7 An East German in the American Southwest

Have you ever met someone from a country that does not exist? Well, now you have. Between 1949 and 1990, there was a country called the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The GDR disappeared when the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989 — exactly two months after I was born and a few months after the “Peaceful Revolution” started, in which East German citizens took to the streets to protest their government. I was born in what many Americans today call “former East Germany.” Perhaps because of these intersections between my own life and world history, my passions have come to include literature, history, and travel. Though these interests may seem very different and not inherently connected with my heritage, I have come to understand these interests as being essential to my development as a critical thinker.

Because we live in the twenty-first century, you might have never heard of the country that was absorbed into today’s unified Germany. Growing up in the 1990s, I was still surrounded by a core value of the GDR: community before individuality.  My nursery school teachers, for instance, were middle-aged and GDR-socialized women, meaning they put more emphasis on the well-being and functioning of the group than the needs of the individual. Later, my urge for individuality grew and I spent my twentieth birthday on the Empire State Building with my parents who — for almost 30 years of their lives — were not allowed to travel west. Thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I grew up able to travel and with access to all the books on the planet. For me, reading has been a gateway and it has opened new worlds for me.

I believe that anyone can learn critical thinking. Anyone can question inherited concepts such as your family’s politics or religion, and forms of information — like which news channel you consume, or which social media pages you follow. Once you start questioning, you can actively pursue new or other routes without cutting out the old ones. In contrast to critical thinking, ideological thinking entails never questioning your learned ways. It means digging a hole and deciding to stay inside it. One way to avoid ideological thinking is to read as widely as possible. I learned about the country of my parents and grandparents because I read literature that was written in the GDR — some texts were full of praise for the Soviet Union, but they were also patriarchal in disguise: the stories contained both men and women working full-time, but the wife would still be doing all the domestic work in addition to earning a living. At the same time, the governments of the Eastern Bloc took pride in having equal rights clauses in their constitutions before the Equal Rights Amendment even became a widely discussed topic in the U.S.

Through reading, I also learned about different perspectives and history. This is where an area of my academic interests comes in: the Holocaust, which occurred in the years 1933-1945. By this term I am referring not only to the mass murder of millions of Jewish Europeans, but also — among others — the imprisonment and execution of political enemies of the Nazis, such as communists or queer people. Ever since my high school took us on a field trip to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial Site, I felt drawn to this topic and was eager to learn about one of the darkest parts of Germany’s history.

Immediately after this field trip, I read Anne Frank’s diary. I was not only moved by the book’s content, but I also felt called to action. What I learned through literature and history activated me and made me aware of how powerful reading is. The American-Iranian author Azar Nafisi writes “that literature is an act of resistance against dehumanization. War and trauma numb our senses and freeze our feelings.” She goes on to say that “literature restores us, awakens our feelings, and returns us our sense of individuality and integrity” (Nafisi 115-16). Nafisi reminds us that literature has the power to keep us human in a world where horrible things happen far too often.

Critical thinking can also be developed through traveling — not as a mere tourist, but as somebody who is eager to find out who they are. I came to UA with my East German identity and my research interests in GDR literature and the Holocaust. My parents and grandparents never learned English in school, but I was exposed to it on a weekly basis since elementary school. In the GDR, life was very predetermined: for instance, based on your social class, you would be allowed to go to university or be barred from it by the government. In today’s world, we have so many choices: places to go, or careers to choose. Freedom can be quite overwhelming and it might be hard to know who to trust these days. My advice is this: trust yourself and your own capacities. I noticed that the concept of individuality is particularly potent in the American Southwest, which struck me as such a contrast to my own East German upbringing, because in my early childhood it was so much about being nice, neat, and fitting into a community. Cultivating a sense of individuality is an important value that contributes to society.

To become a critical thinker, become an avid reader first, ask questions about ideas and concepts that you encounter, step outside of your national, lingual, or cultural comfort zone, and you will learn about yourself! When I came to Arizona for the first time, I didn’t know which ideas I would be exposed to. Today I know that it has been the richest of experiences and Tucson has become my second home — in no small part due to the Southwest being so different from everything I have grown up with as an East German. In Tucson, I have learned about individual freedom, the vastness of the Sonoran Desert, and multiculturality, to name just a few things.

Works Cited

Nafisi, Azar. Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. Dey Street Books, 2022.

About the author

name: Sina Meissgeier

Sina Meissgeier is currently working as a Research Associate at the University of Leipzig in Germany while completing her PhD in Transcultural German Studies at the UA. Her passions include teaching, sitting in libraries, having conversations with family and friends over a glass of wine, exercising, singing in a local German big band, as well as cooking and cleaning, which she sees as part of her self-care. Sina is also a trained journalist, which makes it hard for her not to follow the news multiple times a day. Prior to living in the U.S., Sina did a study abroad in England during her bachelor’s.