Author: Frances Brogan (Page 1 of 2)

As someone who is fascinated by Holocaust remembrance and Palestinian liberation movements, I was particularly curious to see how Berlin would reckon with and commemorate its genocidal past, and how current debates over Israel-Palestine politics would unfurl in Europe’s largest refugee hub. We’ve only been in Berlin for a day; I recognize that the city harbors a plethora of opinions. But today, I discovered a paradoxical unwillingness to engage with the anti-Semitism of the past coinciding with an institutionalized tendency to dismiss the pro-Palestinian sentiment of the present as anti-Semitism.

This morning, I interviewed two student activists from the Technical University of Berlin who have been bravely collecting evidence that their university has helped fund MedWater, a water distribution system that restricts Palestinian access to water in the occupied West Bank. H. was small and gentle, ensconced in a red-and-black keffiyah that seemed to swallow him. He hugged me when we split off — he had to lead a workshop teaching high schoolers in South Berlin how to make good trouble. M. was broad-shouldered and more brusque; H. frequently interjected to explain that it was the injustice of water apartheid and not my questions that prompted his indignation. I asked them if any professors had been supportive of their campaign to expose the university’s entanglement with a project that violates international law, and they said that even though 90% of their student body supported their divestment demands, faculty were reluctant to speak out publicly due to fear of being maligned as anti-Semites. The activists told me that no German journalists will publish the story of TU’s sponsorship of MedWater, presumably for the same reasons. I was shocked.

This atmosphere of self-censorship is probably overcompensation for Germany’s violently anti-Semitic history. But it struck me as contradictory that given its perpetration of the worst genocide in history, Germany would be so quick to stifle criticism of a present-day genocide. I had hoped that, at the very least, fear of the “anti-Semitism” label would prompt German institutions to substantively contend with their former Nazi ties. So I was incredibly disappointed by the presentation we attended this morning at Bayer Pharmaceuticals.

Bayer was a founding member of I.G. Farben, a chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that served as the largest corporate donor to Adolf Hitler’s election campaign. I.G. Farben tested newly developed drugs on prisoners at Auschwitz and Dachau, injecting healthy inmates with diseases like typhus and causing many deaths. Bayer also had a controlling interest in the company that distributed the poisonous gas that the Nazis used in their death camps. All of this, however, was absent from or glossed over in Bayer’s presentation about the corporation’s Nazi involvement. 

At Bayer, we ate salmon and lavishly decorated chocolate mousse; servers in white uniforms cleared our plates. Our bespectacled guide, who had the bland affability of a high school science teacher, smiled while he narrated the story of elite Germans’ complicity in the most monstrous regime in history. He told us that Bayer initiated a “History Project” in 2022 to disseminate information about the Nazi history of the company. (It only took almost eighty years.) But a quick Google search revealed that the history we received was highly sanitized. The presentation felt less like an effort to demonstrate genuine remorse for the past and more like a public relations campaign designed to assure skeptical Americans of the company’s present-day ethical commitments. I was disturbed. 

I know that America’s free speech liberalism breeds disinformation and hate speech, and Germany’s more restrictive speech laws have effectively combatted extremism. But I wonder if they haven’t also circumscribed the terms of civic debate, rendering frank, open discussion of both Nazism and Palestine taboo. Today, I felt that Berlin’s facade of cosmopolitanism and Holocaust memory belies an aversion to difficult conversations that allows injustice to proliferate in the present. 

I was particularly struck by the paradox Panievsky illustrates of how the rightwing populists actually love the media that they excoriate, because it provides them with a platform. I wondered if this creates a feedback loop, where rightwing allegations of leftwing media bias push mainstream outlets to increasingly marginalize leftwing voices and highlight rightwing ones. If rightwing politicians are seeking the media out and even expressing their affection for it behind the scenes, then their attacks are clearly spurious; why doesn’t the media ever report on this contradiction? 

Panievsky lucidly illustrates how the media has desensitized the public to the radicalism of politicians like Nigel Farage and Itamar Ben-Gvir by consistently elevating their positions. I was fascinated by the study that showed that Americans were more likely to donate to anti-immigration causes after seeing data indicating that Trump would win their state. This demonstrates that people are more comfortable espousing extreme views once extremism is normalized, and the media is a key arbiter of social acceptability. It is remarkable that many journalists are so cowed by potential allegations of bias – even when their audience is also ideologically siloed – that they facilitate the spread of hateful views. It is ironic to me that as the mainstream media continues to veer to the right, they increasingly lose the trust of conservative audiences, demonstrating the disconnect between the media atmosphere and reality. Panievsky’s point about how journalists can enable the rise of the far right is particularly notable amongst frenzied discourse about how social media foments extremism: social media just provides an audience, but mainstream news coverage confers credibility, deserved or not. 

Panievsky’s analysis of strategic bias and “objectivity” as a metric for journalistic quality was also interesting. The prevalence of strategic bias in coverage of demagogues like Trump and Netanyahu reveals that the compulsion to give equal weight to both sides isn’t even objective, as it can disproportionately amplify less popular or patently false views. Neutrality doesn’t equate to truthfulness, and the failure to debunk false claims can expand their influence. (We see this most clearly in Panievsky’s striking example of how journalists dispassionately report right wing attacks on the media itself without defending themselves. Paradoxically, journalists are platforming only one side of the “debate” about the legitimacy of the media, and thus risk framing their opponents’ cynical position as fact.) The compulsion to balance suggests that the mere act of reporting the truth is ideological, which amounts to acquiescence to the rightwing characterization of reporting as political persecution. I was curious as to whether, by pushing the demarcation of acceptable views further and further right, and perhaps abetting the populist resurgence across the developed world, the vilified “liberal media” is actually encouraging rightwing politicians to adopt progressively more extreme positions by mitigating the social consequences for doing so.

Germany’s left-wing party Die Linke won Berlin’s state election on September 20, with lead candidate Elif Eralp poised to become Berlin’s next mayor. But less than two years ago, Die Linke was perceived to be in decline, making its decisive victory particularly stunning as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) prevailed in other parts of the country. Eralp’s triumph demonstrates that Berlin voters are unsatisfied with the center, especially as a housing crisis grips the city, and have an appetite for unyielding resistance to the AfD.

“Until the federal elections in 2025, the conventional wisdom was that [Die Linke] was on the way out,” said Jan-Werner Müller, a German political philosopher and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. “But if your number one concern is to keep as far away from the far right as possible, Die Linke is all of a sudden a plausible option.”

Die Linke’s triumph can’t solely be ascribed to establishment parties’ increasingly conciliatory approach to the far right. Eralp campaigned relentlessly on Berlin’s housing crisis, a winning message as advertised rents in the city have more than doubled since 2014 and many landlords seek to subvert rent control laws. “Opinion polls suggest that the voters for each party were concerned in particular about one key issue,” noted Maria Mitchell, a professor of Modern European History at Franklin & Marshall College. “For voters supporting Die Linke, it was housing.”

Germany’s mainstream parties maintain a “firewall,” or informal consensus to avoid collaboration with the far-right. Motivated by a desire to safeguard democracy from extremist elements, the tradition has endured since the end of World War II. However, the demarcation has been tested recently by growing willingness from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the center-right party leading Germany’s governing coalition, to cooperate with the AfD, especially on migration matters. In January 2025, CDU leader and current Chancellor Friedrich Merz introduced an anti-immigration bill in the Bundestag, relying on AfD support in a vote that failed by only a small margin. And on October 6, Tobias Rausch of the AfD was elected parliamentary speaker of Saxony-Anhalt – the first time since World War II that a far-right party garnered such an influential post – with four votes from the CDU.

Müller attributes Die Linke’s success at least in part to their status as the most uncompromising bulwark against the AfD. Although the CDU and the center-left Green Party have long been considered rivals, Greens leaders have made overtures to the CDU this year. Greens co-leader Felix Banaszak told Deutsche Welle that the rise of the far right, unprecedented in postwar Germany, calls for a “union of the political mainstream.” But some voters, Müller believes, may interpret the openness to compromise of conventional left-leaning parties such as the Social Democrats and the Greens as an indirect concession to extremism. 

“Even though the Greens would never collaborate with the far right, if the Greens are willing to work with the Christian Democrats and the Christian Democrats increasingly go soft on the far right, it can look like they’re legitimating something deeply problematic,” he said. 

As the AfD banks its political fortunes on a xenophobic platform, mainstream parties have responded by veering rightward on migration. Müller described a trend of Germany’s centrist parties “copying elements of far-right rhetoric on migration.” Although they are known for pro-migration policies, even the Greens have recently expressed a hardened position on issues such as deportations. “It’s understandable that people might want a choice that’s uncompromising in this regard,” Müller said of Die Linke.

In this increasingly anti-migrant political milieu, Die Linke’s welcoming posture was attractive to Berlin’s diverse population. “About ¼ of Berliners are not German citizens, and almost one-third have immigrant backgrounds,” said Mitchell. “Die Linke’s pro-immigrant stance appealed to those voters.”

But Eralp’s rise is also symptomatic of a broader trend. The German electorate is increasingly spurning centrist parties and gravitating towards both the far right and left, Mitchell explained. “In the Berlin elections, the establishment parties…all lost votes compared to the last election,” she said. “The only parties to increase their results were those on the far right (the AfD) and far left.”

The turn to Die Linke suggests a possible ideological realignment on Berlin’s left. Early data from ARD’s tagesschau, a public television news program, shows that Die Linke gained an estimated 57,000 votes from the Greens and mobilized an additional 75,000 former nonvoters. Although these figures are preliminary, left-leaning voters’ disillusionment with traditional center-left parties indicates an enthusiasm for bolder proposals. 

With its left-leaning voter base, Berlin can’t be interpreted as a microcosm for Germany writ large. The left may be on the rise in Berlin, but the far-right is also ascendant, with a historic victory for the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. “It is unlikely that Die Linke will dominate elections in other Bundesländer,” said Mitchell, “but its national fortunes are rising as support for establishment parties declines.”

I have been doing outreach and research into two different ideas. I’ve been very interested in humanitarian accountability for wartime atrocities for years, but especially since reporting from Jerusalem on the Gaza genocide this past summer. Deb told me about a trial taking place in Koblenz, Germany for the 2012-2018 starvation of Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee district in Syria. Five men with links to the Assad regime have been charged, but only one allegedly ordered the use of starvation as a weapon of war. The trial will have significant reverberations for war crimes prosecutions, as it is the first time that starvation of civilians has been prosecuted as a war crime. I have reached out to a couple of experts on famine to learn more about the trial’s legal implications. I’ve also read some of the court transcripts, which are widely available, and I’m wondering about talking to a few witnesses, if that’s at all possible. The “Drummer of Yarmouk,” a witness who helped lead a peaceful demonstration in 2012 before militias opened fire on the camp and inflicted a massacre, was a key witness. I’d be really interested in interrogating that event as a microcosm for the destruction that followed. 

My second idea is to write about pro-Palestinian activism in Berlin, state repression of such activism, and its impact on the Palestinian migrant community. In recent days, I’ve seen a lot of videos on social media of police harassing, beating, and violently detaining pro-Palestinian activists, and knocking down or forcibly seizing their Palestinian flags. I also follow a few journalists and activists who strategically confront police officers to expose this repression, although they are often prevented from filming. I’m curious as to how the activist community has adapted to this hostile environment, and how it affects the safety of recent Palestinian migrants. I’ve made connections with a couple of activists and plan to meet with one in person while in Berlin: something I’ve consistently heard from them is that they are skeptical of traditional political parties, even Die Linke, because they don’t believe electoral politics will substantively change conditions for Palestinians in Berlin. I’ve also heard testimonies of police assault. Berlin’s second borough has a large Arab diaspora, and activists described increased police scrutiny and harassment in this area. People sometimes struggled to cross the street or get into their house due to the excessive police presence. I’m hoping to talk to people who live in predominantly Arab areas about the surveillance they’ve experienced, and learn about who the police have singled out.

These ideas aren’t well-defined, and I anticipate that they’ll evolve once I talk to people on the ground. I’ve also encountered a lot of reluctance from activists to divulge too much detail over the phone, so I’m looking forward to in-person interviews and developing a more specific, tailored direction for my reporting.

I was appalled by the findings of the Correctiv investigation. I couldn’t help but hear echoes of the Nazi “Final Solution” in the totalizing rhetoric of Martin Sellner’s “masterplan,” and the proposal to deport presumably non-white Germans en masse recalls Nazi concentration camps. “Non-assimilated” German citizens seemed to be a euphemism for “non-white” citizens, and the notion of deporting legal citizens is particularly disturbing; it creates a hierarchy of citizenship, extending civil rights only to some and evoking systems of racial apartheid. The clandestine nature of the AfD event further supports how the party is attempting to subvert democracy – the exposure of their manipulative techniques, such as using influencers, propaganda, and cynically sowing doubt about the viability of political processes, might decrease their credibility. I wondered what effect the Correctiv investigation had, if any AfD supporters tempered their views or became skeptical of the party, if their enthusiasm about its extreme platform only increased, or if they are already disinclined to trust journalism. Does political polarization in Germany operate similarly to the U.S., in which many people only consume news that reinforces their preexisting beliefs? Does this curb the influence of groundbreaking investigations like Correctiv’s?

I was also shocked by the CDU and Friedrich Merz’s willingness to collaborate with the AfD, even after the revelations of the Correctiv investigation and the party’s inflammatory statements and proposals. The 2025 collaboration on the hardline anti-immigration bill was unprecedented, representing the first occasion since World War II that a piece of legislation passed the Bundestag with the support of right-wing extremists. Although it’s an imperfect analogy, the CDU’s willingness to work with the AfD reminded me once again of how the Weimar Republic enabled the rise of Hitler and refused to ban the Nazi Party, because conservative elites mistakenly believed that they could control the demagogue. How are Germans grappling with the historical parallels between their country’s Nazi past and the current resurgence of the far right? Could the AfD be banned on the grounds of its private statements, or only what it espouses publicly? What do we make of the disparity between its private and public platforms? Would banning the party effectively limit its political power, or would that backfire, turning its leaders into martyrs? 

I was also fascinated by what this week’s readings reveal about German free speech policy. The concept of a court litigating the credibility of a journalistic piece is so alien to me as an American, and seems like it could create avenues for the government to undemocratically prescribe what people read. Shouldn’t the public determine for themselves what news they trust? Then again, Americans are notoriously bad at doing that – the rise of the far right in the U.S. could be at least partially attributed to outlets like Fox News. I wondered how exactly the Berlin court made its determination about the Correctiv piece, especially as the Reuters piece established the validity and rigor of the investigative team’s methods. It’s true that there was a lot of opinionated language in the Correctiv piece, but that doesn’t detract from the impact of its conclusions. I wondered if the writers should have assumed a more neutral tone, letting the damning findings speak for themselves, in order to defuse potential allegations of political bias, or if this would verge on sane-washing a horrifying political development.

Germany’s left-wing party Die Linke secured the most votes in Berlin’s state election on Sunday, September 20, with party leader Elif Eralp, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, poised to become Berlin’s next mayor. As the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) prevailed in other parts of the country, some see Eralp’s victory in Germany’s most multicultural city as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies dominating German politics. But voters are divided as to whether Eralp’s candidacy portends real change.

Eralp’s platform highlighted affordability and alleviating Berlin’s housing crisis, as well as social justice and standing up to the rising right. Die Linke won an unprecedented 25.7% of the vote in Berlin. The AfD finished a distant third, but put up a stronger showing than it has in past races, edging out the Social Democrats.

Eralp has drawn comparisons to Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City who is lauded for his left-wing populism and charismatic style. But Melina, a young voter and pro-Palestinian activist in Berlin who asked to be referred to by her first name only, was skeptical about this analogy. 

“Erap was trying to recreate Mamdani’s aura, which I didn’t think was authentic. She’s not that radical, in my opinion,” Melina said. She explained that she has qualms about Eralp’s reluctance to take a stronger stand opposing Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “I can’t say that things are going to change, especially when it comes to Palestinian life in Berlin.”

Others were more optimistic about how Eralp’s background as a child of refugees may influence her governance. Julia Hack, a student from Frankfurt who described being highly engaged in politics as a teenager, praised the historic nature of Eralp’s triumph. 

“She is the first elected mayor with a migrant background,” Hack said. “That fits what you want from a Berlin mayor, because Berlin is such a diverse city.”

However, Jan-Werner Müller, a German political philosopher and Professor of Politics at Princeton University, cautioned against exaggerating the novelty of Eralp’s victory. He called the “German Mamdani” narrative “facile,” pointing out that other prominent figures in German politics hail from a Turkish background, and Eralp is not the first leftist or female mayor of a major German city.

Still, Müller said, Eralp’s win “deservedly gets attention.” He added that she will now face pressure to deliver on the ambitious housing and expropriation promises that helped propel her to victory.

Hack expressed the view that Eralp’s identity enhances her receptivity to the needs of her constituency. “With her migration background, she is closer to the average Berliner,” she said.

Müller speculated that beyond Eralp’s identity, Die Linke’s welcoming approach to migration contributed to their ascendance in Berlin. He argued that center-right and center-left parties across Europe have begun “copying elements of far-right rhetoric” on migration. “I think it’s understandable that people might want an uncompromising message in this regard,” he said.

Juli Janitz, a German student studying in the U.S., also echoed the belief that Die Linke’s impressive performance may be partially attributable to the party’s status as a counterpoint to the anti-immigrant hostility espoused by its rivals. The AfD “creates this fear of Germany being overrun by immigrants,” Janitz said.

Noting the significance of the decline in support for the center-left Greens, Müller observed that the Greens’ willingness to work with the Christian Democrats, who are “increasingly soft on the far right….can look like they’re legitimating [far-right migration policies].” For many voters, Die Linke represented the only option prepared to unequivocally defend immigrants.

“I think living in a diverse city makes people more tolerant and open-minded,” Melina reflected, when asked about why Berlin’s voting patterns on migration might diverge from those of other parts of the country. “But Berlin is also not Germany. Berlin is an exception.”

I was impressed and appalled by Azmat Khan’s investigation into the U.S.’s devastating airstrikes on Syria and Iraq. I was particularly struck by how Khan was able to establish a pattern of “confirmation bias” in which civilians were consistently presumed to be combatants. Rather than a series of incidental errors, the killings of civilians were an inherent feature of a system in which all ethical considerations were subordinated to the goal of obliterating ISIS targets. While reading, I wondered whether the astonishing civilian death toll was a product of Pentagon incompetence, or merely a callous disregard for human life. The stagnation of the accountability process made me inclined to believe the latter; that no disciplinary action was taken in nine out of ten cases of failed strikes and only a quarter garnered further review suggests that the Pentagon views civilians as disposable. I was also curious as to how much of the misidentification of civilians as combatants can be attributed to racism, and whether myths and stereotypes about Arabs are being perpetuated at the highest levels of the military, leading to the devaluation of human life. 

I appreciated how Khan drew attention to the replacement of boots-on-the-ground warfare with airstrikes directed by controllers sitting at computers far away. I think the remoteness of airstrikes likely contributes to their inhumanity, as it is harder to conceptualize the impact of violence on real people when you are divorced from their physical presence. The cold, clinical language in the military chat logs that Khan reproduced revealed the dehumanization of civilians in strike zones, reflecting the gamification of violence. The rise of autonomous weapons seems like an even more dystopian extension of this trend. The Pentagon’s lack of transparency about the civilian toll of its strikes and failure to make condolence payments to victims was horrifying but unsurprising. Drawing any attention to this devastation would lay bare, as Khan’s reporting does, the contradiction between the soft power image the U.S. seeks to project of itself as a bastion of liberal democratic values and humanitarianism, and the destructive effect of U.S. intervention on the rest of the globe. ISIS’s exploitation of the strikes for propaganda purposes demonstrates how they undercut the U.S.’s diplomatic goals, calling into question whether the Pentagon was more motivated by the expansion of American empire than the defeat of ISIS alone.

I also thought Khan did a fantastic job explaining the methodology of her investigation and why it matters. She spelled this out particularly well in the nut graf, writing that “the Times did what military officials admit they have not done”: the piece epitomizes how journalists should serve as democratic watchdogs. Khan also preemptively shuts down potential skepticism of her damning findings by clearly delineating her methodology – she went to the strike sites, looked for eyewitnesses, did not give advance notice of her visits, and more to prevent bias from tainting the information she received. Journalism shouldn’t have to justify itself, but in an era of the erosion of trust in mainstream media, reporters can enhance their own credibility by reaffirming why their function is vital.

I was particularly struck by the depersonalization of war that the increasing integration of drone warfare implies. Drone technology, especially as AI rapidly advances, can completely abstract a human agent not only out of battle but also out of target deliberations, reducing opportunities for the human conscience to mitigate brutality. As the Reuters podcast noted, the U.S. mandates that a human being must be “in the loop” for any kinetic attack, but a lot of other nations don’t have similar restrictions – and I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that the U.S. will liberalize its guardrails to keep up with geopolitical competitors. It seems that in some ways, because they are cheaper than missiles, drone warfare will level the global playing field, preventing the bifurcation of the world into the strong and the weak (and enabling future “Ukraines” to resist their conquest, as Ukraine has).  But it also seems like the greater chasm between those who foment conflict and those who suffer that drone warfare facilitates will increase civilian casualties and lead to a proliferation of refugee crises.

I was also shocked by how holistically Ukrainians have incorporated the war into their daily lives. As Deb’s Substack illuminates, it is astonishing how people will gamble on a few extra hours of sleep rather than race to a bomb shelter, but it also makes sense: we fundamentally need to preserve mundane experiences and any illusion of normalcy. Organizing every aspect of everyday life around the possibility of death probably feels like a form of capitulation. The New York Times article about the Ukrainian children’s books that address the war is another example of this integration of the war into life, rather than treating it as the geopolitical anomaly that it is. I wondered whether the desensitization to war that these children’s books may encourage paradoxically protects childrens’ sensitivity, or whether it may be counterproductive. For example, I was slightly disturbed by the anecdote about the mom who bought her 10-year-old son books about “fighter jets, missiles, drones, and fire arms” because it “helps him have hope.” The desire to safeguard your child’s childhood is the most human instinct there is, but I wondered whether these books play a role in the excessive militarization of a society, whether treating war as normal will ultimately reproduce cycles of violence.

I was intrigued by the Russian state’s relationship to religion, as presented in the documentary A Faith Under Siege. The narrator commented that Russia is a “self-described Christian nation targeting evangelicals in Ukraine”; the persecution of white Christians (a group that is far more often persecuting others) is an image with no modern parallel, and their ethnic and religious status doubtless contributed to the outsize global response to their suffering. I wondered whether the optimism and hope that religion nurtures is particularly threatening to Putin, especially because the barbaric arbitrariness of Russia’s drone strikes against civilian targets evinces a war strategy of demoralization and the crushing of the human spirit. Putin, however, is attempting to have it both ways with religion, mobilizing the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument of power. The documentary notes that “in occupied Ukraine, Russia is trying to replace God with the Russian state.” Putin knows fidelity to faith jeopardizes fidelity to him, but he also is attracted to the possibilities of weaponizing a highly regimented, hierarchical religion.

The Holocaust was at the forefront of my mind as I completed this week’s readings. Of course, no other atrocity in human history compares, but German callousness towards the survivors of a brutal dictatorship is particularly horrifying given the country’s own recent history. Anand Gopal’s account of Abdul Hadi and Oday finding each other in prison, for instance, felt reminiscent to me of the accounts of Holocaust victims who reunited with their friends in concentration camps. For me, these stories amplify the paradox of how Germany has effectively integrated Holocaust remembrance into its civic infrastructure while turning its back on the kinds of vulnerable people that it systematically annihilated only eighty years ago. The surge of anti-immigrant hostility seems to render those memorialization efforts shallow.

I was struck too by the irony of European countries demanding the departure of Syrian immigrants while also providing sanctuary (if inadvertently) to the war criminals who precipitated their pursuit of refuge. Austria harbored Khalidi al-Halabi for years, but is now pushing for Syrian immigrants to return to Syria. I was fascinated that Halabi’s violent techniques were in part inherited from Nazis like Brunner who found refuge in Damascus, exacerbating my disgust that the countries that helped create a legacy of destruction and persecution have no interest in alleviating that wrongdoing by accepting asylum seekers.

While the AfD’s xenophobic bellicosity is particularly pronounced, I encountered a theme throughout the readings of a veneer of politeness masking sinister immigration policies and prejudices in Germany and Austria. The New Arab article highlights how the German government has offered to charter planes for immigrants returning to Syria, reflecting a theme in right-wing politics of couching racist policies in spurious benevolence. For me, this recalled Gopal’s characterization of Aleppo under Assad: “Beneath the niceties of neighborhood hookah bars and sports clubs was the true order, a hidden order, which dictated every breath and every step a human being might take.” Although Germans aren’t subjugated by a despotic regime, the undercurrent of racism in German society reveals the fragility of the social fabric. For instance, the Syrian ENT featured in the Washington Post article who was mistaken for a native-born German by a racist patient railing against foreigners corroborates how seamlessly Syrian refugees have been integrated into German society. I wondered if this increases or mitigates calls for these immigrants to repatriate Syria; their natural incorporation into German society is likely alarming for racist Germans because it emphasizes the lack of innate differences between ethnicities, but as a group, Syrians seem to conform to “model minority” myths and offer Germany tangible benefits, making it difficult for even the most vehement racists to argue that Syrians are a drain on the social welfare system.

I was also intrigued by Kingsley’s interrogation of the framework of a “refugee crisis” in discussions of the influx of migrants to Europe. I had no idea that the developing world is home to 86% of refugees, because the word “crisis” is usually only applied to migration to Europe. This suggests that in the West, we think of the “crisis” as beleaguering not the migrants who have endured unimaginable suffering and left behind everything they know, but the European countries being asked to welcome them. No one is talking about a refugee crisis in Lebanon; instead, the country is implicitly blamed for its own struggles, reflecting a neocolonial mentality of the innate superiority of Western European countries. This made me contemplate the journalistic obligation to correct misleading narratives while preventing opinion from encroaching on our storytelling.

The youngest-ever Princeton student is notorious for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Aaron Burr was thirteen years old when he matriculated. He went on to become a Revolutionary War hero, Senator, and Vice President. But he died destitute and forgotten, perhaps a victim, like generations of Princeton alumni to follow, of gifted-kid burnout. 

In the intervening years, Princeton has been reluctant to admit child prodigies. Jasper Gebhardt, however, was only fifteen when he arrived at Old Nassau from Ione, California, a rural hamlet founded by his grandfather, to study mechanical engineering. “There was so little to do around me that I had to find and create my own things to do,” he said. “At a certain point, this accumulated into a resume.”

Homeschooled and without siblings, Jasper’s was a lonely childhood, saved from drudgery by his ravenous appetite for the way things work. Like the plucky protagonist of a children’s novel, he read every book in the town library, which wasn’t that many. He took apart old cars and excavated an accordion from a neighbor’s attic and won a slew of geography bees and wandered off into the nearby hills, armed with science kits from his grandparents, to look at bugs under microscopes. “I was very excited by the world out there,” he mused. “I feel like people stressed me out.”

At first, Princeton was intoxicating. “He was very humble, young, and innocent,” Jasper’s friend Jackie recalled. “He didn’t even have a Facebook account…Social life was very exciting to him.” Jasper became the president of Princeton Racing Electric, teaching students years older than him how to take apart cars. But the engineering path began to feel “stifled,” and the pressures of Princeton became unbearable. When Covid began, a still-teenage Jasper took an extended leave from school.

He had nowhere to go. Although he had “nostalgia” for Ione, his relationship to the town – and his parents – was complicated: his dad is local royalty, his mom a Korean immigrant in a conservative hotbed, forever an outsider. So Jasper moved to Orlando to be with his partner, Tim, a gun-control activist he first met online, and then in person, in a whirlwind romance defined by marathon conversations about esoteric philosophy and their remarkable biographies. “I was super off the wall crazy,” Tim confessed, “and he was down for the ride.” In Florida, they were broke, renting a room from an older gay couple, quarantined together on the precipice of the end of the world. Jasper worked in a UPS warehouse, then sold handbags for Coach and Kate Spade, then became a front desk receptionist for a defense contracting company. Intellectually restless, he assembled a project brief for an important client that made its way to the company president, who told Jasper, “That’s kind of weird that you’re a receptionist. Why don’t you manage projects?”

Jasper met Afghan refugees at military inspection bases, and then switched to construction management for Florida’s state parks system. But despite his rags-to-riches professional ascendance, he never abandoned the notion of returning to Princeton. Last year, ten years after he first arrived, he came back.

Now, Jasper lives with Tim in Spelman Hall. When I visited, the living room was littered with Tim’s paintings. Two black-and-white cats deftly navigated the cramped space, and the speakers oscillated between Doja Cat and Nina Simone. According to Tim, Jasper “can be really specific about the strangest things. He has a stick up his butt.” He doesn’t like the clutter in the apartment, and he would wake up at a regimented 7am every day if Tim weren’t there to wreak havoc on his schedule. (He may be a clean freak, but he’s also a “hoarder” – of, among other things, a Snoopy magnet advertising “Free Hugs,” a Dolly Parton votive candle, and tomes from Jung to Shakespeare). His thin frame belies his ability to put away food, which Tim compared to a “garbage disposal.” He is a maximalist in life as in learning and love.

At twenty-six, Jasper is no longer cowed by Princeton’s intensity. He is not so volatile. He wears button-down shirts and cooks Korean food with Tim. “I feel like as a kid, everybody was just telling me, ‘Oh, you’re amazing. You can do all these things…You’re going to cure cancer,’” he reflected. “And then you come to Princeton and you lose some confidence.” A newly minted anthropology major, Jasper now immerses himself in the way people work, a gifted kid turned gifted adult refusing to burn out.