Territoridentity

My dear interspacers,

what an amazing week with you....!
hope, everybody recovered ;-)
finally, as I promised, I hereby post the text I read to you last week.
Whoever wants to do so, feel free, to experiment with it.

Looking forward to what happens til we meet again!
Best, Silvie

P.S.:Reading the text please don't mind the many mistakes concerning the usage of the english language...some words are deffinetely written the wrong way and sometimes grammarwise I am also not completely sure...
anyway, I didn't make the effort to perfect it...because I know you all understand;-)


WHERE YOU ARE IS WHO YOU ARE
A PERSONAL PLEA FOR THE PLAY WITH TERRETORY BASED STEREOTYPES

In his essay “On being European” David Michael Green presents outcomes of Europe wide surveys on the characteristics of identification with region, nation and the continent.
Reading it I realized, that I never consciously identified with any of these optional terretorries.
I just referred to myself as coming from them when somebody asked, and then sometimes afterwards realized, that what I say or do actually fits with the stereotypes that go with this localization.

Thus I decided to give my own contribution to the survey today and fill the Eurobarometer questionnaire.
Before I will do so, hoping a lot of people in the auditorium will join me, I want us all to take into consideration, what an important historical moment this will be in the process not only for shaping my own identity but also the identity of Europe.
Everyone of us is shaping Europe as a whole.
The example I want to give to emphazise that is Me.

I wasn’t one of the children for whom the black forest and Egypt are just a plane flight apart.
I didn’t’ even know that Egypt exists or what a plane flight was.
My parents wanted my world to grow slowly.

I come from a small village in the south of germany, precisely baden württemberg or better schwobaländle.
However this never mattered to me. I was not at all conscious of what this would mean for my future.
It never mattered to me where I came from, I was there, everywhere, it made no difference where. Could have been anywhere else.

My parents plan was to extend my world each year on summer vacation.


Age 5 summer vacation in Bavaria, some hundred kilometers from home.
The children next door come from Hannover. We call them “die Hannoveraner”. They call us “die Schwaben.” and make Fun of our accent and that my brother orders Spätzle when we have dinner together.
I didn’t even know, I had something like an accent, I didn’t even know what it is, but I realized, it defined me from the others as a Schwabe.

My father points out the differences.
The churches in Bavaria look different, especially the towers.
They have what he calls an onion hat.
The Bavarians have Flowers in front of their windows…mostly red and pink and very overloaded…my Mother didn’t like that. I could sense her slight antipathie against the Bavarians in general. For her they seemd to drink beer all the time and therefore a bit primitive.
I didn’t even know, what a Bavarian was, I had’nt met one til then. But I already knew, what I had to expect.



So eat this
Go out of your region: you are your region.
I am Schwabe
I speak dialect.
I love Spätzle.

And this:
If you know what a region is like, you know what its inhabitants are like.
And this:
having expectations makes you meet your expectations


Age 12 Italy, Toscany, still summer vacation.
The perimeter has grown.
I know now about the specialties of almost every region in germany…soutern germany. I’ve never been to the german north however, not even to Hannover.

The children next door, who we pet the cats with don’t speak our language. They stay in the vacation camp all day while we have a well structured plan to see all the places we came for. Sienna, Firenze, Lucca.
I almost feel guilty to enjoy that but get the sense that sitting around with them could also be fun.
I think about my list of friends and pen pals I planned to write to during my stay, maybe I should not do it.
We call them “The Italians”. They call us “the Germans”.
They are fascinated about our blond hair, we wonder why we never get this beautiful teint skin they have.

My father starts to point out the differences:
The Italians speak with their hands and feet and with a rrr like the Bavarians.
They don’t have this strong work ethics like the germans and therefore make siesta almost all day.
I meet my expectation: the hands and feet are there, the rrr and also the siesta.
When I want to go sightseeing at 35 degrees there’s no single Italian on the streets.

So eat this:
Go out of your country. You are your country.
I am german,
I am well structured
Amazingly organized,
I always need a to do list
I stick to my aim even at 35 degree
And I am blond as a blonde can be.

And this:
As soon as somebody doesn’t speak your language, you will find other differences about him as well.
You will once again meet your expectations.

Age 16, I don’t go on summer vacation with my parents anymore.
I make may way to the USA, on my own, everything organized entirely by myself.
My first plane flight is a transatlantic one.

I’m surprised how little all the people I live with know about germany when I tell them, that’s were I come from. Besides Hitler and the Oktoberfest Germany is just one Country in Europe.
Europe, I never thought about Europe, or me being European,
But the Americans told me:
You have all this history in Europe, all this cultural stuff.
Europe is such a great place for partying.
They were wandering why I didn’t know that and hadn’t visited all European countries yet.

I realized, that the size of Germany meant nothing to Americans. Germany for them was something like California. And Europe something like the USA.


Before I left germany my father pointed out differences:
Americans are loud fat and always think they are the best.
I didn’t listen, I know that he’s never met US citizens before, and thus he hadn’t meet his expectations yet.

I pretty much succeeded in going without expectations.
I ignored the warnings about gigantic shopping malls and milk cans as big as half a cow,
even the fascination about high buildings did not cross my mind.
Today it even seems to me I didn’t just ignore them, but didn’t realize that they exist.
The only reason I wanted to go to the USA for, was to get to know the places where my beloved music from the sixties and seventies came from…the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jannis Joplin were what I went there for.
And, hardly surprising I was not shocked by shopping malls milk cans or the empire state building…I just recognised them. Because what to be shocked about, if you don’t know, what to be shocked about.
But I met my expectations: In San Francisco and Los Angeles.

So eat this:
Go out of your continent: You are your continent
I am European.
I am Beer
and Pizza and
the Fall of the Berlin Wall
I am Party
And Culture
And interrail

And this:
You will meet your expectation, even, if it differs from the stereotype.


I have a multiterritorial identity. Depending on where I go different parts of it are of more relevance than others.
Or I can give them more relevance.




Looking at this, it seems like the importance of identity based on terretory is still important today, in a different way however:
Because our world is bigger than the world of our parents was, we are not as rooted in a certain territory as they probably were. This makes us kind of lose in a way but this state of being gives us the possibility of playing with the part of territorialy based identities that is left behind: Stereotypes.

I know now, that expectations will be met.
So I can try to make whatever expectations I want to meet.

Even if this will not entirely chance a stereotype, I can create a new one and will meet it.
I want to make the suggestion that today in Europe all regional, national or European identity is a fairly personal selection of fix stereotypes.
In a multicultural, globalized environment we are very conscious about stereotypes compared to our grandparents or parents for whom they were a given.
And we know, that region and nation are just parts of a big variety of identity options.
In many conversations about where somebody is from both parts know, that that they are just balancing stereotypes.

The lowest common factor, where all these stereotypes collide and interact is Europe.
Europe as a melting pot of stereotypes.
A strange tasting cocktail, of which we’ll never know the components.