Additional Week 4 Reflection

Although there was not a required blog post this week, I felt as those this week was especially important for me to reflect on as I made more and more connections between our program, my work and my own identity. The week began with a lot of free time to do research and prepare for our presentations on Thursday. I used this time to try to reform my research topic in order to fit what I soon realized was a reality of immigration in Germany; although supranational organizations are important, ground-level grassroots organizations touch and affect those individuals who face issues around immigration and asylum every day. I spent time trying to reach out to my contacts, who unfortunately were very busy and I have yet to hear back about my research questions that focus more on my new topic.

On Monday, I also got to participate in one of my work meetings by telecommuting for the first time since the program started. I finally got enough Wireless Internet to Skype in, although Skype is quite finicky and my call was dropped a couple times. Taking a step back from our close examination of German identity actually allowed me to look at the work we’re doing here through a new lens. I work as a research assistant on a project that is attempting to code every major mass movement throughout the world between 1800-2012, and by taking some time to do my work I re-examined the main 270 variables that we code the movements by and worked to compare them to our program. I took this lens to consider how the Third Reich came to power in Germany, and how all counter-movements against the Nazi, the Soviet state and even in current day relate to the variables I am trained to code. Some of these variables include the identity of those mobilizing, the policy areas mobilize for, their mobilization tactics and their successes. It’s hard to imagine any of the movements between 2007-2012 in Georgia had the same amount of propaganda as the Nazi regime, but it is important to realize the connections and similarities of movements around the world and that they both used this specific tactic to help gain some successes along their individual policy demands.

On Wednesday and Thursday I had a lot of time to reflect on one of the favorite topics to discuss in Germany – the understandings and perceptions of art through street art and memorialization. Through our Art Walk on Wednesday, and then again through listening to my peers presentations on their research this quarter, I was able to think about not only the importance of art creation, but also the perception and understandings of art by the viewer. Can art be a way to spread a message when every individual interprets it and projects one’s own identity and understandings onto the art? Sometimes I think that art can do just as much damage as good if it only accentuates the differences in beliefs between individuals through their different understandings of the intended message of the art. Sometimes I almost wish I had focused my research project on art so I could explore this closer, but hopefully I will have the chance to in the future.

Over the weekend I had the chance to travel to Krakow, Poland with a few other members of our program. The first two days in Krakow were almost an information overload. We had the chance to visit Oskar Schindler’s factory that is now a national museum on Nazi occupation of Poland, specifically Krakow and on Saturday we toured Auschwitz concentration camp about an hour outside of Krakow. I am still processing the information I learned in Auschwitz and Krakow and so far it’s been hard to reflect on what I saw and was exposed to while there. Through writing and reflection, I am slowly working to compare Auschwitz to the concentration camps I saw in Germany (Sachsenhausen and Dachau), as well as the city-specific information from the former factory. There are important questions to consider, such as the main role of the camps in the Nazi Structure, who were mostly prosecuted in the camps, what the narrative differences is of the story coming from the victim state as opposed to the aggressor state at the time.