All the Pretty Compartmentalizing
A coup unfolds in the US, the verbiage around Gaza hits a fever pitch, Egypt (for once) doesn't just play along with western powers, and I...am making plans to attend a family wedding in Germany?
This isn’t going to be about horses.
I have a narrator in my head now. She’s a science fiction version of me who provides terse summaries of current world events, particularly the ones attached to my family’s countries of origin. I picture the data rolling out like The Terminator’s robotic eye, scanning the horizon:
2025 first quarter tricultural identity report
Merging status: Questionable
Analysis: Global signs of violent fracture and separation. Includes casual ethnic cleansing, domestic coup presented as affable buddy movie, and racism as journalism
Challenge: Attend springtime wedding in Thuringia, site of forest forever haunted by concentration camp + medical experiments; also former maternal evac location, and previous pleasant trip to Weimar in 1990s
Task: Synthesize contradictory, compartmentalized data
Projected results: Unknown
She’s a bit of a comedian. But I think she emerges with her narrations when I need to detach. Sometimes it helps to pretend it’s all a top secret job assignment rather than my real, personal life. I think we’re all taking the world’s temperature and evaluating for our own safety. It appears I find safety in distance.
How to be a citizen of a particular superpower spinning out of orbit while also being part Northern European, and also partly Global South? All three regions seem to have plenty to say about each other, and little of it is good.
When I’m overwhelmed, I miss hearing my mother speaking German to me. It was a source of comfort and warmth. I know, that sounds so contradictory. How could a person extract solace from the harsh, angular sounds of German and those comically long words? So many people have paused in their day to present their sneering comments on the unpleasant sound of the German language. And they comment on Arabic, too, which I think sounds beautiful.
The Arabic language has been banned at protests in Berlin. Since last year. I only just learned about it a few days ago.
*
I used to frequently attend the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival always held in February. Now I’m reposting messages on social media encouraging people to boycott the event this year. So, that’s new. Previously I loved the bustle of activity, that thick catalog of films, reading thumbnails about international movies I’d otherwise never hear about nor see. That version of Berlin was my romance, a benevolent place perhaps only existing in my imagination. From today’s perspective, I’d say I was being oblivious and sold myself a fairy tale. But still, the city is family. I can’t escape these contradictions.
My Berlin family members are involved in this wedding, of course. The plan is to spend time there as well, and I feel like a bit of a hypocrite. I had plenty of criticism for that city over the last 15 months, from how they handled protests to the statements their government officials made about Gaza. Just thinking about flying into Berlin makes me tense. I remember when two Berlin airport workers (it was still Tegel then) were going on and on right in front of me, talking about my carryon bag and what might be inside. It felt like racial profiling, which was probably newer then. They never once asked me if I spoke German. It didn’t occur to them that I understood every word, that I had a mother named Helga. I watched them in silence and tried to understand who they saw when they looked at me, and how simple, how linear their world was. Mine isn’t. This was so many years ago, long before the current politically-charged moment. Meaning, it was already bad then. How bad is it now?
I’ve seen TikTok videos of enormous crowds in Berlin protesting Musk and the far-right party AfD, singing their defiance in unison, and to that I say a sincere thank goodness. What really surprised me was a headline about German President Steinmeier saying Gaza belongs to the Palestinians. I had to go to a Turkish news site to get an actual article about it; other sites only offered one brief sentence. His comment was in response to the current US President’s blunt language; you know the things he said, I don’t have to link that.
Here’s the question I want to scream from the rooftops: why couldn’t Steinmeier have said Gaza belongs to the Palestinians a year ago? Where did he think all this carnage and destruction since 2023 was heading? And why didn’t all these protesting crowds do so for Gaza over the last year and a half? That’s right, many of them did, but they were hurled to the ground and dragged away by riot police. But why didn’t more protest, and sing in unison?
Meanwhile, a certain German TV journalist/correspondent based in Munich plainly stated his hatred of Palestinians, because what else could be expected of journalism? The old standby, “Arab animals.” Ah, yes. Others have apparently said this as well.
I suspected this is where we’d be. I read Sarah Kendzior, so I knew who was going to win our election, and why. In my piece here from last year about Gaza, I talked about a fire sale (meaning, everything must go) and rearranging the land for a different demographic. This was the goal even under the previous president, and then even before him as well. But the disguise of vocabulary, the costume of it all had sufficed. All the words I said under my breath about Gaza, it turns out, were correct: ethnic cleansing, capturing off-shore natural resources, and beachfront real estate development. Egypt, usually compliant to demands from the United States, has shown some defiance. I’m glad.
With all these events gurgling in our world right now, robbing us of our attention spans among many other vital things, it feels wildly non-sequitur to make plans to attend a long-distance wedding in a country where there are apparently many citizens who openly despise brown people. And I mean, will we even have functioning airports in the US by the time we reach the spring equinox? I want to attend this wedding and be with my German family. Celebrating this young happy couple has a sweetness that might be good medicine. But it also feels surreal, inaccessible, like I’d need a wormhole to get there. Some mad compartmentalizing will be required of me. And by the way: I think plenty of other demographics across our nation are doing their own compartmentalizing, and have been for some time. Maybe everybody has.
*
This year will mark the 50th anniversary of visiting Berlin to see family. I started at age 7. The circumstances around this milestone feel batshit.
Science fiction characters such as myself, ironically, don’t get to travel for fun or adventure or even for choice. Travel has always been synonymous with duty and the familial occasions: funerals, weddings, and paperwork.
The multiplicities of Thuringia add to the drama. This is a place that holds the horrible history of Buchenwald. It’s also the region of my mother’s childhood evacuation during the war. A family wedding set here, all while a young Musk DOGE aide catches headlines for having posted racist eugenics stuff (then resigns, then is reinstated to continue hacking the US government) has me simmering in the inkiest darkness.
Here’s more compartmentalization: my mother and aunt and I had a wonderful trip to Weimar in 1996. Weimar is also in Thuringia. We were floating in a beautiful fantasy during that visit. Are we terrible people? How can one location hold such contradictory realities and histories? It’s unbearable to process. In Weimar, I finally had that travel feeling I always wanted, the one I assume tourists usually get as they pursue their dream itinerary. That travel high is the payoff. But it’s rarely been my experience.
Why do things look like this after 50 years of visits to my mother’s hometown? I thought the world and I were on a trajectory of positive movement forward and upward. You know, heading towards something improved, evolved and enlightened. The war ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and then…Musk endorsed the AfD and journalists spoke of their hatred of “Arab animals.” We’re returning to my mother’s childhood. 50 years is supposed to feel like an achievement, not a regression. Isn’t it?
I am aghast. If my parents were alive to see this, they’d probably be weeping. But I’m not crying. Maybe there’s something horse-like to my stubbornness. There’s a serenity to my alarm, my not-okayness, and a new determination is finding strength in its four legs, preparing to buck.
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