ambiguous

I have just come back from watching the Germany-England game (not at the stadium - tickets were sold out and it would have been f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g)

and as I was on the S-Bahn with Christian - a German I met this evening - I was surrounded by English people, drinking beer and being rowdy, but not as bad as the lot I saw at Friedrichstr. station earlier today. My overriding feeling on the S-Bahn was that I wanted the English to think I was German. Whether or not this can be analysed deeply I don't know - perhaps it's more to do with my innate desire to eavesdrop all the time - but still it was interesting.

And it makes me think - and sometimes worry - about how I will react to England when I go home. I fear I may now always have a slightly ambiguous relationship to it. Earlier this month when I was going through one of my bouts of "homesickness" (if you can really call it that) I was remembering all the best things about England and why I loved it. But now I am really feeling comfortable here - not at home as such - but comfortable, and it gives me great joy to discover new sides to the city in a different way to the wide-eyed tourist who first arrived here in September.

One of the reasons I love Berlin is because it is just that: ambiguous.

And ambiguity can never cease to be totally fascinating.

For example there was an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung two Sundays ago (I picked this paper up at the station - it's quite a hardcore one) about what it is to be native. And it was talking about how Obama is as American as he can be, and has the right to become president because of the being-born-in-America law. And then it was talking about what it means to be American: is Obama really "American" seeing as only two generations of his family have lived in America. Applying this and many other thoughts about barbarians and immigrants and 'native' people - questioning the legitimacy of such a term - to Germany, the author does not talk about Nazism – the seeming default for any thoughts on nationality, but instead sees the roots far far earlier, even than what he discusses in relation to Luther, who spoke German at the Wormer Reichstag and the King, Karl V, could only answer in French. A cause of this discrepancy was the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, and the lack of ‘Germanisation’ as a result.

"Worin ja auch eine der Ursachen liegt dafür, dass die Deutschen so viel Zeit der Frage, was deutsch sei, opferten. Und dass so viele Antworten sich aufs Blut und den Boden bezogen. Und auf eine Kultur, die einen Begriff wie „undeutsch“ hervorbringen konnte."

Roughly translated, this says “Herein also lies one of the reasons why the Germans sacrifice so much time dealing with the question what it is to be German. And why so many of their answers encompass blood and earth. Answers for a culture which is able to come up with a concept like that of being ‘ungerman’”.

I find it so interesting to read about how deeply insecure the nation is, and how this has been a characteristic from so early on in its history. If their language was not recongised for generations, the sense of identity and security would doubtless be damaged. And so perhaps one of the reasons that articulation does not figure so highly in the historical ways the nation has tried to express itself.

And speaking of history, I finished a book last week called “The Past Is Myself” by Christabel Bielenberg. She was a Brit (half Irish) married to a German in the Second World War, one who was involved in resistance movements such as the Stauffenberg plot to blow up Hitler. One of the great things about this autobiography is that much of her life took place in places I know well here: she had a house in Dahlem (where my school is) and had friends on the Budapester Str. (two roads down from where I live).

And the other thing I really like is her observations about the Germans.

But it’s a bit late and I’m a bit tired to find them all, so I will do so another time and just end with this one that caught my eye:

“The story goes that at Hitler’s birth three good fairies came to give him their good wishes, and the first wished for him that every German should be honest, the second that every German should be intelligent, and the third that every German should be a National Socialist. An uplifting thought. But them came the bad fairy, and she stipulated that every German could only possess two of those attributes. She left the Führer then with intelligent Nazis who were not honest, honest Nazis who had no brains and honest and intelligent citizens who were not Nazis.”