Girl meets Author

So, in the same newspaper article about the Stolpersteine last week was a small blurb about various other upcoming, Jewish-centered local activities. One of them is a memorial service for Kristallnacht -- on November 9th, as it were, the night before my birthday. Funnily enough, tons of Important Historical Events in German history happened to occur right around this date:

November 9th, for example, is not only the anniversary of Kristallnacht, it is also the day of the proclamation of the Weimar Republik in 1918 (Germany's first, unfortunately somewhat unsuccessful, democratic government), as well as the night of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. November 11th is both the holiday celebrating the official begin of the Karnival season, as well as the anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended World War One. And right between those two dates, on November 10th, I get to share a birthday with Martin Luther, Friedrich Schiller, and Arnold Zweig! Hey, maybe I was born to study German!

Speaking of studying German: one of my favorite authors is Barbara Honigmann, the daughter of two Jewish Germans who fled their homeland during World War Two, to return after the war
to the new communist state that was East Germany. Having personally witnessed the horrible demise of the "German-Jewish symbiosis" so hoped for during the Enlightenment, Honigmann's parents thus threw their past -- including the last remaining traces of their Jewishness -- out the window and declared themselves devout communists. Communism observed no religion, no skewed concepts of "race"; only class mattered, and those (theoretically) as equal as possible. The GDR seemed to offer the Honigmanns a new beginning, and they never looked back.

Unfortunately for their daughter, however, this meant growing up in a family whose history felt like some kind of conspiracy. Most of Honigmann's books are therefore witty, poignant, fearless autobiographical narratives chronicling her lifelong search for roots and an identity: her unanswered questions as a child; sneaking into her mother's closet to look at old, unknown photographs in a shoebox and wondering if those strangers were in some way connected to her; being referred to by neighbors and classmates as Jewish, without having any idea what being Jewish really meant; poking around a mysterious cemetery from the previous century, and seeing last names that actually looked like her own, rather than her classmates'... even in the new state which was supposed to be blind to ethnic differences and full of possibility for the future, Honigmann was ever compelled by her past, and the vague feeling that she was somehow not quite as "East German" as her neighbors.

Yet when she began her publishing career in West Germany, she was suddenly viewed as an Eastern writer; and when she forsook both places for a move to France, she's now considered the "token German" among her friends and colleagues. In other words, she's an outsider wherever she is. Talk about a conflicted identity! I took on one of her juicy books for my honors thesis during my B.A. studies, analyzing and translating the work from German to English.

Well, I'll be jiggered if Frau Honigmann herself didn't just give a reading here in Ludwigshafen yesterday! As soon as I read the announcement in the paper, I stuck a big notice to the shelf above the kitchen counter: "HONIGMANN LESUNG, MONTAG 22. OKT, 19.00!!!" I then went out and bought a new copy of the work I'd translated (since all of my books are still in storage in Tucson, a fact that needs to change soon!).

Barbara Honigmann is every bit as funny and charming as her writing. The event was not large -- maybe a few dozen attended -- and so it was like holding a reading in your livingroom. The excerpts she selected were ones I hadn't read before (all the better!): chapters from a work about her eccentric mother, some essays on the writing process, and thoughts about what it means to study the Torah and Talmud as an adult newcomer to Judaism. And she's just great. Her bright eyes sparkle merrily as she reads aloud, glancing up to make eye contact with each person in the room, as if every witticism in the writing is a private joke between her and some audience member; and when she answers questions, her entire small body is animated with flying hand gestures and feisty tosses of her silver bob. (Even Bert pronounced the almost-sixty-year-old author "cute!") During the question-and-answer session, I asked if she could address the change in her own sense of "Germanness" since moving to Strassbourg; and she said that it was indeed interesting to discover a surprisingly deep well of internal German identity that, while in Germany itself, had been too eclipsed by her developing Jewishness to really take note of. Afterward, she signed my book, and asked what an American was doing in Ludwigshafen. We ended up chatting for quite a while -- after a time, it was only the four of us (she, her husband Peter, Bert, and I) standing around, swapping integration stories and talking about my work on her work. Peter asked when I was going to start my PhD, and invited me to come visit his library at the Heidelberger Hochschule fuer Juedischer Studien. Absolutely!!

At some point, Barbara grinned and said, "No wonder you asked about my move to another country. Do you feel yourself becoming 'more American' the longer you stay in Germany?" And strangely enough, yes, I do! This is by no means to suggest the converse, that I also necessarily feel increasingly distanced from my home of choice -- on the contrary, I settle in more and more by the day. But yes, after a year of leading discussions (both inside and outside of the classroom) on American issues and intercultural communication, I do find my own sense of national identity developing clearer parameters. While still in the States, I started to get so jaded with our over-commercialized culture and machismo-soaked, bullheaded government that I wanted nothing more than to escape. Criticism of America while I was in America often met with emphatic agreement. But here, I've learned to accept my country for both its perceived faults as well as its virtues. You have to, when you are daily confronted with your nationality as a very visible part of your identity. It's like dropping an onion into, say, chocolate sauce: in a marinara, for example, that one onion is not so very remarkable. But remove it to an environment where it is clearly not the norm, and its "onionness" will stand out like, well, an onion in your chocolate sauce! I've therefore had not only to adjust to my new, partial identity as a sometimes-outsider, but in the process, also been forced to really learn what it means, to me, to be American. The experience has been both surprising and enriching. I no longer wince at the question, "hey, where's your accent from?" because I know that, whatever the other person's possible perception of Americans, I am my own version of Americanness -- just like the other 300 million of us.

Anyway, all in all it was a fantastic evening. And here are a couple of pictures to immortalize the event!

Eagerly waiting for Ms. Honigmann to sign my book


The conversation begins!