On what a stone has to say

When I was my son’s age, I discovered fantasy literature in the form of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien particularly captured my imagination with the utterly realistic world he created. The major contributing factor of this realism of course was Tolkien’s facility with language. Tolkien’s own love of languages, etymology, and literature infected me and played perhaps too great a role in my decision to study language–probably because my own love of reading blossomed in the midst of hobbits and elves on the fields and hills of Middle Earth.

Key to the hobbits’ adventures was a dwarvish map written in a runic script. The runes were a secret and magic script that led the way to treasure and dragons and access to the world learning outside the Shire. True to Tolkien’s own personality, each hobbit that leaves his home becomes in his own right a scholar of the land that adopts him, brining back the language, learning, and history of that land.

It was a pleasant surprise then, when I discovered in my courses on the history of the German language, that Tolkien’s dwarvish runes were not original to him, but borrowed from the nordic germanic tribes. For the Norsemen too, runes were possessed of a magic wielded only by the select few. I suppose the magic still holds, even if the secret is widely known: if you put something into writing, you call it into being, and therefore you gain power over it as you make it present again – re-presenting it – in the text. The Norse understood this in a way that we have forgotten.

When I went to Sweden this summer I hoped I would find some of these runes. They were often engraved into standing stones–like Stonehenge in England. The stones themselves had meaning both in the way they were arranged and in the act of erecting them. They stand, like the Norse ideal of manhood. Upright. Proud. Immovable. Strong. Timeless. They are Standhaft. When I see them, my own Viking heritage stirs. They represent all the things we cannot always be, but wish we were, and I wanted to find one for myself.

I had heard of prehistoric Norse cemetery that had been discovered south of Stockholm, and which happened to be within walking distance of my hostel. I set out to find this cemetery on a beautiful June morning; the sun was bright and the air fresh after the rain of the previous day. About a mile down the path I began to see a series of stone circles sticking up out of the forest floor. There were other geometric shapes as well, mostly triangles and quadratic figures. It was a curious experience. The stones themselves are ageless: unshaped by any hand, they seem as old as the earth itself. But at some point someone gathered them together and arranged them, and even this act is removed from me by over a thousand, maybe two thousand years. For all that time they have remained, unmoved, a more constant part of the environment than even the generations of trees that have sprung up and died around them. Their permanence served as a contrast to the transience of the human hands that placed them, and my distance from those people, despite the fact that I was standing on the very place where they must have stood long before. The signposts said they were grave markers, but if there was any significance to the layout of the stones, it remained unclear to me, except that their very placement gave the stones meaning. It set them apart so that they were no longer just stones, but a message–Remember us, even though we are gone, we were here. This was our place. We lived. We worked. We created. We were.

At the time I was only struck by the beauty of their extreme age and their stunning simplicity. I was also mildly disappointed that they lacked any runes–any writing to connect me to them. All these other meanings come to me as I sit and write about them months later, when I realize that they had much to say and indeed were able to say much despite their silence. But at the time I resigned myself to the fact that this was as close as I was going to get to Norse paganism and so I set of in search of the coast and the seagulls.

On my way to the airport, however, I made one final stop at the castle Gripsholm in Mariefeld. The afternoon was getting on, but the day was just as beautiful as it had begun. I knew nothing about the castle except that Kurt Tucholsky used to take his vacations there. However, as I walked around the castle, I was surprised to find these two rune stones standing in the courtyard. I do not know if they have always stood on this spot, or as I suspect, they were moved here by the builders of the castle. It doesn’t much matter to me either way. As I looked at them, I remembered the one with the snake’s head from pictures in my graduate classes. Between the unexpected surprise at discovering them and the delight at touching a thousand-year-old inscription (okay maybe only 900 years) it was the perfect end to my trip to Sweden.

At one time I could puzzle out the sound of the language on the stones from the runes, even if the language itself was beyond me. But now I can’t remember the value of most of the symbols. In English it reads this stone was set up by Tola in memory of her son, Harald. He was Ingvar the Far-traveled’s brother They fared like men far after gold and in the east gave the eagle food. They died southward in Serkland.” According to the marker next to the stone, “Giving the Eagle food” means they killed enemies, and the “Far Traveled’s” expedition to Serkland is mentioned in many other rune inscriptions. These rune stones are therefore Cenotaphs, grave markers erected in memory of one who died far away and whose body cannot be returned home. They represent an absence, a symbol of what is not there.

To me these rune stones and the standing stones that predate them become a metaphor for language. Words are symbols for ideas or objects that are not there. The words we use re-present an absence, and even though the sound or shape of a word is meaningless in itself, the use we put them to–the way we arrange them opens them to an infinite number of possible meanings.

The stones do nothing. They just “stand there.” They exist in the moment of nunc stans (Thank you Scott Abbott), of “standing now” in the present. Yet they carry with them a connotation of extreme age, of events long past, of the people who touched them and placed them and wrote upon them. The language of a good book or a good poem does the same thing for me. The words only exist as I read them–before that they were just marks on a page. But as my eyes pass over them, the words connect me to an author who is absent–sometimes long absent. Whatever other message they might bear, Their texts become a monument that says, remember me. I was here. This was my space. I worked. I lived. I created. I am.

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.