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Deike Peters
Reunification as Inheritance of Peace
Amy Shimshon-Santo (AS²): This is Inheritance of Peace. I’m Amy Shimshon-Santo. We’re back with a fresh series that aims to create a culture of peace as a personal and global endeavor. In this episode, just in time for Earth Day, we connect with Deike Peters, a German-American educator, urban planner, and environmentalist. Her parents were children of World War II, and the Berlin Wall fell when she was a teenager. A witness to the reunification of East and West Germany, her inheritance of peace is that “peaceful regime change is possible.” Let’s listen in. . .
[Deike Peters and students Aayusha Prasain, Taiho Higaki, Aakash Baral, Colby Baker, Jenny (Thao-Linh) Vo, Yakubu Mohammed Abass, Khostsetseg (Chloé) Tumurbat, Miyuki Sase, Nala Thomas, Dimpi Lama, Anh Khue Nguyen, Sarah Truong, study the global significance of the Berlin Wall, 2026]
Deike Peters (DP): “Who are you?” always depends on the context where the question is asked. I might say, “Oh, my name is Deike.” Or if I come into a classroom I might say, “Oh, my name is Professor Peters.” I recently introduced myself as a “German-American environmental urbanist.” Which is so funny, because I start with a hyphen, so it’s already a dual identity. And then I’m not even content with describing myself within a single discipline (as an urbanist), but I throw in the environment as well. I guess it’s an indication that we are all multitudes. I’m Deike – and it’s a very unusual name. At least in this country, I often have to just restate my name multiple times for people to get me right. I was named by my mother. It’s a version of a diminutive, a Frisian name. A name that comes from a borderland between the Netherlands and Germany. In a way, it’s an appropriation that my mom just thought was beautiful.
My home region in Germany is an old industrial coal mining region (The Ruhr Valley). I grew up in Post-war Germany. It was a region in decline. Dortmund is my hometown and a place where we’re sort of at the tail end of the extraction that happened through the majority of the 20th century: the coal mining, the steel production. Part of my family were people who came to be part of that era of mining and extracting from the late 1800s on, helping and producing the steel that ‘re-steeled’ the country. Industrialization is at the very core of that part of the family history.
At the forefront of a lot of environmental conflicts these days is, of course, resource extraction. The fact is that a lot of these struggles are global and united. You trace back some of your own biographies, but hopefully at some point there’s a way to connect dots at a more global level. I am thinking about my own history and connectedness of land extraction. Hopefully you have a path in your life where you move from learning and recognition to at some level being part of a solution. It might have been coal extraction. These days lithium mines are at the forefront of what we might have to resist against. Hopefully you get to do something with your life that is still connected to where you come from. Be a lifelong student. Keep learning. Tap into other people’s wisdom. At some point, you’re on the spot for having to help the next generation of young people point the way a little bit.
“At the forefront of environmental conflicts these days is resource extraction. The fact is a lot of these struggles are global. Hopefully at some point there’s a way to connect dots.”
When I graduated from high school in Germany they asked: “Who do you think you’re gonna be? What’s your plan?” I wrote in the yearbook: “I want to do something with languages.” Which is hilarious, right? Being a planner was not on the horizon. But I think it makes sense because we need multiple languages. I grew up [around] too much silence. A lot of what we need to be able to do as young people is to translate, broaden our ability to express ourselves. So multiple languages were really important to me. Once I felt oh, now I have a second or a third language as part of my arsenal of expression, what do I do with it? This is where my idea to become an urban planner came from. Become somebody who has “real” skills. Looking at a settlement or actual map-making, planning. I didn’t know it was going to be more counter-mapping, ultimately. Languages first, as a means of translating and communicating ideas, and then the planning and plan-making as a more interventionist solution-making, skill-building arsenal. Planning is about who’s making decisions in this world. Who’s empowered? Who’s put in a position of laying out futures for us? I know now it was very naive, but I think this idea of plan making was a way to help inscribe rules into the world. Some of us might have to do this, with hopefully different ideas.
AS²: I feel so much empathy with what you’re saying, so I’m leaning towards the microphone. When you do go through an advanced education in urban planning, seeing the way decision-making is coming down right now is such a shock. Especially if you learn the scientific method. It’s a slower pace of improvisation based on a feedback system, where you make a little move, and then you assess the impact through data, and then you lean towards the things that are working and getting you where you want to go. So, there’s of course innovation and improvisation in it, but there’s also deep reflection and a circulation of ideas and reflection and ideas and reflection that I think are more likely to guide us towards the kind of outcomes we want.
“I grew up in a Germany that was at the very center of the Cold War with cruise missiles pointing to East Germany. Threat of nuclear obliteration was a part of your childhood. The Green Party, at the time, was intertwining social progressive ideals with the idea that we need to think differently about our relationship with the environment. Environmental thinking was going to be our pathway.”
DP: As far as urban planning as a profession in Germany at the time, the discipline was explicitly connected to the ecological awakening that was happening. Growing up in West Germany in the 70s and 80s was a post-war environment very different from the U.S.
First of all, this crazy idea that my parents’ generation was the “Stunde Null” the “zero-hour” generation. The idea that a country, as a whole, can start over. So you have May 8th, 1945, as the end of the war. But then, all of a sudden, you had a new Germany where supposedly “we’re not Nazis anymore, because the Nazi regime is over.” My parents were 5 and 8 at that point.
I grew up in a Germany that was at the center of the Cold War with cruise missiles pointing to East Germany. So the threat of nuclear obliteration is part of your childhood. The Green Party, which was the most progressive political force at the time, is intertwining social progressive ideals with the idea that “we need to think differently about our relationship with the environment.” Environmental thinking as something that was going to be our pathway.
Talk about peace, right? It’s a cold war, we’re not hot. The missiles are not exploding. But if there’s a pathway towards a better future, a better world, a better re-entangled way of being on this planet: ecological thinking and systems thinking were what these planning faculties wanted to think about. My planning education didn’t come out of the modernist, dominating tradition of let’s all build neighborhoods looking from above. The kinds of teachers, and the pathway for an education in urban planning faculties at the time, was very inherently progressive. People who had good community organizing roots, and naive hopes for an alternative future.
AS²: I really appreciate the hopefulness. My mother, who is in her 90s, said “You have to have a romantic idea.” It’s very hard to get anything done, to mobilize things, without a romantic idea. It gives me a sense that we have a very small flash of time on Earth, and we don’t get to see the bigger picture, and things can change. I guess that’s my romantic idea. We’re not stuck, we’re not powerless, even though it might feel that way right now. One of the classic stories that a lot of Jewish people have said is anything is possible if German people and Jewish people can hang out. You’ve been impacted by growing up with parents who were children of war. That reality may have also demanded the romantic, hopeful environmentalist response. We really know how bad it can be so let’s really try for something very good. In terms of an environmental focus as something that can bring people together across regions and nationalities and cultures.
[Remnants of the Berlin Wall at the Topography of Terror. Photo: Deike Peters]
DP: When we talk about any kind of reconciliation, it has to be peaceful so there can’t be war. But it also has to relate to the way that we relate to the more-than-human world. My parents, of course, did not have the luxury of reflecting on the past, or where they come from. My parents’ generation is the generation that had to endure the silence that came after the rebuilding. So my mom would always share with us these very, very strong childhood memories. She was born in 1940, so her first 5 years of her life were bomb shelters and enduring hunger. She grew up with a mother who struggled for them to survive, and with a father who, when he came back from fighting in the war, she didn’t recognize. Her earliest childhood memories were of a war that she didn’t understand at the time. I think more dramatically: a war that was also never explained to her afterwards. Her father never was able to speak about his experiences. The German educational system did not really “talk.” There was not a good way in the 50s and 60s to grapple with the enormity of the Holocaust. My mom was sort of a seeker. She didn’t have a college education. She was always interested in history, but I think she felt — I would say on her behalf — a little bit betrayed. She was not the perpetrator generation. She was the recipient.
“Growing up, I had the incredible benefit of teachers that had to be very aware of the ‘never again’ part of history, of the grappling with ‘how could this happen?’”
Whereas for me, growing up, I had the incredible benefit of teachers that had to be very aware of the “never again” part of history, of the grappling of how could this happen? The 1980s in Germany are that moment where we, as a nation, were talking about, “is there such a thing as collective guilt?” Intergenerational.
For me, it’s really hard to fathom how that’s something that you might lose with the next generation. It’s almost like the shaking off of that weight and the historical responsibility of we as a people must uphold certain values. I realized being a young German in the 80s, you can never be proud of where you come from. You can’t ever wave a flag. You semi-understand. So you create new identities. I mean, growing up European. Being multilingual. Speaking a different language to the point where people can’t pinpoint directly where you’re coming from. So, its very interesting to realize at some point, that that’s not a universal thing that every German generation goes through. But, again, that is something that you have to somehow uphold. Then raising my own children, mostly outside of the country, changes things because it changes them. I eventually created a more hyphenated multiple identity for myself, but they were born into it. Yeah, it’s interesting.
AS²: First of all, now we see that your love of languages is also your precursor of being a multinational, transnational person. The precursor for understanding another way of being is to be able to listen and hear much less speak and converse.
The idea of silence is so fascinating to me because there’s been a lot of silence here. Obviously, the United States was built on all of the genocidal activities that were underscoring the foundation of this country. And when I was studying or living in Latin America, people said, “we understand the United States has a certain relationship to imperialism, and yet we see you as you and not as the government.” And now, with family in the Middle East, I see the negative impact on everyone. I want everyone in the region to have a good life. It is heart-crushing to see so much suffering. Even suffering in the name of the Holocaust, which is absurd to me. My ancestors would never have wanted that to be the outcome of what we went through in Europe. This calls for constant reflection, storytelling, and also staying open. Rather than just saying, all Germans are the same, or all Americans are the same, or all Israelis are the same, or all Lebanese are the same. That’s just foolishness. Don’t we have any authority over what we think, what we do, what we wish for? It’s just very rational and obvious to me not to equate people with their governments. Because we’re seeing how difficult it is to get a democratic process going here in the U.S.
Is there anything else you want to share about the idea of silence? It sounds like you were witnessing the silent generation, and also receiving a different kind of education.
DP: Yeah. How is genocide a repeated occurrence throughout humanity? It is essential to have had human encounters with Others. People who are unlike yourself and who you learn to love, appreciate, and encounter. At its core, and it sounds super corny, the importance of intergenerational, intercultural, and multi-lingual human encounter. Seeing the other. You would hope that empathy is possible across multitudes and otherness. We’re grappling with the idea that there are certain structural conditions that make genocide possible. Genocide is mass murder usually within the context of an oppressive state. There are belief systems that powerful people and structures are able to institute that make mass murder possible. And then there’s an instrumentalization. There’s something that happens. It’s weapons. It’s violence.
But what can break through? What is the other side? What brings a German family to either hide or denounce a Jewish person in the 1930s? What brings you to reaching out or pointing a finger? It’s something in the humanity. In order to be able to understand, you need to be able to listen. So I think at its core it’s communication. That’s what it is. Non-understanding. How do you give someone the means to hear you and to understand? It’s a two-way process, so you have to do the work of making yourself understood. That’s definitely one of these through lines in my life. You need to find some way of clearly articulating ideas. It could be that you need images or tools. Sometimes you just also need to learn who the other person is and not reject that. I’ve also put myself into positions where I needed to challenge, or overcome, that.
AS: I’m seeing that there are so many silences. Recently, Ghana argued in the United Nations for recognition of the holocaust of African people during the transatlantic slave trade. The United States and Israel both didn’t want to recognize that. So, there’s a silencing of what are the facts of history. It’s hard to look at. Part of the value of education is to try and cut through.
The opposite of silence isn’t just speaking out. Maybe it’s also what you were talking about — communication. Because communication isn’t just, I’m going to tell you what I think, and what I think is more important than what you think. It’s actually making myself vulnerable and receptive to learn from a different period of time, a different perspective, and somehow gain a larger analysis and understanding of truth and what good ethical behavior might be at this moment in time.
“Listening is silence. Silencing is something else. Silencing is a violent act. Silencing is suppression of ideas. And it is absolutely frightening to see how quickly that could happen, and the patterns.”
DP: There is a place for silence too. Listening is silence. It’s when you shut up and you hear the other. Right? Because silencing, of course, is something else. Silencing is a violent act. Silencing is suppression of ideas. And it is absolutely frightening to see how quickly that could happen, and the patterns.
One of the most memorable and important ways was how my high school history teacher encouraged us to understand German history, and of course Nazism and the Holocaust. He started in the 1920s and talked about the structures and the culture of a post-war environment (because there was “The Great War” in 1914). So, a people that wanted to have strong leadership. People very often think the Weimar Republic was this beautiful cultural moment where we celebrate Berlin as the center of the world. What happened in Germany in the 1920s is exactly what happened in this country. The rise of authoritarianism. You want to believe in leadership, but people are being convinced by authoritarian propaganda to fall back on simplistic ideals. The parallels are stunning.
“What happened in Germany in the 1920s is exactly what happened in this country. The rise of authoritarianism. You want to believe in leadership, but people are being convinced by authoritarian propaganda to fall back on simplistic ideals. The parallels are stunning.”
Are we on this pathway of an increased willingness to become violent? Violent suppression — the way that we have just seen in the past year unfolding? Strategic violence. The raids. It is frightening. But silencing is at the core of these things. Silencing whom? It’s the other. It’s diversity. It’s the claiming of dominance. That’s something that doesn’t ever end well.
AS²: What is your inheritance of peace?
DP: I just did this intensive project with students where I took them to Berlin to study the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was 19 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. The idea is that peaceful regime change is possible. The formal marker of the end of the Cold War is the fall. The fall of the so-called Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a reunification of a country that had been at the very center of the division, of not just the country but the world. Here is the supposedly democratic, capitalistic west, and the communist east. The two systems we have divided the world between. Here is a concrete physical marker that we — the people— are tearing down within a very short period of time. Then we are left with the task of stitching something back together that probably should have never been pulled apart.
The irony is that I wasn’t even living in Germany at the time. I was doing another study abroad, living in France, crafting a more European identity for me. I’ve since reflected a lot on the fact. This influenced how I think about the possibility of a peaceful transition. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite. And you think, that is just right and obvious. I have assembled that, like most Germans of my generation, into an identity as something that’s almost a given. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite.
Once again, we are now at a moment where we realize: no, we’re in danger of losing unity on all fronts. I think this is an inheritance of my adolescence. I came of age, and was choosing my future path of where I wanted to be in the world, at a moment where my own country was in one of its better moments.
The fall of the Berlin Wall “influenced how I think about the possibility of a peaceful transition. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite. That is just right and obvious. Once again, we are now at a moment where we realize we’re in danger of losing unity on all fronts.”
It was interesting to take a group of 12 international students, some of them from communist countries to Berlin. Vietnamese students, Nepalese students, students from Ghana, from Japan, encountering the place for the first time. How do people of an entirely different generation, from entirely different corners of the world, encounter that memory as a teaching moment? When, for me, it was a reality that sort of happened to me. I didn’t make it happen.
Yeah. So, inheritance is also an intergenerational project. An inheritance of something that’s given. My inheritance is reunification.
AS²: We’ve had so much harm on top of harm on top of harm, and normalization of that. You see people saying we just need to win by being stronger, by being the bigger bully, by showing more force. I love that your counterpoint to that, from actually having been born into a place that was so deeply impacted by war, is not domination. It is unification. It is the fall of a wall. It is, what are our common points? Which does sound very romantic.
“One of the things we need to hear is that regime change is always possible. Because we think of things as entrenched. One way of flipping it, and reframing things is always to say: ‘No, we can point to the moments where change was possible.’”
DP: The reality of course is complicated. It wasn’t really unification. In so many ways it was a taking over. Yeah, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not romanticizing what actually happened in the process, or what happened in the years since, and how the country has turned out to be, and how fragmented it is now, and all the problems that came with it. But we recognize the symbolic power of the moment. One of the things we need to hear is that regime change is always possible. Because we think of things as entrenched. So one way of flipping it and reframing things is always to say: no, we can point to the moments where change was possible.
AS²: Just for clarification in our current context, we’re not talking about taking over another country as regime change. We’re talking about taking responsibility for our own spaces, with certain values, and certain actions as regime change. We’re all a part of this since we are wrapped up in a global economy. We are wrapped up in a global war economy. “Regime change” is not, you must change so that I have more comfort, but we must change so that we get peace and sustainability.
DP: To clarify, the Berlin Wall was erected by the East German socialist regime as a so-called “anti-fascist border protection wall”, so it’s the walling in of East Germans.
How was that change possible? It wasn’t because Ronald Reagan just screamed “Let’s tear down this wall.” We needed the Gorbachevian Glasnost and Perestroika. We needed someone to not escalate. We needed someone to not militarily, violently oppress. A quest for freedom and openness. That’s what I mean.
AS²: “A quest for freedom and openness.” I love this. I appreciate you so much. You are such a wonderful presence in my life. I am grateful to you for coming on and sharing your time with listeners, but also for your friendship and neighborliness. Thank you for deciding to be a transnational human being, to speak different languages, connect with different places, and to invest in the next generation. Thanks for sharing about your own legacy, your own origins, and how these lessons have affected who you have become.
“How was that change possible? It wasn’t because Ronald Reagan just screamed ‘Let’s tear down this wall.’ We needed the Gorbachevian Glasnost and Perestroika. We needed someone to not escalate. We needed someone to not militarily, violently oppress. A quest for freedom and openness.”
DP: I love this project so much. It is kind of amazing where you end up in life ultimately, and how there’s more of a pathway, a red thread, that you realize looking back. I ended up becoming a teacher and a professor at a liberal arts college that is ostensibly built upon Buddhist traditions of peace and reconciliation and disarmament. And I’m neither Buddhist nor Christian anymore. It’s this idea of interfaith communication also. When you really start talking human to human, your faith is not the first thing that matters. You see the greater values shine through in many ways. And then you build community out from that. I have taught so many students. For some of them their faith is a big part of their identity, or it might not be. It’s not the first thing that we have to flag. But in these big violent conflicts that we’ve alluded to, that is something that people foreground.
AS²: In a way, we get to experience something that our ancestors may have thought was never possible, and it’s completely possible. I find myself involved with interfaith work. I love working with the Muslim-Jewish Alliance. It’s so healing for me. It brings me closer to any future of accountability and common care and something beyond Jewish supremacy, or Muslim supremacy, or Christian supremacy. It is just a world of difference. I’m rereading the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel now. He was very involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and he had many thoughts about the importance of interfaith communication. That’s why it struck me when you said communication.
I am leaving our conversation with how important communication is. It’s receptivity. It’s mutuality and valuing of a different opinion and a different experience without fear that one will be demeaned or overpowered in some way. I feel like there is a protective quality to friendship, probably because it’s the door to communication.
“True faith doesn’t fear the difference of ideas. I think that’s such a hard thing to understand because dogmatism is the opposite of that. It doesn’t allow for the difference, or the variety, or for the openness of ideas. So much of war and violence is based on fear of the other.”
DP: The really important word that you just used was fear. Fear and faith. True faith doesn’t fear the difference of ideas. I think that’s such a hard thing to understand, because dogmatism is the opposite of that. It doesn’t allow for the difference, or the variety, or for the openness of ideas. So much of war and violence is based on fear of the other. Are you fearing it because it’s challenging your own identity? It’s challenging the way that you live? It’s challenging what you want to believe about the world? I think communication is about overcoming that fear.
AS²: My grandparents on my father’s side divorced, and my grandfather married another Jewish person who said, “I cannot stand the sound of German.” She was so traumatized by the Third Reich that she couldn’t imagine a new relationship to German people post-Third Reich. One of the things that’s so beautiful about a conversation like this is to understand — as these Artemis II astronauts keep on trying to say as they come back to Earth — that our well-being is wrapped up in each other as earthlings.
DP: The blue planet! That’s the other watershed moment, right? I was born in 1970, so the picture was already there. We already had the incredible benefit of looking at the blue planet from space. That’s about framing and perspective. The zooming in and the zooming out. And a part of what we’ve talked about is, when you get to see something up close you encounter it. But stepping back, or zooming out and gaining perspective, is just as important. Hopefully the astronauts bring back the message that from far away these things look a lot more together.
“Look at the blue planet from space. That’s about framing and perspective. The zooming in and the zooming out. When you get to see something up close you encounter it. But stepping back, or zooming out and gaining perspective, is just as important.”
AS²: For sure. But also, we don’t even have to be astronauts. I feel that just with you. I’m sure you do this in your life, in your research, in your classroom, and in your friendships, so thank you so much.
DP: Yeah. Embodying things rather than just spelling it out. Maybe that’s the last thing about silence. Quieting the mind, or silencing. Silencing is an act. But silence can be meditative and convey a lot of understanding without the words.
Additional Resources:
The Berlin Wall: Encountering a Memorial Site of Global Significance
Deike Peter’s Academic Website
“Urban Nature in Need of Ecological Restor(y)ation”
“Igniting Passion for Urban Nature”
“Equal and inalienable rights is the foundation, justice, and peace in the world.”
- Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
This interview has been edited and condensed. Subscribe to Inheritance of Peace with Amy Shimshon-Santo on Apple Podcasts or on Substack at Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair. Theme music for this program is by Avila Santo. This series highlights survivors, everyday people from across the generations and various walks of life —poets, researchers, shephards, healers — who discuss our Inheritance of Peace as foundational for a just society.
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By Inheritance of Peace with Amy Shimshon-SantoReunification as Inheritance of Peace
Amy Shimshon-Santo (AS²): This is Inheritance of Peace. I’m Amy Shimshon-Santo. We’re back with a fresh series that aims to create a culture of peace as a personal and global endeavor. In this episode, just in time for Earth Day, we connect with Deike Peters, a German-American educator, urban planner, and environmentalist. Her parents were children of World War II, and the Berlin Wall fell when she was a teenager. A witness to the reunification of East and West Germany, her inheritance of peace is that “peaceful regime change is possible.” Let’s listen in. . .
[Deike Peters and students Aayusha Prasain, Taiho Higaki, Aakash Baral, Colby Baker, Jenny (Thao-Linh) Vo, Yakubu Mohammed Abass, Khostsetseg (Chloé) Tumurbat, Miyuki Sase, Nala Thomas, Dimpi Lama, Anh Khue Nguyen, Sarah Truong, study the global significance of the Berlin Wall, 2026]
Deike Peters (DP): “Who are you?” always depends on the context where the question is asked. I might say, “Oh, my name is Deike.” Or if I come into a classroom I might say, “Oh, my name is Professor Peters.” I recently introduced myself as a “German-American environmental urbanist.” Which is so funny, because I start with a hyphen, so it’s already a dual identity. And then I’m not even content with describing myself within a single discipline (as an urbanist), but I throw in the environment as well. I guess it’s an indication that we are all multitudes. I’m Deike – and it’s a very unusual name. At least in this country, I often have to just restate my name multiple times for people to get me right. I was named by my mother. It’s a version of a diminutive, a Frisian name. A name that comes from a borderland between the Netherlands and Germany. In a way, it’s an appropriation that my mom just thought was beautiful.
My home region in Germany is an old industrial coal mining region (The Ruhr Valley). I grew up in Post-war Germany. It was a region in decline. Dortmund is my hometown and a place where we’re sort of at the tail end of the extraction that happened through the majority of the 20th century: the coal mining, the steel production. Part of my family were people who came to be part of that era of mining and extracting from the late 1800s on, helping and producing the steel that ‘re-steeled’ the country. Industrialization is at the very core of that part of the family history.
At the forefront of a lot of environmental conflicts these days is, of course, resource extraction. The fact is that a lot of these struggles are global and united. You trace back some of your own biographies, but hopefully at some point there’s a way to connect dots at a more global level. I am thinking about my own history and connectedness of land extraction. Hopefully you have a path in your life where you move from learning and recognition to at some level being part of a solution. It might have been coal extraction. These days lithium mines are at the forefront of what we might have to resist against. Hopefully you get to do something with your life that is still connected to where you come from. Be a lifelong student. Keep learning. Tap into other people’s wisdom. At some point, you’re on the spot for having to help the next generation of young people point the way a little bit.
“At the forefront of environmental conflicts these days is resource extraction. The fact is a lot of these struggles are global. Hopefully at some point there’s a way to connect dots.”
When I graduated from high school in Germany they asked: “Who do you think you’re gonna be? What’s your plan?” I wrote in the yearbook: “I want to do something with languages.” Which is hilarious, right? Being a planner was not on the horizon. But I think it makes sense because we need multiple languages. I grew up [around] too much silence. A lot of what we need to be able to do as young people is to translate, broaden our ability to express ourselves. So multiple languages were really important to me. Once I felt oh, now I have a second or a third language as part of my arsenal of expression, what do I do with it? This is where my idea to become an urban planner came from. Become somebody who has “real” skills. Looking at a settlement or actual map-making, planning. I didn’t know it was going to be more counter-mapping, ultimately. Languages first, as a means of translating and communicating ideas, and then the planning and plan-making as a more interventionist solution-making, skill-building arsenal. Planning is about who’s making decisions in this world. Who’s empowered? Who’s put in a position of laying out futures for us? I know now it was very naive, but I think this idea of plan making was a way to help inscribe rules into the world. Some of us might have to do this, with hopefully different ideas.
AS²: I feel so much empathy with what you’re saying, so I’m leaning towards the microphone. When you do go through an advanced education in urban planning, seeing the way decision-making is coming down right now is such a shock. Especially if you learn the scientific method. It’s a slower pace of improvisation based on a feedback system, where you make a little move, and then you assess the impact through data, and then you lean towards the things that are working and getting you where you want to go. So, there’s of course innovation and improvisation in it, but there’s also deep reflection and a circulation of ideas and reflection and ideas and reflection that I think are more likely to guide us towards the kind of outcomes we want.
“I grew up in a Germany that was at the very center of the Cold War with cruise missiles pointing to East Germany. Threat of nuclear obliteration was a part of your childhood. The Green Party, at the time, was intertwining social progressive ideals with the idea that we need to think differently about our relationship with the environment. Environmental thinking was going to be our pathway.”
DP: As far as urban planning as a profession in Germany at the time, the discipline was explicitly connected to the ecological awakening that was happening. Growing up in West Germany in the 70s and 80s was a post-war environment very different from the U.S.
First of all, this crazy idea that my parents’ generation was the “Stunde Null” the “zero-hour” generation. The idea that a country, as a whole, can start over. So you have May 8th, 1945, as the end of the war. But then, all of a sudden, you had a new Germany where supposedly “we’re not Nazis anymore, because the Nazi regime is over.” My parents were 5 and 8 at that point.
I grew up in a Germany that was at the center of the Cold War with cruise missiles pointing to East Germany. So the threat of nuclear obliteration is part of your childhood. The Green Party, which was the most progressive political force at the time, is intertwining social progressive ideals with the idea that “we need to think differently about our relationship with the environment.” Environmental thinking as something that was going to be our pathway.
Talk about peace, right? It’s a cold war, we’re not hot. The missiles are not exploding. But if there’s a pathway towards a better future, a better world, a better re-entangled way of being on this planet: ecological thinking and systems thinking were what these planning faculties wanted to think about. My planning education didn’t come out of the modernist, dominating tradition of let’s all build neighborhoods looking from above. The kinds of teachers, and the pathway for an education in urban planning faculties at the time, was very inherently progressive. People who had good community organizing roots, and naive hopes for an alternative future.
AS²: I really appreciate the hopefulness. My mother, who is in her 90s, said “You have to have a romantic idea.” It’s very hard to get anything done, to mobilize things, without a romantic idea. It gives me a sense that we have a very small flash of time on Earth, and we don’t get to see the bigger picture, and things can change. I guess that’s my romantic idea. We’re not stuck, we’re not powerless, even though it might feel that way right now. One of the classic stories that a lot of Jewish people have said is anything is possible if German people and Jewish people can hang out. You’ve been impacted by growing up with parents who were children of war. That reality may have also demanded the romantic, hopeful environmentalist response. We really know how bad it can be so let’s really try for something very good. In terms of an environmental focus as something that can bring people together across regions and nationalities and cultures.
[Remnants of the Berlin Wall at the Topography of Terror. Photo: Deike Peters]
DP: When we talk about any kind of reconciliation, it has to be peaceful so there can’t be war. But it also has to relate to the way that we relate to the more-than-human world. My parents, of course, did not have the luxury of reflecting on the past, or where they come from. My parents’ generation is the generation that had to endure the silence that came after the rebuilding. So my mom would always share with us these very, very strong childhood memories. She was born in 1940, so her first 5 years of her life were bomb shelters and enduring hunger. She grew up with a mother who struggled for them to survive, and with a father who, when he came back from fighting in the war, she didn’t recognize. Her earliest childhood memories were of a war that she didn’t understand at the time. I think more dramatically: a war that was also never explained to her afterwards. Her father never was able to speak about his experiences. The German educational system did not really “talk.” There was not a good way in the 50s and 60s to grapple with the enormity of the Holocaust. My mom was sort of a seeker. She didn’t have a college education. She was always interested in history, but I think she felt — I would say on her behalf — a little bit betrayed. She was not the perpetrator generation. She was the recipient.
“Growing up, I had the incredible benefit of teachers that had to be very aware of the ‘never again’ part of history, of the grappling with ‘how could this happen?’”
Whereas for me, growing up, I had the incredible benefit of teachers that had to be very aware of the “never again” part of history, of the grappling of how could this happen? The 1980s in Germany are that moment where we, as a nation, were talking about, “is there such a thing as collective guilt?” Intergenerational.
For me, it’s really hard to fathom how that’s something that you might lose with the next generation. It’s almost like the shaking off of that weight and the historical responsibility of we as a people must uphold certain values. I realized being a young German in the 80s, you can never be proud of where you come from. You can’t ever wave a flag. You semi-understand. So you create new identities. I mean, growing up European. Being multilingual. Speaking a different language to the point where people can’t pinpoint directly where you’re coming from. So, its very interesting to realize at some point, that that’s not a universal thing that every German generation goes through. But, again, that is something that you have to somehow uphold. Then raising my own children, mostly outside of the country, changes things because it changes them. I eventually created a more hyphenated multiple identity for myself, but they were born into it. Yeah, it’s interesting.
AS²: First of all, now we see that your love of languages is also your precursor of being a multinational, transnational person. The precursor for understanding another way of being is to be able to listen and hear much less speak and converse.
The idea of silence is so fascinating to me because there’s been a lot of silence here. Obviously, the United States was built on all of the genocidal activities that were underscoring the foundation of this country. And when I was studying or living in Latin America, people said, “we understand the United States has a certain relationship to imperialism, and yet we see you as you and not as the government.” And now, with family in the Middle East, I see the negative impact on everyone. I want everyone in the region to have a good life. It is heart-crushing to see so much suffering. Even suffering in the name of the Holocaust, which is absurd to me. My ancestors would never have wanted that to be the outcome of what we went through in Europe. This calls for constant reflection, storytelling, and also staying open. Rather than just saying, all Germans are the same, or all Americans are the same, or all Israelis are the same, or all Lebanese are the same. That’s just foolishness. Don’t we have any authority over what we think, what we do, what we wish for? It’s just very rational and obvious to me not to equate people with their governments. Because we’re seeing how difficult it is to get a democratic process going here in the U.S.
Is there anything else you want to share about the idea of silence? It sounds like you were witnessing the silent generation, and also receiving a different kind of education.
DP: Yeah. How is genocide a repeated occurrence throughout humanity? It is essential to have had human encounters with Others. People who are unlike yourself and who you learn to love, appreciate, and encounter. At its core, and it sounds super corny, the importance of intergenerational, intercultural, and multi-lingual human encounter. Seeing the other. You would hope that empathy is possible across multitudes and otherness. We’re grappling with the idea that there are certain structural conditions that make genocide possible. Genocide is mass murder usually within the context of an oppressive state. There are belief systems that powerful people and structures are able to institute that make mass murder possible. And then there’s an instrumentalization. There’s something that happens. It’s weapons. It’s violence.
But what can break through? What is the other side? What brings a German family to either hide or denounce a Jewish person in the 1930s? What brings you to reaching out or pointing a finger? It’s something in the humanity. In order to be able to understand, you need to be able to listen. So I think at its core it’s communication. That’s what it is. Non-understanding. How do you give someone the means to hear you and to understand? It’s a two-way process, so you have to do the work of making yourself understood. That’s definitely one of these through lines in my life. You need to find some way of clearly articulating ideas. It could be that you need images or tools. Sometimes you just also need to learn who the other person is and not reject that. I’ve also put myself into positions where I needed to challenge, or overcome, that.
AS: I’m seeing that there are so many silences. Recently, Ghana argued in the United Nations for recognition of the holocaust of African people during the transatlantic slave trade. The United States and Israel both didn’t want to recognize that. So, there’s a silencing of what are the facts of history. It’s hard to look at. Part of the value of education is to try and cut through.
The opposite of silence isn’t just speaking out. Maybe it’s also what you were talking about — communication. Because communication isn’t just, I’m going to tell you what I think, and what I think is more important than what you think. It’s actually making myself vulnerable and receptive to learn from a different period of time, a different perspective, and somehow gain a larger analysis and understanding of truth and what good ethical behavior might be at this moment in time.
“Listening is silence. Silencing is something else. Silencing is a violent act. Silencing is suppression of ideas. And it is absolutely frightening to see how quickly that could happen, and the patterns.”
DP: There is a place for silence too. Listening is silence. It’s when you shut up and you hear the other. Right? Because silencing, of course, is something else. Silencing is a violent act. Silencing is suppression of ideas. And it is absolutely frightening to see how quickly that could happen, and the patterns.
One of the most memorable and important ways was how my high school history teacher encouraged us to understand German history, and of course Nazism and the Holocaust. He started in the 1920s and talked about the structures and the culture of a post-war environment (because there was “The Great War” in 1914). So, a people that wanted to have strong leadership. People very often think the Weimar Republic was this beautiful cultural moment where we celebrate Berlin as the center of the world. What happened in Germany in the 1920s is exactly what happened in this country. The rise of authoritarianism. You want to believe in leadership, but people are being convinced by authoritarian propaganda to fall back on simplistic ideals. The parallels are stunning.
“What happened in Germany in the 1920s is exactly what happened in this country. The rise of authoritarianism. You want to believe in leadership, but people are being convinced by authoritarian propaganda to fall back on simplistic ideals. The parallels are stunning.”
Are we on this pathway of an increased willingness to become violent? Violent suppression — the way that we have just seen in the past year unfolding? Strategic violence. The raids. It is frightening. But silencing is at the core of these things. Silencing whom? It’s the other. It’s diversity. It’s the claiming of dominance. That’s something that doesn’t ever end well.
AS²: What is your inheritance of peace?
DP: I just did this intensive project with students where I took them to Berlin to study the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was 19 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. The idea is that peaceful regime change is possible. The formal marker of the end of the Cold War is the fall. The fall of the so-called Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a reunification of a country that had been at the very center of the division, of not just the country but the world. Here is the supposedly democratic, capitalistic west, and the communist east. The two systems we have divided the world between. Here is a concrete physical marker that we — the people— are tearing down within a very short period of time. Then we are left with the task of stitching something back together that probably should have never been pulled apart.
The irony is that I wasn’t even living in Germany at the time. I was doing another study abroad, living in France, crafting a more European identity for me. I’ve since reflected a lot on the fact. This influenced how I think about the possibility of a peaceful transition. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite. And you think, that is just right and obvious. I have assembled that, like most Germans of my generation, into an identity as something that’s almost a given. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite.
Once again, we are now at a moment where we realize: no, we’re in danger of losing unity on all fronts. I think this is an inheritance of my adolescence. I came of age, and was choosing my future path of where I wanted to be in the world, at a moment where my own country was in one of its better moments.
The fall of the Berlin Wall “influenced how I think about the possibility of a peaceful transition. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite. That is just right and obvious. Once again, we are now at a moment where we realize we’re in danger of losing unity on all fronts.”
It was interesting to take a group of 12 international students, some of them from communist countries to Berlin. Vietnamese students, Nepalese students, students from Ghana, from Japan, encountering the place for the first time. How do people of an entirely different generation, from entirely different corners of the world, encounter that memory as a teaching moment? When, for me, it was a reality that sort of happened to me. I didn’t make it happen.
Yeah. So, inheritance is also an intergenerational project. An inheritance of something that’s given. My inheritance is reunification.
AS²: We’ve had so much harm on top of harm on top of harm, and normalization of that. You see people saying we just need to win by being stronger, by being the bigger bully, by showing more force. I love that your counterpoint to that, from actually having been born into a place that was so deeply impacted by war, is not domination. It is unification. It is the fall of a wall. It is, what are our common points? Which does sound very romantic.
“One of the things we need to hear is that regime change is always possible. Because we think of things as entrenched. One way of flipping it, and reframing things is always to say: ‘No, we can point to the moments where change was possible.’”
DP: The reality of course is complicated. It wasn’t really unification. In so many ways it was a taking over. Yeah, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not romanticizing what actually happened in the process, or what happened in the years since, and how the country has turned out to be, and how fragmented it is now, and all the problems that came with it. But we recognize the symbolic power of the moment. One of the things we need to hear is that regime change is always possible. Because we think of things as entrenched. So one way of flipping it and reframing things is always to say: no, we can point to the moments where change was possible.
AS²: Just for clarification in our current context, we’re not talking about taking over another country as regime change. We’re talking about taking responsibility for our own spaces, with certain values, and certain actions as regime change. We’re all a part of this since we are wrapped up in a global economy. We are wrapped up in a global war economy. “Regime change” is not, you must change so that I have more comfort, but we must change so that we get peace and sustainability.
DP: To clarify, the Berlin Wall was erected by the East German socialist regime as a so-called “anti-fascist border protection wall”, so it’s the walling in of East Germans.
How was that change possible? It wasn’t because Ronald Reagan just screamed “Let’s tear down this wall.” We needed the Gorbachevian Glasnost and Perestroika. We needed someone to not escalate. We needed someone to not militarily, violently oppress. A quest for freedom and openness. That’s what I mean.
AS²: “A quest for freedom and openness.” I love this. I appreciate you so much. You are such a wonderful presence in my life. I am grateful to you for coming on and sharing your time with listeners, but also for your friendship and neighborliness. Thank you for deciding to be a transnational human being, to speak different languages, connect with different places, and to invest in the next generation. Thanks for sharing about your own legacy, your own origins, and how these lessons have affected who you have become.
“How was that change possible? It wasn’t because Ronald Reagan just screamed ‘Let’s tear down this wall.’ We needed the Gorbachevian Glasnost and Perestroika. We needed someone to not escalate. We needed someone to not militarily, violently oppress. A quest for freedom and openness.”
DP: I love this project so much. It is kind of amazing where you end up in life ultimately, and how there’s more of a pathway, a red thread, that you realize looking back. I ended up becoming a teacher and a professor at a liberal arts college that is ostensibly built upon Buddhist traditions of peace and reconciliation and disarmament. And I’m neither Buddhist nor Christian anymore. It’s this idea of interfaith communication also. When you really start talking human to human, your faith is not the first thing that matters. You see the greater values shine through in many ways. And then you build community out from that. I have taught so many students. For some of them their faith is a big part of their identity, or it might not be. It’s not the first thing that we have to flag. But in these big violent conflicts that we’ve alluded to, that is something that people foreground.
AS²: In a way, we get to experience something that our ancestors may have thought was never possible, and it’s completely possible. I find myself involved with interfaith work. I love working with the Muslim-Jewish Alliance. It’s so healing for me. It brings me closer to any future of accountability and common care and something beyond Jewish supremacy, or Muslim supremacy, or Christian supremacy. It is just a world of difference. I’m rereading the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel now. He was very involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and he had many thoughts about the importance of interfaith communication. That’s why it struck me when you said communication.
I am leaving our conversation with how important communication is. It’s receptivity. It’s mutuality and valuing of a different opinion and a different experience without fear that one will be demeaned or overpowered in some way. I feel like there is a protective quality to friendship, probably because it’s the door to communication.
“True faith doesn’t fear the difference of ideas. I think that’s such a hard thing to understand because dogmatism is the opposite of that. It doesn’t allow for the difference, or the variety, or for the openness of ideas. So much of war and violence is based on fear of the other.”
DP: The really important word that you just used was fear. Fear and faith. True faith doesn’t fear the difference of ideas. I think that’s such a hard thing to understand, because dogmatism is the opposite of that. It doesn’t allow for the difference, or the variety, or for the openness of ideas. So much of war and violence is based on fear of the other. Are you fearing it because it’s challenging your own identity? It’s challenging the way that you live? It’s challenging what you want to believe about the world? I think communication is about overcoming that fear.
AS²: My grandparents on my father’s side divorced, and my grandfather married another Jewish person who said, “I cannot stand the sound of German.” She was so traumatized by the Third Reich that she couldn’t imagine a new relationship to German people post-Third Reich. One of the things that’s so beautiful about a conversation like this is to understand — as these Artemis II astronauts keep on trying to say as they come back to Earth — that our well-being is wrapped up in each other as earthlings.
DP: The blue planet! That’s the other watershed moment, right? I was born in 1970, so the picture was already there. We already had the incredible benefit of looking at the blue planet from space. That’s about framing and perspective. The zooming in and the zooming out. And a part of what we’ve talked about is, when you get to see something up close you encounter it. But stepping back, or zooming out and gaining perspective, is just as important. Hopefully the astronauts bring back the message that from far away these things look a lot more together.
“Look at the blue planet from space. That’s about framing and perspective. The zooming in and the zooming out. When you get to see something up close you encounter it. But stepping back, or zooming out and gaining perspective, is just as important.”
AS²: For sure. But also, we don’t even have to be astronauts. I feel that just with you. I’m sure you do this in your life, in your research, in your classroom, and in your friendships, so thank you so much.
DP: Yeah. Embodying things rather than just spelling it out. Maybe that’s the last thing about silence. Quieting the mind, or silencing. Silencing is an act. But silence can be meditative and convey a lot of understanding without the words.
Additional Resources:
The Berlin Wall: Encountering a Memorial Site of Global Significance
Deike Peter’s Academic Website
“Urban Nature in Need of Ecological Restor(y)ation”
“Igniting Passion for Urban Nature”
“Equal and inalienable rights is the foundation, justice, and peace in the world.”
- Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
This interview has been edited and condensed. Subscribe to Inheritance of Peace with Amy Shimshon-Santo on Apple Podcasts or on Substack at Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair. Theme music for this program is by Avila Santo. This series highlights survivors, everyday people from across the generations and various walks of life —poets, researchers, shephards, healers — who discuss our Inheritance of Peace as foundational for a just society.
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