Things I will miss

Farmer Horst's veggies and fruits at the Saturday market in Friedenau
http://www.obsthof-horst-siegeris.de/index1024.html

(And, I suppose, farmer Horst's insistent and now really quite tiresome lectures about why his apples, zuchinis, spinach....fill in the blanks....are so much better than everyone else's, and farmer Horst literally forcing me to buy 20% more of everything than I actually wanted. How could I not miss that?)

Beer on tap that is so fresh and so perfectly chilled and so delicate and balanced in its taste that you feel you are being held aloft above some waving field of hops by a singing Ethel Merman.

Bike paths!

Fresh dark breads.

The state of Berlin

This city feels like an old friend with a lingering illness.

It's not just that the city is poor - debt like a Third World country, average income per person of just 1157 euros per month -- but that the citizens come off as so resigned.

Americans need to airlift some of that famous optimism. Planes full of chirpy midwesterners should start landing at Tempelhoff Airport every 5 minutes or so.

The latest topic for handwringing angst has been violence in the schools. The tone of the articles is racist. "Arabs" and "Turks" are commiting most of the violence, they say. "Germans" are frequently the victims. (Never mind that most of the "Turks" are in fact German. Will they ever get a handle on this?) More and more the papers produce this breathless drama of German victimization in the schools. German children attacked as "pig-chompers!" What next?! Soon these Arabs will be kicking our dachhunds and peeing on our garden dwarves!

The racist tone of the articles, I think, is just a symptom of cluelessness. People don't know how to talk about ethnic tensions in a way that isn't tinged with panic and uncertainty. They grasp for easy explanations and false tropes, and race is the biggest, falsest easiest trope of all.

If we could all just take a deep breath and say "everything is going to be ok......." I wish Germans knew more about ethnic tensions in the U.S. Of course middle class white boys at integrated schools get beat up now and then, and of course it is an issue - particularly if that boy is you or your son. But it's not a social calamity. One would hope that newspapers could keep an eye on the big picture.

Holocaust Memorial and the Germans

It's one year since the Holocaust Memorial opened here. It's a favorite spot for tourists. Berliners are less inclined to go there. Someone wrote recently that the number of visitors is disappointingly small. I think 10,000 per day is pretty good, and, anyway, who cares. The whole point of the memorial is that it's there. There's nothing "to see" once you've been there. There should be no ceremonies there. No laying of wreaths. It's just a reminder - purposely in the background, purposely modest and simple.

Interestingly, major critics of the Memorial have come around to praising it. The Berliner Tagespiegel reports that ex-mayor Diepgen now says it was a great idea. The writer Martin Walser told Radio Vatican that his fear of creating some huge "monstrosity" in the center of the city has been avoided. He said Eisenman "is a genius....It's a real work of art. It is so impressive that anyone there can just engage with himself." (Sounds better in German: "Dass jeder da mit sich selber zu tun haben kann.")

Former head of the Academy of Art, who made a really big stink when the thing was being planned, has also decided it is a masterpiece.

The longer I live here, the more often I ride my bike past it, or even see it from a distance, the more I feel the memorial is something unique, maybe a model for memorials everywhere.

If only Americans had the good sense to have Eisenman do the World War II Memorial in Washington DC. We wouldn't be stuck with that ridiculous neo-Fascist concrete thing splattered across the mall.