By Irit Dekel, March 20th, 2013 
“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 . . .
Read more: Speech Deficits: A Young ‘Other’ and his Mother in Berlin
By Christiane Wilke, March 6th, 2013 
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 . . .
Read more: Memories of Identities, Identities of Memory
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 29th, 2010 More than ever, cultural context informs the political scene, from late-night comedy to a recent Supreme Court ruling.
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 . . .
Read more: Cultural context is crucial in identity politics
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