This past Friday evening marked the end of my third week in an Integrationskurs here in Berlin — a state-subsidized German-language course that is intended to help immigrants become more fully a part of German society. I'd had some German before, so I ended up joining in the middle of the second of six seven-week “modules.” We meet for three hours every afternoon, Monday through Friday… and I have been learning much, much more than just German language.
I am the only American, the only native anglophone in class (the only French citizen, too, for that matter). My classmates are from Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Brazil, and Afghanistan. The women outnumber the men by more than 2 to 1; two of the women wear the hijab. Alana, the Ukrainian woman, is about the same age as I am, and we are the oldest in the class. Two of the men (an Afghan and a Vietnamese) are also older than the rest, who are mostly in their mid-twenties. Our three teachers are all native German speakers (and all polyglots), and I have been very impressed with how well they teach.
As with all such classes, some students are more diligent about doing their homework than others, and some have more natural aptitude for learning languages. Some students are clearly handicapped by their Muttersprachen (mother tongues): for example, the three Vietnamese students are often nearly unintelligible to my ears, as they all seem to have great difficulty pronouncing S and SH sounds that do not occur at the beginning of a word (and sometimes even then). In large part thanks to my previous short year of college German way back in the mid-1970s — taken mostly because of my voice training — I have the best accent of any of the students (no false modesty here!)… and about half the class has asked me why my accent is so good. (Frau Professorin Frankfurter vom Cal State Northridge, ich danke Ihnen!)
But today I really want to write about one of the Afghan men. Our latest lesson covered more in-depth greetings and exchanges of personal information, and one of the in-class oral exercises was for people to relate why they had come to Germany. My standard reply is always along the lines of “unser Haus in Frankreich ist, aber mein Mann muss hier arbeiten, und ich arbeite über das Internet, also…” (“our house is in France, but my husband has to work here, and since I work by internet…”). Most of the women were also here because of some connection to a husband or partner who is either German or for whatever reason lives and works in Berlin.
Unsurprisingly, both Hamed and Farun (not their real names) left Afghanistan because of the war. When they answered the teacher's query, I could have cried (and could not stop the tears from springing to my eyes): such stark answers to such a routine question! I am far from my familiar American home places (and sometimes it feels very far indeed), but mine was essentially a voluntary choice. Leaving their familiar mountainous homeland was for them a matter of life and death.
I didn't have the chance to talk to Farun, but I did talk to Hamed during the 15-minute class break — and yes, in German, our common language. The older of the two Afghan men, Hamed comes from the eastern part of Afghanistan and has been with his wife and children in Berlin since 2001 (his younger children were born in Germany). At least some of his many brothers and sisters likewise left Afghanistan, where they had enjoyed a middle-class life until strife and war destroyed their family property and business.
Hamed's parents stayed behind, as did a sister and a brother. Hamed was able to briefly return in 2007 — a visit of less than a week. But not long after his visit, Hamed told me, the Taliban rounded up and beheaded both his father and his brother. Though Hamed would like his mother and sister to leave the country, his mother refuses to leave the place where her husband and son are buried, and the sister will not leave her mother.
Hamed does not dare visit his mother and sister again: he is a marked man. And he is completely, totally convinced that as soon as the European and American forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban will return and ruthlessly stamp out any and all modernity (at least any and all that does not have something to do with weapons and warfare). They will, he said, step up the practice of publicly executing all perceived enemies, usually by hanging, in the local stadium. I can hardly bear to think of how desperate the lot of women and girls will become (again) in a place in which their lot is already so grim, but a continued American military presence there seems utterly untenable for many, many reasons.
To hear Hamed's story in the plain and simple German words at his command was far more powerful than I can convey here. It was not that he was indifferent to the anguish of his family's story — no, far from it — it was just that the effort to express the tale in this new language helped tamp down his feelings, otherwise I think he might have wept openly. It was all I could do to refrain from weeping, to hold myself back from apologizing for our country's role in his family's past troubles… and in their future ones as well. In some ways I am amazed that he was willing to talk to me at all.
Hamed's oldest child is a 19-year-old daughter who will be getting her German Abitur (high school baccalaureate degree) this year. There is no question in his mind that he made the right choice to flee to whatever country would take them in — in this case, so generously, Germany. Hamed has prospered in Berlin — at least enough so that he can now take the time off from work to finally learn German. He was very happy this week to learn a word that he will love being able to say to his oldest girl when she graduates: Gratulation! … a sentiment I share with him here, still with tears in my eyes.
10:10 AM PT: Vielen Dank for putting me on the rec list.