How can we find a new way to see ourselves? — Identity crisis of second-generation immigrants
I introduce myself as being from Germany while not being German. To the question, “Where are you from, then?”
My response: “My parents are from Bulgaria.”
Even though my response seems harmless, it is a symptom of my struggle for identity without falling back on nationality or ascribed ethnicity. In order to get to a stage, where who I am is defined by what I do, I will first have to confront myself with what I am.
By making some of my reflections public, I hope that with exchange we can find some collective clarification.
In The Migrant’s Time, Ranajit Guha touches on many aspects, whether he talks about the feeling of betrayal towards the left behind land of ‘origin’, the in-betweenness in the present, or the (im)possible future with a new community. Guha establishes a temporal understanding for the situation of a person in a diaspora, or even a person who doesn’t participate in a diasporic community, but instead chooses assimilation. He does not speak of the second-generation immigrant, about the children of the one’s who have left the known and arrived at the new. He leaves them, however, with a task:
“a new generation arrives on the scene with its own time, overdetermining and thereby re-evaluating […] temporality in a new round of conflicts and convergences”.
My parents are first-generation immigrants who came from Socialist Bulgaria to the German Democratic Republic shortly before the wall in Berlin fell. They didn’t have many Bulgarian friends that lived in Germany. Some, I remember from my early childhood as reappearing characters, but my parents talk only of few of them anymore.
I did not grow up in a Bulgarian diasporic community.
My dad believes way more in punctuality, bureaucracy, discipline, and the neoliberal or American dream than most of my German friends’ parents. Even although he was taught these values way before he came to Germany, he now associates them with ideals of German success. My sister and I had to learn these principles early on — although I have to admit that I am still not too good at them.
However, my connection to Bulgaria is pretty strong. Ever since I was born, there hasn’t been one summer I missed a visit to Bulgaria. I have deep nostalgic feelings for the land in which the majority of my relatives live and my parents grew up. Some of my most cherished early childhood memories are rooted there. Going there keeps me grounded because I am confronted with social realities that are different from my everyday life in Germany. Due to Bulgarias financial state, my family is part of an educated working class. The food is cheap and the wages and pensions are terribly low. Listening to my aunt’s and uncle’s talk about their work and my cousin’s struggle for a perspective after school only reaffirms my social activism to me. At the same time I feel like a spoiled brat, allthough I’ve been earning money at different job’s — ever since I was fourteen. I enjoy eating the amazingly good vegetables from my Grandma’s garden in the summer, but I am not there throughout the spring and the fall to help her work the field.
I am a foreigner in my parents motherland and I am a foreigner in the country to which they came almost thirty years ago. My Bulgarian isn’t as fluent as my German, and the clothes I wear seem strange to most of my relatives to the extent that they even tell me I don’t look Bulgarian. The same clothes usually make me pass as something ‘southern European’ and ‘educated’ in Germany, but still foreign. Because of my given name, most people guess I’m Italian. Without that hint, I could pass as anything on the Mediterranean coast from Spain to Turkey.
If Salman Rushdie talks about the past being a country which all of us were forced to leave and Ranajit Guha — in the process of migration — sets the country of origin into the past, what does that mean for the reality of the migrants children?
The feeling of displacement, not belonging to either or, troubles me a lot. In moments of clarity and strength, I see that I am not deprived of culture, origin, or community. My double-citizenship technically provides me with not one, but two nationalities. What I lack, though, is a strong sense of and understanding for national identification. As long as the rise of right populism and conservative backlashes continue, this becomes my strength. I don’t have an imaginary homeland, but I do imagine that of my parents. My past is not tied to a certain territory and I don’t seek to go back to it, since I never inhabited either that territory or my parents past. What Guha describes for migrants as a temporal state, is my reality in the now. I am stuck between cultures in the present, or — as Guha says — “between paradigms”.
Redefining that trap into opportunity and perspective will hopefully lead me not to what but to who I am. I know I am not alone on this.
So, are we part of a new generation that will be able to define itself beyond nationality?
