On How I am Living in a Different City Than My Students part 3

Note, Part 2 is below and should be read first.

4. Sometimes it is not the place you see, but the way you see it that makes all the difference. One day on my way home from the school, I took a different route and came across and artist’s shop. They had a small, inexpensive watercolor kit that was nevertheless of really high quality. I bought it and some paper with the goal of painting some of my favorite spots in Berlin. So far, weather and schedules have conspired to limit my excursions to just two, the first of which ended in such a total disaster that I never got past the sketch before giving up in despair. My second attempt, however, was much better. On Pfingsten , the day of Pentecost, which is a holiday in Germany, I sat down on a bench at the Gendarmenmarkt, resolved to get my money’s worth out of my paints. I carefully but roughly sketched out the Französische Kirche, which is one of two matching churches facing one another across the square. I pulled out my paints and prepared my brushes, then I began to paint. In the center of the square was a man with a violin accompanied by a woman on a keyboard. They played Mozart and Vivaldi, but also Elvis and the blues. When they played Schubert’s Ave Maria, however, a group of Italian tourists spontaneously broke into chorus and gave perhaps the most beautiful impromptu concerts I have ever heard. The sun was warm, the air pleasantly cool and I was able to concentrate on the neoclassical details of the church on my paper and soak in the music, absorbed in the experience. I painted and listened to conversations around me, amused as some would come up behind me and watch me work for a while. When one father tried to take a picture of his family, I volunteered to take it for him so he could be in the picture with them. “Yes, thank you,” he replied in German, “and from an artist, no less.” As I was finishing up, a woman, sitting on the next bench, asked if I had painted all of the architecture of Berlin. I had to admit that it was the first time in ten years that I held a brush in nearly ten years. My results were far from what I would call art, and show, I think, just how long it has been since I tried to paint. But for me the experience may have been the highlight of my stay in Berlin.

5. Some of my tour stops are about exploring memories from past stays in Berlin. During my second week in Berlin I went down to the Botanical Garden in Dahlem. One of my students and some of his friends tagged along. There are times when living in the city can be too much. Too much noise, too much traffic, too much of people everywhere. Places like the Botanical garden are perfect for escaping for a while.



We walked around the gardens for an hour or two while I tried to keep up with Harmony at flower photography, while the students called me “professor” in British and Swedish accents, and tried to find German words that I didn’t know (a Wachtel is a quail). When they were tired, they went on their way and I stayed behind for my own tour of Dahem. The Freie Universität is in this area, which is where I spent most of my time in 2001 and 2002 while I was working on my dissertation. I really like Dahlem. It is quiet, classy, and peaceful. We had expatriate friends that lived up the street from the University. Their house was large and luxurious–a perk from his company for living abroad. As I walked past, I saw a placard on their front gate announcing I was now standing in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Berlin, and I tried to imagine how the interior must have changed from the lego-strewn, love-filled place that I had known seven years ago.

At the university, whenever I was tired, I would come out of the library and watch the construction of the new library being built. It seems everywhere I go, someone wants to build a new one, but they only finish when I leave. I walked in and had the eerie feeling of deja vu for a place I had only ever seen in architect’s drawings. I wandered around, taking pictures, and looking for the Celan collection I had spent so much time working with in the old library.

6. From the library I crossed the street and walked to a nearby park. One of the things I like about Berlin is the endless possibility of finding little hidden spaces that come upon you unexpectedly. They can be like the Stasi exhibit I found across the street from my current apartment, or a statue entitled “Phoenix” I found once when I took a different way home, or they can be like this garden park. On this occasion I knew what to expect, since I had found this space years ago. In the middle of the park there is a small pond where ducks and other birds will gather. It is off the road and surrounded by enough trees that it creates a satisfying sense of isolation when one sits on its banks. I would come to this place whenever the library became too oppressive or whenever I needed to think clearly. If I brought a writing pad with me, I often got some of my best writing done. Usually however, I just came to sit and think. And that is what I did this time. Under a willow tree next to the water I sat and remembered my year in this place: about the freedom I felt at not being tied to the Army, the freedom to work on a project with relatively few distractions, the freedom to reacquaint myself with a country I already loved.
Sitting next to the water I also remembered the difficulties of that year. I remembered the guilt I felt at what I was putting my wife through. Being in a foreign country with the responsibility of dealing with two young children contributed to a spiral of depression that made my wife’s experience very different to my own. It altered her personality and put a strain on our relationship as difficult as any we have ever experienced. I sat at that pond seven years ago and missed my wife. I missed the wife I had married and wanted her back. So I sat and wrote about all the things I wanted to change and about the guilt I was feeling at what I was putting her through and about my anger and frustration that her difficulties were affecting what was supposed to be a perfect year. I wrote about the guilt I felt over that anger. Mostly I wrote about how I missed my wife and wanted her back. Then I folded the paper with my thoughts on it into a paper boat and set it out on the water. I sat and watched as the ink bled into the water, washing the words away as the boat slowly became water logged, then fell apart and drifted below the surface.

Memories of that day seven years ago color the experience this time too as I wonder why it is that my time in Germany is always tempered by the costs that coming here have one the one I care for the most. Once again I miss her and feel guilt over what I put her through as I set sail again in the hidden places of Berlin.

On How I am Living in a Different City Than My Students Part 2

This is the last day of the study abroad program. I have mixed feeling about the effectiveness of it and on the experience that my students have had. I cannot say how good their experience has been. I just know that in many ways it has not been the same as mine. For at least a couple of weeks now I have felt like I am in limbo between being a tourist and being a resident of Berlin. While I enjoy seeing museums and grand buildings and the big sites of Berlin–they are after all what gives the city its character–the parts of Berlin that I really love are the hidden spaces that the tourists never see. My students, even when I try to describe the things that interested me during the week, can only star back, smile politely, and say “well, that sounds really nice.” Here are some of my tourist hotspots of Berlin, that I can recommend to almost no one. One spot or the other may be of interest to some, but I would be surprised to find someone who would want to be with me for the whole tour.

1. Being the bookworm that I am I like to find spots related to the things I have read. No one else seems to get this, which is fine, as I have found these spots are best visited in the privacy of my own literary geekiness. While my parents were doing the Sound of Music tour in Salsburg, I climbed the Mönchberg in the center of town, looking for the spot where Peter Handke’s alter ego threw the body of the nazi grafitiist over the edge. In Leipzig I thought it was cool to eat lunch in Goethe’s old college dive, the Ratskeller, which figures prominently in Faust . Last week in Berlin, I went to the short end of the Sonnenallee. The novel Am kurzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, by Thomas Brüssig, is about a young man who grows up on this street, the last 200 meters of which happen to be on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. A few years ago they made a film about it, which was showing on Alexanderplatz the first weekend I was here. The other day I found the Sonnenallee on my map and decided to go visit. I couldn’t get anyone to come along. Probably just as well. The street looks very different to what it did 20 years ago, I am sure, but the wall zone has been turned into a nature preserve. It was green and beautiful. The trees, which have to have grown since the fall of the wall, were surprisingly tall. There was a marker showing where the wall went through, and a brief placard that verified the spot I was seeking.

2. In a final effort to bring culture to my students, I dragged as many of them as I could to a production of Iphiginia auf Tauris by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The play tells of the last generation of the line of Tantalus, the son of Zeus and one of his mortal flusies, who, in an effort to impress the gods, cuts up his son, puts him on the broiler, and serves him to the entire company on Olympus. It did not go over well, and he is punished by being placed neck-deep in a pool of water. Only, every time he gets thirsty, the water recedes to just below his reach. When he gets hungry and reaches for the fruit just over his head, a wind will blow that just out of reach too. Hence the meaning of something being tantalizingly close. Anyway, the generations between Tantalus and Iphiginia are similarly laced with tales of sex, incest, violence and revenge. Iphiginia in the play is in the land of Tauris, near the Black sea. Diana has taken her there because her father, Agamemnon, tried to sacrifice her to Diana to gain favorable winds as he leads the Greek armies in the Trojan war. Iphiginia’s brother, Orestes, is being hounded by Furies (harpy-like vengeful spirits) because he killed their mother, who had in turn killed Agamemnon because she was having an affair with Agamemnon’s uncle.

Out of this family soap opera Goethe makes Iphiginia to the height of Greek civilization and culture. Through her grace she is able to tame the barbaric (in comparison to her own family?) King Thoas, and cure her tormented brother of his insanity. The play is a discourse on enlightenment, western civilization, and ethics. Very deep and interesting topics. The catch? There is absolutely no action in the play whatsoever. Pure talking heads. While I could appreciate the subtleties after having read the play a few times, I am certain that my students could not. Oh well, what are five more people in the world turned off to the German classics? For me, however, it was fulfilling a wish I have had for a very long time to see one of the German classics produced on a German stage. I will do it again every chance I get.

3. For my kids I took a side trip down to Lichtenrade and the Föttingerzeile where we lived while I was on Fulbright. Behind our apartment there is a sandy playground with a slide that my oldest son used to scare us with by climbing clear to the top. He was two at the time, so it was a pretty big accomplishment, and would have been a long way to fall had he slipped. I took some pictures of the park and the apartment, trying my best not to look like a terrorist or a voyeur as I did so, then I sat down and remembered what it was like to live there. I thought of the friends we made, of rushing with the baby stroller and kiddy board on Sunday mornings, trying to make the bus to church. I thought of my wife’s efforts to make the best of the situation, even though she was often alone with the kids, with little contact with family and friends at home. I think, despite some of the hard days, we both have fond memories of that apartment and that corner of Berlin.

Around the corner from our house, back on the main road, I found a bookstore that wasn’t there seven years ago. It was small and as one might expect, filled comfortably to the rafters with books. After looking around for a few minutes, leafing through a number of books, I found the new work by Daniel Kehlmann called Ruhm (fame) I picked it up and asked the woman running the store if she had read it or his other, more famous work Die Vermessung der Welt. She had read Vermessung but not this one. We talked for a moment about Kehlmann, about other authors we had both read, and about living in Lichtenrade and her new store. It is a rare thing to find a Salesperson in a bookstore that is also willing to converse about the books she is selling and that knows her way around the literature as she did. For me it was one of the best finds so far on this trip, and it is perhaps fortunate both that her shop opened after we left from Fulbright and that it is far from where I am currently living, since my luggage would have been and would be significantly heavier than it was and is if I could visit her shop more often.