"I Have Been Shocked about My Own Culture!"

Ulla Lenze, a young author from Cologne who has received several literary awards, travelled to Damascus to write an Internet diary within the framework of the Goethe Institute's "midad" project. Larissa Bender spoke with her there.

photo: Larissa Bender
Ulla Lenze during a reading in Damascus

​​In your novel "Sister and Brother", which is set largely in India, you wrote that you felt "decontextualized" there. In the journal you wrote here in Damascus, you said Syria provided "contextualization" rather than "decontextualization". What do you mean by that?

Ulla Lenze: I was referring to my initial feelings during the first few days. Many well-meaning people suggested things for me to do here, told me what I should see, and asked me what kind of things I was interested in. It was as though everything was already taken care of, ready and done, and I could explore the city like one does a museum. But when I travel, that's not normally the way I do things. Of course I prepare myself, for example by reading about the country's history, the political situation...

Does that mean you feel less like a foreigner here than you expected to?

Lenze: That's another aspect altogether. When I travel, I want to be surprised. And if I already know too much, if I'm already too familiar with the place I'm visiting, I see things in a more limited way. For me, the last four weeks have not been an experience of "contextualization", but of the exact opposite. I'm using the word ironically; it's my way of laughing at myself. And I have also asked myself whether it is in fact the case, and have become much more self-critical. Of course, [it is true that] whenever I visit a strange place, I question my own identity, I put myself to the test, and I have experienced this to a great degree here. Here I really have experienced culture shock, but in a different sense than the normal use of the term: I have been shocked about what I have discovered about my own culture, the culture in which I was raised.

From which point of view have you observed this society?

Lenze: It's always the point of view of an outsider. I can't communicate in the language, and that makes me feel handicapped. Yet I believe that even if I could speak the language, there would be limits to my understanding. Occasionally I feel I understand something, but I think even that is an illusion. One would have to grow up here to understand things as they really are, from the inside out. For example, the headscarf issue, which is something I wrote a journal entry about. That's an issue where I sense there is a border, a limitation to my understanding. Or the fact that men and women live in separate worlds here. I can imagine that if you live here, that might be a very pleasant experience, but from my external point of view it looks very different.

You said you were shocked about [what you have discovered about] your own culture. And in your journal, your wrote: "One begins to wonder whether one comes from a country of uncivilized barbarians ". Can you be a bit more specific about this impression?

Lenze: It has to do with my everyday experience with people here, when I visit restaurants, or haggle with taxi drivers, or buy orange juice. There is a certain element in the way people deal with one other that seems to be missing among us [at home, where I come from]. It's – and this sounds suspiciously like a cliché, but there's no other way to express it – it's a certain geniality, a cordialness, an unrestrained sense of relaxedness, of dauntlessness, that I find quite appealing. Just yesterday I found myself wondering – and this is perhaps an audacious and un-thought-out and dilettantish theory – whether there might not be a downside to our open society, namely that our hearts have become hardened. Here, it's the other way around. But that's still just an unanswered question; I don't know.

Is there anything you have learned here that you would like to "take home with you", as it were?

Lenze: Oh yes, definitely what I was just talking about. For example, when a foreigner asks me for directions, I wonder why I couldn't begin by saying, "Welcome to Germany!" It would be so simple, but it's not conventional, not accepted. And yet it makes such a difference when you say it, or when someone says it to you. That's one aspect. And there's another thing I would like to take with me but can't, and that is the city itself. I think it's a very beautiful city, a marvelous, magnificent city, where people take care to ensure that things have a beautiful appearance. From the parks and gardens, to the furniture in their homes, or the way they decorate their porches and balconies. It's not ostentatious, it's just very beautiful and attractive. That's something I often miss in Cologne, in Germany.

Do you think there are different realities, different truths, that one can learn and experience by traveling? Does travel enable one to see "other" points of view, perhaps even to understand the way others think?

Lenze: I do believe that we, from a global standpoint, are moving toward an intercultural society, a society of intercultural individuals, or at least that we should be moving in that direction, and that we should be aware of this fact. That also means accepting and realizing that other cultures conform to other paradigms, and that they are not a threat, but exist alongside our own, and are just as valid as our own. That may seem to be a contradiction, but this contradiction is itself a kind of truth.

Interview: Larissa Bender, Qantara.de

© Qantara.de 2004

Ulla Lenze was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in 1973. In the year 2003 she was awarded the Ernst Willner prize in the Bachmann competition in Klagenfurth as well as the Jürgen Ponto prize for the best first novel and the Rolf Dieter Brinkmann scholarship of the City of Cologne.

More information about "Midad" - the German-Arabic literary forum - click here