Encounters with Otherness in Berlin: Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and Projective Identification
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Encounters with Otherness in Berlin: Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and Projective Identification CONTRIBUTIONS BY ZARTOSHT AHLERS ‘18 ELENA ANAMOS ‘19 LEILA BEN HALIM. ‘20 WILLIAM GREAR ‘20 SYDNEY JORDAN ‘19 EMILY KUNKEL ‘19 NATE LAMBERT ‘20 ALEXIA MARTINEZ ‘20 APRIA PINKETT ‘20 IRMA QAVOLLI ‘20 ALAA RAGAB ‘20 RAINA SEYD ‘19 YANG SHAO ‘20 SAM VALLE ‘19 SADIE VAN VRANKEN ’19 : EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BORNEMAN © 2017 Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies With special thanks to the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University. COVER PHOTO: “There was a big hot air balloon that we passed that said “politics needs a worldview” in German. I liked this message. It was a comforting first impression.” - Emily Kunkel TABLE OF CONTENTS PROFESSOR JOHN BORNEMAN APRIA PINKETT ’20 Introduction . 3 German Culture: The Most Exclusive Club . 44 ZARTOSHT AHLERS ’18 German Culture in Three Words: Beer, Currywurst, and Money . 62 Leopoldplatz . 7 Bergmann Burger: There’s No Place Encounter With a Turkish Like Home . 79 Immigrant at Leopoldplatz . 12 Ich Spreche Englisch . 85 Movement . 25 So Loud . 88 IRMA QAVOLLI ’20 ELENA ANAMOS ’19 An Unexpected Conversation . 17 Cultural Belonging: Belonging: Body Language Childbearing and Channel Surfing: in a Conversation on Foreignness . 23 A Reunion with My Family . 40 A Market Conversation . 48 An Encounter Over Ice Cream Food . 69 in Leopoldplatz . 71 The Language Barrier in Hermannplatz . 83 ALAA RAGAB ’20 JOHN BENJAMIN, LANGUAGE INSTRUCTOR Let’s Test You for Explosives Residue! . .19 Arab is Better, Arab is More Fun . 28 Language: Change in Global Seminars . 82 Germans Nice or Nein? . 38 PARVIS GHASSEM-FACHANDI, ANTHROPOLOGIST Connection? Or a Lack of Thereof? . 53 An Encounter Over Ice Cream Video . 77 in Leopoldplatz . 71 LEILA BEN HALIM ’20 RAINA SEYD ’19 Beirut State of Mind . 22 Beirut Taxis . 43 Ethics of Engaging at Leopoldplatz . 9 From There to Here . 55 Leopoldplatz: AFD and a Soccer Match . 16 German English American Arab Jewish . 100 Outsider . 30 “I am European”: Encounter WILLIAM GREAR ’20 at Leopoldplatz . 39 Hermannplatz . 9 Hollywood and Trump . 60 Cultural Appropriation . 37 Some Tuesday Night . 67 Jam Session . 52 YANG SHAO ’20 Night-Life . 58 Berghain . 64 The Guest Mentality . 26 Eat, Wait, Love . 78 SYDNEY JORDAN ’19 “Hey China! Ching, Chong!” . 87 An Ethnic Culture? . 19 Infrastucture . 101 Basketball in Berlin . 49 Impressions of Museum Spaces Invasion . 57 in Berlin . 102 Making Contact . 81 SAM VALLE ’19 EMILY KUNKEL ’19 Hermannplatz Encounters: Day Two . 31 Cover Photo caption . 2 Getting Started in Berlin . 95 Little Hitler . 57 Hermannplatz Encounters: Day One . 89 Welcome . 61 A Linguistic Progression in SADIE VAN VRANKEN ’19 Hermannplatz and Beyond . 97 Ethnicity . 10 Deutsch . 33 NATE LAMBERT ’20 Ten Years in Berlin . 91 The Grindr Grind in Berlin . 67 ALEXIA MARTINEZ ’20 Ethnicity . 10 Dinner of “Hybrids” . 35 East Versus West; Different Experiences and Stereotypes . 96 LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE IN A GLOBAL SEMINAR n the summer of 2017, fifteen Princeton undergrads gathered in Berlin for the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Global Seminar on xenophilia and xenophobia . This text is the Iproduct of their experiences . It details how and what they learned in engaging this topic in a foreign setting . It is also a Zeitdiagnose (temporal diagnostic) of life as a foreigner in Germany at a time when the standing of the US and the image of America in the world is fundamentally changing . This change is due not least to the success of Donald Trump in the November, 2016, US election campaign, in which a large audience for xenophobic appeals emerged . The Princeton undergrads carried this particular context along with the seminar’s texts and discussions into their life in the German capital, and were asked to document what insights they arrived at in approaching the topic of the foreign and strange ethnographically and psychoanalytically, that is, through the experience of interactions with other residents . They were in the unique position to experience the city as foreigners at the very moment when Germans are being asked to open up to new arrivals on a new scale . In the previous two years, over a million migrants and refugees (the largest group from Syria) had fled to Germany and been greeted in a welcoming culture (Willkommenskultur), framed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to let them enter without prior applications or registration . Many of them ended up in Berlin, even creating within six months what the Syrian and Iraqi refugees call an “Arab Street,” a part of Sonnenallee . There they can speak Arabic and enjoy the familiar smells, tastes, shops and visual culture of streets in the countries they had fled . The question of what their incorporation means, and what social “Integration” might mean in the future, shadowed student experiences of the city . The description of the seminar from the Princeton course catalogue reads: The contemporary world refugee crisis––an estimated 65 million––has increased anxieties about the presence of the foreign in many parts of the world. Identification through irrational fear of the foreign is currently on the rise, manifested in anti-immigrant and religiously motivated national exclusionary movements, discrimination, political party competition, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, internal purging, and even massacres. This course examines the socio-psychology of both xenophilia (welcoming the foreign) and xenophobia (fear of the foreign), focusing on the modification of projections and the changing nature of its objects in Germany. It will also introduce students to ethnographic methods by participating in various cultural encounters and observations outside the classroom. The seminar will be held in Berlin, a vibrant, recently divided city with a radical history of xenophobia and xenophilia. 3 I have been engaged in ethnographic research in Berlin since 1982, with a brief interlude (from 1999 to 2008) in Lebanon and Syria . In the summer of 2015, the people from my two fieldsites came together in Berlin — tragically (for Syrians fleeing war), surprisingly (for Germans), and serendipitously (for me) — and I began to work on xenophobia and social solidarity . I was joined by my partner Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, also an anthropologist at Rutgers University and a native of Berlin, who accompanied us in many of our events . In February, 2017, I interviewed 75 Princeton student applicants for the 15 spots in the global seminar . I subsequently bragged to colleagues that the applicant pool was so diverse and impressive that I could have selected a group comprised of only Asian-born students, only black students, or only Latino/Latina students . Instead I followed my sense of who might get the most out of such a seminar and made the difficult choice to prioritize students from different disciplines who had never been outside the US, and those who had a more direct tie to the topic or to Germany . Four of the students were foreign-born, six brought with them recent immigrant experience, three spoke fluent German . All except one had just completed their first or second year of study . “Learning from experience” is the prosaic title the British psychoanalyst Wilfred R . Bion gave to a book he published in 1962, which anticipated the tenets of object-relations theory as it has evolved since . In an attempt to help us think through and think more profoundly about experience, he works centrally with the concept “projective identification,” and introduces some new (and initially confusing) terms, such as “digesting experience,” “beta elements,” and the “alpha-function ”. The point he emphasizes most relevant to the seminar is that thinking depends on awareness of emotional experience that is the result of frustration and the working through of projective identifications . A projection is easy enough to identify: one projects some qualities onto another person . In a projective identification, one projects them into another person, who then feels compelled to respond to the emotional weight of what has been placed in him or her . Students were asked to pay particular attention to this process not only in interactions between others they observed, but also to what is projected into themselves, along with what they projected into others . Students were also asked to be alert to their fantasies and dreams . Along these lines, Bion argued that to become aware of emotional experience it is not sufficient to bring dream experience to consciousness (as Freud had it), but rather to bring our everyday experience with others while awake to our dream world . To learn from experience, we must, in other words, be able to make what happens to and with us in the everyday available to our unconscious (to Traumarbeit, dreamwork) . There is, then, nothing obvious about learning from experience . It is not a simple process of becoming aware or conscious of something . The fact is, we are creatures of habit and tend to resist learning from experience, especially if those experiences question habitual ways of thinking, behaving, and relating . Learning from experience involves making oneself present to a place in a way that exceeds consciousness and allows for our unconscious to be affected by lived experience . In the academy, we tend to teach students to learn from reading books, listening to lectures, analyzing history, making interviews, collating surveys, or from controlled experiments . Rarely is the student’s own experience with others made into the stuff from which they can learn about an object in the world . In this seminar, students were encouraged to move outside their comfort zones and to have nonjudgmental experiences, to actively seek out encounters with people, places, 4 and objects, to expose themselves to the unanticipated, the unpleasant, the accidental . They were to experience the joys of discovery and frustrations of the fieldworker . Only after they had such emotional experiences could they entertain the possibility of learning from them .