Heritage and discovery in Berlin

Sketchbook drawings by Sella, in black, yellow, green, blue, and red ink illustrating interior spaces of bedding, plants, chair, and window

Interdisciplinary artist Tamar Sella '25 felt like an outsider visiting Berlin for the first time. What she found there would prove otherwise.

 

By Tamar Sella '25
ADF Guest Blogger

 

 

 

Tamar Sella ‘25, a resident of Adams House concentrating in Art, Film, and Visual Studies, was awarded a Fellowship to develop a project engaged in bookmaking, drawing, and writing to explore German-Jewish memory and imagination in Berlin and Nuremberg. Sella worked this spring as a student archivist and librarian in the Adams House archives and is a leader in design and carpentry for the Musical Chairs student art installation to be on display during Harvard’s annual ARTS FIRST Festival (April 27-30). As a curator, Sella collaborated with the Judaica Division at Widener Library in creating the Harvard Haggadot Exhibit at the Loeb Music Library which explored the history and diversity of Jewish text. She also served as the 2022 First-Year Musical Set Designer and Tech Director.

 

 I traveled to Berlin this summer in anticipation of my soon to be German citizenship and to explore Jewish art and expression amid Germany’s anti semitic history. My paternal grandmother’s mother, Esther, fled her home in Germany alone at the age of twenty years in the 1930s. Growing up, I studied German at school, but only recently did I learn of my family’s own German history. I was always puzzled by Esther’s fluency and hearing her German intermingle with Hebrew at her home in Tel Aviv. Having just sent off my application for citizenship to this country, I was eager to experience its famed art scene and to creatively explore my own relationship to the complicated and traumatic German-Jewish identity. 

 

I interned and studio assisted with LABA Berlin, a nonprofit fellowship program that supports art inspired by Jewish texts. Having grown up secular and across the world from my Israeli family, this intense engagement with Judaism felt unfamiliar. Initially, the discussions in Hebrew that I half understood and the citation of texts that I had never heard of left me feeling as an outsider to a shared memory and story. 

 

 Many of my Israeli family members in Esther’s lineage who are also preparing to become German came to visit me. I spoke more Hebrew than German as we visited traumatic sights and renowned art museums with weighty exhibits on wartime and post-war German art. We sought refuge at an Israeli restaurant where nearly all the patrons and workers were speaking Hebrew. We checked all the German Israeli tourism boxes, but my feeling of distance from those identities gave my experiences some sense of impersonality and a confusing relationship to these stories that are in part my own. 

 

It wasn’t until I was alone again, stepped into small independent galleries, assisted in a LABA fellow’s studio, chatted with my former painting TF at Harvard who lives and works in Berlin, and simply observed the city that I began recognizing my own memories and associations with the world I was experiencing. I noticed my grandmother’s apricot cake in bakeries all over the city, and the clear glass mugs for hot tea that she uses that I don’t see in America so I had always associated with her, and that she and her children don’t know much German but can understand a menu at a restaurant from years of cooking with Esther. 

 

 I didn’t have to look further than a cafe to see the complexity of my own generational layers of identity and trauma, and recognize, through mundane and minute associations, my individual relationship with a widely shared history. In seeing this, I was able to understand how artistic communities like LABA and also the other artist friends I made in Berlin are brought together by similarity, but express countless differences and individuality. Understanding this, I no longer felt like an outsider. 

  

I am so grateful to have found such communities, and to have grown to understand their value and individuality. I am sure that these lessons will propel me to seek out artistic communities in the future, and in the short term I am so excited to return to studio classes in school this year!