Italy always has the best Shoah commemoration adverts. See the flyers for the migrant rights benefit gig above (in yellow) and the squat gig, to the upper right. The collage is of course telling, if accidental. Turin, on my birthday.
The Nazi bit is overkill. Around the corner from our apartment, Karl Marx Strasse. Berlin, 20/10/10.
“Grenade Jewish hunchback druggies.” Courtesy of Google translate, warts and all. Torino, 21/01/12.
Back at it, finally, after a well deserved break. See my similarly titled new article (All Roads) in Monday’s Souciant. Last week’s piece, No Navigation Required, is still fresh, and, of course, thematically tied. New photos featured, as well as some older ones, some of which have already appeared here.
The communist version. Torino, January 14th.
The anarchist version. Neukölln, January 5th.
Kim Jong-Il’s death was announced just as I was leaving Seoul. Though I don’t speak Korean, it wasn’t hard to surmise from the TV screen what was up. I couldn’t believe the timing. I spent the whole ride to the airport glued to the news, awed by how composed the newscasters appeared.
The image seemed appropriate for my final article for 2011: Introducing Souciant (Slight Return), my take on how the first nine months of Souciant had gone. Check out Warm Storage, Charlie Bertsch’s additional reflections. Charlie recounts the brainstorming that lead to the journal’s inception.
Neukölln’s public spaces are full of bilingual signage. This one says several things, including “Grilling is forbidden,” in both Turkish and German. A common sight during the summer, Turkish families can frequently be found grilling meats in Berlin’s municipal parks.
This sign, posted in a small park two blocks from our home, has been high on my to-do list to photograph the past year. Every time I’ve tried to take a picture, however, the light has been awful. Not yesterday. Out early with the dogs, I finally found the right lighting conditions.
Surely, such translations should not be a big deal. In San Francisco, for example, I grew quite accustomed to seeing mixed Mandarin-English signs in my former neighborhood, the inner Richmond. I’m not sure how many remain. I moved to the Mission District in April 2004.
Nonetheless, I always get some kind of vicarious satisfaction out of seeing signs in Turkish, in Germany. Even in Stuttgart, where it’s not uncommon to see graffiti expressing support for leftwing parties, in Turkey. It all might as well be in Hebrew. That’s the significance, I think.
Several weeks ago, a German friend who started a wildly successful guerrilla media company, by accident, asked me for advice on what to say on a television news program he’d been asked to join, as a member of a panel discussing the state of the German news media.
“What would you recommend we discuss?” I recall him asking, looking for a few agenda items to help get himself prepared. “Germany needs a multilingual press,” I remember writing to him. “There need to be more than just English versions of German papers.”
Clearly, if cities like Berlin need bilingual signs like this, one might consider diversifying the language of national news publishing, as well.
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