On the sidewalks

By Thow Xin Wei

…eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert.

Walter Benjamin - “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”

1.

It was my first trip to Germany, and the friend I was staying with met me at the airport to accompany me on the train journey back to his apartment. Exiting Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, someone came up to us and there was a brief exchange I didn’t understand, but, as my friend explained, he wanted the plastic bottles we had just finished drinking from. One could claim back the deposit on the bottle—das Pfand—included in the price of purchase; next to the rubbish bins and streetlamps I would sometimes see a small collection of cans and bottles left for the homeless that impressed me. I hadn’t come across the pf combination much in the languages I knew, and it still catches my eye amongst the long trains of letters, asking to be read out loud: Pfand, Pfad, Pfiff, Pflege.

Set into the pavements where these offerings lay were Stolpersteine: brass commemorative plaques that marked the last residence or workplace of a person deported to the Nazi concentration camps. This memorialisation was initiated in 1992 by Gunter Demnig, an artist, a fact that surprised me as I still had the provincial Singaporean habit of assuming everything in civic space was a government project. Stolpersteine—stolpern, to stumble, Steine, stones—take their name from a German expression for “a difficult juncture where things could go wrong”; with their dull gleam they stand out as foreign objects marking, where now you stand, that somebody was once at home. Perhaps it was here they stopped each day to draw their keys from a breast pocket, the little jingle announcing their arrival. Later, from their balcony, they would watch the traffic drifting down the street, while passers-by greeted one another and avoided the drunks; in the evening, a shopkeeper in an opposite window would take care of the books, a flicker of light that would give way to dark. Perhaps it was here where they were finally prised away and loaded onto a waiting van, while eager hands struck their names off a list. Pflaster, Pflicht, Verpflichtungen.

Image provided courtesy of Thow Xin Wei.

2.

Because my move, as a Singaporean, was relatively quick, I optimistically learnt as much of the language as I could from apps supplemented by German news accounts on Instagram, pausing when a post appeared to slowly unwrap their headlines and captions, squirrelling away the words I had learned.

12 November: “Kriegstüchtigkeit”, war readiness military proficiency

“Ein hässliches Wort für eine hässliche Sache”: A hateful word for a hateful thing. Defending his use of the term, the Federal Defense Minister explained that proficiency, Tüchtigkeit is a special kind of fitness, Tauglichkeit and so the word merely signals the willingness to defend oneself. “Und das heißt nichts anderes, als das.”

13 November: Überlastung, overload

Keine Überlastung trotz vieler Geflüchteter: No overload despite many refugees. The root is die Last: which means a load, but I always think of “lash”. Very well then: the lashing of ropes that secure the load; the lashes on the back that carry them, across the river, across the sea. Die Belastung—a strain, burden, pressure, a mark that lasts.

7 December: Zweifeln, doubts

Viele fordern mehr Abschiebungen. Aber was sagen die, die es machen müssen? Polizistinnen und Polizisten erzählen von ihren Einsätzen und ihren Zweifeln. Zwei is two, and I can’t help but hear English demons in fel. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. I thought it might be related to Fels, cliffs or crags, and so one is between a rock and a hard place. But it is actually related to falten, not to falter but to fold, and so one can imagine the moment in a sunny wood, before one is enveloped by the foliage and sent, posthaste, into the future.

31 January: Opfer, victim

Wie Kinder von Holocaust-Opfern mit dem Leid ihrer Eltern umgehen. In a story by one pair of siblings about another, a witch is pushed into the oven where she had once baked the bricks and mortar for the house they had eaten. Das Opfer des Ofens. She turns into ash that rises with the smoke, and flies away to a new home by the river across the sea, from which the water flows under the bridge. “Of course they want her happy there,” said a friend in one of his cynical moods, “they stay friends as long as she never comes back for her old address.”

10 January: Geheim, secret

"Ausländer Raus” wird “Remigration”: Wir werden Ausländer in ihre Heimat zurückführen. Millionenfach. Das ist kein #Geheimplan. Das ist ein Versprechen. Heimat means home, and one could be forgiven for thinking that Geheim means “homed”. But actually: “secret”, one thing homed inside another. Here, they have said, there is no secret: go home.

Early on, now buried irrecoverably beneath the pile of new vocabulary, was a video whose hazy fragments I have somehow retained: an old lady—Turkish, probably—is seated in front of the camera in a mountainous black dress merging into her headscarf. She tells the camera she has never learnt German well. A close-up on the crags of her face. She points to one ear, hier rein, then the other, hier raus. Her voice is dry and cracked with age, and yet there is something childlike about her—or childish perhaps, depending on which side of the comments you stood. I cannot remember any of them word for word, but recall their wearily predictable outrage, leavened by one commenter saying how sad and isolated she must feel, all these years, unable to fully participate in German society. Some days I imagine her floating slowly down the sidewalks in that billowing black dress, blissfully untouched by die der das… on others, she does not dawdle, because nothing catches her eye nor anyone takes her hand—she gathers her shawl around her and strides steadily forth, going about whatever business has brought her here.

3.

Here, I have rediscovered a sensation I first had in my early days in Java, sitting amongst people who, after having established I was welcome by speaking to me in simple Indonesian, then continued the real conversation amongst themselves in Javanese. Javanese—especially in the “low” forms spoken amongst friends—is expressive and punchy, its retroflex plosives, low vowels, and obsession with onomatopoeia giving it a weight and a heft that I have not felt in the other languages I know. Online, it is celebrated for both its near-comic specificity—to fall: tiba; to fall forward, face first: nyungsep; to fall backwards, head first: nggeblak; to fall from above: ceblok; to fall into liquid: Jegur—as well as its potential for brutal economy—lha, tha. Even its high, formal form, which seems insistent on replacing every word and particle with a polite version several syllables longer, is unparalleled at indicating in an instant both the incomparable honour of your presence and the insurmountable social gulf between your eloquent host and you, the landa who cannot remember whether the third-person pronoun is piyambak or piyambakipun.

In those moments, I felt a kind of surrender, sinking beneath the sound as one does with music. In some of them I am sitting with friends at a lesehan, a mat spread out on the sidewalk next to a stall selling drinks. The orange light from above is more painterly than real, placing everyone else beyond a shadowy barrier. Or I am at a bench at a warong, pressed up against the counter where the gorengan have sat since evening, the canvas tent cocooning friends and strangers alike. To the side, a kettle on a stove, next to glasses being washed in a tub. No matter how old the speakers, or how banal their actual conversation, I feel like a child who has been granted a seat at the grownups’ table by virtue of my silence and good behaviour, absolved of all need for participation in this discussion of the real world.

Other occasions: I am waiting for a performance to start, the hosts giving a speech whose formality is as much in its delivery as in its vocabulary, the syllables drifting evenly over all assembled like a fresh coating of snow. Sugeng rawuh dhumateng para tamu undangan ingkang sampun rawuh wonten ing adicara pahargyan dinten punika. Once, as an uninvited onlooker observing the performances at an event, I felt that something was off and realised it was that the young emcees spoke High Javanese with the annoyingly cheerful intonation of Indonesian TV presenters. SeLAmat MenYAKsikan!!! This was a gathering of the Javanese diaspora, attendees coming from Malaysia, Singapore, Suriname, the Netherlands, and so on, titled Ngumpulke balung pisah—“assembling scattered bones''—and I felt like a foreign object in that anatomical collection who carried their ancestry in their hearts, their guts, their marrow.

4.

I am mistaken: the first time I had this feeling was not in Java, but in Malaysia, during Chinese New Year, hearing my parents and relatives talk in Hokkien, a language they never used with me in Singapore. The singsong accent washes all around me—yi suka jia, wa balu ki, wa mm zai yi ai zo ha mi—but nothing comes my way: I am a guest at this table, a child who is only expected to eat. Later, back across the causeway, passing my parents room in the night, I would hear it again as they chatted to one another, going over the day and planning the next, giving the language, to my ear, an intimate connection with the real world, clinging to it in a thin and transparent film. To this day, I have not learned it.

5.

One day, fetching my keys from my pocket, I found my surname finally listed on the buzzer of my apartment, nestled between those of my housemates. This had taken somewhat longer than it should’ve: a slow response from our property managers meant that for weeks I had existed by dint of a printed sticker stuck on so I could receive the bureaucratic missives from the relevant authorities to whom, with each Anmeldung and Termin, I was slowly coming into view. One of these letters began with the beautifully slashed salutation Sehr geehrte/r Frau/Herr Thow, and I imagined myself in the eye of the Behörde, an auntieish Beamtin squinting at me above her glasses across a vast gulf of paperwork, trying to work out my gender from beneath my winter coat, beanie and scarf.

Two Stolpersteine are set just outside our front door, and I always give them a small salute as I pass, usually by quickly touching a hand to my chest. This is a gesture I developed on trips to Thailand with an ex, who was amused by my compulsion to do a wai towards every temple and Spirit House we saw. On one hand, it was embarrassing to have a tic called out, but on the other—well, after all, as a Thai spiritual adviser interviewed by DW explained, "guardian spirits are everywhere, whether near houses, temples, farmlands or rivers. They protect different places and look after us." Surely, coming to their residence, I should greet my hosts them at least? Hence this discreet compromise: the second half of the Indonesian-style handshake which people in Singapore often find disorientating when performed by a Chinese person. I have come to where you are; a space in me is kept for you.

On the sidewalks, I avoid stepping on Stolpersteine, a concern which I initially —and small-mindedly—thought of as exclusively Asian. Later, I came across the passionate objection to them from Marian Offman, a politician in Munich who was also a prominent member of the city’s Jewish community, inviting his colleagues to imagine asking the victims for permission to use their names in a project that would see them trampled underfoot by neo-Nazis and smeared by the dirt from their boots, have them run over by dogs, and perhaps even have passers-by remarking, when stumbling over these “stumbling stones”, that “a Jew was buried here”, as they did in Nazi-era Munich. In short, if we could ask them, would they agree to endure more suffering through the painful work of remembering that we, not they, should bear? “Man trägt die Erinnerung an die Verstorbenen im Herzen und nicht an den Fußsohlen.”

As far as I have read, there are no Stolpersteine in Munich’s public spaces: those commissioned by private sponsors have been stored, waiting to return to their old addresses. In their defence, reads an article from the Goethe Institute, in stepping on Stolpersteine we polish and shine them; in pausing to read them we bow to their memory; in engaging with the names we think about where they lived, not where they were buried, which, come to think of it, would be in the air that envelops the earth, and enters us with every breath. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”

Image provided courtesy of Thow Xin Wei.

6.

The other day I was walking with my friend towards a junction; we would soon cross a bicycle lane. Seeing a cyclist come from behind, I tapped him on the elbow in case she should turn into our path. She did not, and sailed straight ahead past us as the lights turned green. But she called back a danke, and gave a small nod to me.

I can recall quite a few of these small interactions here, the results of little actions which in Singapore would be merely ignored or taken for granted as the oil between the cogs of society. If anything, I often felt as if no matter how small I wore myself down or squeezed myself in, it would never be enough: I would always jut out like an odd-sized object in a cluttered shelf.

Here there is sometimes the opposite problem: some friends find these small actions for strangers unnecessary or baffling, as if I were in a perpetual state of merendahkan diri. And I guess one does have to sometimes be firm or pushy because Germans do seem a little less spatially aware than I’m used to — they stand at the doorways of trains and buses, just being... larger, somehow, and always in the way. I think of Singaporeans before the years of stoic, red-jacketed makciks waving traffic wands on train platforms finally corralled us into a semblance of civic and moral rectitude. To be as pathologically polite as I am, fading like old Stolpersteine into the Pflaster, seems foolish at best and foolhardy at worst.

So it's in these small moments, being thanked for giving way, for hurrying across a crossing for a car, for watching out for others, that I find a space for myself floating through these pavements the colour of the winter sky. Pas aku, ich passe rein. I remember the little ritual greetings in Java: kula nuwun, monggo, nderek langkung, nggih, these words and gestures which were so comforting to perform, a constellation of stars over the void inside. Each point, a dot on the batik that will cleave to me, set me in the earth.

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Thow Xin Wei graduated from NUS in 2009 with a degree in English Literature. More importantly, he discovered a love for Javanese gamelan, which has shaped everything thereafter. His other essays and reviews can be found in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore and Jom. He is interested in the arts—especially music and literature—ethnography, cooking, travel, and memory.   

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