On being semi-functionally foreign

Traveling to a place you can navigate but you do not quite understand is full of pleasures and joys

I just returned from Germany, which has become one of my favorite places to visit. I have been afforded this opportunity thanks to the multi-year academic hospitality of Gesine Müller at the University of Köln, one of the leading Latin Americanists in the country. My constant engagement with Germany has become one of those paradoxes of life I could not quite foresee. After all, learning German is the one academic pursuit in which I failed miserably. When I was a teenager, I struggled through a year and a half of classes in the Goethe Institute in Mexico City, from which I remember only the numbers under one-hundred and a random assortment of vocabulary. I was somewhat more successful learning French at the Alliance Française, mostly because I had a very close friend in that school and Romance languages remain more or less intelligible in my thick Mexico City accent. And yet, my first visit to France, and the first time I used my French for something other than reading, was in 2022, a full nine years after my first time in Germany. My teenager self did not pursue those languages out of a vocation but a way to assuage my mom’s concerns of my choice of literature as a career. She presumed I would make a living as an interpreter in absence of an actual job market for literatos.

My first time in Berlin was in 2013, when the Walter Benjamin Archive kindly invited me to a conference on the reception of Benjamin’s work around the world, probably because I had published an essay entitled “Reading Benjamin in Mexico” that was mostly about Bolívar Echeverría. In extending this invitation, my hosts did not realize I did not speak German, so, in an act of deep hospitality, summarized the papers in German to me. They also summarized the papers of those of us who read in English to those who only spoke German and their native language. I learned a few cool things that stayed with me, such as the fact that, apparently, the word Arcades is not directly translatable to Korean. The person who translates Benjamin to the language explained to us that he used a word that refers to arches from the 18th century found in the Korean countryside (disclosure: you may want to fact-check me as this is a decade-old memory of something that was told to me secondhand).

That trip was ultimately a complicated affair: my smartphone worked clunkily and it was quite expensive to use roaming data. Mitte, where I was staying, was undergoing major repairs so you could barely work in the ruinous sidewalks. And yet, I loved it. I became fascinated with the traces of East German culture, visited a spectacular exhibit by Anish Kapoor and discovered one of my favorite street snacks: currywurst. I even found in my files my very first photo of the day of my arrival in Germany, taken by a kind Berliner.

In many of my subsequent trips, I would see little, because I could only afford to attend the conference and leave. But these past two years, I was able to stay a bit extra and, in the case of Berlin, take advantage of the places to do research in my fields. I quickly realized that the years of learning some German words in practice and the growing reliability of my smartphone made the experience far more fluid. I can now confidently order some of my favorite things: apfelschorle, mineralwasser mit kohlensäure, bratwurst mit senf, Türkischer mokka. Those numbers I know from 1 to 99 cover the vast majority of transactions. When the limits of my German have arrived, it is now possible to take a photo of a menu and have Google Translate decipher eighty percent of it in seconds—it still misses things like fish names or menu items coming from immigrant languages. It is not always without hiccups. I discovered this trip that Google Maps will make you take a complicated trip with three connections in the subway over a direct bus ride if it saves you one minute. I even know, after being lost a few times, that an app called Free Now will get a taxi to my location.

Once you arrive at this basic functionality, but remain lost in the big picture, something fascinating happens. In the absence of full comprehension, random details begins to stand out and become little puzzles. For instance, a potato chip brand called Funny-Frisch sells a variety of international flavor. I wonder if the name of the brand is one of those instances in which a bland-palate culture considers the spiced foods of elsewhere to be weird. In any case, they carry a flavor called “ungarisch,” a paprika-laden chip that appears to be very popular and a concoction called “oriental” which tastes like a hodgepodge of tomato, allspice, coriander and paprika, among other more indeterminate things. Funny indeed. The one that always caught my eye was “chakalaka” which was a mystery due to my refusal of googling it until I found in an African store that it refers to a South African tomato relish. Potato chips are always a good barometer of a culture because it is a way to see what they find familiar and what is a novelty: a similar thing could be experienced if you came for the first time to the US and found sour cream and onion or barbecue lays alongside their weird seasonal flavors like “Cuban sandwich” or “cappuccino.” It is always important to remember that these are constructs: the chakalaka of the chips probably tastes little like the South African concoction (just like the Cuban sandwich chips is more a semi-failed approximation than a reality).

To be semi-functionally foreign means that you are effectively isolated from a significant part of the noise of everyday life and become able to perceive some specific objects that you would have missed in your home city. The relationship to urban space becomes de-instrumentalized and you begin to truly wander. Walking through a backstreet in the search of a shop may lead you to a unique building or a serendipitous encounter with a river sight. You fixate on a landmark as a point of reference a begin to realize the many aesthetics that an object like Berlin TV Tower an have: a continuity from the regal past, an interruption of the landscape, a prophecy of the modernization to come. You begin to experience the layers of history perhaps naturalized for the locals but that never fully coalesce from an outsider’s gaze.

We are creatures of habit and one usually visits a city with a long cultural archive on the basis of the works in one’s memory. Risking cliché, I cannot visit Berlin without looking for elements of Wim Wenders classic film Der Himmel über Berlin (known in English by the silly but now canonized title Wings of Desire). It so happened that Criterion just re-released it in a 4K disc, which I dutifully watched before leaving. This prompted me to look for the ICC building, to compare the filmed images of Postdamer Platz to its much different current configuration, to walk around the remnants of Anhalter Banhof and, of course, to walk through the Tiergarten to take black and white photos of the Victory Column.

In my travels to Germany I have also learned of artworks that fascinate me. One of the truly spectacular museums I have visited is the Ludwig in Cologne, whose unassuming modern building hides an enormous set of exhibition spaces carrying a collection of 150 years of art. The catalog is endless. I could compare the pieces by Max Beckmann and Otto Dix to the ones I frequently visit in the St. Louis Art Museum. One can see the mutual exchanges between German and American art through various pieces by Claes Oldenburg, Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. The enormous contemporary art holdings clearly follow a mandate to diversify, so pieces by artists as broad as Teresa Burga, Georges Adéagbo and Xu Bing are on show. In my last visit, they featured a site-specific wall-relief mural by Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas, which provided a stellar final sight after a truly exceptional special exhibit of Isamu Noguchi’s works.

In all of this museum walks, I was deeply struck by Gerhard Richter’s spectral paintings. Richter is a very well-know artists and I had seen his work before but I mostly identified with his abstract paintings, which I find interesting but not compelling. When you visit a museum in any country, some of the weakest work is by the artists from the country, because the patrimonial duties of a museum requires them to do such collecting. This is why the I found the collection at the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin—the national museum collecting contemporary German art— to be unremarkable: many of the works felt derivative or overly specific in their political and aesthetic concerns. But the works in the Ludwig have never failed to catch my eye.

This artist then becomes a point of reference and when I visited the Neue Nationalgallerie I was once again taken by Richter’s spectral paintings, which definitely stood out next to his late-period abstract works.

Beyond the art, such travel is always full of unexpected possibilities, particularly if friends allow you to discover spaces they already know. My friend Steffi took me Sonnenalle, a street in which I felt in the Middle East, thanks to the signs in which Arabic exceeds German. A succession of shawarma, baklava and coffee awaited me. And my new friend Rocio took me to the Mexican Embassy, an astounding building designed by architects Teodoro González de León and Francisco Serrano. This visit was follow by a wild and delicious Georgian restaurant in which the bathrooms hidden behind a house of mirrors and disco balls, and a bar that served beer with a kimchi paleta, a new take on michelada.

I have more stories: walking in the main road of Mainz and discovering the Gutenberg Bibles, my quest for Eritrean food in Frankfurt, spending an evening in a lobby bar with the attendees to a Rammstein concert. I hope my future is full of travel to cities which I will know little, but being lost can be the source of illuminations. Cosmopolitanism, after all, requires finding objects and spaces in illegible maps. The quality of a semi-functional foreigner mirrors something Walter Benjamin wrote in the “Tiergarten” text of his Berlin Childhood Around 1900, “Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.”