It's been an intense first week of classes. Of course I'm grateful to have gotten into university – after passing the second part of the latest exam, I was told that the registration was completed lickety-split the next evening.
What I'd forgotten, though, is how much first-year classes are not for shy people. In the upper semesters it's, I'll generalize, taken for granted that everyone will be absorbed in their own subject matter and have taken on a smaller group of friends with whom they have a proven, specific rapport. But in many of my seminars this year, we're being smushed together like platonic Barbie and Ken dolls, told to socialize and form groups amongst each other, and I hate it. It's not that I don't like the other students; but that doesn't mean we necessarily have a good chemistry when it comes to teaching each other, completing a task together, or otherwise mutually bringing out good academic qualities. I'm still used to the experience of having classmates be indifferent or unhappy about being paired up with me in group projects, from school, and I can't say that reawakened trauma and awkward social interactions are a wellspring of academic genius. And I don't know why adults think that everyone who is, say, 18 years old, has so much in common that the whole class is soul twins.
Anyway, the week started with Romance-language literature, Greek, and a Spanish language class.
In the Spanish-language class, the professor was friendly and strict and thoroughly fed up at the same time, looking at tables practically bulging with students and whipping us through our paces. (The classes are overfilled, and he had a cold so that his voice was hoarse.) He set us the topic of journalism. He seemed pretty annoyed when a student innocently mentioned a celebrity magazine as an example of that journalistic genre, interjecting that maybe we should use Der Spiegel as an example instead. He mildly blew his top when someone also innocently said 'There are the ...' as 'Hay los...'; 'If it's a definite article like el, la, or los, you should use the verb 'existir,' not 'hay'.' I on the other hand wept on the inside when a fellow student said 'There is no need to be too informed' and one or two students proudly claimed that they got their news from social media...
(Which also made me rant internally about people saying that they are 'not political,' without realizing that their attitudes about everything from poverty through immigration to whether or not to adopt a climate-friendly clothes closet are quite deliberately instilled and stoked by political actors. If they don't live in a cave and shun human contact, their words and actions are in fact furthering someone's political agenda. It's important to learn about political science and history so that these hidden strings – that sounds too conspiracy-theorist, but I can't think of a better term off the top of my head – are revealed.)
Since I haven't spoken Spanish regularly since around 2002, the fellow students came across as linguistic geniuses to me when it came to their prompt and snappy replies to the teacher. It was only as I heard one trivial grammatical mistake after another, including adjectives not declined to the correct gender, that I began to feel like I fit in.
We had homework assigned for the class, which I have not quite finished yet and it's haunting me like a disgruntled spirit.
Then more Greek, where I translated German into English for the benefit of a fellow student, and I wept internally because I'd spent hundreds of Euros and over 11 hours of exam-writing to prove that I knew German... when the university uses English a lot anyway.
Last evening there was some excitement, if mainly online, because a group of 20 (police figures) or over 40 (university press release figures) broke into the university president's offices. Apparently computers were damaged and at least one red triangle (associated with the militant group Hamas) was spray-painted somewhere. The police were called. The president of the university appeared on the evening news.
I still think that the university's media strategy is totally out of touch with the opinions of students and I've gotten the sense many professors. Thinking that the best way to honour the survivors of the Holocaust is to pretend that 40,000 Palestinians are still alive in the Gaza Strip and there's nothing to worry about, is not just useless but also totally beneath our intelligence. It has nothing to do with ethics, just with a shallow notion of public relations. It just makes us look like hypocritical idiots. Besides to me it's part and parcel of a socio-religious/racist construct whereby 'Arabs' are inherently 'fanatics.'
(I guess with Lebanon it's the case that Syria and other countries have been pulling the strings of its political system from the outside through violent means for decades or centuries anyway, but also given the severe economic situation that's already created deep hardships, I'm still frankly shocked that the invasion of Lebanon isn't raising more eyebrows. Maybe it's easier to grasp the cost if one has known a Lebanese person; one of my former colleagues mentioned that he brought along medication every time he travelled to the country – because the stocks in the country are so low or the prices are too high, I've forgotten which.)
Besides it's unfair to reduce Israel and its people to a military campaign. Why can't we espouse Israeli literature, show the spectrum of opinions and interests in that country in their full diversity, instead of throwing ourselves behind a Netanyahu policy? By contrast, I really like that somebody put a literary calendar page with a photo of the Israeli author David Grossman on a door in the humanities building at the university: it always reminds me of the dissidents, and of the complexity of nationalities and experiences.
Anyway, there was a protest this afternoon 'for Jewish life and the right of Israel to exist'... One of my professors told the lecture hall that she'd be fine if we skip class to attend it. By the time I passed, it was 15 people holding Israeli flags near the biggest cafeteria, as two police officers who looked relaxed stood beside them. As I've mentioned in the past, insofar as I have a Jewish family history I do not identify myself one iota with the waving of Israeli flags in the context where it's an endorsement of killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, so the 'for Jewish life' part... Did the protestors look fanatic, though? – No, they were just quietly chatting.
Do I wish that students who are pro-Palestinian activists would concentrate more fully on raising funds for medical care, or on giving a platform to moderate speakers from Palestinian territories, Palestinian refugee camps, Israel, or Lebanon, to become more informed without attempting to instrumentalize these speakers for propaganda? – Yes.
Anyway, I still have homework to do, and shopping, cleaning, and food to prepare for friends on the weekend. But after walking through the autumn leaves at Dahlem under a sunny sky, writing all of this, and already making sure I have no homework for the last class I had today, I feel a little less disgruntled.
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