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.