Ich bin ein Berliner

From the East Side Gallery - painted on the remains of the Berlin Wall

Last week I was back in Berlin, courtesy of Martin Barthel and his Comparative Research Network.  In some ways, for example the structure, the week was quite similar to the one I spent with them last year (here's the blog on that one) - but in other ways it was decidedly different.  That was largely down to the people who were gathered there under the EU's Grundtvig scheme, which is remarkable in its cross-sectoral approach to interculturalism.  Usually when I go to an "event" - a festival, a workshop, or even Platform meetings and Practice Exchanges - there is a sense that everybody is there for much the same reason, and that, whatever the national, ethnic and cultural differences, everybody has a similar agenda.  In Martin's workshop, the agendas were radically distinct.  There were people whose work and way of thinking were close to mine, of course - a noted actor from Romania; a dance therapist from Hungary; an intercultural youth and community worker from Mauritania via Copenhagen, who extraordinarily runs an organisation called Crossing Borders! - but there were also people from education and business, politics and grass-roots NGOs, health workers and librarians.  Actually, there were quite a few whose professions never even came up in the conversation - and probably all the better for that.  The mixture allowed Martin and his colleagues Kamilla and Ewelina to create role-plays and scenarios which took everybody out of their comfort zone, and genuinely created the tensions which occur when different cultures meet.  Or collide.

It's simulation, of course.  My one quibble with this work would be that it highlights, through its very celebration of diversity, the one area which intercultural practice has not yet embraced, namely class.  However varied our backgrounds, they were all educated, middle-class professions - the sort of jobs that sit readily with language skills and international travel.  We may have role-played refugees and starving people, but we did not encounter them - even though some of the former were right on the doorstep in Kreuzberg.  I don't blame CRN for that at all - it's just something that has been preying on my mind for a while now.

It's to do with walls.  Berlin, in many ways, is the symbol of an inclusive idealism - its notorious wall either demolished or making space for optimistic murals.  But I have also recently seen Beirut, where there are deep, extreme economic divisions that accentuate cultural difference; and I have thought about those refugees' journey from Palestine, where there is still a literal wall dividing their people from their neighbours.  I have also been in Belfast, where it was explained to me that the people are not yet ready for the "Peace Walls" to come down.  And last summer we worked with refugees from the Western Sahara, where the occupying power, Morocco, has erected the longest wall in the world - and nobody in the West even talks about it.

I'm hugely grateful for the week in Berlin: and for the way it highlighted how very far there is to go.

A week in Berlin

Just got back from a fascinating week in Berlin, courtesy of the EU's Grundtvig Programme, who funded me to do what they call "In-Service Training" with an organisation called the Comparative Research Network, looking at interculturalism and cross-community dialogue.  CRN is an academic set-up, largely run by geographers, but the workshop was very practical, indeed very theatrical, in its approach, and pointed some really useful ways of making use of theoretical ideas around cultural exchange.  Just the sort of thing we've been looking to develop in the community engagement side of the company.

Take the image above.  The feet belong to a Turkish woman, a first-generation migrant to Berlin, who lives in the Kreuzberg area of the city.  This is a hugely diverse part of the city, far from the conventional tourist trail, and it seemed strange to be led around in a tour group.  But the viewpoint and ideas of a local guide from a particular community enabled us to see the area very differently.  There is history everywhere you look...  even in Berlin's equivalent of Tottenham.  The little bronze plaques at her feet are miniature memorials to Jewish people taken to the concentration camps by the Nazis.  There are many of them along Karl-Marx-strasse.  She showed us her mosque, which is a converted Christian Free Church, a school where 90% of the pupils are from immigrant backgrounds, shop windows with clothes for Turkish weddings and circumcisions.  The city from inside.  A beautiful cultural reversal.

On the last day of the workshop, after presenting what we do to the rest of a very cross-disciplinary group, I found myself talking animatedly about how exciting it had been to take part in a workshop so specifically rooted in the city.  One year ago, I said, only a few yards from the Wood Green office, my own city had been in flames.  We have to address this disjuncture between living somewhere and regarding it as home.  We have to find ways for people to validate their London neighbourhoods as cultural spaces in which they are at home.  I still have to process the ideas from the workshop fully - but my sense is that they may point some exciting ways forward.