An Autumn Meal and a 'German Daughter' Rant

After cycling to university this morning — the city still steeped in yellow and green and brown and red leaves of autumn — and practicing past tenses in Spanish in my Wednesday morning class with six classmates, I went into a cooking frenzy. It had started raining by the time I left class, but it was only light rain.

The manor farm shop at Dahlem was stocking heads of lettuce, a handful of apple varieties, radishes and pears grown elsewhere in Germany, beefsteak tomatoes streaked like heirlooms, clementines from Spain, dusty red beets, yellow onions, raw ginger root with stems, and orange Hokkaido pumpkins.

So lunch was a huge salad of lettuce, radish, chopped celery, tomato, and an olive-oil-and-balsamic vinaigrette. I boiled beets, and an egg for myself, but they were done later.

For dinner, I used a Middle Eastern recipe for pumpkin soup: its ingredients were, amongst others, coconut milk, ginger root, carrot and celery and onion, and spices. I had dropped into a small organic grocery store for additional ingredients. It was wonderful, although yet again I reflected that to have an even finer flavour maybe I need to conquer my inner sloth and start making homemade vegetable stock instead of resorting to bouillon powder. Besides I like using a mortar and pestle for the spices, because it links me to the history of human cooking technology all the way back to homo habilis. Afterward I roasted the pumpkin's seeds in the oven with salt and olive oil. There was dishwashing in between, since a mountain of pots and plastic and other things that would be damaged in the machine had accumulated, but it's only half done (life being too short and all that).

Brother Ge. also made hot chocolate with marshmallows for all of us.

It was a nice distraction from a scholarly article that I was reading and taking notes on for university, about the 19th century Greek diaspora in Odessa. It was also a nice distraction from thoughts of the class presentation I'll have to give next week for Spanish.

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I didn't catch all of today's Tagesschau (national public broadcaster's evening news). But amongst other topics it reported the further fallout of our Chancellor's remarks about Germany's urban landscape (Stadtbild) being sullied by asylum seekers.When the Chancellor was asked the following day to clarify, he said he didn't have to — people should just 'ask their daughters.' At the age of forty, I might no longer qualify as a 'daughter,' but ...

From my perspective, there is a ton of sexism in German society. I think it's partly a conscious cultural choice (I think it is OK if people make this choice for themselves), but partly also an unwanted imposition on people like me who want to see it reformed.

In terms of workplace sexism, the CDU itself looked more conscious of women's issues under Angela Merkel than it does now, where Friedrich Merz (and the SPD's Lars Klingbeil) don't seem to want to take much trouble when it comes to including women in his cabinet etc. I also think that the fledgling backlash against LGBTQIA* rights (exemplified by not flying the Pride flag at the Reichstag building for Christopher Street Day this year) is part of the conservative right's renewed fervent embrace of stifling gender roles.

So I don't understand why Merz is singling out asylum seeking men as the problem.

Turning to asylum seeking men: I can't speak for every woman's experience. But after 19 years in a Berlin apartment two doors down from a mosque and two blocks away from an asylum seeker apartment building in streets full of German-Turkish businesses, and 2 years of reporting on protests by asylum seekers and refugees, I've personally never been sexually harassed by the demographic that Merz's Birth of a Nation fantasies seem to be projected onto. Namely, young men of Middle Eastern origin/men under the age of 40 who might be German citizens or not, but either way don't look 'Aryan.' I know that there are individual news stories that contradict my experience.

Whereas I do have experiences being sexually harassed by German men: one entered the family bookshop where I worked and talked about how they like to masturbate to me and a 13-year-old female pupil who was doing a work experience programme, another read out sexually explicit poems to me unasked, a third talked in a music shop about how a famous historical female opera singer 'spread her legs for everyone,' a fourth told a university class a 'funny' anecdote about how a letter of the Arabic alphabet resembles the male reproductive organ after making a ton of eye contact with me during the break beforehand ...

I won't go into the less prurient sexism in the workplace, university, shops, etc., and how I get a little creeped out when a few men seem to like if I behave in a meek/submissive way.

If I didn't know so many men who are truly respectful and use whatever privilege they have to try to make things easier for the women around them — like my father, all my classmates at school and university in Canada, friends from the old workplace, etc. — maybe it wouldn't annoy me so much. But, as it is, I have known my brothers who have taken the time to walk places with me when I was worried about being harassed, men whom I didn't know who have looked ready to intervene when a stranger approached me and tried to chat me up in public, a male delivery driver who hustled the man who was being offensive in the bookshop out the door, colleagues who checked in with me regularly to make sure I didn't feel uncomfortable about x or y, etc. (Of course I've also had many supportive women around me, who are a bit off topic here but equally important in real life.) So I know that Merz & co. can do much better.

His rampant racism also leaves totally unaddressed the wellbeing of the women in the lives of the supposedly predatory asylum-seeking men, whom these same men may be supporting, protecting, and caring for, and selflessly loving.

In conclusion, just once, I'd like to flip a CDU advertising poster the bird...