“Archive of Flight”: 41 stories of migration – culture

When the wall came down, Lucía Muriel was overwhelmed by two very strong, very conflicting feelings in quick succession. The first: great joy. A friend called her and reported that he was walking back and forth through the Brandenburg Gate, everything open, everything possible, and Lucía Muriel thought: “How great is that?” And then, one day later, when the East Berliners arrived in West Berlin, where Lucía Muriel lived after a childhood and youth in Leipzig, she saw them, on the Ku’damm, in front of the savings banks and banks, picking up the welcome money. And it hit her like a shock: the racism she had experienced in the GDR would catch up with her, she was sure: “People don’t just come with Trabbis,” she thought. The “German-Germans” lay in each other’s arms cheering, but she, who had come to Germany from Ecuador in 1970 and knew the country on both sides of the wall as well as few others, had a crying fit.

One day after the great liberation break at the Brandenburg Gate, Muriel saw Turkish and Arab cleaners clearing away the dirt on Straße des 17. Juni. No director in the world could have imagined a better picture for the distribution of roles at this historic moment.

For people with non-white skin, reunification posed a real risk

One could object that Muriel’s statements are themselves marginalizing and derogatory, after all, not all East Germans are racists. But you can also remember Hoyerswerda, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mölln and Solingen. And then you have to come to the conclusion that German-Germans who were sensitive to nationalism at the time also came to the conclusion that reunification represented a real risk for people without white skin, that the beautiful event first brought out the worst that both Germanys had had to offer.

So for a moment it runs down your spine while you listen to Lucía Muriel in the Berlin House of World Cultures. The armchairs are comfortable, the headphones do not press. And although the large screen on which Lucía Muriel and the other speakers appear seems to float in the middle of the foyer, the impression is of great closeness, yes, of intimacy.

“People started talking because someone asked,” is how the Iranian-German writer Asal Dardan described the project’s conditions. “Archive of Escape“Put it in a nutshell. Someone asked 41 times, the oral history collection contains 41 stories. Author and journalist (and SZ columnist) Carolin Emcke and migration researcher Manuela Bojadžijev curated them and presented them at the beginning of October – accompanied by prominent theme days .

The interviewees – 18 women, 23 men, including four LGBTQIA – come from 27 countries. Their reports range from their flight from Silesia in 1945 to the Syrian civil war. Age, education, social affiliation, everything is completely different, just as the interviewers work in very different disciplines, are white or not, have migration experience or not, are Jews or Christians or Muslims or something completely different. Emcke and Bojadžijev strive for maximum diversity, maximum inclusion. That sounds like strained proportional representation, but actually only makes things varied.

Escape is not a historical exception, so the curators want to show with this spatially and temporally stretched approach that it is not an “anomaly” (Bojadžijev). Rather, it has always been part of German history because it is part of human history. Many religions revolve around prominent stories of exodus and salvation. “The first story is the story of the flight,” the writer Senthuran Varatharajah repeats at the opening like a refrain.

Germany is not a special case, Germany is “a country with a migration background”, said Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on October 3rd, which on the one hand was a statement of startling evidence. On the other hand: Didn’t that sound too self-evident, too stable, too closed? Isn’t the essence of a country of immigration just the constant becoming, as Asal Dardan remarked, a constant negotiation of access and participation?

If you immerse yourself in the “Archive of Flight” for a few hours, if you let yourself be taken with you by the terrible stories about wars or mutilations or slavery, of the danger of death and loss, and if the reports tell of the arrival in Germany at some point the impression is very strong that not all Germans are by any means at the level of the Federal President. And whether they ever want to be is still very much a question.

The interviewers are sometimes more moved by the force of their experiences than the interviewees

Bino Byansi Byakuleka, gay, Christian and founder of the campaign “We are born free!” for the integration of refugees, can no longer hear it when the people in Uganda rave about a Germany that he experiences very differently. When he was about to be deported and turned to a pastor for help, he said, yes, what a shame, but there was nothing to be done. Besides: Jesus also lives in Uganda. The Syrian Mouna Aleek wears a headscarf and knows crooked looks, she understands the gestures, even if her German is not yet very good. But she definitely doesn’t want to go back to Syria, it is a good life here.

With so much courage, so much resilience, so much optimism, the only question that remains is why the “Archive of Flight” does not cause a major shock, no lightning-fast realization, no deep touch? Perhaps it is because the interviewers sometimes seem more moved by the force of their experiences than the interviewees. The narrators often report surprisingly sober, pragmatic and sometimes downright tidy. You can understand: they will never forget the escape, but they had a life before and they do everything to have one afterwards.

The “Archive of Flight” is an elaborate, respectable, committed project. What it is not: surprising. The past few years have brought a wealth of moving stories of successful or catastrophic new beginnings in the media, literature and film. Some protagonists from the “Archive of Flight” were also portrayed in reports and television programs, or they wrote their own stories, like the writer Sasha Marianna Salzmann.

In this respect, there is not necessarily a lack of stories, but rather of listeners. When the Taliban take Kabul, part of the German public is upset because those who believe in the West are threatened are those who represent women’s rights, freedom of expression and Western values. But another part and at the very front, of course, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer sees nothing but an impending new “refugee crisis”. And the narrative that closes this gap has not yet been written.

“Archive of Escape”. House of World Cultures, Berlin. Until January 3rd.