You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning to the incessant beeping alarm of a cell phone that´s been roaming for three months, shield your eyes from the gloomy gray strands of light creeping through the window blinds, and attempt to pull the all-too-small hotel comforter over your face only to remember that you are are in Germany... and it´s all because of Bangladesh?
I do.
Today was the first day of my Orientation Seminar as a German Chancellor Fellow, and although I should have been excited, my early morning self really would have preferred an extra hour (or twelve) of sleep. I slumped out of bed, remembered begrudgingly that, thanks to Germany´s prohibition on Sunday shopping, I had absolutely nothing for breakfast (no kidding, yesterday I ate müsli with water, and I really never want to do that again), and raced to meet my colleagues at the hotel reception. We boarded the U-Bahn and made our way to the Hotel Bristol in Bonn for a day of meetings and to give our long-awaited project presentations auf Deutsch.
The plans for the day pretty much focused on our colleagues from the Climate Protection Fellowship, because this is the first year of their program. The AvH (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung) had invited various Climate Change experts to today´s meeting, and as a result a good portion of the day was spent hearing about solar panel production, silicon, renewable energy, and various other subjects that don´t exactly have a bearing on historic Jewish buildings in Germany, but which I found honestly interesting... if incredibly depressing. Basically it turns out that WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!
My reflections on the talk: Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems we have spent the last 150 years skipping blissfully towards the edge of the cliff of catastrophe. And now, with rocks crumbling beneath our feet, the gaping mouth of the abyss preparing to swallow up civilization in one smoggy slurp, we are desperately screaming UNCLE! And here he is, Uncle Alex(ander von Humboldt) to the rescue, in the form of a very well planned Symposium.
Actually I really did find it fascinating, if terrifying. But for me, the issues were best laid out by the guest speaker, Foreign Minister of Bangladesh. She explained to us that Bangladesh is the densest populated country on earth and among the most desperately threatened countries when it comes to climate change - crowded, low lying, marshy, impoverished, coastal, a recipe for disaster. The people of Bangladesh are really experiencing horrible things, which are only going to get worse, despite having played a quite minimal role in the industrialization, and thus carbon emission, currently plaguing the world. I don´t really know that much about Bangladesh, and I have a feeling that this a bit of a problem for a lot of Americans - relating to foreign countries is not exactly an area of national strength. But there is one thing I know for sure about Bangladesh. Bangladesh is the reason I am in Germany.
Simple.
But maybe it is best to start at the beginning. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, spring 2005. I am a freshman history major. I have pretty much been a history major since I was seven, and I read Little House in the Big Woods for the first time and decided that I wanted to be a pioneer when I grew up. Once I found out that the pioneer days were over, it was pretty much clear that I was a bit more interested in looking backwards than forwards. Nevertheless, in college I had to take some science courses, so I selected a science course that most resembled a non-science course - The World of Language. It was sure to be a winner. For those of you who are getting snarky right about now, yes linguistics counted as a science credit, it is part of the cognitive science department.
Anyway, it turned out that half of the class time was devoted to using linguistic skills to illicit information about a language. We were divided into groups. Each group had one native speaker of a language that no one else in the group spoke. The groups met for a few hours every week in the attic of Maryland Hall, where we would ask our native speaker questions like: How do you say "I am." How do you say "I was." And based on this type of information we would draw conclusions about how the language functioned and how it was constructed.
My language was Bengali, the language of Bangladesh.
To make a long story a little bit longer, I found out that I loved linguistics. It was thought provoking. It forced me to think on a different level and in a different way. I just wanted to think about languages all of the time. At the end of the semester I decided that I wanted to take my new understanding of languages for a spin, and try to learn a new language (my only previous flirtation with languages being a mostly unsuccessful attempt at high school Spanish). I picked German. German seemed like a logical choice. Lots of history, same alphabet. Once I started learning German, I suddenly found myself learning Yiddish. And once I began learning Yiddish, it made sense to learn about Jewish history. And then it made sense to think about German, Yiddish and Jewish History all together, and then suddenly, here I am, all because of Bangladesh.
That is a very self-interested way of saying, I suppose, that I care a lot about Bangladesh, and maybe you should too. It´s also a way of acknowledging that self interest is completely okay, normal, and probably in a lot of cases a good thing. It´s definitely my motivating factor behind giving a damn about global warming. Death by climate change sounds incredibly unpleasant and unfortunate, and above all, totally unnecessary. So why should I experience it, or for that matter, anyone else in the world?
One hundred fifty years ago, the world was just getting really into the idea that burning stuff from inside the ground could make you do stuff faster and more efficiently. Laura Ingalls Wilder and the pioneers were heading West, Germany was being unified into a modern nation state (for the first time), and my host institution, Die Neue Synagoge, was the largest active synagogue in Germany. Boy have times changed.
What is my point? Well, for every generation the future and the past feel too far away to actually be reckoned with. And in this sense historians (like me) and scientists concerned with climate change actually face similar professional issues. We both want to get the world to engage with things that it does not know how to relate to, because these things are either too long gone or just not here yet. The study of the past and the study of the future are united in their struggle with human nature to overcome our own natural self-interest in the time, places and people with whom we are closest, or perhaps to teach us how to channel this self-interest into mutual interest. How to do this, well, this is only day 1. I have a year to figure it out.
In the meantime, I guess it´s best to figure out where my mutual interests lie- in the past and the future, in technological advancement and a healthy planet, in German history and Jewish history, in other words, in me- my life- and of course, in Bangladesh.
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