Awkward Situations: Identity crisis

Park an der Ilm, Weimar

I was having one of those inner monologues today where I was trying to ask myself, who are you really? Do you see people as they are, or do you project all of your fears and insecurities onto them and so you see them a a shadow of your insecure self? And so on and so forth. It was just one of those days. Then I had a train of thought that led me to this next story.

This story takes place several years ago in 2007 when I was living in Weimar.

One afternoon I was walking across the Theaterplatz with a friend. I'm not sure where we were going, but there was a man playing the marimba in front of the Neues Bauhaus Museum (the pink building to the right). He was wearing a grey sweater and he had a black yamaka and little curls on the side of his face. Obviously Jewish.

Now as my friend and I were walking by, the man was speaking to the people gathered around. Almost as though he were giving a mini workshop on what he was doing. I only briefly heard him speak and it sounded like he was speaking English.

So, not sure if I had heard English or German, I turned to my friend and asked, "Oh, is that man German?" My friend looked at the man, then back at me, and goes, "No. He's Jewish."

He hadn't said it, nor can I imagine meant it, in anyway judgmental or critical, but just as a fact.

I found it really interesting. Obviously the man was Jewish, but that hadn't answered my question. My question had been about nationality, not religion. It'd be like asking if the Pope was Argentine and going, no he's Catholic. And coming from a German and, naturally, from their history, I thought, huh.

It took me back to this class in grad school about "The Other" in German literature, the only class I received a B+ in because I put a hyphen in anti-Semitism on my final paper. <--Fyi, that hyphen is offensive. I hadn't gotten the memo that the hyphen indicated that yes, Semites are a race, but as I do in fact know, they're not. And based on a gruesome and oppressive history, naturally, that's bad to assume they are, so NO HYPHEN.  When I was doing research on my topic for the paper, no one had informed the authors I cited either, so I think they deserved a B+ as well.  Anyways, lesson learned and forever marked in my marred graduate transcript.

This whole incident got me thinking about identity and how we label things. Would that man playing the marimba consider himself a Jewish-German or a German-Jew? What about, for example, a girl born in the US to immigrant parents from China? We'd still probably call her and her parents Chinese-Americans and not and American-Chinese. Does that mean I'm a Texas-American?  Do I want to be defined that way? 

How would I define myself if someone asked? I became who I am today partly because of Germany, and some German culture affects who I am and how I think and behave, so technically, couldn't I be a Texas-German-American? Or maybe an American-German-Texan? Or, since religion seems to be the most  important thing to some, like my friend above, maybe the next time someone asks, what are you? I could just say, 'Presbyterian'. Does it matter? Why do we automatically define people? Why do we need to define people? In fact, the next time someone asks, 'What are you?', I'll just say, 'Kathleen'.

That's how I ended up full circle back to my original question and no where near answering it. I'm sure there are loads of research papers and books and articles and essays, and so on devoted to this topic and none of them can  fully answer this question either.

A bit awkward if you think about it. Who am I? And better yet, who are you?