Germany was not a frequent subject of discussion in my family while I was growing up. Though my father had served in the Second World War, he was a Palestinian Jew whose family had been in the Middle East since 1882. Despite the fact that he had serious issues with the country, at the same time, it did not occupy the same kind of negative mental space, as say, the UK.

To wit, I remember the day Elie came home to London, following a business trip to Hamburg. Opening up his briefcase, he pulled out a Boney M record. If I remember correctly, it was the album with their hit Rasputin. “The most popular group in Germany,” he told us. Looking at the packaging, I noticed that the band members were black. That was that. I never thought about it again.

Photos taken on Koenigstrasse, in Stuttgart, Saturday. Click for detail.

Algerian and French flags fly. Les Puces flea market, day three, World Cup.

South Asian-focused photo exhibit. South Asian migrant workers. Via Padova, Milan. February 2010.

Click for larger photo.

Even though the English could use some work, the irony is as welcome as the tolerance. April 10th, Berlin.

What they’re reading. Neighborhood radical chic retailer (out of view: designer skate decks, commissioned Melvins flyers), Friedrichshain.

The Zeek landing page image, Wednesday, April 7th.

I couldn’t think of a better expression of Italy’s anxiety about its increasingly multicultural character than this bus advert for designer jeans. Shot in front of our apartment building in Milan last week, it’s also featured as the main photo on Zeek‘s landing page today. I wanted an image that would speak to Wednesday’s feature, Mya Guarnieri’s  We’re Not White Trash. We’re Jews.

The same logic applies to this picture, which we ran on Monday. Published in conjunction with Bruce Wilson’s Their Religion is Hatred, I was hoping the photo would help capture, however indirectly, the stress felt by Arab migrants, like this woman, standing in front of Lega Nord campaign posters, already condemned by an elections campaign monitor. (See “Manifesto Abusivo.”)

Though this photo has already expired (replaced today by the bus advert photo), its caption read “War in the ghetto,” since the shot was taken on Via Padova, the symbolic heart of Milan’s immigrant community. The bus picture, similarly, bears the caption “Dreaming of Multiculturalism,” as a means of explaining what it reflects, rather than what it intends to express. Everything is documentary.

The coffee is okay. Perhaps a little too nutty for my taste. It’s probably one of the same discount brands on offer in the deli. However, the piadina sandwiches are pretty good, during the winter it’s always warm inside, and there’s a newsstand with an excellent selection of international newspapers less than twenty feet away.

Located in the tube station underneath our building, I increasingly find myself eschewing above-ground establishments in Piazzale Loreto in favor of this cafe’s womb-like environs. Despite the fact that it’s always busy, there’s something calming about the cheap cappuccinos and availability of familiar news periodicals.

Like the majority of the cafes in our neighborhood, it is also full of foreigners. Eavesdrop on any of the conversations taking place and one will hear everything from Albanian and Arabic to Portugese and Tagalog. If I have any difficulty ordering, there’s oftentimes one or two Peruvians on staff whom I can speak to in Spanish.

If you were to ask me for an example of present day Milan, I’d be hard-pressed to offer something more au courant. No, its not Peck, or one of the hip cafes in Isola or Brera, where the coffee is indeed superior. It’s the fact that this place is both so totally comfortable and contrary, simultaneously, to Italy, as we imagined it to be.

Local curio shop trafficking in kitsch covering everything from Italian colonialism to boys toys and illegal immigration. Milan, 12/09.

Inside the Christmas market. Milan, 12/12/09.

Albanian, French and Arabic samples of migrant news and money transfer services. Migropolis exhibit, Venice, October 15.