BesondersWeg

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.