Reflective Paper 3: Grandfather’s Tongue

Observation:

Ozadamar’s writing Grandfather Tongue tells about the physical relationship between the narrator, a stand-in for Ozadamar, and her Arabic writing teacher, Ibni Abdullah. Their relationship lasts for 40 days and is plagued by feelings of doubt from both sides about the validity of the relationship given that they are not wed and their cultural feelings about sex. In the story, Ibni tells two stories that appear to reflect their feelings about their relationship. The first one is about a young girl who spends forty nights with a dead man before marrying him. The second one is about Zeliah and her love for her slave, Yusuf, who refuses her advances until they are married because he is a servant of Allah.

These allusions to their relationship are contrasted with the very physical way Ozadamar describes everything else. For example, she describes the Arabic characters as “sleeping camels”, “pomegranate trees freezing in the rain and the wind”, and “like a fat woman’s arse sitting in a Turkish bath on a hot stone”. (20)

Reflection:

The allusive nature that she uses to describe her physical relationship with her teacher is not always in euphemisms. It is explicitly stated that she “pulled off his gym trousers, made love to him”. (32) But compared with her thoughts on some passing Arabs, it is rather tame. “I fol­lowed the Arab women wearing headscarves, their pregnant daughters beside them, I wanted to get under their skirts and be really small, I wanted to be their daughters in Neukolln.” (25).

However, the fairy tales told by Ibni express their feelings better than they could. The first tale, about the girl and her dead lover, reflects how Ozdamar pines for Ibni’s love: “lbni Abdullah comes, lays his mouth between my cheek and mouth. Now I’m calm.” (26). It also is called back to at the end when she leaves after forty days. (52). The other story mirror’s Ibni’s views on himself, as a pious man who is trying to maintain his purity and relationship to Allah. Both fairy tales are only close analogies as a central theme of both stories was saving one’s self for marriage, something Ibni and the narrator appeared to believe in but could not adhere to.

Contextualize:

The writing tells a story of the internal culture clash that Turkish immigrants experienced in Germany during the Cold War. While there are few references to worldly events or contemporary objects, the few that are, are significant. First East Germany: she mentions it as she leaves to return to West Germany and “looked at the ground and said, ‘Oh, it rained here too.’” (21) as though it were another world. The second important reference is the Turkish Worker’s Party, Communist and that “Green is anything that is not red.” (20) in reference the West’s aversion of anything Marxist while still trying to be progressive and liberal. The last contemporary reference is to Israeli soldiers. This last reference does not mention what conflict but that they killed all Ibni’s seven brothers (18). These traumatic events that are referenced set the stage as one of loss, both physical loss and a loss of tradition and culture.

Conclusion:

Ozadamar’s writing creates an incohesive but emotionally potent narrative of coming to terms with assimilation. The narrator represents a more assimilated Turk who wishes to regain what has been lost to assimilation. Ibni, in contrast, represents the traditions of Arabic that the narrator hoped could help her regain her cultural identity.

Reflective Paper 2: Seit die Juden weg sind

Observation:

Omer Bartov’s essay Seit der Juden weg sind discusses how the absence of a Jewry in German post-war culture was not discussed and how the empathy, and the remorse, that the Germans should have felt about the war and the Holocaust was instead directed towards themselves to create themselves as victims of the Nazi regime. To most German, it is “a mere statement of fact” (211) that there are no Jews in German and that the Jews that are there are not connected to the Jews that died in the Holocaust. This “absence of representation” was soon filled by literature, film, and historians who wrote stories in this “skewed universe of competing victimhood” (216) about innocent Germans who are swept up in the conformist society and forced to perform as soldiers for some evil “other”. These German protagonists are posed as victims of circumstance and their actions against the victims of the Holocaust are only seen as afterthoughts. Bartov poses these stories and their victimized protagonists as the “representation of absence” of the Jews. The absent Jews are “known to have been the perfect victim[s], the true, innocent, ideal victim, the victim with whom one precisely should empathize, had one not already chosen oneself as the preferred object of empathy” (216).

Reflection:

When I initially read Bartov, I was annoyed by this focus on very specific examples of literature, film, and history as it appeared to be cherry picking examples. However, on further examination, Bartov is using the most prominent examples of people in the given fields. This ubiquitous, unconscious creation of an alternative narrative was compelling, not only because almost all cultural figures had taken some stake in it, but it was also because it was a narrative about true events, as opposed to fictional ones, like what the Japanese created in post-war Nippon. I found the use of German rural life, from Edgar Reitz’s film Heimat, and the unwitting soldier, from Boll’s Der Zug war punktlich, to be analogous to the South’s use of the Antebellum Period in turn of the century America. These recreations of true events with a change of victims seem to be a common occurrence by the perpetrators of atrocities who then lost their wars.

Contextualization:

In the 1980s, members of the German intelligentsia were involved in what was soon called die Historikerstreit, a debate about how to properly view Germany, WWII, and the Holocaust. The right-wing position was that “there was a need to reintroduce the notion of empathy to the study of Nazism and to eliminate the distancing techniques and rhetoric employed in such writing” (221). This led to many of those historians disgracing their reputations, as some had argued further saying that historians “must identify with the fate of the Wehrmacht’s soldiers on the eastern provinces of the Reich” and that the atrocities committed there were only as bad as the Allied Power’s (read Soviet) policies towards Germany. Bartov writes his essay about these events and the wider cultural phenomenon of rationalizing war and attempts to create a unified national history.

Conclusion:

Bartov’s essay Seit der Juden weg sind is an interesting look at how the atrocities that one’s own people commit are rationalized and normalized. The three areas that Bartov looks at give very good insight into the unconscious thoughts of a culture and how that culture perceives itself and its place in the world. For the post-war Germans who were born during WWII, the guilt that is given to them by the world at large they feel is largely unjustified as they were mere teenagers who were swept along into the tide of Nazism. This innocence and victimhood they portrayed does not necessarily negate the empathy that should be felt for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Indeed, Bartov, falls for his own skewed logic in the “skewed universe of competing victimhood” (216).