From the Outside of the Inside: Commuting, Community and (slightly complicated) Commonalities

This post is part of a series called “Speaking Deutschlish” about living in Berlin as an American. 

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“Berlin is where a family doesn’t have to look like a family,” reads a new advertisement for The Berliner Morgenpost. I stare at the sign for sometimes up to twenty minutes as I wait for my train to come every morning. The picture: two young women with some ear and nose piercings stand next to each other. One holds a small boy wearing earmuffs. The boy is excited and points at something in the distance. The second woman has her hand around the first women and stands slightly behind her. They are a lesbian couple and that is their son. They are at a daytime music festival. They are smiling and happy and look like they are a really loving family. According to the Berliner Morgenpost they are a family that “doesn’t look like one.” My train comes, and I move on.

Five minutes later, when the train stops again, I have my daily interaction with another piece of advertising. Two naked women try to lure me into their porn-film-store, promising to only charge me 0.69 cents per day for any of over 10,000 DVDs. If you walk next to the women, whose stomachs measure an incredible three feet in height, you will see that their carefully groomed public hair has not been censored, unlike their nipples which are covered by small yellow stars.

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Another stop, and the train fills up quickly. It becomes so full, in fact, that I usually don’t see any more advertising at all. We are all going together downtown to work, or look for work, or to go to class, or to shop. Often, my fellow travelers are Turkish women, wearing beautiful silk Hijabs. Berlin is the third largest Turkish city in the world after Istanbul and the Turkish capital of Ankara—a truth that the German people are still working through. Many Germans believe that the Turkish immigrants abuse and oppress “their” women because they supposedly force the women to wear Hijabs. Many believe that such a cultural difference is insurmountable and that Turkish people need to acquire Europe’s much more civilized attitude towards women, or to stay in Turkey.

Germany is a liberal European culture, steeped in conservative traditions. It is a land where gay marriage is legal, but a family with same-sex parents cannot be considered to “look” like a family. It is a land where sex isn’t taboo, but where women’s bodies are as shamelessly used to push products as in the United States. It is a land where women are given freedom and rights under the law, but are expected to use those freedoms and rights exclusively along a certain cultural pattern.

I am twenty-two, I just graduated from college, and I am a middle-class white American women. And Berlin is my new home.

I find myself in the position of being an invisible, truly “silent” member of the minority immigrants population here in Germany—with Irish heritage on my mother’s side and Dutch on my father’s, as long as I do not give myself away through my accent, I look just like any other German woman. And even when I speak, thanks to the fabulous American education my parents helped me finance, my accent is not horrible. This allows me to pass as “British” or “Irish,” or “Dutch” or “Scandinavian,” all of which are considered “acceptable” immigrants.

Through this sort of passing during my commute, I’ve developed sympathy for women who aren’t able to disappear in the subway as I can. Polish, Italian and Russian women, whose accents are too familiar; Turkish, Vietnamese and African women, whose complexions and clothing may betray them; immigrants who are under close observation for being potentially culturally hostile.

I’ve also developed sympathy for the liberated German woman herself. So liberated is she, from Puritan-prudery and religious-regulation, that there’s hardly a need to look at sexism in Germany. That is a “thing of the past,” or at worst, of Bavaria (the largely conservative, Catholic state, whose capital is Munich).

I would like to share with you my perspective from the outside of the inside. Err, inside of the outside? That is to say, my perspective as a white, well-educated, middle class individual, who can’t get a job, is a foreigner, and is a woman living in Berlin, a city that is, as Karl Scheffler said in 1910, “damned to always become, never to be.”

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