Language Acquisition
When I moved to Berlin, I signed up for a German language course, like many new arrivals do. In the class, I joined students from Luxembourg, Italy, the Netherlands, Estonia, South Korea, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, the UK, Venezuela, Ireland, and Brazil. Each week, we were thrust together, the lingua franca being, humiliatingly, the single language that we were collectively incapable of speaking.
As a result, our potential for nuanced conversations was limited at best. The well-intentioned teacher transformed the classroom into a mini-model United Nations. We were made into begrudging emissaries of where we came from, tasked with presenting on our families, our favorite foods, holiday celebrations, films, local customs, and national educational systems. Hour after hour, we listened to each other’s halting German, every other word a mistake.
My experience of these assignments was one of endless frustration: the full complexity of our relationships to our home countries, of our political beliefs and identities were flattened into performative monoliths, reduced to benign comparisons. If someone said something interesting, it was impossible to follow up, or to articulate genuine points of intersection.
It feels almost too obvious to say, but these times demand it: interesting conversations — and civil discourse — require that on a basic level we can understand one another, which cannot be achieved without some level of discomfort, effort, and fluency.
I’ve found myself thinking about my early German classes a lot these days, particularly when asked to describe what’s happening in Germany to my friends in the US. I’m struck by the same feeling of inadequacy when discussing the gap that seems to exist between this country and the rest of the world, the historical particularities and the cultural forces that make the situation here seem so dire.
How do I explain to an American Jew in New York, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, a recent subheader in one of Germany’s largest newspapers that reads, “Antisemitic violence is directed mostly toward the police?” The words might make sense, but the context is absent, and often leaves the facts even more absurd.
Broadly speaking, we live in a time of an authoritarian shift, as far right, ultra-nationalist parties continue to gain power and those in power continue to radicalize. Some consequences of that are the erasure of nuance, the self-selection of comfortable spheres of engagement, and the reduction of meaningful debate. As we continue to learn, it’s hard to have a conversation with someone when you have a fundamentally divergent understanding of what truth is.
Berlin’s primary appeal to me has always been as a cosmopolitan city. With nearly a quarter of its inhabitants foreign-born, from over 170 countries, it is where western Europe meets the east, where the global north comes into contact with the global south. The city’s particular demographics allow for a confluence of life here that would be unthinkable in other parts of the world: Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora living alongside a growing number of Israeli immigrants.
One condition of being diasporic is to find yourself in two places at once: one where you are, one where you come from. This definition rests well with me as an American Jew, despite its history as an antisemitic trope, and its weaponization against other migrant communities: to be diasporic is to be always in between, to never belong entirely to where you are or to where you came from. As a result, the condition of diaspora can be seen as an act of translation between different places, taking vocabulary from each and facilitating the conversation between the two.
For me, that is the heart of the Diasporist: to translate concepts across contexts, to tell stories with a critical distance, to approach ideas from multiple perspectives, and to build internationalist frameworks. We feature pieces that shed light on experiences of the in-between, tell stories that are curious and engaged with the world, make space for nuance, and invite differences of opinion. Our content is published bilingually, to allow English-speaking audiences to experience the conversations happening in Germany, and German readers to get a better sense of what’s happening in the rest of the world (and, sometimes, within their own country). We approach this as an experiment: what happens if we try to begin on the same page?
In our starting lineup, Millay Hyatt writes about her childhood as the daughter of Moravian missionaries conducting clandestine missions in the GDR. Ghayath Almadhoun shares two poems exploring the pain and absurdity in exile, grief, war, and longing. Ben Mauk talks to Sarah Schulman about the lessons AIDS activism can have for contemporary solidarity movements. Emily Dische-Becker reflects on the connection between austerity and censorship, and strategies of survival under authoritarianism. And Maria Wollburg considers the complicated histories of pleasure and violence inside the oyster.
Over the next several months, we’ll be publishing new work that builds off, adds to, moves away from, and sometimes wholly contradicts what we’ve already run. Our writers will be exploring corners of life and debates in Germany that haven’t been widely reported elsewhere, and stories from abroad that take on particular resonance here. It’s important for Germany to be in conversation with the world, not only because as Europe’s largest economy, decisions here have an impact far beyond the nation’s borders. But it’s also because we see echoes of talking points, tactics, laws, and operations deployed here playing out in France, the Netherlands, Argentina, and Hungary, and vice versa. As Emily Dische-Becker says in her discussion of “inner exile,” we have a lot to learn from one another.
In translation theory, there are two approaches towards translation: domestication—the adaptation of a text to match the receiving culture–and foreignization—the preservation of particular rhythms, logic, and norms, that require you to approach a text on its own terms. This is an aesthetic distinction, but also, it seems to me a moral one: at the Diasporist, we value the prickly contours of individual experiences, the sharp edges of one person’s opinion, even when it might grate with deeply held beliefs. Disagreement is key to developing nuance.
I’ve also been thinking about language courses as a useful paradigm: as annoying as they are at the beginning, they are a shared project that allows for mistakes, disagreement, questions, and misunderstandings, for the sake of learning to engage one another with more complexity. As simple as that may be, I believe it is an essential condition of any communicative enterprise. In a time in which Germany is more concerned with litigating any sign of solidarity with people who are being subjected to inconceivable violence than the nature of the atrocity itself, what would it look like to create a space where we could build a shared vocabulary and enter into genuine conversation, define points of disagreement, listen to others, and contribute our own perspectives?
I find it increasingly difficult to remain optimistic these days. But I, like anyone, am driven by the same fragile drive to make myself understood, and to get closer to understanding the world. And we have to believe it will be worth the discomfort, the vulnerability, the stammering, and the frustrating effort to try.