Teoría de Internacionalización desde las tres perspectivas

1-5 (L) French Dominican sister's immigration trunk. 1880. Smithsonian Museum. (R) Abandoned steamer trunk, California desert, 2015. The handles signal

Inside trunks and bags, immigrants, refugees, and soldiers en route carry special things with them. Gert Berliner was both immigrant and refugee. A Jewish boy in 1930s

Germany, he rode his bicycle around Berlin with his “good luck piece” toy monkey tied to his handlebars. After the violence of Kristallnacht, his parents sent fourteen-year-old Gert to a foster family in Sweden. His son Uri writes:

He boarded the train in Berlin…. He had a small bag and there wasn't much he could bring. But stashed away in his suitcase was the toy

monkey, his talisman. The monkey wasn't useful. But he took it with him anyway.7

His parents were murdered by the Nazis. At age 22, Gert immigrated to America. The Gripsholm passenger manifest shows Gerhard Eduard Berliner departed from Gothenburg,

7 _{Uri Berliner, "A Toy Monkey That Escaped Nazi Germany and Reunited a Family," in All Things Considered}

(National Public Radio, 2018).

1-6 Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog p. 268 from 1910 showing a variety of steamer trunks.

Sweden on March 1, 1947. Gerhard’s nationality is noted as “Stateless,” confirming his status as liminal subject.8

The monkey stayed with Gert on all his journeys, from New York to New Mexico, to Italy, and back to New York. Gert’s son Uri says the monkey is “the most tangible

connection to his childhood, to a fleeting moment of innocence. … And for more than half a century, his toy monkey … lived in drawers, existing only in a private space, so private that I

never even knew about his childhood toy, and all that it symbolized.”9 _{Uri admits there was}

much about the past his father never shared with him.

In 2003 Gert decided to give his toy monkey to an archivist from the Jewish Museum Berlin. In 2015 a Swedish woman visiting the museum saw the monkey, read Gert’s story,

8 _{Gerhard Berliner, "S.S. Gripsholm Passenger Manifest, March 10, 1947," (National Archives Microfilm}

Publication M1417, Roll 11: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85), stamped page 80, line 2.

9 _{Berliner, "A Toy Monkey That Escaped Nazi Germany and Reunited a Family."}

1-7 Gert Berliner packed this toy monkey in a suitcase when he fled for his life nearly 80 years ago. It's now part of the collection at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Photo credit: Jacobia Dahm for NPR.

and noticed the last name matched her mother’s; hence, two sides of a family separated 80 years ago were reunited. By sharing a treasured object from a traumatised past marked by the loss of his parents, Gert says he’s received something significant in return: “It’s a gift. In

my old age, I have discovered I have a family.”10 _{Moreover, Uri welcomes a pivotal piece of}

his father’s life story, which could easily have died in a drawer.

This toy monkey underscores how special objects support people during major transitions and crises. Migrations are critical junctures where we separate ourselves from possessions of lesser meaning; the monkey is not useful — its power is talismanic. The toy is also an object that anchors a story. Gert must weigh the pain of revisiting his past against his obligation to contribute to a cultural record through storytelling. This dialectic reveals that remembering and forgetting are at once personal and public activities inflected by perceived responsibilities to family and community. Furthermore, that Gert chose to hide the monkey inside a drawer indicates how furniture serves memory practices, sequestering an object connecting him to a lost place, a lost family, and to the imminently evolving story of his own survival.

Refugees

Refugees are another group caught in between, sometimes still seeking asylum years after fleeing their homes. Social anthropologist David Parkin describes what possessions can mean for the African refugees he worked with:

Even under these conditions of immediate flight or departure, people do, if they can, seek minimal reminders of who they are and where they come from. Alongside the items to sell or use in defence en route … are

sometimes the compressed family photos, letters and personal effects of

little or no utilitarian or market value. … When people flee from the threat

of death and total dispossession, the things and stories they carry with them may be all that remains of their distinctive personhood to provide for future continuity. Take those away, that little which they have, and

social death looms closer ….11

10 _ibid.

Parkin argues that where social relations and trust cease to exist, what he calls a state of “precluded social personhood,” as in Nazi death camps like Auschwitz, people may transfer aspects of self-identity to objects or imagined worlds:

[I]t is open to that individual to inscribe their sense of a personal future and identity in whatever remains to hand of impersonal physical, mental and bodily bricolage: to invest emotionally, in other words, in accessible objects, ideas and dreams rather than in the living people around one.12

This investment of self in something material can be, according to Parkin, a form of reversible objectification, then as the future allows it, the person recalls through the thing the seeds (the shared songs, rituals, stories, etc.) leading to the rebirth of his or her social being.

As an example of adaptation to mobility and transition, Parkin cites the memorial rituals practiced by the Giryama culture of Kenya. The Giryama engrave softwood timber posts to commemorate deceased ancestors, moving the posts with them if they relocate

12 _{ibid., 308.}

1-8 Memorial Post. Nyika peoples, Giryama group, Kenya. 20th century. Metropolitan Museum collection.

their homestead. Parkin claims, “The softwood posts are nevertheless thought of as portable objects consubstantial with the family and its health and future viability. They

literally make the death of loved ones bearable.”13 _{As some Giryama have migrated into}

towns and urban residences away from their homeland, for practical reasons the posts are left behind and photographs and personal effects of the deceased are used by some instead as the new centres for ancestral storytelling. Parkin believes there is a fundamental

difference between forcible and voluntary being -in -the -world and that it is important to investigate how people adapt to these states.