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

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(By the way, I explicity exclude Arudou Debito (http://www.debito.org/) from my "anyone can rewrite the code" philosophy. Because he annoys me with his lawsuits and his "me too" assumptions, but mostly because he's American, and the monoculture is American. So the idea that Debito can "rewrite Japaneseness" is identical to a wish to see Japaneseness dissolved into the same old monoculture.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(And by the way I have named my rabbit Debito -- his full name is Debito Baker -- just to mock Arudou Debito. If he's done something very bad, I shout "Mukatsuku, Debito!" at him. He understands Japanese. My rabbit, that is.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(PS: podcast tutorial (http://archive-b01m01.libsyn.com/bXeceJh2bHeTd5R7mXtuqm%2BmZHLI/podcasts/japanese/show14_copy_1.mp3) on use of the phrase mukatsuku.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Learn Japanese (http://japanese.libsyn.com/) (with a slight Osaka accent). I have to brush up so that I know when Hisae (who arrives next week) is telling me I'm being annoying.

[dmt81.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to see a Japanese kindergarten showing the same kind of cultural sensitivity. "Imprinting" the young generations with the necessary archetypes for survival of culture-specific imagery in the imaginations of future artists.
At any rate, I am not german, or even eusropean. It strikes me that geographical and cultural similarity would allow some overlap in the "national flavour," achieving similar ends regardless of the instigator's original homeland. The polish person could, after all, have grown up in Germany.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but Japan is definitely much less litigious than the US or Britain. The Japanese corporation I work for has absolutely no concept of lawsuits, so I spend a ridiculous amount of time changing all these claims that people in the US have instantly brought to court before. It's crazy how two societies can be so different, even when sharing culture: of course I don't care, I'm getting some decent scratch.

[(Anonymous)]

My wife's Polish, and as soon as I saw those pictures I sensed something Polish about them. In Kazimiersz in Krakow there was this really nutty children's garden this guy put outside his flat, with a sign saying "the children are asking for fish". Unfortunately the property developers have moved in, and it is no more.

In spite of the bad historical relations between Germany and Poland, I notice a lot of Germans have telltale Polish surnames ending in "-ski". A few of the German football team players have Polish names, for instance.

London is rapidly developing a Polish flavour, in response to the sudden influx of Poles coming to work. Asian corner shops now stock Polish beers and sausages, and there are posters in Polish advertizing gigs in London by Polish hip hop acts. Apparently it's quite similar in Dublin.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Excuse me but what does "litigious" mean?

[(Anonymous)]

haha, maybe they'll start looking like American cities, where you can find a frosty Żywiec on every corner.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Liable to sue in court.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Oh, I thought it had something to do with the attitude against immigrants and tourists.

(Hmm...)

[me-vs-gutenberg.livejournal.com]

I find it important to note that it says "Kinderladen" in your photo, not "Kindergarten". Despite your intimate knowldege of German culture, you may not know that these are two very different things: "Kinderläden" are (or used to be, I don't know to what degree the idea has been co-opted by now) comitted to anti-authoritarian education, and are "selbstverwaltet", ie run by the parents themselves. Their origin lies in the social movements of the 1960s, when kindergardens in W Germany were, for the most part, church-run (they still are).
And I think you're taking it a bit far with the Germanness.

[ksta.livejournal.com]

the poles and germans like to pretend they have little in common, whereas this is clearly untrue.
obviously the poles consider themselves a separate tribe, but with all the mixing, culturally, geographically and racially (i, a half-pole/half-brit, have a few german relatives), to me the whole of central europe from about the middle of germany onwards exhibits many many many common characteristics.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know about other areas or regions, but in the last few years sharky polish entreprenuers have underpinned the budget lettings market in large parts of West london, to mainly provide low rent shared accomodation for their countrymen making what now must be the rights of passage economic gap year jump. Hammersmith seems to be the epicentre of this cultrual explosion - every other business is a polish deli, cafe or information centre.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the german kitsch for children may be less romantic. The cross between janoschentendiddlemausregenbogenfisch and hightechtrolleygoretexqualitaetsklettverschluss.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Some national identities are more open-source than others.
I've heard Englishness described as an open-source national identity a lot, in that there is no such thing as a English volk (i.e., a significant and culturally influential part of England is comprised of immigrants and the descendants thereof), and often some of the most "English" people are anglophilic immigrants/expatriates (e.g., T.S. Eliot).

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Poles speak a Slavic language and are strongly Catholic; Germans speak a Germanic language and are mixed Catholic/Lutheran. However, both have similar cuisine (sausage and cabbage featuring commonly).

I heard that a few decades ago, there was an organised effort in the Polish language to purge the language of German loanwords (such as "kartoffel" for potato) and replace them with Slavic coinages.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting! Yes, the parent I met seemed like an activist type.

[ksta.livejournal.com]

mere details. :)
there are huge crossovers in the population.

if the poles were to get rid of the german words, and indeed the foreign words in polish, there would be a huge chunkn of vocab missing.

[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.

[ksta.livejournal.com]

London is overrun with poles! It's brilliant, because lovely polish food is now much much cheaper.
Plus I get translating work :)

I also now have family living somewhere in Ireland, and in Plymouth.

[ksta.livejournal.com]

you wouldn't believe how sharky - sadly, poles here are all too happy to thoroughly exploit their fellow countrymen, offering deals to get work and taking the money and running.

Today I found out that some are being literally treated as slaves by gang masters.

[ksta.livejournal.com]

sorry to go on about this, but my P.S.:
on my way home from work I passed a hip-hop poster, as you mentioned, advertising a polish night in BRixton. All in polish, of course.

[tilney.livejournal.com]

As a Polish person, I am much partial to the idea of the 'Mitteleuropa' (Central Europe), comprising of countries such as Poland, Germany, the ex-USSR new democracies etc, united by interweaving histories and so on. It gives me more feeling of an identity than feeling purely Polish does, what with the craziness that is going on here now. What I meant to say that you might want to consider Germany and Poland as closer, in fact, than it seems.

[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.