Filed under: Sightseeing | Tags: a natural history of destruction, architecture, berlin, david chipperfield, egyptology, elgin marbles, museums, neues museum, restoration
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.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: holocaust education, john demjanjuk, peter novick, victims and perpetrators
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).
Filed under: Fulbright Stuff | Tags: german history, imposter syndrome, lesbian history, migration, proud to be an american
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.
Filed under: Holocaust Stuff | Tags: historical justice, holocaust education, john demjanjuk, victims and perpetrators, war crimes
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.
Filed under: Fulbright Stuff | Tags: edward said, gastarbeiter, henry darger, imposter syndrome, outsider art
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.”)
Filed under: Literature | Tags: dachau, memorial sites, my bad translations, yüksel pazarkaya
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
Filed under: Literature | Tags: gastarbeiter, izmir, my bad translations, yüksel pazarkaya
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
Filed under: Turkish Stuff | Tags: clash of civilizations, language learning, samuel p. huntington, the european idea, turkish
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.)
