To come to this country, my body must assemble itself into photographs and signatures. Among them they will search for me. I must leave behind all uncertainties. I cannot myself be a question.
— Gabeba Baderoon, “I Cannot Myself”
South African and American poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon refuses to an- ticipate or fear the inhospitality of others. This is not just a leap of faith in an- other person. In her poem “I Cannot Myself,” Baderoon issues a new challenge regarding what it means to be welcomed, an urgent demand for hospitality on behalf of those who have been framed as “a question.” In its sparse lines, the poem also reveals the cost to one’s inner sense of peace when the question of one’s belonging to a community is constantly externally probed, leaving a life-
time burden of proving oneself with “photographs” and “signatures.”1 The state
apparatus uses legal language to translate communal inhospitality into bureau- cratic application forms and unending paperwork, making it easy for citizens of the state to fail to see the personal role they play in supporting this inhospitality.
This experience of being existentially unwelcomed can lead to an injured sense of self. In her book Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left
Out, and Lonely, Lysa TerKeurst describes how she carried a sense of being un-
invited from childhood into her adult life: If “someone doesn’t invite me to her event, my thoughts recount all the faults and frailties I’ve voiced about myself recently. Suddenly, I assign my thoughts to that person. I hear her saying these
same hurtful things. I feel labeled and judged and, yes, rejected.”2 TerKeurst
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this world, with the initial cause being her father’s rejection of their family. She shares her personal healing journey, offering readers insights into how they can overcome this type of rejection. But what happens if a person forms an injured sense of self as a result of having been uninvited by society, community, history? When entire groups of people are harmed by their systematic exclusion from the hospitality of those who are in power and in the majority, “living loved” requires challenging the foundations of communal inhospitality.
Community is an abstract notion until a welcoming gesture and labor of hospitality take place. The new forms of hospitality presented by the artists dis- cussed in this book are not new just in terms of the artists’ looking into the future and helping their audiences imagine hospitality differently. They are also new in relation to the old habits of arrested welcome that discriminate between the “good face” and the “bad face,” as described in chapter 6, and the practice of offering unconditional hospitality only to some groups— those privileged by class, gender, race, national belonging, and other markers of social status— at the expense of others. The new forms of hospitality discussed in this book take not only imagination but also courage and a leap of faith, because exclusions from and denials of welcome have long been part of how the promise of un- conditional hospitality is conditioned in practice by divisions between “us” and “them.” Extending an invitation to (or accepting one from) “them” might mean standing up to the inhospitalities perpetrated by one’s own community. A com- munity wields communal disciplinary power, and it might act against its own members to enforce a communal vision of (in)hospitality. The consequences of becoming unwelcome within one’s own community range from relatively mild, albeit potentially significant and consequential, forms of discipline, such as stern warnings and threats, to harsh physical punishment and exclusion. Historically, there have been many instances when defiant hospitality has been punished by death. That is why new forms of hospitality require not only a new vision of com- munity but also solidarity and support among those who are committed and courageous enough to enact this new vision.
Neighbors
Early in 2016, contemporary American artist Ken Aptekar asked me to translate several sentences from English to Russian for his Nachbarn/Neighbours exhibi- tion at the St. Annen- Museum in Lübeck, Germany. The exhibition, which ran
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from February 7 to May 29, 2016, was designed to address the topic of neighbor- to- neighbor relations, past and present, among ethnic Germans, German Jews, and recent Turkish and Russian immigrants and their descendants (for this reason, the exhibition materials were presented in German, Turkish, English, and Russian). Most of the original German Jewish residents of Lübeck had been murdered or had fled during the Holocaust, so the present- day Jewish commu- nity consisted primarily of Eastern European immigrants, many of whom spoke Russian. My translations were for this audience.
I had visited Aptekar’s studio a year before. We talked about my interest in hospitality, and I saw the paintings he planned to use for Nachbarn/Neighbours. The exhibition installation also included a video and objects. As I was translat- ing into Russian several passages about one family’s fate, I was struck particu- larly by the story of one key object, a towel:
1941. Food rations for the Simson Carlebach family are reduced. Jews are not permitted to buy meat, milk, cigarettes, or white bread, and can shop only between the hours of 4PM and 5PM.
After nightfall, neighbors provide the family with food that they secretly leave inside their garden gate, a crime severely punished by the Nazis.
When the Carlebachs find out the Nazis are coming to pick them up, they tie a monogrammed kitchen towel to the garden gate, a final thank you and farewell.
1984. Nearly five decades after the Nazis murdered most of the Lübeck Jews in the Bikerniecki forest in Riga, the Hanseatic City welcomes Simson Carlebach’s son Felix. He managed to escape to England in 1939.
In the town hall near the synagogue, where Salomon Carlebach was Rabbi from 1870 to 1919, Felix Carlebach and his family are honored by the people of Lübeck.
A woman approaches the guest of honor. “Our parents were neighbors. I brought you something that belongs to you,” she says, and hands him the monogrammed kitchen towel.3
For the exhibition, Aptekar presented this family story in six paintings with German text accompanied by English translations (see Plate 10). The paint- ings were based on motifs found on Renaissance altarpieces that were part of the St. Annen- Museum collection. Through the paintings, Aptekar wanted to raise the question, “What can Christian paintings from long ago, some with
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anti- Semitic imagery, possibly have to say to Jews, and Muslims, not to mention Christians, today?”4 By strategically selecting centuries- old scenes and overlay-
ing portraits with the family’s Holocaust- period story, Aptekar compressed time in the paintings, making neighbors of many centuries coexist in the same space at the same time— making them contemporaries.
This kind of connection to community takes time. Aptekar took the time (he spent ten years preparing the exhibition) to ensure that his work would enable his audience to “see” neighbors in this intimate light, throughout centuries, as contemporaries of one another. Aptekar spent years with German Christian, Jewish, and Muslim residents of Lübeck of various ethnic and cultural back- grounds. He immersed himself in the city’s Jewish diaspora and learned many stories before focusing on one element, that of the neighborly defiant welcome. Aptekar was hosted by residents of Lübeck throughout a decade, which is why the story of neighbors was so precious to him. This exhibition proposed a new form of welcome that Aptekar envisioned for Lübeck; it was a platform not only for recovering the past but also for returning the welcome he received.5
Aptekar sent me the names of his hosts in Lübeck:
• Heidemarie Kugler- Weimann, head researcher for the Stolpersteine project in the city6
• Albrecht Schreiber, former newspaper editor and author of several books about the history of the Jewish community in Lübeck
• Rolf Verleger, professor of neuropsychology at the University of Lübeck and former president of the city’s synagogue
• Murat Kayman, legal counsel for the Muslim Community in Germany, based in Cologne
• Alla Prien and her son, Tim Prien, Lübeck residents
The Priens were new, post- Holocaust, Jewish residents of the city who provided the artist with Russian- language expressions, the sorts of things that neighbors would say to each other, which Aptekar incorporated into his paintings. Many of the citi- zens of the city who had hosted Aptekar attended the opening of the exhibition. I list the people who supported Aptekar’s work here to make a point. A work of art about hospitality such as this one, developed with community members who have given their time and resources, imagines a new form of equitable neighborliness, with a hope of releasing welcome from its previously arrested states. The artist did not just fly in for the exhibition. For Aptekar, it was not just
FIGURE C.1. Ken Aptekar, Nachbarn/Neighbours, 2016, Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck, Germany. The opening of the exhibition brings the community together. Ken Aptekar wears a dark suit and talks to visitors in the gallery. Photographs copyright Linn Underhill.
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a “gallery” show; rather, it was an act of immersing himself in the community with a desire to ask questions about the future of hospitality in a specific loca- tion, responding to the presence of specific people, with their varied histories, identities, and traditions of arrested welcome. The result of this exhibition is the possibility of a new community, in Lübeck and beyond, right here and now. Aptekar, like Ana Prvački, is not naive about hospitality as a solution to all prob- lems, but he does want his audience to be confronted with the possibility of a new solidarity, enabling new forms of welcome.
Aptekar’s exhibition confronted the viewer with personal implications in a political reality, where individual choices could lead to outcomes of historical magnitude. The distinction between “us” and “them,” which is often to blame for historical violence, is not fixed and thus depends on such individual choices. The Carlebach family members who were taken by the Nazis were murdered without much protest from those whom they used to call neighbors. Were they ever real neighbors who could rely on each other in times of need? Neighbors are defined by their proximity in space (living near to one another) and time (being together in the same moment). Community is defined through shared territory, language, and customs. Even if the members of the Carlebach family considered them- selves to be part of Lübeck’s community because they lived in the same space and time as ethnic Germans, the question posed by this exhibition concerned what they meant for each other as neighbors. After all, Jewish families had been living under the precarious rules and regulations of European anti- Semitism for centu- ries, including in ways depicted on the altar paintings in St. Annen- Museum. For Aptekar, such history did not mean that his audience should resign themselves to a future of the same violence that was experienced in the past; rather, he chal- lenged his viewers to wonder about contemporary “Lübeckers’ attitudes toward
Muslims— and the Russian Jews now living in Lübeck.”7
Here, in the spirit of this specific exhibition, Aptekar chose the story of a towel, rather than larger legal, structural issues, as his focus. The story speaks to the power of art in considering the question of communal hospitality.
The Carlebachs’ Towel
In this exhibition, the key object that represented both the hope of welcome and the violence of its failures was the towel. There was nothing extraordinary about the towel itself, or about the glass cabinet that housed it. A visitor had to take