Visual assignment 2

First, the prompt from Jen and Chandan:

We come to travel with our fantasies. These fantasies, at the border of reality, make the line between the real and the fantasized, the personal and the public, the outer world and the inner world ambiguous and porous. For this assignment we’d like you to offer one picture or image that you’ve taken here in Berlin that captures best for you the crossing of your fantasies about this summer abroad and the world of difference you actually found here in Berlin.

Make sure to include a caption (200-500 words) that describes what you’ve been thinking about while in Berlin. Like memory, fantasy is also a supplication or contestation of socially made “reality”; “reality” is most often asserted as away of controlling what can be asserted as socially possible. What terms of possibility do you think your fantasy was contesting or playing into? For example, a specific racial script, a specific national script, a specific gendered script, a script of community and family membership. Was your fantasy and how it shaped your arrival/experience here in Berlin one that you think secretly desired a contestation of these scripts or did it ease your travel by conforming to normative possibilities? An example might be that you wanted to come to Berlin to be that every-American who found in Berlin the promise of late nights parties, dancing and an anything goes atmosphere, and found yourself being something very different. You will want to place your reflections within a context of migration and identity, and learning about the history of cities, states and communities. 
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My fantasy was of a simple, textbook-like Berlin. For example - Nazis: Bad. The persecuted: Good. Communists: Bad. Capitalism: Great. East Germany: Over. (Re)unified Berlin: Thriving.

But Berlin was not that simple, and it did not reveal itself to me like words on a page. I had to go find it, explore it, uncover it. And much of what I discovered was really, really awkward. And I'm not talking about "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" awkward - this is state archives, changed street names, lower and uppercase W's and E's, can't-tell-where-the-wall-used-to-be awkward. This is physical sites and symbolic rituals like those at the Bendlerblock's Memorial to the German Resistance, in which the state cannot commemorate the heroic acts like von Stauffenberg's without also confronting the immensity and ruthlessness and horror of the Nazi regime against which he fought. And that, as I stand at the gates looking in on the military ceremony, seems like all the more reason for the state to forget that Operation Valkyrie ever happened. This is uncomfortable.

The things that matter most to me about Berlin are the things that are not shown, and not discussed. They have physical manifestations in these abandoned sites I've spent the past few weeks obsessing over (see: hospitals, theme parks, and military bases). These places' heydays, the heights of their respective operations, coincided with Germany's darkest moments. Normal people did normal things here, at the wrong times. So today, we cannot heal our wounded where the Nazis healed their wounded, or train our soldiers where the Soviets trained their soldiers, or entertain ourselves where "Ossies" entertained themselves.

Instead, at these places I watched five layers of paint fall off to expose naked wrought iron. Which color did the Nazis paint? Which color signifies the point at which the Soviets occupied the building? And why, near the end, did the Soviets have such a thing for mint green? At these places I also marveled at the Soviet newspapers behind every sheath of peeling wallpaper. A hidden message from the headlines of the past? No, more like a DIY wallpapering trick that someone seems to have figured out, if the dates on the headers are any guide, in 1985.

To me, this is all novelty and irony and excitement. But if I lived near these places and had to coexist with them in my everyday life - and people do - I imagine it would be easier to not ask so many questions.

Let me make it clear that I don't think collective amnesia and state memory and all that jazz is a German phenomenon - it's not. We could talk about the Indian Removal Act, or Chile's 9/11, or the myriad ways in which all x years of my adult life have been, and in all likelihood will continue to be, saturated with hyped up, fear-fueled frenzy about "terrorism" and "illegal immigrants." (Clearly the Jackson School has taught me well.) But I'm at least used to these episodes of memory altercation, and have good people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and the professors at my liberal university to wade through it with me daily and keep my head above water. But I don't know how to swim in German history. This is a history of which I still feel woefully ignorant, and a history that I tried my best to understand in just four weeks on the ground. I am leaving with an education that I did not expect, and will not forget any time soon.