In which Geri and I Play a Game.

Last year when I was in Berlin, I was crossing Potsdamer Platz on my way to or from somewhere. On that day they were having a market, which is when various and random vendors set up tents on city squares and sell random wares, good food, and usually some kind of beer or Bratwurst as well. Walking through I noticed a vendor selling a beautifully carved chess set in what looked like a well constructed case with drawers to hold the pieces. It was only 25 Euro. The problem was, I was feeling poor that day, having just spent most of my liquid assets for tickets to a concert in the Philharmonie for me and my students. So I didn’t get the chess board. I felt bad, even though I already have several chess sets, and really display exactly none of them. And even though it was probably made in Poland or somewhere else in eastern Europe, I still like the idea of a chess set as a souvenir. A good one has beauty and function. When I told my dad about it, who also likes chess sets, even though he hasn’t played me since the first time I beat him, he told me I should have bought the board anyway if it were only 25 euro. I thought this was odd, since he is, if anything, even more conservative with his money than I am.

Which leads up to this year. When I took the students to Dresden, there is a market place near the Frauenkirche with all the typical shop tents and wooden huts set up – I had some roast rabbit and Rotkohl with klöße there that was amazing. I also saw a chess board with stone figures and a stone-inlaid playing surface. 25 Euro. So without thinking too long. I bought it. I broke it in at the train station on the way home by beating one of my students in its first game. I don’t like to brag, but I demolished him, sucking him into a gambit and then picking him apart piece by piece. I still don’t like to brag, because he wasn’t a bad player, – but the game wasn’t really that close.

So now the board sits in my room, and I have no one to play. So I have been playing myself–Geri’s game style. If I wait long enough between moves, the left half of my brain can’t remember what the right half was thinking, and it is a pretty fair fight. We can’t play for false teeth, since neither of us has any, just a few crowns we both share. Maybe the loser will have to buy the winner a chocolate bar. Winner chooses the flavor.
By the way, no stone lions were injured in the composition of this post, but 3 of the four stone horsemen have already left the game. My apologies to Ron Weasley.

Stuff happens when I am in Berlin

Stuff always seems to happen when I am in Berlin. As a missionary, I experienced the reunification of the two German republics first hand. I wasn’t here for the fall of the Berlin wall, but I took part in much of what came immediately after. I thought at the time I understood what was happening, but now I am not so sure. I know so much more now about the complexities of German history that much of what at the time seemed so black-and-white now takes on a rich texture of colors and patterns even as it fades into the past at the same time.

Ten years later I arrived in Berlin with my family in the shadow of 9/11 and the threat of a new war on terror. The expected bombs soon fell in Afganistan and soon thereafter the (from me) unexpected ones in Iraq.

In that year that everything changed for the United States I filtered it all through the BBC and the German newspapers. I still had trust in President Bush to do the right thing, and I am still not sure whether he did or not. Certainly nothing turned out as we expected it to. One could argue that the fall of the wall and the fall of the twin towers are related. The Soviet decline begins with their failure in Afghanistan, and caused Gorbachev to rethink the entire foreign policy of the Soviet Union. So Bin Laden was a product of the Cold War and that the Soviet pull-out of Afganistan and the later US failure to help the country stabilize in the resulting vacuum set the world down the path that put American soldiers in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Now another ten years have passed and I sit in the Goethe-Institute I read of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden and the new awakening of the Arab Spring. I am 40 instead of instead of 30 instead of 20 and I wonder what these events mean for the future. I no longer think that I can make sense of it the way I thought I could before.
As any president would, Obama is taking credit for the success of the operation against Bin Laden, but it appears that the groundwork that led up to the assault on his compound in Pakistan goes back to well before the begin of Obama’s presidency. The president has also taken some credit for the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere that the newspapers have been calling the “Arab Spring.” Yet I wonder how much of these changes would have been possible if it had not been for the US policies of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan in the decade leading up to today.

And yet another “yet,” it is clear that the Bush presidency and the US made countless mistakes and miscalculations in their foreign policy during the last ten years, and I wonder how much we have hindered the possible progress that could have been made in that time if we had not created so much animosity for the West over the last decade. Is it possible that change could have come quicker if we had left the muslim world alone, if they had left us alone? If we had reacted differently?

Here We Go Again

Today is the first of May and my first full day back in Berlin. May Day is of course the international day of the worker when the socialists remember the call to unify themselves in revolution against the establishment. The establishment celebrates May Day by holding hands behind plastic shields to make sure the socialists are properly anti-social within their carefully established space. In Berlin these marches are countermarched by the Neo-Nazis, who celebrate May Day here by dressing in black, and by throwing rocks at the socialists and the establishment. The counter-marchers are then counter-counter-marched by others who just want everybody to get along–especially if they can get a good drink while doing it. Soccer is not the national pass-time of the Germans, protesting is. Most of the citizens take in the road blocks and the transit stoppages stoically as if it were just another change in the weather.

I plan to celebrate May Day by sleeping off what is left of my jet lag quietly in my room. My appetite for taking in civil unrest from close range has never developed to the point where I have felt like I need to take in civil unrest from close range. I wonder what the soccer score is?

Where my October went

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. November 9th, 1989 is a pretty important date for me personally since the fall of the wall and the opening of East Germany meant that my mission call to Switzerland was changed to the Dresden mission. It shaped my understanding of German culture and has had a profound impact on the course of my professional development. In the past few years it has become a marker to me of how old I have gotten as my students were born closer and closer to 1989, and their memories of the fall become more and more vague. This year a majority of my students were born after the wall fell and the event that plays a central role in my personal identity might as well be ancient history to them.

At the beginning of the semester I had a conversation with Stephan-- a local high school German teacher who also served in Dresden with me and shares my sense of identity with Wende-Germany-- that we really should do something to commemorate the 20th anniversary. It would help both of our programs and raise the profile of German studies in Utah, and give us a chance to share our experiences. Both of us think big and of course things quickly snowballed until they were nearly out of control. But in the end I think we put on a nice event. I had to coordinate for all of the space at UVU, organize the schedule, arrange for prizes and "schwag" for the participating students. Here are a few pictures of the event. We built a replica wall out of cardboard posters. There were over 150 entrants making a wall nearly 200 yards long. we filled up the Hall of flags at School. I was really pleased with the art work. Some of the students copied things that had appeared on the wall, like this series of weird faces. Others did other historical or political messages in a style that might have appeared on the wall. Others were completely creative.
I like the picture of a butterfly through a hole in the bricks that the German Club president did--thanks Cindy.





I invited the Honorary German Consulate, Charles Dahlquist to participate in our event, and he was very helpful. He provided us with cases worth of material to give away to the students--Over one hundred t-shirts, cases of water bottles, magazines, pens, pins, markers, etc. This necessitated the creation of a "Wheel of Schwag" that we used to give it all away fairly.
It was a lot of fun and my student volunteers seemed to be enjoying themselves. The prizes were a big hit with the students. Over all the event was a success. We had over 500 high school and junior high students in attendance, and things got a little chaotic from time to time. But every one had a good time. KUER radio came and interviewed me, and I made the hourly news, so I only have about 14:30 left of my 15 minutes of fame
This is Mr. Dahlquist and I at the wall. His remarks were very nice and well-thought-out. I was glad that he was able to find time to come and participate.

We had other activities as well. We had a number of presentations given by students and a woman who grew up in the east. She told of life in east Germany and brought back memories of FDJ, the Pioniere, and other youth organizations. It was very good. The student presentations were hit and miss. We showed a movie called Prager Botschaft that told about the crises at the German embassy in Prague, 1989, when thousands of east German refugees fled to Czechoslovakia to escape into the west. It went well until the scene that showed a woman's bare shoulders (that's all, I swear!!) as she sat wrapped in a sheet in bed. One of the junior high teachers promptly panicked, made us stop the movie and wanted to escort her kids out of the theater until we talked her down from the ledge.

Maybe my favorite part, however, was my friend's Trabant. The Trabi is THE icon of the communist era in east Germany and both loved and hated by the people who drove them. There are some great jokes about them here-- (only site I could find in english-the Sun's site has some inappropriate links on it though, so beware) He and I both had the opportunity to drive one as missionaries when the members bought new, western cars and didn't know what to do with their trabis. That worked great for about a month when the general authorities heard about it and shut us down. :-( A few years ago, Stephan found a trabi for sale in Minnesota and bought it. Since then he has used it in his teaching, brought it to mission reunions, and had a general good time with it--when he wasn't spending insane amounts of money fixing it.

It was a real pain arranging for permission to get it in the building, and event more trouble ensued when a couple of police officers got all territorial about it, but we brought in his car. It was a real hit. Kids got to have their pictures taken with it. Sit inside, and look under the hood at it's lawnmower-like engine.At one point in the planning, someone asked me if it would fit through a set of double doors. "Um, I don't think that is going to be a problem," was all I could reply. The car actually looks bigger in this picture because it is just kids behind the wheel. I have a picture at work (not an electronic copy, just a printout) of one of my colleagues in it--then you get a real idea of the scale. The sound the motor makes is the best part. It is only a 2-stroke engine, so it sounds something between a snow mobile and a chainsaw. Listen and enjoy

And Now For Something Completely Different

For all of you who wondered what the communists were up to all those years.



Or this Swiss "rocket Scientist" I suppose it could be real.

Poetry and living life

Several years ago, one of my professors introduced me to a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “Selige Sehnsucht.” (Maybe blessed yearning). It is one of the staples of German literary history and well known by most in German Studies.

Sag es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet:
Das Lebendge will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.

In der Liebesnächte Kühlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Überfällt dich fremde Fühlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.

Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reißet neu Verlangen
Auf zu höherer Begattung.

Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du Schmetterling verbrannt.

Und so lang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

Once again my poor attempt at a translation. Sorry for the lack of rhyme and meter:

Blessed Yearning

Tell no one, only the wise,
For the masses will only mock:
That which lives I will praise,
That yearns for death in flames.

In the cool of the nights of love
That begat you, where you begat.
Falls over you the foreign feeling
When the silent candle shines.

No distance is too far,
Spellbound, you come flying,
And at last, covetous of the light
You, butterfly, are burned.

And as long as you cannot grasp that,
This: Die and Become!
You are but a dreary guest
on the darkened Earth.

There is far more in this poem than I can probably discuss at the moment. Obviously the final stanza makes a powerful statement for roll death plays in one’s life and in one’s existence. The butterfly’s flaming death suggests that it is not just death but the manner of death–the striving toward light–that brings meaning to life.

But the part that has always made me wonder was a claim by my professor that the Greek word for butterfly was psyche , a fact that I have had a hard time verifying, but that may be substantiated here. In Greek mythology (at least as we have this story handed down by the Romans–nothing is ever simple) Psyche is a mortal so beautiful that all the worshipers of Aphrodite have left the temples to go and worship Psyche. Angered, Aphrodite sends her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest thing possible. Instead, Eros pricks his own finger with the arrow intended for Psyche and falls in love with her. The two are married, but Eros refuses to appear in daylight, coming to her only at night. Her sisters, jealous of her happiness, convince Psyche to light a lantern and discover her husband’s identity. In response, Eros flees and Psyche is left heartbroken (and angry at her sisters). Eventually, Psyche must enter into Aphrodite’s service and perform a series of impossible tasks in order to win back her husband. In the last of these, she must descend into Hades and bring back a jar containing Persephone’s beauty. When she tries to partake of this beauty, however, she falls down, as if dead. In the end, Zeus intervenes, and she is reunited with Eros and becomes immortal with him as she joins the other deities.

On my recent trip to Germany, I ran into Psyche once or twice and it got me to thinking. In the Berlin museum of art, there is a statue in one of the stairwells of Pan consoling Psyche. It is hard to imagine the debaucherous Pan of having very pure intentions in his efforts. The statue is intensely sensuous and seeing it, I wanted to warn her against what the old goat had on his mind. But Psyche is more resourceful than one might think looking at her and I suspect that in the end her beauty (so often a stand in for goodness, a trope I have no desire to deconstruct at the moment--and excuse me for using the words deconstruct and trope in the same sentence) will save her again.

My second encounter was a family grouping outside the Zwinger in Dresden. Here, Psyche, Eros, and presumably Aphrodite appear to have reconciled and the happy end seems assured. I wonder at the placement of the statue and what the sculptor intended with his composition, but I like this one, too. There is also this representation that I found on the web that is intriging.

In both sculptures, Psyche’s butterfly wings are clearly visible, establishing the connection that I had wondered about earlier. The word “psyche” in Greek means breath or air and has by extension connotations of spirit and soul.

So in this context, the figure Psyche becomes a symbol for the longing of a mortal soul to be joined with the divine, and the efforts one will take, even if it means descending into death to do it. The more I learn of the story, the more impressed I am in Goethe’s ability to weave the various elements of it into his poem. For me there is something vividly mystical about the poem and the mythology in the idea that the soul, psyche, wants to be united with the heavens. At first reading, Goethe’s poem may seem to be a justification for suicide. But in reality, I think it is an appellation for life lived to it’s fullest, for a Thoreauean effort to suck the marrow out of life and live deeply and deliberately so that in the end, we will not discover that we have not lived at all.

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.

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.