Munchen

“Do you know where I live?”
I had remembered on the plane. When Koushik got his postdoc at the Max Planck Institute I was so proud to know him! Then he moved here – ok, I’m still delighted to rub shoulders with him (cool cosmologist and all-around great guy that he is!) but it turns out MPI bought a few of the apartments in the housing complex built for the 1972 Munich Olympics. I wondered if it would feel creepy to be on the site where several Israeli athletes were killed by commandos of a Palestinian terror organization, Black September.
All the apartments were sold after the games to private citizens or companies. The balconies are overflowing with plants, the complex seems abuzz with life. Dada and Jhunu’s apartment is cute and comfy. I think I’ve become a bit numb to the present-ness of the history of violence in Europe – having felt it intensely in many places over the past eight months.
What does strike me as one of those strange coincidences that populate my life is how immersed I am in co-writing a chapter for a book coming out of the Dialogue Under Occupation conferences that I’ve been attending since 2006. The chapter is an endeavor to act into Bakhtian dialogic space and turn discourse to dialogue. In some ways it is a response to the challenge of a Palestinian professor during the opening of the second DUO conference at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem: “Go ahead and see what you can do.”