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?

Adam's new girlfriends

My son Adam playing cards with Heiko Hengst's daughters in Hohenstein-Ernstthal

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?

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.