“Each sixth kindergarten child has a speech deficit” announced the Monday headlines on the front cover of the Berlin’s Tagesspiegel. The subtitle reads: despite immense investment in Berlin’s kindergartens, there is very little improvement. The biggest problem is in NeuKoelln [the neighborhood with the largest number of migrants in the city].

The opinion page, with the cover “speechless,” describes the “problem” even better:  directing the responsibility to “education politicians,” the anonymous writer says: even after many years of visiting the Kindergarten (it is free from age 3 in Berlin, and heavily , wonderfully subsidized otherwise), more than 3,700 children of Berlin, one year before they go to school, have significant speech deficits.  Among children with “non German Origin” the number is 34%. That op-ed ends with the sentence: “now time presses: society cannot afford to give up even one of these children before school begins.”

This makes me think of the classic catholic definition of Limbo, of the newborn that dies before they even get baptized by the church, but also about the excellent ethnography by Haim Hazan, the Limbo People—where he talks about the liminality of the elderly in a Jewish old age home in London. There I learned how time is organized to exclude them, over and over again, from partaking in what is otherwise life by, most significantly, obliterating the future, which in turn helps them ‘cope’ with the end of life.

Back to the Tagesspiegel article: The reader is led to conflate a child’s ability to speak at all with that ability as it is measured by the German test in the German language. The reader is also morally implicated as speechless, herself, facing the disappointing outcomes in language-abilities despite the investment. Then, proposes the newspaper op-ed, after we approach families with “remote education” problems, after we let their children register to the kindergarten when they are one year old and after we qualify teachers to better serve their needs, we need to direct our gaze to the families— “things go wrong there” (in direct translation from the German). Where do things go wrong?

We happen to be one of those families, so I can write about what a very privileged version of two “white” academics experience with a child at this age. Our five years old son speaks three languages and about a year ago was deemed as having “speech deficits” in German. We, then living in a part of town that has the least problem, in the former East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, were also asked whether we heard of autism and very sensitively—that perhaps the problem is inherent in our language. Perhaps we do not speak clearly some consonants with which our son had issues.  From this we also learn that unification is finally a success story: the former East isn’t inherently a problem unless it is also poor, added Die Welt on the issue.

A few months later, we switched to a multi-lingual kindergarten across town in the former West Berlin that speaks all the languages (Hebrew, German, English) that our son speaks. We went Jewish, basically.

He loves it, but about two months ago we were summoned to the kindergarten and told that he has both speech and also social issues, that perhaps something is wrong with his brain and that he’ll possibly need another kind of school. Professionals should test him. We agreed and they did, four times, and found that the child is quite intelligent and likes to play on his own and do math. The doctor who tested our son first was perhaps the most telling. He showed culture-specific pictures that our son then needed to describe. The best example was a picture of an old man carrying a sack with round figures inside. On the right hand side was an apple tree, the left- a flower garden. Our son said—in the backpack there are flowers. The medical doctor, a cool looking guy a little bit older than me, told our son that in Germany many kids say that this the man is carrying a sack of potatoes. He then looked at me and said—perhaps your husband, the philosopher, would be able to explain your son’s answer.

It was indeed an existential question for us all (I, the sociologist, wanted to explain under which circumstances I am spoken to like that and my son fails to recognize the core of the local culture, but remained silent). The doctor then asked what we heard earlier—perhaps in your language there is no L and Sh. Then, confused, I said- but I just told you we speak English (and Hebrew). When we agreed that it would be best for our child to stay another year in the kindergarten, he asked me “will you send him there”?

I said of course. He is very happy in the kindergarten. I then heard: “well, some people with migration background (we do not name the monster “migrant,” mostly because the child in question is often third generation German born) when they hear that the child will not go to school [in the year dictated by their date of birth] say that it is too hard for them to send them anywhere.” I assured him that this will not be the case and thought what kind of a threat, and an assumption, it is on our working hours?

The unintelligibility of the migrant as a total other is so severe, so pronounced, that Berlin tries time and again to save the children from this fate, and fails. This ‘deficit’ is described in terms in language as such, and never in terms of potency, of multi lingualism. Without language these families have no history, or the wrong one. In the US and in the migrant country I come from, Israel, I know many people—some of whom teach in universities—that have no one mother tongue. But that never made their parents suspect in the way it does in Berlin. Our solution was to let the professionals assess the child, intervene, and make sure that we stay powerful enough when it comes to the definition of the situation. I cannot imagine what a less recognizably “western” mother goes through when she is first approached with stigmata—she is not catholic, she does not have Goffman and the Limbo People (even if she read them, she is not heard anyway) and she perhaps does not have time to read the newspaper articles in the very same Tagesspiegel that reveal that boys can get cured of autism.

How do memorials shape who we think we are? And how do we “do” identities when we interact with memorials? As Salon.com and others noted recently, gay men have been using the signature concrete slabs of the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as backdrops to their profile pictures on grindr, a geo-social app that lets those have have logged on find each other that is popular with gay men. In Salon’s account, the combination of the memorial and the anticipation of erotic pleasure is “odd” and “peculiar.” The Memorial appears as a “prop” for self-presentation. The trend is portrayed as equivalent to the EasyJet airline’s 2009 fashion shoot for an in-flight magazine at the memorial. EasyJet apologized. “We realized that to hold a fashion shoot in front of the memorial was inappropriate and insensitive, and we didn’t wish to offend anyone.”

Is the grindr trend just another “inappropriate and insensitive” use of the memorial space? How are our current identities involved in claiming spaces and making calls of inappropriateness?

I was asking myself these questions, weeks after correcting the proofs of my article on two Berlin memorials and complex identities. For this article, I asked how memorials to Nazi victims deal with the complex identities of those who are commemorated, and how these memorials shape current identities. I looked at a small monument to a group of Jewish Socialist resistance fighters, and to the Monument to the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism that is located right across the street from the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Theorists of identities have long emphasized that in order to capture identities and experiences of discrimination, we need to stop talking about identity dimensions as if they existed in isolation from one another. We all are situated differently along axes of, for example, gender, race, sexuality, class, (dis)ability, religion, and so on. We also know that racism, for example, affects women and men differently because racism is already gendered. So goes the theory. It seems to not have made its way to the people who plan and design memorials.

In Berlin, there are memorials dedicated to those who were persecuted by the Nazi state as members of distinct groups: Jews, Sinti and Roma, and homosexuals. Not all of the victims identified with the identity under which they were persecuted. In addition, the groups were in fact not distinct. Consider Magnus Hirschfeld. He was a prominent advocate for gender and sexual diversity. He was Jewish. He was a socialist. He was repeatedly singled out by Nazi propaganda as a “degenerate Jew,” yet Hirschfeld did not identify as Jewish. He also did not publicly identify as gay. On 6 May 1933, Hirschfeld was abroad when the Institute for Sexual Sciences was raided by Nazi groups. Research material was looted and destroyed, and approximately 10,000 books from the institute library were burned. Hirschfeld never returned to Germany and died in exile in France in 1935.

Where does the Berlin memorial landscape make space for people like Hirschfeld? There is the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. With the authorization of this memorial, German Parliament also recognized its “obligation to commemorate the other victims of National Socialism in appropriate ways.” The grassroots memorial initiatives from the LGBT community converged with the state’s commitment to recognize “other” groups of Nazi victims. Thus, there are two memorials dedicated to identities under which Hirschfeld was persecuted, though he did not identify with them.

There are, however, no memorials to those persecuted as “anti-socials” or “habitual criminals,” two groups who were consistently vilified and persecuted. Memorials to groups of Nazi victims require the presence of contemporary social movements that identify with the identity aspect under which victims were persecuted. Memorials mediate between the identities of those who were persecuted and our own complex and shifting identities. Memories give roots to identities, and memorials are sites that animate memories.

The meaning of memorials is constructed through interaction between the visitors and the memorial site. The Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews, an abstract undulating concrete garden, has animated different modes of engagement. Most people walk through the memorial maze, many take photos, some play hide and seek, others try to climb on the slabs. Not all photos are the same. Some try to capture the mood of the place, some document and denounce the “inappropriate” behavior of other visitors, and others resemble the typical “I was there” tourist shot of smiling persons against the backdrop of a recognizable site.

In the grindr photos, men perform gay identities in a space that is devoted to Jewish victims. The blog totem & taboo, which collects these photos, offered an interpretation of these identity performances that is congruent with the space:

“Grindr, the latest most addictive gay obsession, has wowed its members in relentlessly promoting the memory of the holocaust. While the gay community is being under scrutiny for promoting hedonism and alienation, this tribute seems all the more compelling.”

Is this performance of queer identities complexity at work, an act of solidarity, or a protest against the separation of memorial sites by the victims’ identities? Or is the “grindr remembers” explanation for the photos an attempt to give an appropriate justification for an inappropriate practice?

In their collection of the photos, the totem & taboo blog owners include their own comments on the relationship between space, identities, and grindr. For example, the profile of a young man leaning against the slabs that contains the request “no Asians” is presented under the heading “Commemoration – yea; Asians – no.” The photo of another user is presented as “and another Israeli is occupying the monument.” The photo of user “Hungry@Berlin” is headlined with “commemoration is a dish best served cold.”

In the discussion of the grindr profiles, little attention is paid to the fact that the memorial dedicated to those persecuted as homosexuals is across the street from the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Would it be more appropriate to pose at this “other” memorial? Who can claim a memorial as one’s own? And how is this done? The meaning of memorials is shaped through identity performances, through making claims to spaces and relationships. The grindr photos ask us to confront these questions about identities and claims to memories and spaces. They challenge us to own up to what it is we are seeking to find in memorials. “When we come to see a memorial, we and the reasons we chose to visit this memorial are already in the pictures we are taking,” I wrote in the article.

Back then, the sentence was a comment on the reflective glass surface of the video booth of the Memorial for the Persecuted Homosexuals. But is applies to other photos taken at the memorials on both sides of the street. I ended the other piece, and would like to end this one by suggesting:

“The ethical challenge is to look for more in memorials than the reflection of ourselves and to engage with the complexity of the suffering, resistance and identities that the memorials can be made to speak to.”

Sometimes the solution to theoretical problems become apparent not through careful research or close reading of important texts, but in the course of thinking about everyday life, in the course of leading a reflective life.  You have an everyday encounter. You give it thought, and a major intellectual problem is solved.

I had such an experience and revelation at a lunch in Berlin in November of 1994.  I remember the discussion.  I remember the setting, an Italian restaurant in the leafy outskirts of the city.  But I have only a vague recollection of my lunch partner, a female German scholar.

I was in Berlin in 1994 on a leg of a United States Information Agency sponsored lecture tour in Europe.  The main event was in Poland, where I helped inaugurate a short lived American Cultural Center there.  Following my stop in Warsaw, I flew to Berlin to speak in the well established American Cultural Center there about my book The Cynical Society, but also gave a talk at the Free University about my other relatively recent books, Beyond Glasnost and After the Fall.  The first Berlin talk was about my work on American political culture, the second on my work in Central and Eastern Europe.  After the second talk, I had a lunch with my hostess.  We engaged in the normal small talk.  No doubt, we discussed the presentation I gave and the reaction of the audience.  The details escape me except for one exchange.  It went something like this:

Jeff – “I think that it is not at all clear that Hitler’s crimes were qualitatively different than those of Stalin.”

Hostess –  “No!  Hitler was unique.  The intentional project of modern industrial genocide was unprecedented, uniquely evil, something that must not be forgotten.”

We went on and discussed this, I, as an expert on the Soviet bloc and its democratic opposition, she as a German scholar.   The conversation was warm, not at all heated, though the subject matter was tough.  I emphasized the immensity of Stalin’s crimes, of the gulag, of the mass starvation in Ukraine, the brutal treatment of those who dissent and of inconvenient national minorities.  She countered with recollections of the Holocaust.

At some point, I don’t remember when, I realized a paradox.  The meaning of this exchange would be precisely reverse, if I argued the position she presented, and she argued the position that I presented.  The embodiment of the argument determined the meaning of the exchange.

If I, as an American Jewish scholar, argued the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and she, as a German scholar, argued that Nazism was no worse than Soviet Communism, we would have been emphasizing the differences between us, revealing suspiciousness of the other, moving in the direction of nationalism.  As it was, we recognized each other as open people, as colleagues.  The meeting that we had was one of mutual respect and understanding.  The meeting of the imagined encounter would have been antagonistic.  Discussion could continue in the actual encounter, it would end in the hypothetical one.  Learning would accrue in the real one, probably wouldn’t in the imagined one.

As the author of The Cynical Society, I am quite critical of reductive reasoning, reasoning that reduces the meaning of an utterance to the qualities of the speaker, particularly related to positions and motives of wealth and power.   I emphasize that text should not be reduced to context.  On the other hand, as a sociologist, I know that context matters.  At the Berlin lunch, I think I saw how the criticism of sociological reduction and the insight of sociological knowledge can both stand.  Text and context are related in important ways, but context doesn’t determine text.  It culturally informs it.

This has many practical applications.  The cultural context of American racism, thus, informs how blacks and whites can speak to each other effectively.  This is why being race blind is funny when Stephen Colbert asserts it. It is why when whites complain that there is a need to struggle for equal rights for whites; they actually intend the opposite of what their words on the surface apparently say.  Indeed it is why when the Supreme Court rules that the law must be color blind, it is on very dubious grounds.