31-year-old Wafaa Khattab has three sons who speak German
and Arabic. They attend a Jewish Montessori school and go to a community
mosque. She greeted us at a neighborhood museum in a colorful maxi dress and
big gold hoop earrings. Wafaa lives in Kreuzberg, this Berlin neighborhood
dotted with those gold cobblestones telling us Jews used to live there. Now,
the streets are filled with doner kebap stands, and the two main spots are a plaza
with a refugee tent city and a three-block GDR Russian-minimalist apartment
building. The area is home to hipster coffee spots, the Green Party
headquarters and trendy shops, waiting for you to say, ‘Maybe, I’m actually in
Williamsburg.”
At the Kreuzberg Museum, we took part in a virtual walking
tour to prime us for our real tour. Before entering the virtual tour chamber,
we had to put shower caps over our shoes. The exhibit, a map on the floor,
allowed us to see and hear the area. We got iPods and could click on numbers
while standing on the correct ‘street corner’ and listening to audio
testimonials about food, struggle, religion, conflict and community at those
locations over the last 100 years. I heard about a little girl playing in a
park last summer, a punky woman at a gay and lesbian café in the ‘60s, and a
man immigrated from Turkey on a one-year factory worker’s visa in the ‘80s. We
left the building and took to the streets soon after. On Wafaa’s live walking
tour, we spotted two famous German movie stars, but we had no idea because we
don’t really go here. In a Turkish candyshop called Smyrna, Wafaa treated us to
a nut mix, and then I spent a euro on a bag of chocolate balls. They turned out
to be chickpeas, covered in chocolate. I would not recommend this unless you
enjoy confusing your tastebuds.
The tour’s last stop was a 10 million euro mosque, a modern
construction cattycorner to a store called ‘Crazy Korean Fried Chicken: So so
crazy.’ A few of us went in the mosque and I was transported back to Istanbul,
the incredible sense of peace and immensely beautiful design details. The
stained glass reflected in a central chandelier, and a single man sat and
checked his phone on the edge of the room. One of the many difficult issues
facing Kreuzberg’s diverse community and the Muslim community in Germany is the
lack of government acceptance. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish are all
claimable religious communities you can affiliate with on your tax forms,
channeling funds toward clergy, programming and general support. Islam is not a
recognized tax-gaining community through the current system, and I don’t really
understand why. It doesn’t seem quite fair that other German citizens can help
support their religious communities but Muslim Germans can’t… I’d have to learn
more to really dig into the issue. Fun unrelated fact: once, Angelina Jolie-Pitt
and Brad Pitt were spotted in Kreuzberg, too.
We returned to the museum for a Turkish buffet lunch of stuffed
grape leaves, sundried tomato skewers and vegetable kebabs, and tons of
mysterious spreads of all colors. Lucky for me, everything was vegetarian so I
could go to town across the table. I think I overloaded and in a stuffed
stupor, I could barely keep my eyes open in our next discussion, with two
leading activists against modern anti-semitism and right-wing extremism. As
interesting as the topics were, I decided a quick break in the hallway was
needed. After a snooze in the stairwell, I returned refreshed and was able to
engage in the group talk, asking a question about gender and women’s
involvement in modern extremist groups.
I was so glad to return home soon after and promptly passed
out into a three-hour nap. I hadn’t intended to sleep so long, but I must have
needed the rest. When I woke up at 6:10, shabbat in Berlin was less than an
hour away…
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