On How I am Living in a Different City Than My Students

During our first week here I went with a small group of my students to Potsdamer Platz, just south of the Brandenburg Gate. We were headed to a movie at the Sony Center, a semi-open plaza with a round, tent-like covering far above and a lit reflecting pond with a dancing fountain below. When one steps into the enclosure, the street noises melt away

underneath the splashing of the fountain and the Gerede of the natives and tourists gathered there. It was dark, and as entered, we looked up to see the illumination on the cover change from blue to a deep lavender, reflected also in the lights in the fountain.






“Dude!” says my student, “I hate America, and I am never going back. Why don’t we have anything like this?”



















Doctor Packer shrugs and goes to buy his ticket.





















On Sunday, I listened as one student spoke over the internet with his family about his experiences here. His voice was full of excitement and enthusiasm as he described the things he had seen and the places he had been. His words piled one on top of the other as thoughts seemed to come faster than he could utter them. One story interrupted the next, pushing past it, before the first thought could be completed, only to be cut off again by another description, itself impatient for its turn. His descriptions were so certain, so absolute: Germany is like. . .You can never find. . . Germans always. . . They were the impressions of a person discovering a place for the first time, and I enjoyed seeing Berlin from his fresh perspective, even as I fought not to correct him, to tell him that everything we think we know about a culture turns out to be wrong at least part of the time. I remember having similar impressions of Germany when I was first here as a missionary 19 years ago. I have learned that I didn’t always know what I thought I knew. I remember not feeling culture shock upon arriving in what was left of Communist East Germany. To me, that was just the way Europe was. I had no expectations and so I absorbed my surroundings as they were. It wasn’t until I entered West Berlin--which confronted with Rolltreppen and Mikrowellen in a country where I thought they did not belong--that I remember feeling any culture shock.

Now, things are different. I remember. I remember. I have used this phrase a hundred times in the last weeks. The city I am living in is different than the city my students are living in because for me the city has to pass through the filter of all that I have experienced in Berlin. This is the same thought that I have been trying to express since I arrived. The images that my students are experiencing in raw form have to negotiate the layers of memory that color my perceptions. Movies at Potsdamer Platz for me mean spending time with the young couples from church. They mean eating spaghetti ice cream in the Arkadien and teaching Britta that popcorn is to be saved until after the previews are over. When I pass under Brandenburg gate, I remember my first experience on the 3rd of October, 1991–one year after the reunification–when a Russian soldier tricked me into paying an extra 5 Marks for a stacking Matroschka doll and a soviet watch that broke two weeks later.

I keep sharing these memories with the students, even though I know they don’t get it. Berlin hasn’t acquired the level of depth for them yet that it has for me. Sometimes I find myself holding back, resisting the urge to share something that I know about a place, about the way it used to be. In the end, my memories are not repeatable (nicht zu wiederholen) for them, and I am left wondering if they are richer or poorer for that lack.

On the Dificulty of Experiencing the real Germany

I had a culture class today with my students in Berlin. The first question I asked them was to tell me the most remarkable thing about their stay so far in Germany. They made comments varying from having to pay to use the public toilets, to the great art we have seen in Berlin and Dresden to the street music played in the subways. All of them were great answers. Then I thought myself about the most remarkable thing I have experienced. For me it was Sunday dinner with a family I came to know in 2001 when I was here last.

I have explained to whoever will listen that Germans are like their bread. They tend to be hard and crusty on the outside. In other words, one of my students remarked that on the subway, no one talks to each other, they stare ahead, or at a book, but they seem to avoid eye contact at all costs. I think this is a defense mechanism to living so close on top of one another that they establish a sphere of privacy about them that can be difficult to pierce. But German bread is only crusty on the outside. Inside it is fresh, and warm, and contains a great deal more flavor and substance than American bread. I think the analogy holds true for the German people as well. Once you succeed in getting past the tough exterior, they are warm and generous beyond what one would normally experience in America. The German word Freund is so much richer than the English equivalent. There is an intimacy in German Friendship that suggests a closeness akin to family. This is what I experienced this weekend. Two families shared in the birthday of a 13 year old daughter, who has grown into a beautiful and accomplished young woman since I saw her last. They invited me into their circle and it felt as if I had always belonged there. Instead of making a big deal of me as their guest, I felt as if I were a natural part of the event. I felt taken for granted–not in the usual negative way that phrase connotes, but as one whom they took for granted as belonging–a friendship resumed as if there had been no break.

I don’t know if my friendship means as much to them as their friendship means to me, but it does not matter, really. For me it is enough to know how privileged, how fortunate I am to be a part of such relationships-not just once, but many times over with many families. I want my students to experience Germany and come to appreciate it the way I do. But I don’t know how to recreate the relationships for them that I have had the good fortune to have made while I have been here. It is not something that anyone else can create for them. Some experiences have to come as they will.




Oh and Dresden was amazing too.

A bird in the hand. . .

Peter Handke in his collection of essays "Noch einmal für Thukydides" (once again for Thucydides) writes about short Geschichten. In German the word Geschichte means both"history" and "story." Thycydides is of course the great classical historian of the Peloponnesian war and the father of modern historical writing. Handke's Stories treat small happenings and observations of daily life as if they were as importants as the great wars and events that we normally think of as History. And indeed as he describes it, the butterfly in his garden or the hour between the last Swallow and the first bat in the evening are the actuall great events that, in the end, will have more influence on us if we let them than the presidential campaigns, the battles in far-off lands, or the lives of the "great and powerful" men and women in the news.

One of the things I was looking forward to most about coming back to Berlin was the food--especially the Bread. the rolls here-Brötchen--are a thing of majesty and wonder. The first one I ate last Thursday made the whole flight over here worth the price. One the morning of my first full day in Berlin I awoke very early, still affected by jet-lag. From a brief workshop through the Study abroad office on photography, I knew thea sunrise was the "golden hour" for taking pictures, and, since it was an unusually sunny (for Berlin) morning, I left my apartment with my camera in hand to pass the time before the bakery opened and I could enjoy my first German breakfast in seven years. Out the door and to the left. One block down past the British embasy and then to the left again and you will stand on Pariser Platz right in front of Berlin's Propylaea, the Brandenburger Tor. Its four-horse Quadriga, placed on top the gate by Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1791, and which was promply looted by Napoleon when he invaded Berlin in 1806-and consequently replaced upon Napoleon's defeat in 1814, is a central icon of the city. If you stand directly in front of the Gate, one sees Victoria atop the Siegesäule--the victory column-- at the center of the Tiergarten. Both the gate and the column remind the Berliner of their superiority over the French. From this point John F. Kennedy stood in front of the Berlin Wall and eloquenty declared to all the world affinity for the people of Berlin and his love for Jelly-Filled Pasteries.

Through the gates and again to the left one comes to a field filled with row upon row of concrete blocks, all the same size but each of a different height, none precisely erect. When one walks between the perfectly-aligned rows, precise in typical German fashion, the ground below falls away, first to one side, and then to the other. Between the blocks it is both completely open and utterly confining at the same time. It is the new Holocaust memorial, and the early-morning shadows create a contrast of dark and light that parallels this memorial with the Gate and the tower that reminds me of the two sides of German culture that interest me so much. Both reflect opposite sides of the Hubris and glory, the neo-classic past and the stark post-modern present that give rise to the complexity of Berlin and Germany and make it worth exploring.

One more left turn and the sun is directly in ones face. A long sidewalk, trees along the road and, to the other side, an East German Plattenbau–the prefabricated apartment buildings that arose in the GDR in the 60s and 70s. These too have been rebuilt and sanitized of their socialist past until they are as invisible as the now-absent wall. Turning my back to the sun, my shadow creates an A-frame silhouette, long legs and short torso. I like the image the shadow makes so I include the Selbstporträt with the other photos.

One last turn to the left and the bakery is finally open. One Vollkornbrötchen, a Semmel, and a Sesambrötchen and my breakfast is ready. Atop the trash can is yesterday’s paper with an essay from a journalist who spent November 9th, 1989 doing tango at a Tanzabend as the wall was coming down. At my feet is a finch, which hops closer and closer, hoping that some of my breakfast will fall. I throw a piece down to her, which she snatches, and ungratefully flies away. The journalist wanted to study ecology in Mozamique before the wall fell. Instead he travels, and describes the most beautiful morning of his life in the Himalayas. The bird comes back. This time landing on the bench next to me. I hold out my hand with another piece to her. This time she bounces hesitantly forward and takes it directly from my hand.








In the tradition of Handke, this is my history of the first Brötchen in Berlin.

First thoughts in Berlin

Berlin 7 May, 2009
I told myself that I was going to start writing a minimum of twenty minutes every day starting with my arrival in Berlin. Well I am here and now I will start writing. There are a lot of impressions that I could write about but the most remarkable thing will have to be first. Seven Years ago when I was last here in Berlin, There was a girl, whom I do not know that I saw several times in the City. Today I saw her again. Am Potsdamer Platz. It might seem strange that I could be so certain that I would recognize a complete stranger after seeing her again across a seven year time span. But I know it was her. The girl is, for lack of a better term, an African albino. I don’t know if that is correct, but it is the only way I can describe her. She had pale white skin and blond hair that did not look as if it had been bleached. Her hair, both today and seven years ago, was braided up into corn rows. And even though it was blond, it wound up on itself in infinitely tight African curls. Her facial features too were unmistakenly African, with a broad nose and beautiful high cheekbones. Her eyes were pulled slightly together–as if there were also an Asian Grandmother as well. Perhaps it is exactly because she was so striking that I am sure that it was the same person from before. I would like to say that she looked older than I remember.

It strikes me just how racist my description sounds. I don’t know what to say in my defense. Is noticing heritage racist? I wouldn’t call her beautiful. Is that assessment related at all to her mixed race? Certainly I have known women from every corner of the world and of every shape and size that I would consider beautiful. I would not consider her ugly–although I have known ugly women from every corner of the world too. She was just–striking–and it was so strange to see her again. Which leads me to my second impression: Berlin is a city of dauer im Wechsel in a constant state of change. The city is always new, and yet always the same. Full of energy, full of youth, Berlin seems to be constantly reinventing itself. But it hasn’t changed at all at its core, I believe, since it was the capitol of the Weimar Republic. Otto von Bismark, The Siegessäule, Rosa Luxumburg, Potsdamer Platz Hindenburg, Döblin, Alexanderplatz, Hitler, Willi Brandt, JFK, Eric Honiker, the wall, Checkpoint Charley, the Ampelmännchen, Brandenburg Gate. Berlin layers one identity on top of the next, adding one to the other; evolving, and never changing.