As an American, but one very familiar with Central and Eastern Europe, I believe that integrated Europe is extremely important for several reasons. First of all, it is important for maintaining peace and stability, and thus, for overcoming terrible legacies of the Second World War, so devastating to Europe and the rest of the world. Secondly, European Union plays a crucial role in creating economic opportunities for all of its members. The current crisis should not make us forget how prosperous Europe is and can still be. Thirdly, European integration might be a driving force behind a process of creating broader sense of political identity. Europeans have so many different cultures and nationalities and there is a need to bring them together, so that they have some shared sense of community. Any European project has to take this into account, but at the same time create means for people to cultivate their own national identity at the local level.

The process of European integration has gone through a number of changes since the early 1990s. Some of them were very encouraging, and some problematic. The first dramatic change occurred right after 1989, when the long-lasting Soviet domination over a large part of the continent collapsed and many nations suddenly had to reinvent their states, drawing upon their own democratic traditions. In Poland or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, i.e. countries with some history and strong feelings for democracy, this transformation proceeded quite smoothly. In other states it was less clear on what traditions new institutions should be built. In Hungary, where I now live, there have been strong democratic traditions, but also strong authoritarian traditions, dating back to the Habsburg era. The same is certainly true of Romania, Bulgaria and other countries in the Central and Eastern Europe. These were the initial challenges, later developing in the 1990s.

At that time there were two major steps, Eastern Europeans were eager to take in order to revive and develop their democratic traditions. The first one was the NATO accession. Joining the alliance which has been at the center of the Cold War, but which was really committed to the defense of democracy, was a very important moment for them. Being admitted to the group meant becoming a member of the democratic community. The EU accession – the second of the steps – was more complicated, but perhaps even more important. Undoubtedly it created more excitement among the public, also because of some practical advantages of participating in the common market and being able to travel within the Schengen zone.

Ten years after the accession, we clearly see that at least some expectations of the public have not been met. Why? Firstly, there was a structural problem from the very outset. European Union was designed largely as an economic project and it failed to create effective instruments of political participation for the public. Centralization of the European bureaucracy in Brussels and the development of a highly structured regulatory governance system created a growing frustration among the Central European societies, and indeed among other European peoples as well. A democracy deficit at the highest levels is one of the major problems EU needs to tackle in order to develop. It has been partially addressed by the growing political influence of the European Parliament, which has become a more active player in representing opinions of the European electorate. But I think there is still a lot to be done in order to give people a sense of participation. Otherwise, they will always turn for help only to their national governments, which can sometimes act against Brussels.

The second big factor undermining trust in the European project was obviously the economic meltdown. The way the euro crisis has been managed so far seems to prove that southern and eastern regions of the EU are treated as secondary areas by the central economies of Germany, the Benelux area and to a lesser extent France. Economic instability has also created some further tensions, since people affected by the crisis want to identify the causes of it and punish those, who are allegedly to blame, i.e. immigrants and ethnic minorities. As a result in many European countries xenophobic sentiments are on the rise. The anti-immigrant, anti-Roma perspective that you see in Europe today is very disturbing. These are pan-European phenomena, not specific to the Central and Eastern Europe. Naturally, different politicians in different countries are using these processes to foster their own interests. This is particularly true in Hungary, but in other countries as well.

Will these two factors undermine the whole process of European integration? We should do all we can to prevent it. European integration is of crucial importance for the reasons of peace, stability, economic prosperity and democratic rule across the whole continent. This is even more true today than ever. That is why I was pleased to see Croatia becoming a member, and I think it is of crucial importance to bring in other Balkan countries. Dynamic European integration, even if it has serious problems today, should continue and must not be reversed.

* John Shattuk is an American legal scholar and diplomat. He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1993 to 1998, under President Bill Clinton. From 1998 to 2000 he served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. Since 2009 he has been the President and Rector of Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. This article originally appeared in Kultura Liberalna.

“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.

“All truths – not only the various kinds of rational truth but also factual truth – are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting validity. Truth carries within itself an element of coercion, and the frequently tyrannical truthtellers may be caused less by a failing of character than by the strain of habitually living under a kind of compulsion.” – Hannah Arendt (Between Past and Future. 1954, p. 243)

During the period immediately before someone leaves one city and moves to another, they seem to liberate themselves and experiment with abandon during that window of freedom, or fearfully adhere to the tired routines of a forgone order. Having witnessed the Eurocrisis unfold over the past two years from a window in Berlin, I recently thought I would have to move elsewhere due to conflict with the archaic hierarchy of a German university. I naturally rebelled and charged heedlessly into the freedom inherent in a contingent situation – refusing to comply with the hierarchy and arbitrary exercise of power so prevalent in the German university. With the comfortable order of my German life on the brink, I attempted to understand my position in German academia, as well as the European position under German hegemony. In so doing, I came to discover that the latter is not a debate between Keynesianism vs. neoliberal austerity, but a particularly virulent condition of wider academic and German culture: the need for truth.

If a traditional German university is a window into German culture as a whole, then the problem of truth becomes immediately apparent. Imagine riding horseback through the patchwork of political entities in medieval Germany, each with an independent lord holding absolute power over a small slice of territory, beholden only to the good grace of a distant and disinterested central authority. While riding through this landscape, the casual observer cannot help but notice that when moving from one lordship to another, the organization of labor and adherence to a unifying conception of community is entirely dictated by the lord. Some territories have jovial lords who interact with their subjects, interested in seeing smiling faces on their townsfolk and full bellies in the peasantry. Others sit aloof in marble palaces patronizing a small circle of followers and sycophants, while browbeating the remainder into perpetual worship and servitude. In each case, the truth is held by the lord, and the lords themselves are at almost constant war with each other, attempting to extend their vision of truth across the land. Because each professor in a German university effectively governs an entire department, with an army of student assistants, research assistants and post-docs, this medieval image illuminates the culture of a traditional German university. Unsurprisingly, the “market” for those lower but rather well-paid positions is brutal and precarious, and switching between lords becomes an exercise in switching between truths.

Extended to the German dominions themselves, certain truths are self-evident among the mainstream, functioning at the federal level. The law is sacred. The state is sacred. The economy is sacred. The currency is sacred. The four mainstream parties, the Conservatives, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens are surprisingly adept at working togetherafter accepting these truths – at least compared to the polarized American environment. Of course, the Left, emerging from the Communist East and persisting over the years, has been a pariah to the mainstream, while the recent success of the Pirates is just downright baffling. The response to these outsiders is a mixture of aggressive repudiation, particularly towards the Left (You dangerous lunatics want to bring the GDR back!), or sneering contempt (what do these pothead idiots dressed as Pirates want anyway?). In each case, the outsider is considered a threat not only in the traditional understanding of violence and theft, but also because their positions are invalid. Thus, they are simply wrong, false, in error – a threat not simply to order, but to the truth.

Brought to the European level, behind the intractable German position on austerity is not so much an essentialist identity, moralizing about hard work and responsibility, but a feeling of compulsion among the elites driven by “the truth” of the situation. After all, how can a Haushalt spend more than it takes in? What other solution is there but for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (“the PIIGS”) to “get their houses in order”? What can open market operations by the European Central Bank (ECB) lead to but inflation? These are truths!

Of course, there is no “German Truth” to which all citizens adhere. The political culture is quite vibrant, diverse and filled with plenty of activists who have been at the forefront of anti-fascism as well as movements similar to Occupy. Nevertheless, there is a tendency, particularly among those in positions of power, to possess a form of aggressive self-assurance that they themselves hold the truth in isolation from all others. Because it is the truth, those in inferior positions must comply. Yet, it is precisely this combination, holding the truth in isolation and expecting others to comply, which generates the result any casual observer would expect: the social isolation of that person. This alienating self-assurance manifests itself not only in the lordships of German academia, but also in the acrimonious conflicts over the Eurocrisis. The two best examples of this are probably the two most important Germans in Europe at the moment: Angela Merkel and Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann – the most powerful council member on the board of the European Central Bank (ECB).

Merkel, a consistent advocate of austerity under the folksy belief that national budgets are just like household budgets – something John Maynard Keynes laboriously tried to discredit – finally got what she deserved this summer: isolation. With the replacement of French President Sarkozy by Socialist François Hollande, Italian Prime Minster Mario Monti quickly formed an alliance against Merkel’s dominance and effectively forced her into isolation. The result was a defeat for Merkel’s beliefs and the further extension of European-level credit to troubled countries.

On the other hand, if Merkel is stubborn in her timeless wisdom, Weidmann is as unyielding as a mathematical equation. Following his interview in Der Spiegel, one wonders if this trained economist would like to see Europe in ruins just to prove true whatever macroeconomic paradigm he functions under. Although quite young and only on the job for little over a year, scarcely a month after Merkel’s defeat, Weidmann was likewise isolated on the board of the ECB. The ECB subsequently plans to move forward with open market operations – exactly what Weidmann wanted to avoid.

In the end, it is clear Europe is moving towards a new order, or, more figuratively, moving from one city to another. If “the truth” of the old order is already forgone, we can only hope that the leaders of the transition liberate themselves from its routines. But, if my personal experience with the German university is any indication, or perhaps also that of Monti and his allies, directly challenging the truth tellers of the old city is the only way to move forward to a new one. We can only hope that such a challenge brings the truth out of isolation and into rational public debate.

The European Left seems on the rise. With left-of-center parties doing very well in elections in France, Greece, and Germany, it is tempting to read these elections as part of a broader repudiation of the conservative EU project of fiscal stability and indifference to unemployment. And surely, no election in Europe these days is removed from the question of where the EU is going.

Yet, the German elections, in the provinces/states of Schleswig-Holstein and North-Rhine Westphalia, were primarily provincial elections about provincial problems. At the same time, the recent election in North Rhine-Westphalia reveals interesting dimensions of how people negotiate the financial crisis at the provincial level.

The elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) had become necessary because the liberal party inadvertently brought down the minority government of the Social Democrats and the Green Party. The occasion was a fight over the budget in which the liberals wanted to appeal to their anti-tax constituency and at the same time support their minority government. Germany is not used to minority governments. Hence, those who deal with minority governments do not necessarily understand the arcane legal and political rules involved in keeping minority governments alive.

The results:

The elections worked well for the two parties that had formed the minority government: the Social Democrats received 39.1% of the vote (up by 4.6%) and the Greens 11.3% (down by 0.8%). The Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Merkel, received a disappointing 26.3% (down 8.3%). The Liberals, whose grandstanding had caused the election, came out with a surprisingly high 8.6%. The Pirate Party, barely visible in the last election, scored a strong 7.8%. What do these results mean? Who and what has won?

First, women won. Hannelore Kraft and Sylvia Löhrmann, the leading candidates for the Social Democrats and the Greens, respectively, converted their minority government into a solid majority. This is not just about gender, but about gender in an interesting way.

Kraft and Löhrmann won not in spite of their gender. They used it, by mobilizing a non-confrontational and caring form of femininity that resonated with the voters. They did not campaign against one another. From the beginning, they were committed to form a coalition. Hence, Kraft did not engage in the macho politics of first trying to get as many votes as possible and then trying to woo an attractive coalition partner. Both women were also aided by the fact that Norbert Röttgen, the candidate for the Christian Democratic Union, had only committed to moving to NRW if he won the election. In the case of a loss, a possibility that has turned into reality, he would stay in Berlin as the Federal Minister of the Environment. Kraft, in contrast, seemed committed to the province instead of maximizing career opportunities.

The elections not only vindicated a non-confrontational and caring style of politics. The minority government’s impressive record on social issues, centering on school reform and support for youth and families, impressed the voters. For example, the minority government managed to solve a conflict on schooling that seemed intractable. The classic German school system segregates students by perceived ability starting in grade five. This system exacerbates existing social inequalities. Conservative parents stridently oppose the closer integration of the different forms of schools in the name of meritocracy. Kraft managed to diffuse the conflict by allowing municipalities to decide between different models of secondary schools. This compromise is likely to improve the conditions of schooling for many children from working class and immigrant families.

The election signals support of German voters for the welfare state, but it is the local, provincial welfare state at home. It is far from clear that these same voters would support the conditions of possibility for a welfare state that need to be present at the EU level or a general commitment to the welfare state in the EU. The voters would like a caring, anticipatory welfare state in NRW, but probably not similar provisions in a Greek state that is financially dependent on the EU.

Crises often breed new parties, or they buoy extremist parties that have existed on the fringes. What is to report on this front? The Pirate Party is on the rise. It is now represented in four German provincial parliaments. The Pirates bundle the energy, skills, and values of young voters and combine it with the enthusiasm of older citizens who feel that no party properly represents them. The results are promising. The party’s core issues are copyright, civil liberties, internet regulation, and general transparency in politics. They field candidates that have only recently begun to be active in politics. They are, in a political way, cute. And they are important. They compete with the old liberal parties that have focused on lowering taxes rather than defending civil liberties, as well as with the leftist parties that have become too entrenched, used to compromise, and unimaginative. One Pirate demand, for example, is to provide free local public transportation in order to reduce traffic and make the right to mobility real for low-income people. The Pirates are a product of the crisis; their membership is made up of people who did not feel at home in the other parties. Given their outlook and their radical democratic practices, I can only hope that they are here to stay, to remind us that democracy can be more meaningful if we can participate more meaningfully and take up the opportunities we have.

What, then, can we make of the NRW election? It was not a vote on the EU, on Greece, on the Euro, or even on the future of the welfare state. It was a local election. Yet this election gives the hope for a style of politics that is cooperative, post-macho, open to compromise, and committed to social justice, with a good dose of new inventive Pirate politics. It is still too early to say how much of this spirit carries over into the 2013 German national elections.

Upon boarding the flight back last Wednesday night from NY to Berlin I picked up the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), finding on its first page a picture of Guenter Grass, holding a pipe. The headline read “Ein Aufschrei” (An outcry): Guenter Grass warns of a war against Iran: “the literature Nobel Prize Laureate’s claims that Germany should not provide Israel with Submarines.”

I did not read the poem, “What Must Be Said” on the flight (being busy with two young children and recurring attempts to sleep), but thought that, from that headline, I would support an outcry against attacking Iran. I like poetry making the first pages of centrist (left-leaning) newspapers, and as for the pipe and the submarines, they are signs of older times, part of performing memory in Germany around Grass who is identified with the pipe, the 68’ers and Germany’s underwater adventures, and its declared commitment to Israel’s security. So be it. But now I have my concerns about the not very good poem and about the controversies surrounding it.

In the taxi ride back home, we heard discussions in all news channels (as the driver browsed from one to the next) about Grass’s anti-Semitism, which perplexed me. We read the poem at home and were underwhelmed. Thomas Steinfeld noted in the SZ on Wednesday night, it is not Grass’s first poem. Actually, the first published one made him join group 47 in 1955, and his poetry has always been full of exaggerations. Exaggerations are part of the poetic form, we are reminded, and Grass went wrong here, as he erred about, for instance, “trying to save the collapsing GDR from the German Federal Republic.”

I would like to focus a bit on the language of the lyrical prose, preserving and highlighting parts of it that have been overlooked, like the discussion of comparable moral standing and silence, and the performance of national memory narrative.

In the German (and Israeli) discussion following Grass’s poem, the focus has been on the attack on Israeli atomic policy, on Israel’s moral superiority in the Middle East and on Grass’s statement that Israel is a threat to world peace. Since we are dealing with a poem, we ought to also consider the form and language of the poem. Silence (Schweigen) is repeated five times, concealment (Verschweigen) twice, and the formulation “what must be said” and speech (Rede) three more times. Barring or forbidding (Untersage) once. “Outspoken truth” once. Mr. Grass here liberates himself from a long, allegedly nationally imposed, silence about Israel. This silence, he maintains, is due to the threat of being called an anti-Semite, which he is ending now because “tomorrow might be too late.” But here I focus on the performance of national narratives by Grass, about the discourse of silence. It resembles the opening of Foucault’s History of Sexuality about the repressive hypothesis that creates and marks more discursive mechanisms affording speech and control of speech about sex.

What is the role of writing about breaking the silence? How can a Grass poem stir such discussion? Stephen Evens wrote for the BBC:

“In the years after the war, Guenter Grass’s writing gave him a status of Conscience of the Nation, and in a nation which takes its soul-searching very seriously indeed […] For more than 60 years after the war, he showed a zeal and what seemed like a searing honesty in the way he berated those who refused to admit their own dark pasts. But this reputation was dented when it emerged in 2006 that he had kept quiet about his own past as a member of the Waffen-SS (a branch of the military under the direct control of the Nazi party). Even then, he was not universally discredited. Some took this as evidence of the complexity of the psyche of the man (and by implication of the nation).”

With this reputation it is easier to understand the context of the discussion in the German press and how easy it was for the Israeli press to also pick up on the stained, repressed past of Grass as a Waffen SS member.

Concerning the content and form of talking about silence, Grass is actually onto something quite disturbing here, as Michael Naumann, the former culture minister under the Red-Green coalition of Schroeder, recognized in an article on Monday in the Tagesspiegel. Namely a way of speaking, which I heard time and again in reaction to the Holocaust Memorial, often from right-wing radicals, but also from other Memorial visitors: they are not allowed to say what they think about Israel. Israel stands, at least for these actors, for the Jews. Naumann declares the “Poem” (quotation marks in the original) a moral and political scandal. He asks: what motivates Grass? What speaks through him? And he answers:

“…once, just once, to have a vacation from the German ‘responsibility history’; once, just once, to shout at the Jews that they can also be perpetrators; once, just once, like Martin Walser did, to withdraw from the memory the photos, handed down to us, of the concentration camps […] but this exactly we have already heard. What, for the sake of God, speaks there in Guenter Grass?”

Who picked up on the poem’s language? The AJC (American Jewish Committee) condemned using the verb “Verbrechen” or “perpetrator” to describe Israel’s security policy. Westerwelle, the German Foreign Minister wrote yesterday in the popular Bild that positioning Israel and Iran on the same moral level is absurd.

The Left party, historically connected to the SED (the former ruling party in the GDR), supported Grass, providing the only outspoken supporter of his views.

As for German Jewish symbolism and the timing of the poem’s publication, Haaretz reports:

“Emmanuel Nahshon, a diplomat at the Israeli embassy in Berlin, said the allegation – just before the Jewish feast of Passover – that Israel wanted to wipe out the Iranian people belonged to a European anti-Semitic tradition of accusing Jews of ‘ritual murder.’ ”

Meanwhile, a cartoon in Haaretz shows two young men on a roof with their garden of marijuana plants, and one guy is saying to the other “I thought Grass was already banned.” Haaretz’s editorial reacted to Yishai’s declaration of Grass as persona non grata by stating that he “just wrote a poem” and people are free to express their views. What I find interesting about the drama following the publication is the talk about formerly understood taboos: “What Must be Said” is Grass’s reaction to his compulsion to stay silent because of Germany’s responsibility toward Israel after the Holocaust.

All in all, it must be seen as something positive that so much attention and interest has come to light from the publication of a poem, however weak in content and form. At the same time, it is worthwhile to mention and recall just how weak it in fact is. Perhaps the most important lesson in this episode, however, has not to do with the poem itself so much as the way we (in speaking about it, or in neglecting to do so) extend underlying narratives about the political significance of silence and speech, about certain subjects (the Holocaust, Israel, nuclear power and weaponry), in certain places. Or, indeed, anywhere.

Visiting the exhibition Hitler and the Germans:  National Community and Crime at the German Historical Museum, I found very little new about Hitler and even less about “the Germans.”

I did find interesting the display and discussion of the national community as connected to perpetration. However, the presentation of crime, or perpetration, lacked individuals and their daily choices and was instead filled with examples of the masses looking for security and stability. The exhibition was celebrated in the local German press as revolutionary simply for showing so much of Hitler, and for connecting his rule to the German people.

It is not a small thing, this act of naming, and the exhibition does that, but then compiles exhibits: posters, photos, Hitler’s aquarelles, busts and books and Nazi advertising in materials that were mostly used for propaganda.

There was a fear expressed in the press around the opening of the exhibition that right wing extremists and Neo- Nazis would come and admire it, now in the open. Those worries were dismissed as the curators assured the prospective visitors that Hitler is not presented spectacularly, and so those loathed groups, which also “probably do not go to museums,” would not come.

Here is the first time where presumption about class, education, racism and origins from the former east could be easily detected but not explicitly discussed.

The mix of thinking about what is presented in the exhibition together with how it will be consumed was at the center of the exhibition’s review in the German press (see, in German, a review in the Spiegel). The curators Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Dr. Simone Erpel, Klaus-Jürgen Sembach  made sure that whenever a photo of Hitler is shown with his gaze directed at the camera, the affect of dimming light and photos of Nazi crimes will flicker in the background, so that the visitor is always reminded of the crimes together with whatever else they might feel or think of 1933-1945.

An interview for the center-left weekly Die Zeit focused on the historical relations between the national community and perpetrators. The November 4th issue of Die Zeit has a cover article about how the fourth generation family members relate to the deeds of their great-grandparents. As opposed to the third generation, who generally refused to admit that their grandparents were perpetrators (see Welzer Opa war kein Nazi), the fourth generation (14-19 years old were interviewed) would admit that their families were involved with the Nazi crimes, but ask time and again, “what does it have to do with me.”

The teachers seem as confused in trying to answer this simple question, a confusion I see well in my current study of educational programs at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. What most educators and teachers worry about is that the pupils show no affect. I can attest: not only are they not moved, they are encouraged to perform a repetition of horrible historical facts as well as reflect emotionally on the exhibit’s materials when asked: “Which photo or room moved you the most?”

Each memorial is supposed to raise different feelings: in the Holocaust memorial one is to feel lost; in the Topography of Terror: angry. What should one feel in the Hitler exhibit?

In looking at people in the exhibition (it was full, we waited in line for about 30 minutes to get in) I saw that it was important to project, or perform, seriousness. The curators seeded in the exhibition a few parts of Chaplin’s “the great dictator” as well as other comedians and cartoonists work on Hitler. However, they were situated in close proximity to very sad documents and photos, so most visitors did not laugh.

The three very visible right wing extremists I encountered observed Hitler’s busts with awe, as well as the beer glasses, Nazi toys and other memorabilia of that time.  They were walking there alone. German parents came with teenage children; tourists speaking many languages came to see the event, too.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung criticized the exhibition for not showing the growing loyalty of the people as they were awarded the new jobs, apartment and capital of Jews as the war progressed. I went to the exhibition with a colleague and a friend, Victoria Bishop-Kendzia, who is writing an ethnography on school classes visiting the Jewish museum in Berlin.  She summed it up: “there is no perpetrators’ narrative.”

Not because the crimes are not named, but because there are little, scattered, opportunities to become empathetic, or to understand how it was for Germans then, without an immediate repudiation.

A few reviews commented on the timely opening of the exhibition around Sarrazin’s  book publication on the German race (and other less fortunate races like “the Muslims”) in late October and when Merkel gave an interview in Potsdam in which she announced “the failure of multiculturalism” and lamented the fact they, the immigrants, do not try hard enough to become Germans.

If such an exhibition, besides its ritualized “newness” quality, could illuminate, or help see differently how certain concepts, which are not the same as the Nazi’s used, can be limiting or hurting, we could say that its goal is well achieved. But I am afraid that its stays on a safer, familiar level of fascination with the exhibits and their piling-on, in a dimly lit, very old-new German Historical Museum.