Thoughts on Berlin

Berlin made me feel like crying much of the time.

For a European city it looks new because of all the destruction and new building. The contrasts are breathtaking. The Sony Building. The Kathe Kollwitz museum. The memorial to the murdered Jews with over 2,000 blocks of stone and uneven walkways through it has no graffiti although the wall does as does most of the city.

Ellen and I took a bus tour and went to all the sites. The tour guide was very good. Very opinionated and serious. There was none of the U.S. tendency to cheer and hyper-ventilate when speaking of "the country". It seems the Germans have learned the cost of that. She was very thoughtful and so my tourist experience was a chance to reflect on destruction, damage, and coming to terms with so much loss. I could hardly bear it. It is not what she said, she was simply being factual. She did not make anything into melodrama (another U.S. touristic tendency).

The divided nature of the city -- that wall, that wall! -- and the desire to unify but not to forget was symbolism that affected me deeply. I would say that going to Berlin helped me turn a corner in my own life after all the difficulties.

Berlin also felt very familiar. I had no sense of displacement. The food reminded me of growing up. My grandfather on my father's side was German. He immigrated to NYC to work. He met my grandmother who was Puerto Rican. She had also left home to work in los nuyores. When I was three one of my first memories is of food; a hard boiled egg in a little cupped dish. One of my favorite childhood foods was a boiled egg and a hot dog dipped in the ocean for salt. When I saw that it was a typical breakfast at the hotel it brought back a part of my life I rarely think about.

The plaques on the buildings commemorating Jewish schools which were emptied by the Nazi's reminded me of the plaques here along a "Scenic Byway" which do not commemorate the Cayuga who were burned out of their ancestral homes in the Clinton and Sullivan Campaign. There have been holocausts here and over there.

I was reminded of Britzman’s writing very much, especially her thoughts on Freud's ideas of history as a series of murders. It was very moving in a quiet way, in a silent way.

The symposium which took place at the very last day was especially significant to me after spending the week in Berlin. Offer Maurer's paper, he lives in Tel Aviv and founded the first gay friendly clinic there recently, was quite
beautiful. He approached gender as a place of being home and I think his "rearranging of the furniture" with a client of his who is a transsexual woman had many metaphors that attempted to make the place of gender moveable. Clive Aspin's paper on takatapui was wonderful in how he brought out how language and self-determination are key. Oren Gozlan took a novel approach within psychoanalytic theory. He engaged the novel, Middlesex, as a way to explore what is lost with gender and what can be found there. Offer also discussed his problem of having to gender language in Hebrew with his client. Clive is not gay, but is takatapui. The words we use to describe ourselves -- grounded in culture, not as static but as
a place for the decolonial -- was a central theme of the symposium which would be good to continue.

All our partners/spouses attended the talk. It was a family reunion with Oliva also there.

For more information on the 29th International Congress on Psychology, Berlin, Germany click here