Cause Célèbre
Officially, we don’t “celebrate” national holidays. We “observe” them.
Observing rather than celebrating feels appropriate today, as the current Administration continues to run roughshod over ethical and empathetic norms with zero accountability. Like many other Americans, especially abroad here in Berlin, I feel awkward wishing others a “Happy 4th” this Independence Day. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration birthed a vision of democracy that continues to struggle to live up to its implied inclusiveness, and that has never been more apparent than in the blatantly racist rhetoric espoused by far too many who currently call themselves Americans. Rhetoric now codified by official policy which itself expands upon the institutional racism historically sanctioned by even the most progressive of American Presidents.
Last weekend, coming off of Berlin’s annual Black Lives Matter protest along the streets of Kreuzberg, followed by one in global solidarity with Families Belong Together, I found myself taking a few moments alone to wander the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is just across the street from the US Embassy where we were demonstrating. Berlin remains filled with historical sites along the main thoroughfare that encourage its residents and visitors to simply slow down and reflect.
From there, I jumped on a train out to Wannsee, an hour or so from the center of Berlin. There sits still the House of the Wannsee Conference, where the upper echelons of the SS ironed out the administrative logistics of the “Final Solution” in 1942. An adjoining permanent exhibit on the Anti-Semitic sentiment and policies throughout Germany in the preceding decade, such as 1935’s Nuremberg Laws, makes clear that these decision makers had long since leaped past any moral considerations. Instead, these men spent the 90 minutes of the conference debating details such as how far back one’s Jewish heritage had to go before being deemed “German” enough to be excluded from the mass deportations into what were already unofficial death camps.
Once again, Berlin awed me with an unvarnished look at its own checkered past, wholly applicable to the present, especially in the country of my birth. The Nazi poster within the Wannsee House exhibit that decried the amount of taxpayer money being used to subsidize healthcare for the ill and disabled reflects the debates continuing to rage in modern America’s still needlessly stratified society. The following day, I didn’t think twice about unabashedly celebrating Canada Day with friends. In truth I needed the respite after taking so much on and in over the days prior, raw material for today’s essay.
And so I’ve taken July 4 off from my day job, as I did last year, reserving the time and space for another personal reconciliation with the American Dream. Using the occasion to step away from the containment of my workplace focus to take stock and organize the jumble of ideology that eats up mental space in reaction to the continued madness back home. A house cleaning of the mind and soul, a la Marie Kondo. As a single man with no children and in general no responsibilities to anyone other than myself, I have the privilege of being able to semi-regularly dedicate time to this exercise, and I hope it is of some worth to others whose schedules are less flexible.
Because the Battle of Gettysburg also spanned Independence Day in 1863, I often reflect upon it during this time. On July 4, 2016, I examined my longtime fascination with this lore, unfurling into my own winding journey onto the battlefield itself.
After the election, I continued that journey, beginning to observe a new Independence Day tradition of my own. So in 2017, I once again set aside a large part of the holiday to delve into the legacy of Gettysburg, this time in the renewed wake of attention surrounding Confederate monuments. I related that history to that of my current city of residence, in which physical reminders of not only the inhumanity of the Nazi regime and the divisions of the Cold War abound, but even transplanted pieces of American history, such as the Rosa Parks House.
This year I’m leaving Gettysburg behind, but continuing the thread of the Asian American experience abroad. Following with the theme of observing rather than celebrating holidays, I traveled to Flanders Field American Cemetery within the town of Waregem in Belgium at the end of May, to attend the Memorial Day Ceremony which has been held there since 1923. Having grown up with the Memorial Day special, “What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?”, which ends with a stirring recitation of “In Flanders Fields”, it was long past time for me to pay my respects in person.
Up close, the site of the Flanders Field American Cemetery is smaller than I pictured it. The Charlie Brown special had planted the entire scope of both World Wars upon it in my mind. But it is nonetheless a place of high reverence; one senses the detail in which the life of every soldier interred there has and continues to be appreciated and carried forward. Local schoolchildren “adopt” a soldier and share his story through their own research.
Among the volunteers at the ceremony was Troop 325 of the Boy Scouts of America, based in SHAPE, an hour or so from Waregem. This Troop included a young girl, a bright sign of increasing inclusiveness within America’s most conservative institutions. Other young Americans in attendance included a high school class learning about World War I.
For the children of Waregem, this event is a fixed tradition, and the ceremony always features them singing the Belgian and American national anthems, then waving the flags of both countries with youthful exuberance. Even as someone who blanched at the references by the day’s speakers to the “War on Terror” followed with the expected platitudes of “Never Forget” and “Freedom Isn’t Free”, I was quite moved by the expression of the two countries’ longstanding friendship, as expressed by their youth.
From the continued vast turnout for the ceremony, it is clear how grateful Belgians remain to Americans for their help in the liberation of this region from German occupation. Interestingly, even Germany sent a wreath to be laid onto the memorial during the proceedings, cementing the Federal Republic of Germany’s postwar fellowship with the USA and Belgium.
There’s a small museum on site, which walks the visitor through the 100 Days Offensive in which these American soldiers took part. The exhibit also touches upon some of the causes which brought the USA into the conflict, such as the unrestricted warfare waged by German submarines in waters trafficked by American vessels, and the interception of the Zimmermann telegram, which revealed a potential German-Mexican alliance against the States. Still, there didn’t seem to be as clear an inciting incident as there was with Pearl Harbor (would the current Administration have coordinated a more effective relief effort if Puerto Rico had been attacked by a foreign power instead of a hurricane?).
Even today, historians and laypeople are divided over whether America should have broken its neutrality and intervened in the Great War. The moral imperatives were not as clear as they would be against the Axis Powers. And yet, I can’t deny the warm feeling I drew from the American-Belgian affection that I experienced this Memorial Day. This affection has been expressed without fail on the occasion for nearly 100 years. Great nations build upon such affection. Others reconcile in its wake. The air was as solemn at the ceremony as it would be at the Black Lives Matter and the Families Belong Together protests, but also as charged with positivity. For all of its immediate and terrifying power, hate has its limits as a unifying force, since it is inherently divisive. Stronger Together.
Unbeknownst to me that day (or perhaps I had forgotten), some 60 km from Waregem, there stands a memorial to the deserters of World War I in Poperinge. I had spent some time in Poperinge during a bike tour of West Flanders in 2015, and visited several other neighboring WWI sites. Fortunately for my ignorance, my current surroundings are home to their own installation in memory of the deserters from both World Wars. After exiting the House of the Wannsee Conference last Saturday, I continued westward into Potsdam.
Artist Mehmet Aksoy wanted the negative space of this piece to express the inner conflict between war and peace within the solider. The human instinct to help his fellow man shoved aside by being told that that fellow man is actually not human, at least not enough to avoid a death sentence on the battlefield. Accompanied by a 1925 verse from Kurt Tucholsky honoring an unknown soldier’s reluctance to shoot that fellow man, this 1989 sculpture pre-dated the fall of the Berlin Wall by two months.
The concept of honoring deserters is still relatively new to me. The first time I visited Yosemite as a child, I immediately ran inside the cabin and switched on the television. Yes, even after years of Scouting, I’m a city boy through and through. But showing that night was a war movie. The scene that was playing when I started watching was the execution of a soldier found guilty of cowardice. I was young enough that the formality of such a gruesome sentence shook me. In the States, the case of Bowe Bergdahl still enrages many. Committing financial and creative resources to acknowledging the experiences of such men and women at war is a practice that will hopefully continue to proliferate. It is only then that everyone can understand what a standing military truly costs.
Along with the Memorial for the Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters, Aksoy’s sculpture stands as part of the Platz der Einheit (Place of Unity) in Potsdam. Originally, Aksoy’s work was unveiled in Bonn, then a point of asylum for those escaping from East Germany. Now once again, refugees are a political flashpoint in Germany, as in the United States, my two homelands. Even in Hong Kong, from where my parents emigrated, three families who respectively fled Sri Lanka and the Philippines face deportation after providing shelter to Edward Snowden at a critical time. Their last hope lies in being accepted as refugees by Canada. It’s high time that America, Germany, and Canada, among other leading nations, reassert themselves as Places of Unity, recognizing the human race as one population. The vast majority of all three countries support a more humane immigration policy than the ones currently being enacted, yet the backslide continues. The challenge is left to the people to show the world what true democracy is made of.
A fitting closing image for this year’s Independence Day comes from a presentation by the Harun Farocki Institut at Kino Arsenal this past March. The screen opens up on a snow-capped plain, seemingly bare. In the distance, a dot starts moving towards camera. In voiceover, we hear Black Panther Bobby Seale delivering a speech. Seale’s words continue over the unbroken shot for 11 minutes as the figure continues moving closer, eventually to be revealed to be an Afro-German boy, snug in a warm parka. We take in Seale’s impassioned oration, literally given a human face.
African American director Skip Norman made this short, Cultural Nationalism, as a student film in 1969 during his studies in Berlin. Once again, I’ve learned more about home while abroad. Over his time at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie, Norman took part in 27 productions. The Harun Farocki Institut programmed five of Norman’s shorts for the evening, and led an audience discussion afterward. Among other race-related topics, the films exposed Germans to the goings-on within the civil rights struggle undertaken by the Black Panthers, documented in procedural detail.
Norman’s instincts for experimental techniques, with overlaid graphics as well as an uncensored depiction of interracial intercourse, call again to mind Olivier Assayas’s question in 2012’s Something in the Air, which takes place around the same time as Norman’s residency in West Germany: “Shouldn’t revolutionary cinema use revolutionary syntax?” It makes as much sense then as it does now, when revolution is all about maintaining a sustainable level of engagement. As Asian American civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs might have said, revolts end. Revolutions don’t. Round and round we go.
With the level of such cultural exchange that I’ve witnessed in Europe, it shouldn’t surprise me that its residents are so familiar with American history. The Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil Rights Movement, the Declaration of Independence, all of these elements so enshrined in our national makeup, are all well-known over here. Many of the lessons and promises of those events and movements have been implemented abroad to success, sometimes beyond what is currently available under American institutions.
But those lessons continue to emanate from the American Dream and the unending endeavor to implement it. The Dream has recently been recast as the “American experiment”, or also the “American enterprise”. This shift in terminology feels like a dodge, but it also recognizes how young our nation is in the wider scope of history. There is also reason in not expressing ourselves solely or foremost as idealists, especially when things are so bleak.
For me, as a minority beta male, I’m coming to see myself through these annual essays as a vessel of empathy — no more, and no less. Exercising empathy not just to be a nice or good person, but as an advocate for empathy as the basis for the most effective public policies. One doesn’t have to be a bleeding heart to recognize that a Muslim Ban only gives angry impressionable young men, susceptible to ISIS recruiters, more proof that America doesn’t care about them.
Like the boy in Cultural Nationalism, I am but a dot on the screen. I may not have significance, but I have purpose. The path to true independence lies in knowing the difference between the two. Stay Woke. Observe.
