Tagebuch KW 19 – Lesen, kochen, schreiben, auf die Impfung warten, wie immer halt

Diese blöde Eingabemaske von WordPress, die immer das Kästchen „Remember me“ angeklickt haben will.

Selten so viel geheult wie bei diesem Film.

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Auf die Zweitimpfung warten, um mal die Überschrift zu konkretisieren. Noch drei Tage.

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Der FCA bleibt erstklassig. So gerade eben, aber okay. Nach mehreren Samstagen, an denen mir Fußball egal war, habe ich vorgestern mal wieder ein Spiel geschaut und war doch erleichterter als erwartet. Aber im Prinzip ist es immer noch eher egal.

Das Wort „Trümmersaison“, das dieser BVB-Fan nutzte, fand ich großartig. Bitte googeln Sie selbst, wie wenig grün sich Schalke und Dortmund sind und wie Schalke gegen Frankfurt gespielt hat. (Falls Sie das Thema interessiert, wissen Sie das eh.)

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Der Vertrag des Verlags für die Diss ist da. Das ist schön. Den kann ich jetzt nämlich an einige Stiftungen schicken, die mir hoffentlich Geld geben.

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Austria’s newest citizens reclaim birthright stolen by the Nazis

Die Nachricht, dass Österreich es Nachkommen emigrierter, vertriebener oder ermordeter Juden und Jüdinnen einfacher macht, die Staatsangehörigkeit ihrer Vorfahren anzunehmen, freute mich sehr. Ich erinnere mich noch an einen Artikel aus der FAZ, den ich auf dem Weg nach Nürnberg ins Kunstarchiv las, dass Deutschland sich damit ewig schwer getan hat. Inzwischen scheint sich das auch geändert zu haben, sagt zumindest der Artikel. Es sollte mich nicht mehr überraschen, dass die Aufarbeitung der Folgen der NS-Diktatur immer noch an allen Ecken knirscht, ich lese schließlich seit über drei Jahren ständig davon, aber es erwischt mich immer noch.

„Rohrlich’s grandfather escaped before the outbreak of the war and got into Harvard in 1946, four years after his parents died in a concentration camp. Rohrlich, a 25-year-old resident of the Washington DC area, remembers trying to get memories of Vienna from his grandfather.

“Anytime we asked him about it, we would usually get a one-sentence answer,” he says.

A sobering piece of heritage which has reached him is the Gothic-lettered passport of his great-grandparents Egon and Cilly, stamped with the red “J” signifying they were Jews. Many of those who had to leave were not keen on talking about the experience. The priority was rather to draw a line under Austria and start afresh elsewhere. For their descendants, becoming Austrian citizens is often a way of reconnecting with their forebears.

“Now, being an Austrian citizen and an engineer kind of makes me feel closer to him,” says Rohrlich, referring to the fact he also shares his grandfather’s profession.“

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The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is “Disgusting”

In Malmö steht seit 2018 ein Museum, das sich „Disgusting Food Museum“ nennt und eher spezielle oder lokal genossene Lebensmittel nicht nur präsentiert, sondern auch zum Verzehr anbietet. Sauerkrautsaft und Lakritz sind übrigens zwei davon. Das Museum führt ein Scoreboard, wer sich am meisten beim Probieren übergeben muss.

„An Icelandic shark dish, called hákarl, was the first assault on his stomach. “Eating it was like gnawing on three-week-old cheese from the garbage that had also been pissed on by every dog in the neighborhood,” he said. Next up was durian, a spiky, custard-like fruit from Southeast Asia that “smelled like socks at the bottom of a gym locker, drizzled with paint thinner.” But worst of all was surströmming, a fermented herring that is beloved in northern Sweden. De Meyer said that eating it was like taking a bite out of a corpse.

He vomited ten times, topping the museum’s previous record of six. Mercifully, admission tickets are printed on airplane-style barf bags.“

Die Autorin Jiayang Fan lebte bis Anfang der 1990er Jahre mit ihren Eltern in China und beschreibt ihre erste nicht-chinesische Mahlzeit an Bord des Flugs, der sie in die USA brachte:

„In a tinfoil-covered tray was what looked like a pile of dumplings, except that they were square. I picked one up and took a bite, expecting it to be filled with meat, and discovered a gooey, creamy substance inside. Surely this was a dessert. Why else would the squares be swimming in a thick white sauce? I was grossed out, but ate the whole meal, because I had never been permitted to do otherwise. For weeks afterward, the taste festered in my thoughts, goading my gag reflex. Years later, I learned that those curious squares were called cheese ravioli.

Olives were another mystery. In Chongqing, I had been introduced to them as a fig-like snack, dried or cured, that had a sweet-tart kick. In the U.S., I placed a dark-green drop onto my tongue and, for the first time in my life, spat something out of my mouth and into my palm. Salty and greasy weren’t what I was expecting, and my reaction was born as much of disgust as it was of having been deceived.

To be a new immigrant is to be trapped in a disgusting-food museum, confused by the unfamiliar and unsettled by the familiar-looking. The firm, crumbly white blocks that you mistake for tofu are called feta. The vanilla icing that tastes spoiled is served on top of potatoes and is called sour cream. At a certain point, the trickery of food starts to become mundane. Disgusting foods become regulars in the cafeteria, and at the dinner table.“

Der Artikel befasst sich generell mit den Vorlieben für Speisen, die wir seit der Kindheit kennen, der Entstehung von Ekel und natürlich auch mit der latent rassistischen Annahme, dass nur Dinge, die Westeuropa und die USA als schmackhaft bezeichnen, auch schmackhaft sind.

„As Peterson wrote, “The museum is trying to have it both ways—poking the bear, then backing away, hands raised innocently.” Even those who believe in the museum’s statement of purpose question whether it can be put into practice. The trouble with cultural institutions, Casey R. Kelly, the author of “Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization,” said, is that those who run them can’t always control what’s being communicated. “On the one hand, the museum is introducing visitors to new foods,” he said, “but, on the other, there’s a cosmopolitan sanitization process at work,” in which foods are being stripped of their cultural context and then presented at a museum that keeps track of how many people they make vomit.“

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The Game Is Changing for Historians of Black America

Sehr interessiert gelesen: wie digitale Hilfsmittel die Rekonstruktion Schwarzen Lebens erleichtern. Im Artikel lernte ich auch, dass selbst Archive segregiert waren, nicht nur Busse, Schulen und Trinkwasserbrunnen. Das heißt, dass weiße Menschen darüber entschieden, was von Schwarzen überliefert werden sollte. Falls es überhaupt etwas zu überliefern gab, auch darüber schreibt der Historiker William Sturkey, dessen eigene Forschung mit einem Foto begann, das er nicht zuordnen konnte. Er benennt Ancestry und Newspaper.com, das zu Ancestry gehört, und erwähnt auch, welche Gründe es neben der Rassentrennung für den schlechten Überlieferungszustand Schwarzer Geschichte in den USA gibt. Große Leseempfehlung.

„To research and write the stories of Black and white southerners is to undertake almost two entirely different tasks. Black artifacts and records have long been systematically destroyed and marginalized. Like water fountains and public schools, the creation of historical archives was once racially segregated. Archives are usually supported by state governments or private institutions and include a wide range of personal, organizational, and government documents. Extant collections typically reflect the prejudice of past white southern archivists who didn’t believe that the Black people who shared their society lived lives worth studying. When white archivists set out to collect documents they thought future historians would find most important, they often gathered only the photographs, ledgers, diaries, and letters produced by wealthy, white citizens. Most of these archivists didn’t think someone might someday want to study the lives of African Americans. Their racism prevented them from imagining that someone like me could ever exist.

Black people were also erased by the newspapers of the past. Many mainstream papers in the Jim Crow South didn’t mention African Americans unless they were arrested or killed. Sure, there were occasional features on church functions or sporting events, but in general Black communities received far less coverage than their white counterparts. Black southerners in Hattiesburg and elsewhere responded by starting their own newspapers. But many of those papers have been lost to time. While Hattiesburg’s Black community published several newspapers before World War II, only a single issue of one paper remains available today. When it comes to traditional sources, the historical record of Hattiesburg and many other Black communities is meager.

Environmental factors also conspire against researchers of Black history. Like many Black neighborhoods of the Jim Crow South, Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District was built over a tenuous landscape. The neighborhood sits in a floodplain near the confluence of two rivers. Even if Black people had managed to save their own historical records, their neighborhood—and the materials housed within it—remained susceptible to destructive weather events. If a Black business created a ledger in, say, 1910, any number of minor or major floods over the ensuing decades could have destroyed it. The same is true of family Bibles, wedding photographs, community newspapers, and an endless number of other heirlooms that might have provided rich clues into the history of Black life.

Active racism, exclusion, and environmental injustice have systematically destroyed or buried whole sections of Black history. Many of those who gripe about “erasing history” of Confederate monuments and other symbols in the South have no idea how much history has already been erased. This erasure is part of the reason why the picture of the distinguished Black men in the window stopped me in my tracks. You don’t see many old pictures of Black people from that neighborhood.“

May 17th, 2021