Ashley Rennt: An Adaptation Of The German Heimat

ASHLEY RENNT: AN ADAPTATION OF THE GERMAN HEIMAT 1

Abstract

Following my two semesters abroad in Berlin, I found myself struggling with a sense of

disillusionment with my American identity as I had come to understand it as an African-American

female growing up in the southern United States. In this project, I present a phenomenological

argument for cultural hybridity through the use of theory, literature, and experimental

autobiography. Using recollection of experience, observations based on my time within the German

cultural space, and relevant theoretical work, I am able to draw a connection between my moment of

insecurity and a wider global calling for the reevaluation of cultural essentialism. e project will

make use of both American, German, and other European writers such as Toni Morrison, Walter

Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, and will draw heavily on the theoretical framework for cultural hybridity as

outlined by Homi K. Bhabha.

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ASHLEY RENNT: AN ADAPTATION OF THE GERMAN HEIMAT 2

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Ashley Rennt: An Adaptation of the German Heimat

Ashley Washington

New York University, Global Liberal Studies

is thesis has been submitted on this day of April 15th, 2014 in partial fulllment of the degree

requirements for the NYU Global Liberal Studies Bachelor of Arts degree.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction: Departure………………………………………………………………………………4

Chapter One: Vergangenheitsbewältigung…………………………………………………………..17

Chapter Two: e Heimat……………………………………………………………………………37

Chapter ree: e Hybrid……………………………………………………….………………….57

References.……………………………………………………………………………………………67

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Introduction: Departure

I ew to Berlin alone over a week early and I was not afraid. It was raining and it made me feel

comfortable. Everything was stony and gray and it made me feel at peace. I could not understand

the space but this was not an unfamiliar sensation. We led o of the plane in a long, winding line.

Slow and tired but patient in the haze of the strange bond passengers form with each other aer

ying, a commodied near-death experience. Someone was right on my back. ey kept stepping

on my shoes. One came o. I just held onto it. Everyone was quiet. It was no dierent than any

other disembarking plane in any other place I’d been before. For a moment, I thought that I could

be going home, but I saw the stand for customs processing and the distance set in wrapping itself

around my heart and squeezing. ere is this thing that I do on roller coasters, on the way up the

rst incline, where I measure the distance from my exit (the ladders up the side of the structure,

distance from the ground). I always cry once we pass the last ladder. e customs ocer assumed

that I could not speak German and asked me for my “passport”. I squinted a bit. at’s what I do

when I don’t approve. I thought of ten dierent reasons why he did that. en I took a deep breath.

Probably the rst one in a while. at’s what I do when I (can) remember (to do it— breathing).

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e baggage claim was immediately behind the customs ocer. I sat on the farthest edge of the

room so that I could see everything. I looked for faces that were happy to be home and faces that

were confused. Twice I had to stop myself from staring blankly into the distance. I had been there

for over forty ve minutes before I realized that I had not seen my bag. It had been lost somewhere

in the ight process. e panic never hit me the way that I expected it to. I made a note of this to

myself the moment I realized that the reality failed to set in. I strolled out of the gate, hugging my

coat to my chest. No, I walked slower than that. I thought about each step that I took. at is the

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closest anyone can ever get to having an empty mind; reducing oneself to mechanics. is is easy to

do in a German airport at 7 o’clock in the morning. Everything I needed was in that bag because I

am stupid. I had my computer, with no charger, my passport, wallet, and my medications. I had

never lost a bag before and I had no idea what to do. I found this laughable. My mother would not

nd it very funny. I would wait until aer I found my bag to tell her about this.

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My bag arrived later that day at the hotel. Once I received it, I immediately realised that nothing

inside of it was really so important. It stayed closed for another two days. I stayed in bed for

another seven. I had jet lag, I hadn’t had enough water to drink, and my migraine never went away.

I slept all day and stayed up all night. I could only nd an Aldi so all I ate was cereal and pretzels.

e salt didn’t help with the dehydration. I let myself become trapped in a cloud of German with

only the news on television. I watched Marilyn Monroe movies when I couldn’t take it anymore. I

never let housekeeping clean my room and I spoke only to my mother. e day I opened my eyes

(and the curtains) and let the sunlight force them closed again, I knew that I could never leave. is

feeling stayed with me throughout my time in Berlin and, though I lacked the words to explain it, I

understood that it was something that I had never experienced before. Aer years of planning my

escape from every place that I lived in for more than a few weeks, I had nally entered a place that

felt eerily right. I dug my toes deep into the soil and simply le myself there.

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e moment at which I successfully found the words to describe my love for the swamp city came

much later— months aer leaving the city and a year aer my initial swooning. at process began

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with my own Vergangenheitsbewältigung of sorts. My family, headed by two people who had lived

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the textbook denition of the (African-)American Dream (and its reality), was as comfortable as it

gets. I never doubted my disposition. I was taught that I was very fortunate and that hard work and

big dreams would get me exactly where I needed to be; that I was lucky to be where I was and that

no other place would oer me this beautiful wealth of opportunity. In other words, I believed that

my failures would have everything to do with me if I wasn’t capable of taking advantage of this

magical silver platter of imminent success. e moment I recognized this for the farce that it was

proved to be the best moment of my life. It was the same moment that I decided that I would go out

of my way to learn a language and its culture long before I knew with condence that I would ever

set foot on its soil. I would not wait for the American Dream to repay my eorts. I would get the

owers myself.

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Realizing the futilities of reductive nationalist attachments is, in many cases, nothing short of

traumatic. In my experience, it manifested as a progressive disillusionment that gave way to a

systematic deconstruction of my own previously rigid cultural identity. It was a slow process that

oen le me feeling largely unsatised with my surroundings. While in the States, I found solace in

my visits with magical realism, spirituality foreign to my own, and cultural staples previously

unknown to me. Reconstructing my belief system with pieces of these new worlds made more

sense to me than the rituals that I made up most of my childhood experience. Trying to t these

new and beautiful ideas into the ideological mold I had cultivated up until this point was a painful

and somber practice. I do not know many things about myself but I do know that “I don’t know” is

is word is most accurately translated as a “mastering of the past” as written by Caroline Wiedmer in e Claims

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of Memory: representations of the Holocaust in contemporary Germany and France

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never enough. Understanding that I had the capacity to place words with this sensation was all that

I needed to set out on this journey.

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Hybridity is a valuable strategy for those of us struggling with the question, “What happens when

the culture one has been ‘given’ isn’t enough?” It can ease the sense that one is an anxiety waiting to

be cured because it replaces a demand for a stable identity with a a sense of plasticity. Yet although

hybridity is a perfect state for a body in ux, it still leaves me with questions of origin, namely: what

is the fundamental basis for my desire for hybrid identity? What problem does hybridity set out to

solve?

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e work of Homi K. Bhabha provides an approach that attacks the question at its stem, taking o

directly from the multicultural attitude of the liberal West. It deconstructs the essentialist attitudes

towards cultural openness and replaces it with the more thoughtful practice of cultural hybridity.

is post-structuralist theoretical work is something that will lay the groundwork for my own

theoretical exploration but stops short of a phenomenological viewpoint which is something that

my project provides. Post–colonial perspectives can appear to be distance and dicult to detach

from the Western mindset; a phenomenological presentation could use rst-person perspective to

minimize some of that distance through experience-based exploration of hybridity. Perhaps of

specic interest is his concept of an ambivalent and contradictory “ird Space”, one in which “all

cultural statements and systems are constructed”. I argue that within this construction, the hybrid

development takes place. e second question manifesting itself as a problem posed by the

institution of cultural hybridity is that of its active application– what happens when the Western

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world exerts itself with these things in mind? What are the products of such “multicultural”

thinking and what is the product?

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Salman Rushdie’s work in his essay collection, Imaginary Homelands, complements Bhabha’s work

with the ird Space with his exploration and criticism of the modern day remnants of colonialism

in contemporary culture and the subtlety of the irony through which these remnants manifests

themselves in lm, day-to-day life, and politics. While not directly inuential from the theoretical

perspective, the Rushdie writings, a collection of his work from 1980-1991, provide insight to the

moments in Western culture where a disruption in the smooth transition from other to us occurs.

In other words, Rushdie shows us where colonialism and ideas of dominance bleed through, even

in attempts to broaden Western perspective. While my work with cultural hybridity is not meant to

remain within the realm of post-colonialist criticism, work with the concept of the “other” is

essential to creating a framework for the exploration of why my solely American cultural

upbringing was not one that I could sustain without question.

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We could do worse than beginning with the nature of the term “homeland.” Wie viel Heimat

braucht der Mensch? or how much homeland does one need? I explore homeland in terms of the

German concept of Heimat, which is similarly dened but generally weightier due to post-WWII

connotations about the Jewish diaspora. e idea of questioning that space is one that raises

treasonous implications in the literal sense but also lends itself to the individual experience of

ambivalence and emotional dissonance as a result of analyzing the inevitably disappointing reality

of such a relationship. is disappointment only becomes amplied when seen from the hybrid

perspective that begins to unfold beneath this questioning spirit. In my writing, the act of

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questioning national aliation is a productive act that enabled me to view my past in a critical light

as opposed to a resentful one. ese are only the rst steps in this complicated process.

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One of the rst issues is most easily stated as the title of the rst piece of literature I use: “Wie viel

Heimat braucht der Mensch? (How much homeland does humanity need?)” (1967) is is a

question posed by a Jewish man following his time in Auschwitz and throughout his experience

leading up to his suicide. In this essay, Jean Améry attempts to discover whether or not a heimat is

a necessity. At the surface, it would seem that it is not; that moving from homeland to homeland is

as simple as changing one’s name to seem less Jewish. However, deeply woven throughout Améry’s

writing we see that the disillusionment with the German reality is something that he cannot come

to terms with. at the answer to the question is viel (a lot) and that he has none. In 1978, he kills

himself. While functioning as both a question and as a reference, this essay is deeply informed by

his experience and its relationship to trauma induced by the same country in which he was born

(in this case Austria). ere are parallels here between slavery, a minimized tragedy, and the

American black population which are very important to the underlying discomfort that comes

with submitting wholeheartedly to the constitutional ideals that were not written for you, and the

institutionalized rejection, genocide, and diaspora that Améry is speaking to through his own

investigations. I am interested in this connection because it expands the lens of my criticisms and

creates a historical bridge that appeals to a wider audience and reduces alienation. Absent from this

perspective is only a direct link to the black American discourse. is is to be addressed through

the use of Toni Morrison.

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Toni Mor ris on’s bo ok , Playing in the Dark (1992), tackles some of the aforementioned

disillusionment head on. While the relevance is not readily obvious, Morrison’s identication of

some of the principles held to be most dear to the American identity— and their dependence on

the existence of black people—is something that can be described as an answer to the issue of what

can be done with the despair of that disillusionment. e reconceptualization of the ideological

national identity is something that I am performing through my own process (generating hybridity,

identifying ambivalence, etc) and is more eloquently brought to light through her own language.

e conversation she raises between the white-dominated resources I’ve accumulated to populate

my research and her own realizations is undeniably valuable to vocalizing my perspective.

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Ultimately, this is not a story about how I went to Berlin and never wanted to come back. is story

is about the willful deconstruction of that disillusion through appropriation. While highly personal

in many ways, my process is one that reappears in various facets of cultural discourse. In the

beginning, my feelings about Berlin were something like the anvil-shaped cloud that forms over the

ocean before a hurricane. I could only express them through gestures. With time and theoretical

exploration, the feelings became clearer and I managed to conceptualize the major reactions at

work in my mind. ese themes are cultural hybridity, homeland, and self-discovery through

spatial immersion.

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At the core of my personal progress is the wealth of epistemological information that I gained

through deliberate immersion in the city of Berlin. When it comes to the relationship between the

person and the city, notions of space transcend that of a simple habitating relationship. Of course,

people dier in the degree to which they allow the city to dene themselves or a phase in their

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personal development. In the most extraordinary cases, the moment in which they take part in this

involvement coincides with a similar moment in the city. For Berlin, this transformative aspect was

particularly important. I am not alone in feeling this way about Berlin: there is much literature to

be found engaging with this topic. e thoughtful personication of the city places it on the same

level with the inhabitant as an individual. e relationship evolves and becomes one much like any

other between friends, or between lovers. In his book, Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin

Childhood Around 1900), Walter Benjamin uses thoughtful vignettes of upper middle-class life in

Berlin through the eyes of a child in an unconventional approach to aneurism. rough the

account of Berlin an image of Berlin’s timeless essences is painted and presented. e approach to

the city in this observational manner is one that has heavily inuenced my own. Much of the

inferences I have drawn about the nature of Berlin have taken this form. Berlin is a space in ux

that manages to keep its heart in the same place.

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First and foremost, this section is concerned with how we can breathe life into the city in a way that

aligns it with a living and breathing individual. How can we personify the city of Berlin?

Interestingly enough, Walter Benjamin’s semi–biographical book Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin

Childhood Around 1900) does this through thoughtful vignettes of upper middle-class life in

Berlin through the eyes of a child– an unconventional approach to aneurism. rough this

account of Berlin, an image of Berlin’s distinctively timeless essence is painted and presented. e

approach to the city in this observational manner is one that has heavily inuenced my own.

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Also addressed within this framework is the fragility of subjective experience and how narrative

devices can be used to paint a more objective and therefore supportive picture. Here I am

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employing WG Sebald and his book e Rings of Saturn (1998). While this book does not take

place in Berlin, it is written by a German and is characteristically aware of what the self can project

onto the environment and the benecial understanding of what can come from this activity. e

nameless narrator of the book explores the city in memory and fragments, vocalizing the

observations of a person that has lived quietly through a period of adversity. roughout much of

the novel a repositioning of otherwise ordinary elements of urban life occurs and allows the author

to discover things that would otherwise not have seemed apparent. is systematic repositioning

appears within my own observations and reduces the desensitization that may have occurred as a

result of the banality of day-to-day routine.

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My love of Berlin is that of one presented from a subversive perspective but stating that alone is not