, is centrally about being able to appreciate the slippery nature of these two roles, these two behavioral dynamics, that of the perpetrator and that of the victim, and being able to reject self-aggrandizing and totalizing myths in favor of a more nuanced understanding of what makes people and nations behave the way they do.
If that’s the European idea, I think it’s a beautiful one.
That's my U-Bahn stop in 1961. I walk under that sign every single day.
1989, buses crossing borders--check the use of Turkish in public space!
This cafe is decorated by a chunk of the wall and mushrooms made out of bread. It also has free wireless.
Filed under: Fulbright Stuff | Tags: german politics, imposter syndrome, proud to be an american
One week of classes down. It turns out I have a class every day of the week: my second-year-Turkish-for-Turkologists class meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, my “Migration and Memory” seminar meets Tuesdays, and my “Erinnerungspolitik” seminar meets Thursdays.
It will be a new experience for me, since I never really got the whole study-abroad-at-a-German-university experience, but I do feel a bit like I’m playing it on the safe side.
But what can I do? I don’t know who to talk about this with, but the process of making research contacts–the process of telling people “I am interested in what you do and I want to talk about it with you”–still scares me, and it’s because I feel voyeuristic and somewhat ashamed of my interest in German history.
When my Erinnerungspolitik professor was giving his introductory spiel on Thursday, he started talking about how Americans have a lot of Holocaust memorial museums, and then made some comment about how that was something we should interrogate, because it sure seemed like Americans tended to focus on the crimes of others and forget about their own.
It was one of those moments where you feel sick to your stomach because suddenly it turns out that the nasty things you think about yourself? You’re not the only one who thinks them.
I already feel like I constantly have to justify my interest in the history that interests me, because I think we’ve all experienced this in some form: if you don’t tell a compelling narrative of your own, people will draw the lines for you based on their perception of your identity. Sometimes they’ll be right and sometimes they’ll be wrong, sometimes they’ll be nice and sometimes they’ll be cruel.
Certainly everyone at the Schwules Museum (where I now volunteer) assumed I was gay and wanted to learn more about lesbians in Berlin–okay, I can handle that.
When I was in Turkey and studying Turkish, I think people who saw me on the streets mostly assumed I was German, and people who knew I was American were satisfied with the thought that America was reaching out to Turkey in the age of Obama, but every once in a while you would run into an asshole Turkish guy who would make a lewd comment and then say “Come out for drinks with me! You must be interested in Turkish men otherwise why would you be here…”
So what do the people in my Erinnerungspolitik seminar assume? That I ran away to Germany because I had some dark secret lurking at home in America? That I study post-war Germany out of some sick sense of Schadenfreude?
I worry about these things. I’m still not sure why I’m so drawn to Germany outside of curiosity and circumstance, so one comment about Americans being trauma tourists can put me into a funk of self-doubt for a week. Thinking too much about those questions leaves me in a state where I can’t pursue my actual research questions.
This is not to say that I don’t think it’s important to interrogate my reasons for wanting to study Germany. Indeed, I think it’s very important–so important that the nagging guilt of it often threatens to derail my actual research.
It’s hard to make research contacts when you’re constantly apologizing for your own interest in the subject, difficult to contact people when all you have to offer is “I know I’m not the right person for this job, but I’d like to do it anyway.”
But I know that I’m capable of improving my own mental habits over time. Two years ago I couldn’t imagine contacting archives to say “So I’m writing a thesis on Hans Prinzhorn… can you let me see your papers?” but I did it, I did it again and again until I had contacted all the archives I wanted to contact, and I got a lot of weird looks and a few rude questions, but I got a thesis out of it.
Now I struggle with writing e-mails to people who work on contemporary German history, but I’m not going to struggle forever. Even if I don’t meet anybody else who admits to having these feelings–which are, perhaps, a sort of impostor syndrome, but classic impostor syndrome seems to be about doubting your intelligence, and I’m doubting my motives and my identity–I’m going to learn how to work through them anyway, e-mail by e-mail, meeting by meeting, week by week.
Maybe this particular sort of Fulbright grant is designed as boot camp–maybe the Fulbright people saw something in me, so they said “Let’s send her to Germany now, with her ill-defined research project and all, so that when she comes back as a PhD student she won’t be a quivering mass of jelly.”
And for them I will try to firm up.
Filed under: Holocaust Stuff | Tags: freie universität, holocaust education, memorial sites, proud to be an american
I went to my course about Holocaust memory in international comparison today. It’s one of the courses in the new Public History MA program at the university, so I was the only person in the class who was not also pursuing a Public History MA. That was uncomfortable. Also, two things struck me as odd:
1) We all had to go around and introduce ourselves and say what we liked and didn’t like about the syllabus, which hasn’t really happened in any of my other classes, and which became particularly awkward for me because
2) Everyone felt the need to complain about how America was over-represented on the syllabus, and “Can’t we talk about Poland more?” or “What about the Third World why don’t we ever talk about that,” which was stupid, because the professor is an American Studies scholar, so he’s playing to his strengths, but which was doubly stupid, because Americans basically invented Holocaust memory.
Maybe this is my own biases showing, but as far as I’m concerned there’s a reason that you have to study American contributions to Holocaust memory: it’s because those are by and large the contributions that had ripple effects around the world.
Have you ever watched a Polish miniseries on the Holocaust? No. Was the largest collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors in the world collected by Germans? No. Does the rest of the world put together have as many Holocaust museums as America does? Surprisingly no. Do non-Hollywood films about the Holocaust get made? Of course. But they’re not the ones that reach wider audiences.
We can talk about how it’s weird that the Americans like to talk about the Holocaust so much (and we did; the professor was all “Isn’t it weird that the Americans have more Holocaust museums than slavery museums? Why do they need to focus on the crimes of others so much?” and more on that later, don’t you worry), and we can certainly say that it’s important to think about local Holocaust memory in France and Poland and Japan and what-have-you.
But there’s many good reasons that there’s a lot of America on the syllabus.The word “Holocaust” was popularized by Elie Wiesel, who became a US citizen in 1955 and whose work (ever heard of Night?) was consistently supported by American publishers.
The 1978 American miniseries featuring a young Meryl Streep and filmed on location was a key element in Germany’s own confrontation of the past. 70% of young West Germans claimed that they had learned more from the miniseries than they had from their own history classes.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point: don’t go dissing my country’s presence on your history syllabus quite yet.
Filed under: Fulbright Stuff | Tags: esperanto is the shit, freie universität, language learning, turkish
This is how you know you're hardcore.
My plan to learn Turkish in German is a worrying one, but I think it’s going to pay off big. One, it’s going to force me to get better at both of the languages just to be as good as the rest of the kids in the class.
Two, I’m learning Turkish because of German (this isn’t like learning Polish in Spanish or Esperanto in Turkish, although now that I’ve typed that sentence I should really learn Esperanto in Russian, that would be awesome), so being in a German-language class on Turkish will teach me a lot about the embedded assumptions that Germans have about Turks.
I already learned a lot just by looking at the standard first textbook, which was below my level: my American textbook had nothing about Turkey-as-holiday-destination (it was all “How do I talk to Turkish students in my engineering program?”), but this textbook was all about pansiyonlar.
Congrats to me, also, on managing to place into the highest level (B1!) of the Turkish courses offered at the Technische Universität. I was expecting a written test, but instead got a bunch of rapid-fire questions, strung together some past tense verbs and not much else, and then had the woman tell me “I think A2.2…” but then look down at her lists and realize there was more space in the advanced course. So the advanced course it was.
That doesn’t start until the 30th: tomorrow I have the Turkish course at the FU (which is now confirmed to be three levels below me, but I’m not sure the FU has a Turkish course at my level, so we’ll see what happens) and a political science seminar in German, titled “Political Memory and Migration: The Treatment of Migration Pasts in International Comparison with Specific Consideration of Migration Museums.” Catch you on the flip side.
There’s a phenomenon in Germany these days called “Ostalgie,” nostalgia for the former German Democratic Republic.
It manifests itself in the ubiquitous traffic-light-man with a little hat who used to grace the streets of East Berlin, but can now be found on every corner.
It manifests itself in people who buy Trabant cars and East German motorcycles.
And now in me, because I just found out that Nudossi, which is like Nutella, but with three times the hazelnuts, was an East German product.
Evidently the recipe for Nudossi today is very different from the recipe for real DDR-Nudossi, so it’s not quite full-blown Ostalgie, but man. This is good stuff. Creamier and nuttier than Nutella, less chocolate-sweetness and more all-mouth goodness. (Plus it has a better-designed jar–I don’t know about you, but I always waste half of the Nutella in the jar because it gets into the sides and you have to sort of cram your spoon in funny to get it out. The Nudossi jar is round.)
Too bad the East Germans didn’t have any bananas to eat it with.
