Excerpt of essay read in the course Identity of Europe (IUC, Dubrovnik, 2022)
“Hello! I’m visiting the city with my daughter. We would like to join your tour,” began the message from a client prospecting the Jewish Berlin tour I guide. “But she’s only nine years old,” he added, “so could you make it fun, and not mention the Holocaust?”
I am not sure about my role as tour guide. Sometimes I say that guiding is a post-doc beyond books. Travelers and I walk along monuments, bullet holes, documentation centers, facts turned stones. We talk, try to explain, we judge and ask – bounded by the polis and its physical and historical layers. But, after messages like this, I think I trade history. I am a peddler of eras and events, a wandering guide carrying inside my coat not garments, pickles but pictures, dates, chunks of stories. Would you like a bit of Fredrick the Great, Moses or Felix Mendelssohn, Romanticism, a “stab-in-the-back,” failed revolutions, Jewish history with or without Holocaust, served to the costumer’s taste? (…)
Rafael Kasper 