Kindergarten

[imomus]

There's a kindergarten just around the corner from my new flat with lovely folksy decorations. This morning I snapped a few pictures of them.



I was going to give you some spiel about how pre-school decorations like these are a direct route to national particularity, and how much more interesting I find the rooted, quirky imagery here than the "rebellious" (but in fact monocultural and conformist) imagery showcased by the trendy shops slowly taking over storefronts here with their denim and trainers. I was going to talk about how, along with the dress-styles of the elderly, the kindergarten was an exemplary reservoir of "Germanness", reproducing national identity as a series of values to its multi-ethnic pupils at their tiny desks. And I was going to state again that while I'm all for the preservation of national flavours, I'm not for rigid links between national flavours and ethnic groups. Anybody can be the "guardian" of these national flavours, not just an ethnic German. Anyone can go in and rewrite the code.

But then an interesting man came along and told me that his daughter had gone to this school, and that the person who runs it is Polish. So these decorations might be "reproducing Polishness". Suddenly the owl and the little grey woollen kitten looked incredibly Polish to me. Had I got my national stereotypes wrong?

Perhaps not; the putative Polishness of the school didn't contradict my thoughts about the arbitrary nature of national identity. If "anyone can go in and rewrite the code," if national identity is "open source", why shouldn't German imagery be disseminated to the next generation by a Pole? And why shouldn't there be a certain amount of Polishness in Germanness? The border, after all, is just an hour away.

Comments

[ksta.livejournal.com]

yer but, england is as mixed as france, for instance. I personally don't believe it is an 'open-source' identity. I think there is an english core nation, although they themselves were the result of anglo-saxon invasions. Maybe that would be more like open-source, I don't know. Maybe I have misunderstood the term.

Again, look at poland, trampled over for centuries, conquered and divided up by many nations. It's true there isn't much immigration there yet, but certainly there is mixing from around its present borders.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

There have been sets of English values/attributes identified (which have included everything from a belief in "fair play" and a dislike for abstract ideas to a polite hypocrisy and a social inhibition curable only by drinking alcohol, as well as the obvious fondness for tea), and books written about them (such as Kate Fox' "Watching the English" and Jeremy Paxman's "The English"). However, Englishness is attainable by anyone who adopts these values, or at least by their children. (Contrast this to, say, Japaneseness; there are people born in Japan whose grandparents immigrated from Korea who are not, legally or culturally, considered Japanese.)

America is an even more extreme case of open national identity; it's a country of immigrants. Anyone who immigrates can become American simply by adopting the national values. The child of immigrants is, to all intents and purposes, as American as a descendent of Mayflower immigrants.

As for Poland, it is somewhat more of an ethnically- and culturally-homogeneous monoculture than Britain. While there are shared aspects of culture with neighbouring countries, the Poles consider themselves more of a volk than the English do. This undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that, while England had a global empire, Poland's influences were largely confined to its region. The fact that Poland often bore the brunt of aggression by its neighbours (the partitions, various wars) has undoubtedly strengthened a defensive nationalism and more of a distrust of foreign influence.