Here's a Guardian article written by Gary Younge, who attended a Busch Girl reading I did in Berlin earlier this month and included a bit of my subsequent interview with him.
1 comment:
Anonymous
said...
Hi Rose-Anne,
That was a very interesting article. It shows that Germany and its image are evolving.
I found these excerpts particularly revealing:
<< The national mindset, said Mesghena, has yet to catch up. "This issue of biological ethnicity is still very vivid," he says. "Rationally people know it has changed but emotionally they haven't processed those changes. >>
Had I just met Gary Young (the author), I (like the two German schoolchildren doing the project on foreigners) would not have thought he was a German. Does that mean I am a racist? I hope not.
<<"For a long time, to be German was a broken identity," said Mesghena, ... "No other European nation went through their history as critically as they did here. But for a long time it was a broken identity. Nobody wanted to be German, and this was a real challenge for those people who came into this country. How can you become part of a country that was not comfortable with itself?">>
I really would like to understand what Mesghena meant by "broken identity". Whatever it means, it seems like it is at the basis of problems of assimilation.
<<...When [Rose-Anne] did an interview about her book, the quote that was extracted and then circulated widely on the internet was: "Germans are not racist. They are inexperienced." "I said many things, including that," explains Clermont. "But clearly that was what they wanted to hear. The level of debate is really not that sophisticated here.">>
There is a thin line between inexperience/ignorance and racism. And people would prefer calling themselves inexperienced/ignorant rather than racist.
1 comment:
Hi Rose-Anne,
That was a very interesting article. It shows that Germany and its image are evolving.
I found these excerpts particularly revealing:
<< The national mindset, said Mesghena, has yet to catch up. "This issue of biological ethnicity is still very vivid," he says. "Rationally people know it has changed but emotionally they haven't processed those changes. >>
Had I just met Gary Young (the author), I (like the two German schoolchildren doing the project on foreigners) would not have thought he was a German. Does that mean I am a racist? I hope not.
<<"For a long time, to be German was a broken identity," said Mesghena, ... "No other European nation went through their history as critically as they did here. But for a long time it was a broken identity. Nobody wanted to be German, and this was a real challenge for those people who came into this country. How can you become part of a country that was not comfortable with itself?">>
I really would like to understand what Mesghena meant by "broken identity". Whatever it means, it seems like it is at the basis of problems of assimilation.
<<...When [Rose-Anne] did an interview about her book, the quote that was extracted and then circulated widely on the internet was: "Germans are not racist. They are inexperienced." "I said many things, including that," explains Clermont. "But clearly that was what they wanted to hear. The level of debate is really not that sophisticated here.">>
There is a thin line between inexperience/ignorance and racism. And people would prefer calling themselves inexperienced/ignorant rather than racist.
Anyway, that was a very interesting article.
Mi
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