Ethnic City

Preamble

It was a Friday morning around nine o’clock, when I finally knocked at the door of the secretary to the dean and asked for my degree certificate. Symbolically if not factually it was the last act in the long ordeal to obtain the honor. I had refrained from attending the official ceremony where those certificates were handed out the day before and the ensuing party. Somehow, I had not been able to muster the energy I needed to face the futility of trying yet again to join a community which by definition was built on segregation. Motionless I had stayed in bed the whole day and looked benumbed at the wondering clouds through the paint tinted glass of my attic window.

To my dismay the document was not kept as I had assumed at the secretary’s office. At the president’s office, the secretary to the president rather than the president himself had the time to confer the honor; the honor.

Startlingly simple, the honor was a piece of paper duly signed and stamped and bore my name, that of the faculty I attended, the university to which the faculty belonged but above all encapsulated in the university’s name, the name of the city which housed the university: the city of Schopenhauer and Goethe and the city of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, the city of my infantile dreams, once so very attractive to a third world striver that I was. If you believed Pierre Bourdieu – and I must have believed him in one sense or another – the piece of paper was a piece of academic capital to be understood – even in his terms – in conjunction with the equally essential social capital of networking and without it as worthless as any piece of duly signed and stamped paper was in the hands of millions of those whom the Germans – euphemistically and without realizing the irony of it – referred to as “Co-citizens”, officially.

Only - despite the actualities - somehow mine was the feeling of a victory however little and insignificant and however worthless that piece of paper in actual German terms, in so far as another “alien” was concerned. It is with a view of explaining the significance of that Insignificant that I am writing these lines. Perhaps it is a story with a hero or at least someone trying not to be a non hero. However that may be, I believe it is worthwhile writing it.


Chapter One

When I arrived in Hanau, that little town in the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main, it was in my cousin Jamshed’s car, an old VW with a moderately tolerable smell of what I thought was carbon dioxide. But it wasn’t that unpleasant smell of carbon which had silenced us on our long way form Vienna. The three of us, Jamshed my cousin, his friend Assad and I kept our different quiets for reasons which were hardly associated with carbon’s odor.

Jamshed’s silence was a dominant one, if one distinguishes between dominant and recessive in adopted quiets. As a driver he still checked angrily form time to time his rear mirror - gauging the impact of his bark on me when I related that joke - and hardly betrayed any sign of being disturbed by having insulted me. Assad’s quiet by comparison was dominant recessive. After Jamshed’s unchallenged bark he pretended to look at the horizon line’s sublime beauty and be totally lost in it, having thus forgotten his immediate surround. And for me the option of asking Jamshed to stop and getting out of the car before reaching Hanau was anything but viable. I had burnt my ships before I had set foot in Europe and certainly long before I embarked on this journey to Hanau. I simply hid inside my doubly recessive silence.


.......