In Germany, There is No Magical Thinking

Written by Dana Kanafina

One of my earliest childhood memories – of which there are not many – is going to a frozen fish factory and seeing a bandsaw for the first time. I don’t remember how old I was or what I was doing there, besides the fact that I was with my dad. That in itself doesn’t explain much either: he never worked in a food business of any kind. And yet, I was there and witnessed the bandsaw in its frightening glory – harsh, hissing loudly, never needing to stop for a breath.

My dad and I were there with a man who I now assume was a manager. He told us that despite all the safety precautions, the factory still had one or two accidents a year: the workers got their fingers into the bandsaw by accident. He explained that the machine rarely cuts the fingers off entirely. Usually, it’s a clean, slightly angled cut across the middle phalanges, leaving the hand looking a bit like a spatula with a thumb. He didn’t use those words – he traced the trajectory of the cut on his own intact fingers. This made me feel dizzy: ever since I was a baby, my mom taught me not to show any sort of disfigurement on myself – this could invite it into my physical body.

I thought about this the night Charlie Kirk got assassinated in Utah. It happened less than two weeks after I moved to Germany. My fiancé at the time – now husband – was working on something on his stationary computer in the home office. I sat next to him, leaned back on a chair, reading Mona Awad’s Bunny, but mostly just dozing off. It was maybe ten or eleven p.m., but that meant it was one or two a.m. in my native Kazakhstan. I was still jetlagged and disoriented in time, awake and sleepy at inappropriate times.

My fiancé’s phone went off, and he checked it immediately. I assumed it was his internet friend he liked to play video games with (back then, they were both waiting for Battlefield 6 to come out, and it was a big topic), so I leaned in to tease him. But instead, my fiancé turned to me, frowning, and showed a notification from Twitter: Charlie Kirk got shot. The idea of this news being spread like an Amber alert amused me. Neither my fiancé nor I ever liked Charlie Kirk – we are liberal, despite what people assume when they find out we got married young (I am 25, he is 29) – so we weren’t inclined to take it seriously.

“He’ll be fine,” I rolled my eyes. “Where did they shoot him? On the arm as he Nazi saluted?”

We giggled, but my fiancé actually went to look it up, perhaps out of morbid curiosity. He typed it into the search bar on Twitter, and, sure enough, the video of the assassination was already everywhere, fairly up-close and rarely blurred. He clicked on whatever was the first link, and we saw it all: Kirk falling to his side, his neck bursting, and blood gushing in a fountainous, nauseating way. This seemed suddenly serious.

“That’s a dead man we’re looking at!” my fiancé said grimly.

“Stop!” I pleaded weakly. I set my book down and dabbed on my eyelids for a moment, hoping the image would go away.

“But you’ve seen it,” he said, his voice breaking. “It was all like…”

He flattered his fingers around his neck theatrically, imitating a gunshot.

“Stop!” I almost shouted. “I told you not to show stuff like this on yourself!”

“Babe!” he laughed, suddenly. “You are so superstitious!”

I picked up my book again and stood up to leave. I told him sharply that I was going to bed.

“Fine, relax!” he told me then and did another thing my mom taught me (and I subsequently taught my fiancé). He flattered his fingers around his neck again and then made his hands into fists, as if grabbing the wound. Then, turning slightly, he “threw” it out of the window. He didn’t need to stand up and come up to it; it was slightly ajar, but even if it were closed, he wouldn’t need to open it, either. It was the sentiment that mattered.

But I went to bed then and there by myself anyway. I stayed awake for a long time, but when he joined me in bed, I pretended I was already asleep.

***

My dad – who disowned me years ago, thus the ongoing past tense – was a lawyer, and therefore he travelled quite frequently. Dad was a Russian-speaking lawyer, having studied in Omsk and Moscow, so he mostly travelled in post-USSR countries, including Russia (though I don’t know if this changed after the start of the war). Once every couple of years, he went to Europe, too. This was always a big event in my family. Whenever he was back, my mom always cooked him an elaborate three-course meal, which he barely touched, complaining about his travel-induced headache. If he ever did come back in a good mood, he told us children (there are three of us, of which I am the oldest) about “what Europe is really like”. All these stories inevitably included wealth in one form or another.

“In the supermarkets,” he used to say, “the shelves are full, and there are all sorts of foods you can imagine. Literally anything!”

I remembered this when my fiancé bought me vegan tuna (I am vegetarian). This was also shortly after I moved. The tuna was in a glass jar with a yellow sticker on the side. The whole thing, tiny, had almost no fiber in it, according to the label on the other side.

“This is interesting!” I said. “Back home, I made it with chickpeas – high in fiber – copying it off of a recipe on the Internet.”

“This must have taken so much time,” he said off-handedly.

“It did,” I replied simply. Back home, they don’t even sell canned chickpeas. I had to go to a bazaar and find a stall – usually with an Uzbek seller; there are chickpeas in Uzbek cuisine, and not so much in Kazakh – that sold them dry. I bought them in bulk, though not over a kilogram at a time: I couldn’t carry more. After this, I had to soak them overnight, not in a fridge, in a warm place, and then I had to cook them in water over medium heat.

Another thing my dad, who was a bit of a hypochondriac, used to love about Europe is the range of medicine available. He got a runny nose a lot – something I inherited – and he liked to go to a drug store at the smallest symptom of it.

“There are all sorts of nasal sprays,” he told us, sometimes even showing what he bought – a plastic packaging now empty. “There are saline sprays, decongestants, and some are flavored with thyme or honey. They also come in drops if you don’t like a spray.”

Then there were, of course, all the stories about the variety of clothes stores, antique stores, candy stores. This was all told in a whimsical way, unshadowed by the unspoken truth – people over there are wealthy, and over here they are not.

***

I found a lot of this to be true when I moved to Germany – and it correlates, to me, with Germany’s relationship (or, rather, lack of) magical thinking.

In the Critics at Large episode for The New Yorker magazine from August of 2024, Vinson Cunningham observes that over the past five or ten years, there is a growing interest in what he identifies as “a broad canopy that is woo”. He connects this trend with general uncertainty that people – at least in the United States – now experience (and things, understandably, only got worse since then). In Germany, the quality of life and its stability are a lot less of a conversation; thus, there is less need to rely on beliefs and superstitions, but rather concrete evidence, routine, past positive experience.

I’ve mentioned food a few times in this essay already, and it has been a point of contention for me since coming to Germany. I noticed that there not many myths surrounding eating. For example, in a lot of post-USSR countries, dropping salt inside a home is considered a bad omen, an imminent death; throwing bread away can attract poverty; eating anything off a knife can lead to one becoming evil. Whenever anything related comes up, I tell this to my fiance – he forgets almost all of it – but once he asked me:

“You didn’t grow up poor. Why do you believe these things?”

It got me quite heated:

“Well, do you remember the last time you weren’t sure there would be food on the table?”

He admitted that he didn’t.

“Right, well I do,” I said angrily. I told him again about an uprising in Kazakhstan in January of 2022, something he – to his shame – remembered (we called each other on the phone through some app he found: we couldn’t do WhatsApp calls because the government cut off the internet all over the country). The uprising lasted multiple days. My family, unprepared for it, ran out of most stuff within the first few days, and afterwards had to ration and be creative: my mom made bread out of flour and tap water.

This time shook me, and it wasn’t even the first uprising in Kazakhstan in my lifetime. I haven’t lost a loved one in 2022, but many others have, including people I know personally. When living in a country that is on the verge of turning upside down, bordering a state that waged war, it’s difficult to remain level-headed, to believe only what’s at hand. Being shot on the street isn’t a superstition – it is a thing that can tangibly happen the same way it happened in the past. My – or anyone’s – living in Germany now doesn’t negate this experience; it lingers in the nervous system. Immigrants from other places, especially more tumultuous regions, can say the same, and we live in a world now where this must coexist alongside people who were blessed to only ever know comfort.

I like saying “In Germany, there is no magical thinking”. It’s a blanket, generalizing statement people usually don’t take me up on. Magical thinking – despite being in the title of a famous Joan Didion memoir (in which she expresses mixed feelings about the experience) – seems to have mostly negative connotations; it is seen as barbaric, rudimentary. But, being Asian, I can look back at many things that were seen as barbaric and rudimentary but are now widely accepted, if not loved in a cautiously curious way.

In November, a month after I got married, I visited a friend in Prague. On the way from the apartment she shares with her girlfriend to her favorite cafe, we passed by a matcha place. I pointed it out, and she said:

“Yeah! It’s new! I can’t imagine a place like this surviving in Prague even a few years back.”

And I agree with her! I remember the time when matcha was overwhelmingly described as “tasting like grass”, but now it seems to be much more than that. I also remember similar sentiments said about all sorts of things: yoga, bubble tea, K-Pop, tanghulu, fermented foods. Obviously, even the popularity of all of these things is, to an extent, overshadowed by white supremacy and white gaze, but I – again in the spirit of magical thinking – choose to remain somewhat optimistic. Despite the rapid rise of fascism, I do find that we are headed towards a global world, and the global world embraces itself from the inside. Maybe there is a future where we don’t need imminent dangers to respect each other’s rituals and beliefs – maybe there is a future where they are recognized for their strange, obscure beau