BerlinAdventure

Goodbye to That or the Other Thing I Won't Miss

2006-07-16T17:59:00.000+02:00

Saturday we fly home (sort of) to the U.S. After fifteeen months in Berlin & Vienna, we've learned to love a lot of things. Eve has gotten used to seeing horse drawn carriages galloping by periodically. I now enjoy the rhythm of shopping each day for food.

And then there's the things we don't love. Hate to finish on a sour note, but I've got one last thing to get off my chest: the mind-boggling absence of humanity among service personnel.

I departed Berlin on one of the first trains to leave the newly built main station. The fine folks at Deutsche Bahn provided me with a good sense of closure.

The brand new luggage carts were too small for my four large suitcases, portable crib, computer, and bike seat, but I rolled along anyway into the gleaming, eerily clean station. I followed what I thought were the signs to track 2 but ended up at a small, sad looking elevator that didn't seem right. I asked the uniformed personell in the office nearby. No, the man said, that elevator goes to the parking garage. Ok. But the signs say there is an elevator to tracks 1-2 right over here. Well, he said, as if he didn’t notice the piles of suitcases in danger of tumbling, go to the main entrance to the station and there is an information desk (i.e., up one floor and a 5 minute walk back through the station).

I give him my best “are you insane?!” expression and moved on to look for the right elevator. 10 minutes later I was back in front of his office. All the other signs for tracks 1-2 led to escalators or stairs. The correct elevator had to be here somwhere in the vicinity of the parking office. Suddenly I noticed a small, non-descript elevator with no sign on it. It was approximately 4 feet from the parking office.

My old friend and his colleague were now standing talking with a group of travelers in front of the elevator.

<> I asked the colleague, does this elevator go to track 2? “Keine Ahnung,” she said matter-of-factly. “No idea.”

How naïve of me to think -- after one year of living in Germany -- that someone wearing the uniform of the German railroad might be curious about whether the elevator next to his or her office carries passengers to the tracks. How naive of me to think that he/she might feel some vague rumbling from deep down in the bureaucratic subconscious of an obligation - moral, spiritual, legal - to help a person that some cultures call "customer." And what about empathy? Mitleid, Mitgefuehl, Emphatie - the Germans have an impressive number of words for a sensibility that they are so adept at surpressing.

I know that Americans' cheery, sacharine manner can be off-putting. I know that there is a certain amount of employer domination and oppression that goes into making American workers so smiley and ready to help. Ok! But still......

On the train.

Fellow passangers were great. An American student helps me get one of my massive pieces up on the rack. When I return he’s gone. (Probably in dread of the possibility that I would need his help again.) I started to struggle with the next bag, and the woman in front of my seat offers to help. She’s a strapping gal, but the last ounce of chivalry and sense of embarassment as 20 passengers look on, is getting the better of me. No, I start to say, and then suddenly, overwhelmed by visions of a 9-hour train trip chomping on tylenol, I give honesty a try.

Obervogelsang! Never heard of it before, but it's extraordinarily beautiful. Right near the Czech border. Bike paths along the river. Horses, sheep. Enclosed in a valley. Everything impossibly green.

Wehlen is the first town in a while. Looks like a spa.

South of there, still along the river. Striking rock formations jutting up from the river. Kayakers on the water. Sunning bridges. Outcrops of rock with climbers on them.

A beach along the river, but with sheep instead of people lounging, foraging, enjoying the scene.

Another town. Bikers, ut not too many. Intriguing roads, paths leading up into the hills. Koenigstein.

A stop in Bad Schandau.

And then eventually Vienna.

Vienna is a good place to finish up with the theme of congenital unfriendliness. Which story to choose? My favorite is when we were in the supermarket and the clerk whirled our wine bottle past the reader a little too fast. The bottle rolled off the edge of the counter and smashed on the floor, just in front of my two year old, sitting in her stroller.

No shards hit Eve, just a little bit of white wine, but of course Nicole & I freaked and we spent five minutes fussily examining Eve for any damage. The incredible thing is that the woman behind the counter, though embarassed and eager to find us another bottle of the same wine, never said anything in the way of "sorry" or "is your baby alright?" or "gosh, you must have had a bit of a fright." She just put the new bottle of wine on the counter, collected my cash, and said goodbye.

Extreme, but not an anomaly. There is something emotionally catatonic about the entire culture. They live in a beautiful country, with great social benefits, reasonable politics, general prosperity, good health. Am I missing something? Would it cause a crisis in national identity to smile once in a while to a stranger, to connect? I dunno. Funny how American I feel right now.

I guess I'm ready for the Midwest.

Brief Notes on a Short Trip to Israel

2006-07-12T23:20:00.000+02:00

Went to Israel for 4 nights and 5 days for a friend's wedding. My first time there since 1981 when I lived there for 6 months. My 2 closest friends from that time are a) in Chicago and b) couldn't be found. My Hebrew language skills have drifted and disipated almost into oblivion.

So I can't really say that I'm a terribly good source for much beyond "pseudo-cosmopolitan" reflections, as a certain correspondent would say.

The depressing part was Jerusalem. We stayed near the Central bus station - a good ways from the famous religious neighborhoods where secularistas like us have been made to feel unwelcome. To my surprise, ultra-orthodox Jews were everywhere. Our first evening, we went for a walk around 10 PM. Yeshiva students were on their way home, a few couples were out for a snack - the men in skullcaps and fringes or with blackhats and sidecurls, the women in wigs and/or headscarves and with the "modest" outfits of the orthodox.

We stopped in a small urban mall with a 1970's feel, which had kosher pizza and a pastry & coffee counter in the center. I had shorts on and got dirty looks from the other customers. Nicole was dressed reasonably, I thought, but she's 8 months pregnant and not shy about showing it. She got dirty looks too.

The chocolate cake was egregiously bad. A sin against good taste, a betrayal of the supplicant's most simple longings. I marvelled that such awful cake was possible in a Jewish country. For this you brought us out of the desert? We seemed to be the only disappointed customers however.

The next day I studied the faces on the street and on the bus to the Old City. I could have been imagining it, but I thought I felt hostility and even contempt almost everywhere I looked. The orthdox seemed to sum me up in a glance: secular scum, superficial twit, pleasure-obsessed ignoramous. (The kind of idiot who comes to the Holyland expecting to eat good cake).

In the Old City, I sensed a different kind of hostility. Apparently, I look Jewish. I hadn't really confronted this fact in a long time. In Germany and Austria, no one - at least without knowing my name - ever guessed I was Jewish. I'd come to think of myself as Jewish-looking only in the subtle Paul Newman/Kirk Douglas rather than the transparent Adrian Brody/Woody Allen sort of way.

Well, my Semitic cousins see it differently.

Walking through the Arab suk, I experienced none of the bonhomie that I remembered from 25 years ago. Even people who were eager to make a sale, looked at me skeptically, impatiently. I should buy something or just keep walking. Don't linger. Don't stay to talk. What is there to talk about anyway? Here I was obviously a tourist (and tourism is way way down) but even the traditional traps were gone. No questions, no chatter about the gangsters in Chicago, or a cousin they have in Detroit.

On the "temple mount" it was worse. An older man offered us his services as a guide, when I politely declined, he turned on me. "What are you Jews doing, coming up here?" He stormed off.

Arab women and children sat under olive trees picknicking. I could smell the cucumbers from a distance, but tried not to look. I didn't want to be rude. Israeli soldiers were ringing the plaza, sitting lazily but ominously in the shade. An Arab boy was kicking a soccer ball by himself and began kicking it vigorously against the Dome of the Rock. No one stopped him. I took his picture. I felt I had to take his picture, but I felt suddenly like an invader and an idiot for even being there. I was relieved to discover that tourists (for whatever reason) were not being admitted to the mosques.

We had a fantastic lunch in East Jersulaem, just across from the Damascus Gate. The portions were generous. The service was perfunctory.

My friend's wedding was beautiful and uplifting. I was amazed at how at home I felt with the other guests. These Israelis were highly educated, sophisticated, charming, and well traveled. Seemingly everyone spoke English, and those who didn't took great pleasure in helping me rediscover my Hebrew.

It all seemed so comfortable, so familiar, that I began to wonder if this was in any sense the "real Israel." Wasn't I just in some funny island of the elites? We ate barbecued goose, tempura, greek salad. The whiskey was Irish. The wine was....I don't know....something really good. Man oh, sure was not Manischevitz.

The music was Brazilian, Spanish, American soul, hip-hop, North African, French,...you name it. Everyone danced. It was a beautiful scene.

At some point they played an Israeli folk song. For a moment the women formed one group and the men another. I sat down with Nicole and expected to see the kind of elaborate folk-dancing i remembered (and had tried to learn) during my visit to Israel years ago. But that's not what happened. No one knew the steps. The women and men just sort of danced chaotically,holding hands in a circle. It was like some random assortment of Americans who happened to have seen Fiddler on the Roof once or twice, boogying with a touch of yiddishkeit to "If I were a Rich man." It was like seeing Americans dancing at Oktoberfest.

The next song was an Irish jig, and the crowd transitioned seamlessly. It even seemed that a few people knew the steps. And everyone was just as happy dancing to this music as they had been a few moments before.

Funny place today, this "Jewish" state.

You Know You are Still in Europe When....

2006-06-27T23:07:00.000+02:00

Rode my bike home at 10 PM tonight, after my class finished. There was a thunderstorm, moderate at first, but it picked up force as I rode along the Danube toward the train. Lightning slashed horizontally across the sky. I tried to remember everything I had once heard regarding thunderstorm safey. Can you get hit while riding a bike, or do the rubber tires protect you? I remember there was this generally accepted fact that turns out to be a myth, but I can't remember which is which. Ah, well. Ride faster.

Took my bike on the subway three stops and climbed out at Schwedenplatz, along the Ring, on the edge of the Old City. It was now pouring. Still, tourists and commuters hung around the busy station and debated where to go, how to go, whether to go.

I rode along the Ring. At an underpass along the canal there was a public screening of the World Cup. About a hundred people were gathered in chairs. Stage lights illuminated the area around them.

Farther on, I rode across the university quad. A giant screen TV was set up under a large, circus-like tent. Just as I passed, the crowd moaned and groaned about something. A bad call presumably.

I came to a busy intersection, now utterly soaked and cold, and waited for the light to change. I was about to start across the intersection when I made out the shape of a bicyclist coming toward me fast, running the light, in spite of the cross-traffic and the pouring rain. No light, of course.

As the shadow moved past me, I realized it was a young woman on the bike, her hair in a pony tail (no helmut, of course). She was wearing a black cocktail dress and high heels.

For a moment I thought I was dreaming and then remembered, no, I'm in Vienna.

Papa's Keys

2006-06-24T20:08:00.000+02:00

My two year-old is obsessed with the beautiful, formidable doors and gates all over Vienna. Our walks take an increasingly long time, because she stops at seemingly every entryway to pull on knobs and handles.

"Papa," she cries. "Keys!"

"I don't have the key to that door, Eve," I tell her.

"Papa!" She says again, holding out her hand. "Keys."

"My keys are to our house, Eve." I gesture helplessly. I pull out my keys, point to them and then to our apartment, somewhere off in the distance. "The keys won't fit here. This is somebody else's house."

Eve listens intently but impatiently. Nicole tries explaining the situation in her own way. She seems to understand, but she's not buying it.

"Keys, Papa!"

How long will it last, this irrevocable faith that papa has the keys to all doors?

The Myth of Anti-Americanism cont.

2006-06-24T14:04:00.000+02:00

I mentioned to Andy Markovitz that, having lived in Europe for a year, I felt a certain solidarity with people who felt that the Europe they knew was "disappearing." He didn't have a lot of time to respond. He already had to go. So he gave me a pretty direct, simple response: "But that's bullshit," he said.

Aha. I would have liked to offer a follow-up. "Do you mean 'bullshit' in the neo-Wittgensteinian sense recently explored by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt (Schmoes in the Tower Press, 2004?) or was it more in the Biff-at-the-Bar vernacular sense of challenges to your wisdom that you really don't feel like listening to?"

Either way, I beg to differ. Europe is disappearing, and "Americanization" -- while crude and imprecise - is often an appropriate descriptive.

I remember living in Berlin in 1993, when Clinton's Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen showed up to lecture the Europeans on the need for greater "labor flexibility." America had a stunningly successful economic model, the man said, and Europeans need to get on the stick or they're going to continue their slow, miserable decline.

Lloyd was not shy about saying this was an "American" model. Neither are the proponents of lower taxes, broken unions, and a shrunken social state. Now maybe these are good ideas for Europe, or maybe they are not, but they are undoubtedly American -- with very real ramifications for the way of life in most European countries. Why, then, don't Europeans have the right to attack this economic model as "American?" And why don't they have the right to be pissed, including the right to "demonize" the model they abhor?

And now The New York Times reports that Europe is going down the American path of SKY high executive compensation. Quoth the Times:

"For decades, Europeans were far more conservative than Americans when it came to rewarding the boss.

Now, European executives are less inhibited about seeking American- style compensation. And oftentimes they are getting their wish. But while huge paychecks have become a staple of American corporate life, in Europe it appears to be less acceptable and, in some countries, a backlash is building."

Backlash, ja. Probably the critics see obscene executive salaries -- almost totally disconnected from performance - as a distinctly American phenomenon. Probably they would be right.

What else? The German language as we know it has been mutating. There is so much Americanese absorbed into the language - much of it gratuitous and ridiculous - that some of these folks already sound like Valley Girls while still (supposedly) speaking deutsch. I see more Austrians driving SUV's, more Belgians eating frozen french fries, more French eating crappy chocolate. Mon dieu, they are even drinking our wine (and the vineyards of Burgundy are in crisis.) There are also more bad jokes before academic presentations.

Markovitz said a staple of anti-Americanism is to criticize something as "American" and then to criticize the opposite as "American." This demonstrates that they really just hate us - totally apart from the actual things we do, choices we make.

His example: A british journalist criticizes the gym workout craze and criticizes the "American body type" that Brits are now striving for. Then just a couple years later, Markovitz tells us, the same journalist writes a piece criticizing obesity and desribing growing obesity in England as an American import. Pace Markovitz: You can't have it both ways! Skinny/muscular and fat/slovenly can't both be "American" threats to Europe.

But, alas Dr. Markovitz, it does go both ways. America is the world-capital of gym-freaks, lipo-suction, breast-implants, and, as part of the same package deal, anorexia. But America is also the most obese country on the planet. If you don't think there is such a thing as the "American body type" stroll through the old city of Vienna when the tourists come out to play, and play guess who is American. It's all too easy. On the one hand, homo americanus tends to have muscles in strange places: unnaturally bulking shoulders, triceps that press against the back of their sleaves, sculpted chests. These are obviously not the muscles you get from, say, loading furniture into vans. They are middle class muscles, workout muscles, and while ubiquitous among the Amis, they are still rare (though increasing) among the yuppies of Vienna and Berlin. At the same time, on your anthropological stroll, you will see lots more serious weight problems among the tourists than among other inhabitants of the city. And you'll see a few really serious weight problems too, the "morbidly obese." The Germans have been terrified lately by a frightening uptick in their obesity rates, but it's still nothing compared to the USA. In weight class, we're first class.

Maybe a little extra winter oil isn't such a bad thing. Who is to say? But I marvel at the paranoid tunnel vision of an academic who assumes that the notion of "American body-types" is an invention of Yank-bashing European journalists. (There is an interesting history too, which I'm sure Markovitz is aware of. After World War I, Europeans condemned slim, narrow-waisted, athletic-looking women as having "American" bodies. The French in particular feared this "boyish" look -- made popular by the fashion mags and then by Louise Brooks in "Pandora's Box" -- was the harbinger of a new woman, obssessed with fun and rejecting her duty to bear children. In that case, "America" was an abstract symbol, so I don't see any direct connection between these discourses, however interesting the parallels.)

Who really hates America? Who hates the real America - rather than just some tentative, temporary stand-in? I've had trouble finding anyone. I suppose Ganica's comments to my previous posting suggest that self-hating Americans, at least, might be out there somewhere. But he/she is abroad, no? I think that self-lacerating criticism of American culture while living abroad doesn't really count. Like hyper-patriotism, it's usually just a passing stage, part of adapting to the local bacteria.

Do They Hate Us?

2006-06-22T20:44:00.000+02:00

We're in Vienna now.

Saw scholar Andrei Markovitz talk at Webster University's campus here on the phenomonon of anti-Americanism. It was the most intelligent and informed defense yet of the idea that the Europeans' hate us today for who we are (and not simply for what we do.) This is clear, he claims, because they hate is in just the same ways they hated us 50 and even 100 years ago, i.e. long before America became "Mr. Big" in world affairs.

Very interesting, entertaining talk, and just plain wrong. Depressingly wrong. I still don't get the Amis' obsession with so-called anti-Americanism today.

When I lived in Berlin in the '90's someone told me a saying. The Germans are desperate to know if you love them. The French could care less. The Americans just assume everyone loves them.

Well, I guess we're seeing the cost of a love spurned. Now Americans are convinced that "everyone hates us." And we're sure too that it's not for any strange, brutal, thoughtless acts that we are in the process of committing. Noooooo, they hate us cause they.....well, just cause they hate us.

If you want to believe this, evidence is all around you in beautiful, creepy Vienna. Yesterday the streets were full of young people marching against the visiting American President. The weekly news-magazine Profil had a cover photo of Bush with a scrunched up face, and the headline was something like "the crazy world of George Bush." At the Praterstern train stop someone drew a Hitler moustache on the picture of Bush blown up to advertise this issue of Profil. Once you saw the Hitler moustache, you realized it was superflous: Bush already looks like AH in that picture.

Today Nicole and I were walking through the old city, and the America vs. Ghana world cup game was being televised to people sitting or standing around at a sidewalk cafe. Ghana scored it's second goal just as we passed, and the crowd - it seemed like the entire crowd, but who could tell - cheered. This was a pretty sophisticated looking crowd too. I turned to Nicole. Did I miss something in my reading? Was it the Ghanians who sent care packages to the Austrians when they were starving after World War II? Did Ghana play some vital role for 40 years in protecting Austria from a Soviet invasion? Did Ghana invent apple strudel and generously donate it to Austrian national culture free of charge? (Ok, America didn't do that either, but I was getting rollling and Nicole was laughing at my perfect-pitch imitation of an indignant American tourist in Europe.)

I admit it. The Austrians (and the Germans for that matter) go overboard in their animosity toward things American. They have deep-seated, silly prejudices and misconceptions about the USA. On the topic of American culture, they annoy me. Big time.

But: Have you ever heard an Austrian or a German talking about France, Italy, Poland, or Switzerland? You get an abundance of silliness there too. Seems to me that the Europeans more or less all have a pronounced tendency to make incredibly bogus generalizations about each other. They do it with such an air of authority and heartfelt earnestness that it sounds like conviction. Mostly it's just talk.

But how can we possibly argue seriously that they "hate" America? Isn't it enought that the Europeans buy our products, learn our language, visit our country, mimic our customs, watch our movies, listen to our music, obsess about our stars, our politicians, and our pets. They're even into Paris Hilton, for god's sake! Now they read our high-fallutin'ist novelists too. Right now 3 out of 10 novels on the Austrian bestseller lists are Americans. Paul Auster is a household name all across Western Europe. Philip Roth is treated as a demigod. The most widely respected choreographer in Europe is an American. The leading theater director. One of the leading opera directors. Many of the major classical singers are Americans. In the past 10 years, even American conductors have had a breakthrough in Europe -- and they're still mostly not accepted in America as legitimate!

In German and Austrian academia, it's American scholars who mostly set the standard. Look who is getting read in university classes - regardless of the discipline. Even in German history....even in German literature American authors are treated as authorities. Hell, the Europeans even invite American academics to come speak to them about their own anti-Americanism! This is a pretty puny form of hatred?

And how can "anti-Americanism" be worth taking seriously when there are no consequences? A year ago, people were saying that anti-American sentiment had destroyed international cooperation. But this is clearly bullshit: it turns out that even the most "anti-American" European leaders were secretly cooperating with the U.S. on Iraqi intelligence and the schlepping of accused terrorists to secret interrogation spots. What are the consequences of anti-Americanism apart from one bulldozed McDonald's in rural France? Well, ok, they were marching against Bush....but is he now "America?" God help us.

IMHO, the allegation of anti-Americanism is a big farce, and it plays right into the hands of the Bushies and other neo-cons who want to delegitimate the European social model, European foreign policy, and (most of all) European criticism of the U.S.

So enough already. Consider me an opponent of those claiming to fight anti-Americanism: an anti-anti-anti-American.

Can't wait to come home and start a movement....

Some Things I Won't Miss

2006-06-04T21:08:00.000+02:00

1. The Culture of Bureaucratic Deference
There is a myth of the submissive German. Historian Richard Evans wrote a clever essay about it years ago called "In Search of the Untertangeist." He argued that Germans are as cranky and rebellious as the next folk. True, he wrote, the Prussian bureaucracy spinned together a fantastic web of regulations, but that did not mean that Germans followed them.
I am not going to contradict Sir (or almost "Sir") Richard, but living in contemporary Germany does make you feel that the great myth of submissiveness is founded upon a certain truth. German employees tend to have an insanely deferential attitude toward their bosses' pronouncements.
I faced this attitude buying bread, getting a video, filing for my daughter's papers. Germany's bureaucratic hoops and twists are ultimately no more idiotic than the ones in America. The difference, however, is that German workers tend to honor these regulations with solemn self-righteous loyalty. What I have longed for in Berlin are the winks, smirks, and pleasure-filled rule breaking that you get from the average American grunt. I wanted some acknowledgement, any acknowledgement, that the rules do indeed suck (even if we must ultimately live by them), that the boss could in fact be an idiot.
The video store example stays in my mind because there was this ultra-hip, rebel film dude behind the counter, when I posed the question: Is it really necessary to make your customers stand in line for 10 minutes just so we can return a dvd? Couldn't the store have a drop box? No, hip dude counter man said to me with great solemnity and self-righteousness. We cannot have a drop box, because it is important for us to make sure that the dvd has not been damaged at the point that you return it. I gave him my but-let-us-join-in-solidarity-against-the-corporate-boss-man laugh and also a wink, and I said, "somehow 100 + million Americans manage to drop their dvd's in drop boxes without causing major damage to the entertainment industry. It must be possible, no?"
No, he said, and explained to me how the policy needed to stay in place because...well, just because. No wink, no smirk, not even a momentary acknowledgement of the possibility that his corporate boss might possibly demand something irrational.
Then there was the bakery: The great "Backfehler" episode. There is a French bakery in our neighborhood. Many mornings I got a baguette there, and it was excellent. Many afternoons I brought home a baguette that was stale and depressing.
I finally asked the young woman behind the counter what time the baguettes were baked. She told me they were baked once a day at 4 AM. Aha, I said, so that's why my baguette is always stale in the afternoon.
What?! She said. Your baguette was stale? That cannot be.
But, I responded. It's really not surprising. No baguette can be fresh after 12 hours.....
What, she said? Stale baguette. It must have been a Backfehler (a baking mistake). We are very sorry, she said mechanically.
....but a French baguette is not like a heavy German rye , I said to her. There's no way to make it.....
It must have been a Backfehler, she repeated, mechanically. People were starting to get in line behind me, and we were both getting self-conscious.
Ok, I said.
Please try our baguettes again, she said, gesturing to the pile of -- as I had just figured out -- 14-hour old baguettes.
No, that's ok, I said. I think I'll just get some cookies.
I'm sure it was a Backfehler, she said. Things were getting tense.
It's not a Backfehler when bread just gets old, I told her, starting to get annoyed.
She stared at me. For a moment I thought tears were welling up in her eyes.......Backfehler she said. I'm sure it was a Backfehler. The hard-drive in her brain had apparently crashed.
Reboot, reboot, I thought. No chance. I had to get out of the store.

2. The universally dyspeptic mood of almost every customer service person north of Bavaria (and the Bavarians are insufferable with their perky false cheer and cloying formalities)
Are Berlin service workers unfriendly? Is the Pope earnest?
Stay tuned for these and other answers to the troubling questions of Central Europe today.
.....

Things I will miss

2006-05-17T11:54:00.000+02:00

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

2006-05-11T10:24:00.000+02:00

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

2006-05-11T10:13:00.000+02:00

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.

Travel Tales: Berlin to Madrid

2006-04-05T23:15:00.000+02:00

I hardly ever have conversations on airplanes anymore - usually, I suppose, because I'm too busy practicing self-defense moves on my slithering, screaming, gyrating toddler or because anyone apart from insane desperately lonely passengers are carefuly to provide me a very wide berth.

The flight from Berlin to Madrid was different, however.

First, there was the remarkable conjuring of Alejandro the Spaniard.

Alejandro was my roommate for 3 months in an East German dormitory in Berlin in 1988. I hadn't seen him since then. He's been an occasional topic of anecdotes, however, famous among those who know me for both his extraordinary beauty and his atrocious German language skills. That combination of factors led to gorgeous East German women visiting our dorm room on a regular basis to talk to Alejandro, with me serving as interpreter. I can still taste the humiliation of it. What made it worse was that Alejandro was so fantastically sweet and innocent.

The other day was my first ever trip to Spain, and I thought of Alejandro as the plane was about to take off. I knew he was from Madrid, and I was thinking it was a shame that I couldn't remember his last name and wouldn't be able to look him up there.

Later in the flight, I took Eve for a walk and was about halfway down the plane when a smiling polite young man in a blazer got up and asked me something more or less garbled and incomprehensible in German with a strong Spanish accent. Are you asking if I'm from Berlin, I said. I live there. No, no, he said, more slowly and clearly, I'm asking if you were in Berlin in 1988.

I looked at him more closely. Alejandro! It was really him. He had barely changed. The same Dudley Dooright jaw, wavy hair like the guys in the old "wet head is dead commercials," broad shoulders, sparkling blue eyes. Unreal.

And he was living in Berlin, working for Deutsche Welle, had married a German woman and had a three year old daughter. Actually, his German had gotten quite idiomatic and clear, though his pronounciation had barely changed. So we had a wonderful conversation, much richer than anything we could have had 15 years ago, though I had to ask him to repeat everything twice.

Eventually I headed back to my seat. And I must have been feeling optimistic about the potential for airline communication, since I quickly struck up a conversation with the Korean woman sitting next to me. (And Eve must have been optimistic too, because she was extremely well behaved.)

This woman spoke perfect German, so I asked if she was German, and she laughed, as if it was a crazy question. She came from Korea 30 years ago to work as a nurse, had two children (presumably marrried, but it wasn't clear) and raised them in the quiet residential neighborhood of Zehlendorf. Now her kids were grown. One lived in Madrid. She has moved to a tiny Bavarian village, and she loves it.

So she likes living in Germany? Yes. Always treated well? Yes.

Then we talked about other stuff, and at some point she asked me whether I would ever consider staying in Berlin. I said that I loved Berlin, but I didn't think I could raise children there. As Jews, we would never feel completely at home. More often than not, my children would be seen as either a) exotic specimens, ghosts of a great tribe that had otherwise disappeared, or b) aliens and potential objects of hostility.

Yes, yes, she said. I know what mean. Germans don't know how to accept other cultures. There is no space for other cultures here.

I was stunned at her quick change of perspective. And then she suddenly launched into a story about her eldest child.

Antiquarian Munchkin

2006-03-27T11:24:00.000+02:00

Paternal pride requires that I post two more pictures of Eve in Rome. She was obsessed with Roman fountains (particularly those from the early Republic, though I believe that the late Augustan period also caught her fancy). I had to literally drag her away from the one pictured here. I carried her on my shoulder, kicking and screaming, for about 100 meters through the gauntlet of tourists on the ever-busy Forum and then set her down thinking we could now continue our walk. She promptly set forth back in the direction of the fountain. I ran after her, scooped her up, and carried her away again, this time going for a good 500 meters before letting her down. Once again, like a little carrier pigeon, she started back for the fountain. Nicole and I watched her, zig-zagging through the tourists, thinking, well, she can't possibly continue like that, and of course she'll get nervous leaving her parents behind and stop and cry or come back to us. But, no, she continued on for the equivalent of a 1/2 block, pushing aside bemused tourists, tripping over ancient paving stones and getting back up to continue her journey.

Finally, I ran after her and cut short her first classical research expedition. The protest was deafening.

They Spy

2006-03-02T20:49:00.000+01:00

Germans are very much in a huff about the New York Times story saying that their spies passed on information to the Americans on the eve of the Iraq War.

Final proof, I think, that while their Chancellor was boldly giving the finger to Uncle Sam with one hand, he was fervently sending the a-ok sign and "I've got my fingers crossed" with the other. The real question is: why is anyone surprised? Great watersheds in foreign policy don't happen through hissy-fits, at least not in democracies. No matter how much George W. and Gerhard were seething at each other ("I am, like, so pissed at Gerhard!"), 1001 and one institutional relationships were still solidly in place.

"Crisis" my butt.

Told ya' so, people.

Johnny Cash and Lost America

2006-02-19T11:10:00.000+01:00

Just saw the Johnny Cash biopic.

It reminds me how much more divided America has become even since my childhood in the '70's. Growing up, I listened to Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, but also Led Zeppelin and the Who, and also Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. No one ever suggested it was odd to combine an interest in hard rock, country, and folk. And then of course there was funk, soul and disco and all of my parents' music: Steve Lawrence and Edie Gormet, Jacques Brel, Frank Sinatra.

In the 1960's, there were still some radio stations that played ALL of those genres -- without even acknowledging them as separate genres. Once upon a time (as the movie reminds us), Johnny Cash toured with Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Apparently, rural America and urban America, North and South weren't really that far apart from one another -- at least in terms of listening tastes.

Now we are all carved up into separate listening segments. My demographic would never get on the same section of bandwidth with your demographic.

A shame.

It's a sign of the times that the film was too timid, too milky mouthed Hollywood-liberalish to deal with the overwhelming importantance of religious faith in Johnny Cash's life. There are references to the older brother's religiosity, but of course he dies, and the only Christians in the film are portrayed as narrow-minded bigots. The closest Johnny gets to religion is a brief glimpse of him being dragged into Church by June Carter. Did these hosers even listen to the man's music?

At the same time - and for similar reasons - the film failed to portray Johnny Cash's unique importance as a bard of the little man. Since the focus was mostly on his drug addiction and his status as a pop idol, you would never guess that he had written ballad after ballad about the plight of poor workers, that he criticized the Vietnam War, and advocated for prison reform (ok, they did show him saying nice things to Fulsom Prison inmates, but that hardly gets at his importannce.)

Seems like Hollywood missed an opportunity to remind us of a time when being religious, being country, and being -- at least by our standards -- "LIBERAL" was not uncommon.

The Once-a-Month Blogger

2006-02-19T10:54:00.000+01:00

Guess I'm doomed to just blog in little unpredictable bursts. Apologies to those of you (all three of you?) checking in for occasional distractions.

I've been working somewhat frantically on a new book. It's about the so-called "Magdeburg Justice Scandal of 1926," in which the Jewish industrial Rudolf Haas was arrested and held on suspicion of killing his former accountant, Hermann Helling. Helling had disappeared on the day that he was to meet with a tax official concerning alleged tax fraud at Haas' firm. The police, the judge, and the tax officials believed that Haas and his co-conspirators, including officials in the Czech consulate in Magdeburg, killed Helling in order to stop the impending investigation.

The judge held by this conspiracy theory - and continued to hold Haas in prison - even after the Berlin authorities assembled an overwhelming amount of evidence implicating a different man, Richard Schroeder. Schroeder was a con man and petty thug with vaguely rightwing convictions. (He used to put a swastika on his letters, right next to his singature.) A Berlin detective, sent by the state government of Prussia, found Hermann Helling's body buried in Schroeder's basement and various bits of evidence that made clear Schroeder had shot Helling in a regular, unspectacular robbery/scam. Schroeder, however, quickly divined that the Magdeburg interrogators were after bigger fish, and cleverly fed the idea that he was just a small piece in a wider conspiracy.

The story is filled with fascinating characters and strange turns: if it were fiction, no one would believe it. The heroes in the story did everything one could hope for. Jewish groups, conscientious Prussian officials, and dilligent lawyers and policemen disproved the theory of the Jewish conspiracy again and again. Somehow, however, the conspiracy theory kept coming back. It was like the evil cyborg in Terminator II who keeps pulling himself back together piece by piece after Arnold blows him to bits.

Most of my scrounging for info has been in Berlin, where 45 files on the case have been preserved in the Prussian state archive, but now I've started going to Magdeburg too, a surprisingly pleasant city of 200k about 2 hours away by train.

But I'm too compulsive -- and too easily distracted -- to give up this blog entirely.

Aryanization Redux

2006-01-25T21:42:00.000+01:00

.

These are ads for the 100-year anniversary of Hertie's Department Store on the Bahnhofplatz in Munich. The cute boy and girl in the picture are wearing the traditional folk costume of upper-Bavaria.

The freaky thing about this ad campaign is that while the Hertie store in Munich was indeed built in 1905, it was originally called "Herman Tietz." Like most of the great German department stores, it was founded and run by Jews. During the Nazi period, Herman Tietz was "aryanized," meaning the stores were taken from their Jewish owners and executives and given to non-Jews or "aryans." One of Tietz's trusted employees, Georg Karg, happily took charge of the operation and swindled his way to great fame and fortune. Since "Herman Tietz" sounded too Jewish (and "Georg Karg" presumably too ugly), someone had the clever idea of taking one syllable from each part of the old name and calling the store "Hertie."

One could not reasonably expect Hertie today to make a big deal of its Jewish roots, but there's something perverse about celebrating the 100 year anniversary with this kind of ur-Bavarian, emphatically un-Jewish, one might even say "aryan" imagery. It is a little like celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Gospel music in Chicago by picturing a cheezy white guy in a leisure suit.

Couldn't they have just had a nice indescript-looking pair of kids in a vaguely "historical" set of clothes? Are they trying to "aryanize" their history all over again?

Travel Tales

2006-01-19T11:06:00.000+01:00

Just back from on the road. Washington D.C., Delaware shore, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Vienna, Munich, Hamburg, and finally back to Berlin. It's been like one of those James Bond movies, where they flash the title for a new locale every other scene and the background changes without rhyme or reason, but it's still the same characters and plotline. The plot this time: will the poopy diaper hold until we get out of the cab, train, or plane? Can Agent 001 execute a change of diaper during breathtaking turbulence (or hair-raising turns), with baby screaming uncontrollably and inconsoleably and baby's talon-like fingernails sticking into daddy's pituitary gland?

But it was a very good vacation, and I believe I also managed to read 60 or so pages of a novel, a number of newspaper articles, two or three AARP magazine pieces, and various newsletters from Chicago North Shore suburban health care associations, clubs, and societies. I also read the "Eensy-Weensy Spider," "There's a Wocket in My Pocket," and "Meine grossen Tiere Tina, das Schweinchen" approximately 75 times each.

My parents have to be the only people on the planet who subscribe to the Jewish Weekly Forward, the British Economist, and the Waynesville (North Carolina) Mountaineer (motto: "all the news you need"). It's nice to finally be informed again.

Returning to Europe, I had to fly alone with the baby, since Nicole came back early. This was rather less like a 007 picture and more like a scene from The Exorcist. I'm not sure I can tell this story. I'm still too shaken.

But I will say that any doubts about whether British intelligence harbored ex-Nazis after World War II have been cleared up by my experience with British Airways stewardesses. One sees the unmistakeable stamp of Wehrmacht training in their style of customer service.

Warren: This stroller doesn't seem to fit in the luggage bin.
Stewardess: Well, you'll just have to take it back outside to the rampway.
Warren: But they told me it would fit, and I just carried it down the length of the plane, with the baby and my luggage in the other hand.
Stewardess: Yes.
Warren: I don't think I can make it all the way out again with the baby and everything.
Stewardess (with all the tenderness of Margaret Thatcher meeting with the miners) : It's alright. I'll watch the baby.
Warren: No. The baby would start screaming if I left her here.
Stewardess: Oh, I see, you're spoiling her.

After that, things got ugly.

Vienna was wonderful. I especially liked walking into the corner tavern with baby Eve on our first night there. It was 9:30 PM. Big burly Viennese guys at the bar. Furtive, oddly dressed guys at each table, looking like they just came from an early porn show. A rowdy group of couples getting sloshed. All conversation stopped as we walked in. And the waitress seemed to want to tell me I was in the wrong place, but I had already unpacked Eve's toys and bottle and made myself totally comfortable by the time she made it to my table. Eventually we made lots of friends. Excellent wienerschnitzel too, and the cabbage-potato salad was a revelation. The beer was also good, and the steamed milk seemed to be a big success.

Munich was much less my thing, though the reunion with mama was of course great. I think I've picked up all the Berliners prejudices regarding Munich. Too clean. Too happy. Too polite.

Hamburg was more to my liking.

But now we're home, and everything's perfect.

American Optimism Revisited

2005-12-22T12:14:00.000+01:00

Now a Harris Poll tells us that increasing numbers of Americans believe that "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer."

Presumably, however, we can still trust the previous Harris Poll which says that Americans are more optimistic than other peoples.

Taken together, this must mean that Americans believe economic disparity isn't really such a bad thing. Perhaps someday soon we'll have rickshaws in every American city and workers offering half-hour shoulder massages for $5 in the lobby of every office building. Servants will once again be affordable for every member of the (admittedly shrunken) middle class.

I can just see that "Fortune" cover story. "The Upside of Poverty: Finally You Can Find Good Help."

The Rights of Neo-Nazis

2005-12-22T09:27:00.000+01:00

The new Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is not only aesthetically path-breaking but challenges our very notions of what a memorial should be and how it should function.

The memorial is a sprawling collection of stone blocks. There is no front, back, or side. There is no entrance and no definitive, monumental perspective. It looks different from every angle, and the experience is particularly different once you "enter" and start walking among the pillars. No plaque introduces the monument or tells you what it all means. The visitors' center is underneath the memorial, and you almost have to know it's there in order to find it.

Unlike almost every other "Jewish" or Holocaust-related site in Germany, there are no policemen around to protect it or to insure that visitors are solemn and respectful. Soon after opening last spring, the Memorial became a popular meeting point for tourists, friends, lovers, etc. I've seen couples making out, children playing tag, teenagers hopping from one pillar to another (the latter is technically forbidden).

This has upset a lot of people. They ask: Doesn't a memorial to the murder of 6 million Jews right here, at the heart of the decision-making center, need to carry a certain sacred aura? Given the need to remind people of the genocide, shouldn't we take steps to insure that they appreciate the substantive truths behind the symbolic forms in front of them?

The American designer of the memorial, Peter Eisenmann, basically says no. He is asking us to think differently about memorialization, to see it as an open-ended, indeterminate process. Each visitor will relate to the memorial in his or her own way. Over time, this relationship will hopefully deepen. The reality of the Holocaust will have a presence in their lives, whether they're conscious of it or not.

All, very interesting. But what do you do when a group of neo-Nazis (as happened last spring) want to march by the memorial with banners declaring "60 years of Lies about 'Liberation' -- Away with the Cult of Guilt!"?

An interesting article in a recent issue of Merkur discusses this case. The state court in Berlin ruled that members of the right-wing political party, the NPD, were not allowed to march by the memorial, even if they were silent and even if their banners were rolled up. The court argued that the party's slogans presented National Socialism as a "harmless" affair and compromised the "dignity of the victims."

The author of the piece, Horst Meier, argues against the court's decision in terms that will sound very familiar to an American audience. He draws upon John Stuart Mill and other classic civil libertarians to argue that this is an issue of pure speech, since the demonstrators were clearly not threatening public order or security. The Nazi experience, Meier argues, should have taught Germans that "a pluralistic society cannot allow a real or imagined majority to impose upon others their idea of the common good or of 'good morals.'"

I wonder Eisenmann makes of all this.

A Sexy Berliner / A Great Play

2005-12-16T10:39:00.000+01:00

If you are in St. Louis, be sure to see the Rep Theater's production of "I Am My Own Wife," about the life of the Berlin transvestite, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. It's a wonderful play.

And, if you're in Berlin, you should check out Charlotte's Gründerzeit Museum in suburban Mahlsdorf.

I wrote the following program notes for the St. Louis production of the play:

Berlin (Naughty and Nice) and The Passions of a Collector

Americans have this notion that everything sexy, outrageous, and exciting that ever happened in Germany was during the Weimar Republic. That brief period, sandwiched between the national catastrophe of World War I and the horrors of Nazism, often shows up in our movies and culture as one extravagant orgy of experimentation. Thanks to Cabaret in particular, “Weimar decadence” has become one of those seemingly inseparable word-pairings, like “sixties counterculture” or “1950’s Conservatism.”

The heroine of this play – a pretty sexy, outrageous, and exciting figure herself –did not care much about the Weimar Republic. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde, was a transvestite who became a popular icon in Berlin before her death in 2002. She was born in the Weimar Republic, grew up in the Nazi Era, and lived most of her life in Communist East Germany. Her lifelong fascination, however, was the period at the end of the nineteenth century known as the Gründerzeit. She was an obsessive collector of Gründerzeit bric-a-brac, lamps and vases, telephones and gramophones, and especially the era’s ornate neo-gothic and neo–renaissance furniture.

Why Gründerzeit? Christopher Isherwood, the hip, gay, British novelist who helped invent our image of the Weimar Republic, saw the Gründerzeit aesthetic as the essences of dullness. This was the stuff of his elderly landlady’s apartment: Everything was “unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp.” Her decor, he wrote in the stories that became Cabaret, was like “an uncompromising statement” of her views on “Capital and Society, Religion and Sex.”

Perhaps it was precisely this sense of solidity and permanence that drew Charlotte to the Gründerzeit. Having faced the murderous insanity of Nazism, the Anglo-American bombings, the Russian invasion, and then forty years of Communist repression, there must have been something comforting in these things which, as Isherwood wrote, looked like they could never be destroyed. Certainly there was something poignant about this quintessential outsider’s passion for the ultimate accoutrements of bourgeois family life.

But Charlotte also knew something about the Gründerzeit that educated Americans and even most Germans never learn, which is that underneath the trappings of middle class respectability was a vibrant, teeming world of luscious perversity, experimentation, and rebellion. Indeed, almost everything we think of as distinctively “Weimar” had its roots in the Gründerzeit: Avante Garde art, music, and literature; gay and lesbian culture; Bauhaus architecture and experimental theater. As Peter Gay writes, the Weimar Republic “created little; it liberated what was already there.”

At the center of this story is Berlin. Once a provincial backwater, Berlin in 1871 became the capital of a vast and powerful empire. A period of frenzied speculation and spectacular industrial growth transformed the city into something new. In 25 years, Berlin’s population doubled to almost 2 million people. Developers laid new streets and built vast tenement blocks to accommodate the growth. Commuter trains, streetcars, and subways soon followed. People moved to Berlin to work, to study, or just to take in the famous “Berlin air” – the atmosphere of freedom, excitement, and rapid change. “The true Berliner,” a saying went, “comes from Breslau.”

The emperor Wilhelm II tried to put his own stamp on this fast-growing city. He built pompous government office buildings, ostentatious churches, and grand boulevards and plazas for military parades. But, in a sense, Berlin escaped him. The heart of the city – if there was one – was in the thousands of cafés and clubs where people went to read one or two of the 24 daily newspapers, argue about the topics of the day, and entertain themselves late, late, late into the night (much later than Paris, the guide books all said). In the working class districts, the dense housing and intense poverty forged a powerful sense of community and hostility toward the powers that be. Often these neighborhoods became enclaves from the repressive state and the prying eye of the censor. There were thousands of illegal prostitutes in these neighborhoods (20,000 according to some estimates), but also political cabarets, Anarchist and Marxist clubs, and experimental theaters. The Scheunen Viertel, or barn district, was only a ten minute walk from the Emperor’s Palace but at night it was effectively off-limits to the police unless they showed up in force. A number of Berlin’s estimated 40 gay and lesbian cafes were located there, including the tavern that Charlotte von Mahlsdorf later dismantled and moved to her basement in the suburbs.

Among the many artists and intellectuals who benefited from this milieu was a young medical researcher named Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld used the gay and lesbian cafes of Berlin for a kind of ethnographic field work. A pamphlet he wrote arguing for the legalization of homosexuality became world famous after it was used by the defense at Oscar Wilde’s trial for sodomy. Hirschfeld went on to write numerous scientific papers developing the theory that more or less all humans started out as bisexual: most lost their urge for the same sex; some remained bisexual; and others, for reasons of physiology and psychology, became homosexual. By 1900, Hirschfeld was recognized as a founder of the academic discipline of sexology and a leading pioneer of gay rights.

The guardians of respectability have periodically tried to tame Berlin. During the Gründerzeit, repressive legislation, police brutality, and periodic mass arrests sought to keep the underworld within boundaries. Even the most reactionary of police chiefs, however, recognized that the underworld served a broader function. Hirschfeld relished in alluding to the prominent and eminently “respectable” Berlin industrialists and lawyers whom he ran into during his tours of gay nightlife.

After their seizure of power, the Nazis made a coordinated effort to wipe out the Berlin underworld. Tens of thousands of “asocials” were immediately sent to concentration camps. Later, the Nazis suppressed the gay and lesbian clubs and incarcerated thousands of gay men. (Lesbians, for various reasons, were not persecuted in the same way.) Hitler, who hated Berlin’s air of cosmopolitanism and tolerance, dreamed of razing the city and replacing it with a fascist utopia of gigantic buildings, massive plazas, and wide boulevards. Only the lost war stopped his plans. During the Communist era, the East German government continued to persecute “asocials” and homosexuals, though in more subtle ways. The secret police, or Stasi, created a massive system of spies, pitting neighbors, friends, and even spouses against each other. Blackmail was a common tool against anyone who did not fit the dominant image of proper proletarian etiquette.

Somehow the Berlin spirit endured. Over 75% of the city was bombed in World War II. The large Jewish population – which had been so much a part of the city’s uniqueness – was hunted down almost to extinction. Postwar West Berlin became a strange, artificial enclave of western capitalism and consumerism, while postwar East Berlin became a dull, grey zone of state control and repression. And still you find here the “Berliner Luft” – the Berlin air or atmosphere – a certain tempo and rhythm, and a distinctly cheeky, wise-cracking, one might even say “Jewish,” sense of humor.

In Berlin today, the most characteristic form of development is known as Zwischennutzung. Properties that are sitting empty and unused are, with the state’s blessing, taken over by a person or group with an idea for temporary, interim reuse. In this way, hipsters and freaks have turned abandoned warehouses into experimental music clubs, theaters, and art galleries. Adhoc community groups have turned forlorn empty lots into settings for skateboarding, beach volleyball, and community gardens. Young civic-minded types have turned former areas of the Berlin Wall into staging grounds for circuses and concerts, air balloon rides, and tobogganing. And then, seemingly overnight, the Zwischennutzung is gone. An office building or apartment complex fills up the space as if the great happening had never happened.

Looking back in time, sometimes all of Berlin’s history seems like an endless series of Zwischennutzungen. Wonderful, vibrant, monstrous, alluring, repellent things were built as if to last forever and disappeared as if they were never there. History in this city can be found only in discrete, scattered pieces.

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s passion was to collect these pieces. Perhaps she felt that Gründerzeit’s veneer of bourgeois stability was a charming masquerade, a dragshow for the ages, or maybe – as a tour guide at her museum recently told me – she simply found comfort in the aesthetic world of her childhood. Whatever the case, Charlotte created her own marvelous oasis of history in this city of the ephemeral.

(Sources: David Clay Large, Berlin; Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories; Vern Bullough, Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research)

Return from Self-Imposed Exile

2005-12-15T11:31:00.000+01:00

I've been madly finishing my book manuscript, which was insanely overdue, and trying my best not to pay attention to any politics beyond our household debates over apple juice vs. orange juice and how much milk baby Eve should have in a day. (Both issues have been referred to a parliamentary commission, thank you.)

Book is done, sent to publisher for review. I am, as they say, cautiously optimistic, though there was one bad omen at the end. I emailed the book (390 pages, 106,000 words, about 1.4 million bytes), chapter by chapter, to our Department associate in St. Louis for her to print out and mail to the editors. Suddenly, she wasn't getting my emails. I sent everything a second time, waited a few hours, still nada. I called the computer technology czar at my university and left a slightly hysterical (no utterly hysterical) message on his answering machine. I called the computer help desk and....oh, never mind.

Anyway, the department associate eventually found my files -- in her "Trash" folder. It turned out that her email program had identified these emails (and these emails only) as "junk" and automatically redirected them -- without ceremony, without further ado -- into the recycle bin. So much for ten years of work.

Ok, but she found them. And I don't really believe in omens.

More soon on German politics, neo-Nazis, Jews and blues.

...

Philosemitism: A Berlin Story

2005-11-19T10:26:00.000+01:00

I was feeling suddenly notstalgiac. Must be the Berlin winter coming on. So....

Back when I was a poor graduate student, doing my dissertation research in Berlin, I tried to make some money on the side playing my guitar and singing in the subway. I figured Yiddish music was the way to go. Never mind that I don't really speak Yiddish, and that my repertoire was limited to about 8 songs I'd learned off a poorly recorded cassette tape given to me by an overly earnest Dutch engineering student in Ann Arbor who played the squeeze box. I had heard Germans loved this stuff, and with my big curly "Jew-fro" and my vaguely jiddische punim I'd be sure to seem authentic, and the coins would flow.

I advertised in the classifieds for a fiddler or an accordionist to accompany me. A Brazilian violinist called me -- I wasn't sure if it was a man or a woman -- who spoke such awful German that we were barely able to make an appointment, but we arranged to meet at a cafe in Prenzlauer Berg. What followed was like the old Saturday Night Live skits involving "Pat the hermaphrodite." The prospective fiddler was short and slim, with a shock of brown curly hair, a smooth attractive face, and beautiful blue eyes. He/She said his/her name, but I barely understood it, and not knowing Brazilian names I didn't recognize it as male or female. I began carefully listening for gender endings (was this person a "Geiger" or a "Geigerin"?) and even posed baiting questions, but it quickly became clear that whatever German-lessons he/she was getting, gender-endings were not a strong focus.

Well, anyway, Joao turned out to be a guy - happily married in fact to a lovely Portugese-speaking German woman -- and he was a pretty good fiddler too, though he didn't know anything about Yiddish music and was going to have to learn the songs from the same miserable tape that I had used.

We practiced the songs a bit. Joao kept doing these riffs that sounded like Jimi Hendrix crossed with Caetano Velosa: not exactly kosher, but very cool. I taught him a few Chicago blues songs, which seemed (to me at least) like a nice complement to the angst-ridden, yearning, and ironic yiddish folk tunes. Or maybe it's just that Chicago blues was otherwise about all I knew (I'm a pretty lousy guitarist actually.)

After two or three sessions, we headed off to play in the subway station in a transfer point between two lines. It felt pretty absurd. People walked by quickly, and usually barely looked our way. Ironically, about the only commuters who stopped to give us anything, so far as I could tell, were Americans, including a group of burly black guys from Baltimore who were visiting to play football. They gave us more than anyone that day and then danced raucously to "Die Grine Kusine" as they continued through the passage-way. I thought to myself "es lebe die jiddisch-Afrikanische Symbiose!" (Long live the 'Jewish-African symbiosis' - a favorite term of Nazi writers on American culture.)

After a couple more disappointing efforts to make money in the subways, I decided to advertise our services in the classifieds. I'd christianed us (so to speak) "Die Grine Ganoven" (the green thieves) , and I was careful to put my last name in the ad -- ROSENBLUM -- just to underscore that this was Echt.

To my surprise someone called almost right away. To my even greater suprise, he said he was organizing a birthday party for a 90 year old Jewish woman who would be visiting from Israel. He seemed very excited at having found Herr Rosenblum and Die Grine Ganoven and didn't ask me for a demotape or even for references. All he wanted to know was whether we could make it and what would be our fee.

I hadn't given any thought to a fee, and I was suddenly washed in guilt at the thought of charging money for some poor old refugee's birthday party. This woman would probably know all the songs! She was probably a native Yiddish speaker! Certainly she'd see right through us: A graduate student in German history from suburban Chicago with his hermaphrodite Brazilian fiddle player pretending to be klezmorim. Oy, Vey! And did I mention that I'm a horrible guitar player?

Certainly Joao, however, was entitled to make some money. I told the gentleman on the phone that 100 Deutsch Marks would be fine. We finished making plans, and I hung up. Five minutes later the phone rang again. "Herr Rosenblum?" It was the same man. "This is about the fee."

"Ok," I said, feeling guilty again and certain that he was now going to ask for a demo-tape.

"I have to insist that you take more. We'll pay you 200 Deutsch marks." We argued, but he wasn't budging. "Ok," I said finally, "let's see how it goes, and then you pay me what seems right."

Two weeks later, Joao and I showed up at the party site. It was a little convention center on the Wansee, and the party was in a meeting room overlooking the lake. As we entered, they were finishing dinner. A cheerful looking fat man ran up to me, shook our hands, and told me we should sit and have dessert. They were going to make some toasts, and then we would perform.

He pressed a wad of bills into my hand and led us to our seats.

The dessert was fantastic, but as I ate I snuck a peak at the bills. There were four 100-mark notes.

A young woman stood to give a toast. This 90-year old woman, it turned out, was a Berliner. In fact, Frau P. had been one of relatively few women to complete her legal studies in the Weimar Republic and had almost become a judge. It occured to me suddenly that having been an assimilated German Jew, she probably didn't speak a word of Yiddish and could probably care less about Yiddish music. (In fact, she wasn't even Jewish, she told me later. She had simply married a Jewish guy and spent a little time in Israel.)

When the speeches finished, we got up to play, and, sure enough, it immediately became clear that the guest of honor was utterly indifferent to the music, no matter how much angst, loss, yearning, etc. I poured into the Yiddish songs. I decided to make an unauthorized trip to another genre, and we did a version of "September Song" by Kurt Weil, which got a good response from everyone, especially the birthday lady. Then we played the only other song I knew that was remotely similar, Gershwin's "Summer Time" from Porgy and Bess. After that, we had nothing left but Chicago blues, so we played, I think, a Buddy Guy song and something by Muddy Waters, and Joao did his Jimi Hendrix on the fiddle routine, and I think it went over ok, though I remember the fat man giving me funny looks.

Long live the Jewish-African symbiosis.

And then that was it. We got ready to leave, and the organizer came running over to me, enthusiastic and cheerful again. "Herr Rosenblum, " he told me, "Frau Proskauer loved the music. Come, she'd like to speak with you."

I sat with the old lady, who was completely charming, and we talked about judges in the Weimar Republic and law and the Nazis, and then she told me how much she loved 'September Song,' and asked if I realized that it was by Kurt Weill, the German-Jewish composer who'd been a refugee in the U.S.

"Yes, of course," I said. In fact I'd just finished reading a memoir, by Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weil's widow.

"Well," she told me, "I was at the opening performance of Brecht and Weil's Mahagony in Berlin."

"Wow," I said. I was crazy about Brecht and Weil plays but had never had the chance to see Mahagony. I told her that Lotte Lenya wrote something funny: that if all the people who claim to have been at the opening night of the Three Penny Opera had really been there, they would have had to perform the play in a football stadium.

"That's what I meant," said Frau P.. "That's where I was: the opening night of The Three Penny Opera, not Mahagony."

She paused for a moment and then said sharply, "That's crap what Lenya wrote!" (Das ist ja Quatsch was die Lenya geschrieben hat!)

I decided I'd earned my 400 Deutsch Marks. We finished packing our instruments and headed home. I think I even grabbed another piece of cake on the way out.

Americans and the French Riots

2005-11-18T09:31:00.000+01:00

I thought the German commentary on the French riots was bad -- but that was before I had a look at opinion pages in the U.S.

The right-wing pundits, which seems to be most of the American pundits these days, are pointing their fingers at 1) Islam, 2) 14 years of French Socialist government in the '90s, 3) the French welfare state

Incredible.

Quickly to each point:

1) The vast majority of rioters in France were Muslims (though not all of them). The question is, what's the connection between their religious faith and their looting? The vast majority of rioters in Cincinatti (does anyone remember Cincinatti?!) and before that L.A. were Christians, but nobody blamed the Baptist Churches. These are angry, bored teenagers, not religoius zealots.

What's more, the leading French Muslim clerics issued fatwas early on calling for the rioting to stop. But you'd never know that from reading American papers.

2) France has not had a Socialist President since 1995. Blaming Mitterand for the Paris riots is like blaming Eisenhower for the 1968 riots: Not completely implausible, but you'd need to argue your case.

What's striking in retrospect is that there WEREN'T riots during Mitterand's time, and that this has at least something to do with the Socialists' relatively decent (though clearly inadequate) efforts to reach out to constituencies in the projects and to support social equality.

French Conservatives turned their back on these policies long ago.

Which brings me to the dumbest of the dumb Conservative arguments on the French riots: That the riots are the consequence of expensive welfare programs, which stymied French economic growth and produced mass unemployment in the projects.

3) Who woulda thunk that there are so many Marxists among American Conservative writers today? How else to explain these constant displays of crude economic determinism?

Yes, yes, yes, the French have anemic growth rates, and America, America has BIG, lusty, manly growth rates. The French have high unemployment nationwide. America has lowwwww unemployment nationwide.

But the problem is this: French unemployment in the banlieus is not significantly higher than in American inner-cities. Consider the fact that the French poor get subsidized housing, health care, and public transportation, whereas the American poor get mostly bubkas, and the economic explanation for why their cities are burning and ours ain't falls apart.

The other possibility of course is that the economic determinists are right, and it's really only a matter of time before American inner cities start burning (again) as well. If that happens, I wonder where our punditocracy will place the blame. Clinton's welfare policies of the '90's? The democratically-controlled Congresses of the Reagan era? Sister Souljah? Bart Simpson? SpongeBob SquarePants?

I gotta stop reading the papers.

German-US Relations Under Merkel

2005-11-16T12:32:00.000+01:00

The Spiegel posted an English-language analysis of how Merkel's Chancellorship is likely to affect US-German ties.

David Crossland, "The World According to Angie"

I'm still waiting for someone to explain how German - US relations have suffered in any substantial way over the past few years. Yes, of course, Gerhard never got to go to the Crawford ranch (And "W" never got to try that plum pie.) There are enough sulky diplomats on both sides to fill a Smells Like Teen Angst world tour concert.

But, as the Berliners say, "nah, und?" The US and Germany have actually cooperated quite well on most of the issues that have traditionally caused friction: Turkey, trade agreements, relations with Russia. It might even be that having bad blood between the boys at the top is GOOD for the countries' relations. Ever since the differences re. the Iraq war started percolating, Germans and Americans have been extra careful not to battle with each other over other matters.

I hope Angie gets to go to Crawford -- she's got a lot to learn about Texas -- but I don't see how US/German relations are going to change for real over the next few years.

p.s. A self-congratulatory postscript (12/15/05). The revelations that Germany's Red-Green government turns out to have been doing plenty of dirty work for and with the Americans regarding suspected terrorists just confirms my point. Gerhard and Joschka could bluster all they wanted to publicly about standing up to the U.S. and still do plenty of smoochy-smoochy with Don & Colin when the cameras weren't on them. W's temper-tantrums re. world leaders were too silly to be relevant.

Joel Kotkin ist kein Berliner

2005-11-10T10:42:00.000+01:00

Would-be urban guru Joel Kotkin recently published a piece in the British magazine Prospect containing lots of misleading comments about our dear Berlin. My response is here, since Prospect, for whatever reason, chose not to print it.

There is no question, as Joel Kotkin argues, that mayors around the world have gone overboard in their embrace of Richard Florida’s ideas about “the creative class.” Conferences on how to make one’s city hip and cloying ad campaigns have often indeed been useless distractions from a host of important urban issues.

But Kotkin himself goes overboard in his supercillious attacks on Florida and his disciples. I have no idea whether the current mayor of Detroit is doing a good job, but I know from experience how that rustbelt city has desperately been in need of an image make-over. No doubt, fifty plus years of urban decline was not caused by a crisis in hipness, but the fact is that college educated twenty- and thirty-somethings stay away from Detroit today because of damaging myths and misguided perceptions that “there is nothing there.”

Regarding Berlin, where I am living for the year, Kotkin’s comments are totally off the mark. Mayor Klaus Wowerweit has done the right thing in bolstering Berlin’s reputation as a cultural capital and a fun place to live, even as a fiscal crisis has loomed and the industrial labor market has collapsed. Tourism may generate only $7 per hour hotel jobs in New Orleans, but in Berlin it sustains operas, theaters, museums, galleries, antiquarian booksellers, and a host of other cultural institutions. Obviously, tourism also generates good jobs. I have a feeling that Maestro Barenboim’s salary, for example, is rather above the minimum wage. Berlin’s population certainly declined since reunification, but that could be an inevitable effect of pent up demand for suburban housing after years of living in an enclosed island. There are already signs, moreover, that the population outflow has reversed.

Kotkin, like Richard Florida, has marketed himself as a consultant to American cities, including St. Louis, where I otherwise reside. Many of his ideas have been based on solid principles of urban planning. Some of them, including his own previous infatuation with the dot-com economy, were as faddish and overblown as Florida’s. This latest attack on Florida’s success as an urban guru has the unmistakable smell of sour grapes.

The Ostriches of Germany

2005-11-10T10:02:00.000+01:00

If I stay long enough in this country, I may well lose all of my sentimentality about labor unions.

Spiegel reports that the Chairman of the German Labor Federation (DGB), Michael Sommer, has taken a hard line against any changes in Germany's extraordinary job-protection laws. He baldly asserts that creating greater labor flexibility for businesses (i.e. making it easier to fire people) will not create a single new job.

This sounds like the politics of self-destruction. German companies are moving their operations not just to low-wage places like China, but to developed countries whose main advantage is flexible labor laws -- Hungary, Ireland, the United States. It's hard to see how German unions are protecting the little guy, particularly in places with 18% unemployment. Perhaps there won't be mass layoff, but good jobs will continue slithering away. The happy, protected, highly skilled workers who remain will be more and more of a privileged elite.

The unions are also rejecting any effort to raise the retirement age to 67. So there's no stopping the German worker when he wants to work -- or when it's time to quit. Never mind that people are living longer and healthier lives than when these laws were created, or that the nation simply can't afford to pay for the pensions that are currently scheduled. Any politician who stands between the German geezer and his Mallorca beachhouse is likely to get crushed.

Germany and the Paris Riots

2005-11-06T21:00:00.000+01:00

A recent survey of regular readers of this blog found that 50% of them felt recent postings demonstrated a strong pro-German sentiment, bordering perhaps on Germanophilism. That is to say, my wife thinks I've gone a little soft on the Germans. (The other reader, fourteen year old Mike Dennis of Ashtabula, Ohio, is, unfortunately, still under the impression that this is a porn site. His only response to my survey was to complain that I won't give him the password to check out the "naked German babes." Mike, stop harassing me, or I'm going email your mother.)

So, I thought tonight, I'd let loose a little bilious grumbling about the Germans.

First, Berlin restaurants suck. It's almost impossible to find a good meal in this town for a decent price, and when you do find one, the place is likely to screw up everything the next time you come. The Berliners lack reverence for food, so there's really no point in restaurants getting into a sweat over "little things" like flavor or freshness. The immigrants to this city quickly learn about the natives' indifference and become just as slovenly in no time.

Secondly, the German response to the Paris riots has been mostly weird and obnoxious. On the one hand, there is a slight irrepressible touch of pleasure at seeing the French screw up. I gather this comes from something in the cultural bloodstream here. The Berliners still haven't gotten over Napoleon primping around Unter den Linden with his hand in his tunic, turning up his nose like Alice Waters at a Dönerkebab stand.

At the same time, there is palpable anxiety that similar riots could happen here.

How could riots happen here? Well, the logic goes, riots are caused by Muslims. Germany has lots of Muslims. Germany could have riots. There's very little informed discussion of France's riotiting youths -- and whether in fact Islam has anything to do with their anger. And there's very little informed discussion of Germany's Muslims -- who are predominantly Turkish and moderate.

One big problem is that German journalists rarely feel the need to engage in research or, god forbid, reporting. The papers are filled with airy speculation about "Arabia in France." This follows by only a couple months waves of articles on angry Pakistanis in England. Reporters make a point of quoting a few angry teenagers, but you never get the sense that they've whiled around the immigrant neighborhoods to get a feel for everyday life. It's the same kind of superficial in-and-out reporting that leads to the awful, stereotype-strewn reports on the USA, which then lead hyperventilating American reactionaries to accuse Germans of anti-Americanism.

Worse than the journalists on the topic of the Paris riots, however, are the politicians. Leaders of the German Conservative Party (CDU) are trying to take advantage of the riots to advocate their own dubious ideas about forcing the "integration" of Muslim youth into German society. They propogate the myth that Turkish migrants are systematically not learning German, while imbibing extremist ideas in the mosques. A leader of the CDU's parliamentary fraction, Wolfgang Bosbach, just said that it's time for "us" to "look and listen more carefully to what's being said behind closed doors at the mosques."

No evidence offered for this particular bout of paranoia. Just a feeling, apparently. Of course he might have read something in the paper.

SPD's new party chief

2005-11-02T11:44:00.000+01:00

SPD just announced that Matthias Platzeck would be the new head of the party. He's been Minister President of the Province of Brandenburg. An Ossi! And young. He's also known for having strong ties to the Green Party, where he started his political career. Amazing, however, is that the choice is already being applauded by the Conservatives. Apparently, they see him as a moderate on most issues and someone who plays well with others.

Handsome too. They could use a little sex-appeal in that party.

Collapse of the 'Grand Coalition'?

2005-11-02T10:13:00.000+01:00

Germany's "grand coalition" seems to be in trouble. The moderate SPD Party chief, Franz Müntefering, has quit his post. The fear is that the leftwing of the party is staging a revolt and that negotiations with the Consevatives will get derailed.

In almost the same moment, the wild Bavarian - Edmund Stoiber - has announced his retirement from national politics. He's not going to join the grand cabinet but will instead return to his position as governor of Bavaria. On the one hand Stoiber's a loose-cannon who constantly endangers interparty peace. On the other hand, he too is a "moderate" when it comes to social and economic issues. His influence in these areas might have helped hold together a strong concensus for steady but cautious reforms.

Already "grand coalition" seems like a dated term (Oh, that's so...October!), one that better described the larger than life personalities trying to make post-election peace than the rather mundane task of forming a government with a pragmatic reform agenda. The alliance of superheroes is no more. Bring on the young unknowns.

My out-of-step optimism continues unabated. Perhaps it's incurable. I think the revolt that's going on is mostly about young politicoes pushing aside battle-hardened geezers with too many chips on their shoulders. I don't think the young SPD is about to push hard left, and if they do they'll fail. The right is ironically, in even greater disarray. Victory does funny things to people. This is Merkel's great opportunity. If she'd get a bullhorn and start providing a little inspiration, there's no reason she can't rally sufficient troops back to the center.

What Would Sam (Walton) Do?

2005-11-01T09:52:00.000+01:00

The Berliner Zeitung reported that the new German government will consider a measure to forbid retailers from selling food "below cost." The goal would be to stop large supermarket chains (Aldi in particular) from underselling small grocers and driving them out of business.

The measure has the support of both the Conservatives and the Socialists.

All I can say is, wow. Looks like we're not in Kansas (or Missouri) anymore, Toto.

Another stereotype confirmed

2005-10-31T10:32:00.000+01:00

I've been yelled at for littering (though it had been a while), and I've been harassed by drunks, but I don't think I've ever been yelled at by drunks for littering -- until recently.

It's a complicated story. I was on the bike with Eve on the back, coming home from daycare. She had her prized Montana bear in one hand and an enormous, empty, Gallerie Lafayette shopping bag in the other. (Why, you may ask? Why not? The bag was sitting around daycare, and she grabbed it, and her grip for such things is often like a bulldog's bite.) We had just crossed the street near our apartment and were headed up the sidewalk, when I realized she'd dropped her bear. I stopped, turned my head, and saw a woman stopped on her bike, in the middle of the street, holding the bear and looking puzzled. Cars were coming. I turned to retrieve the bear from the woman, and then Eve dropped the shopping bag. I let it sit, figuring I'd be back this way, but that meanwhile I needed to rescue Montana bear (and, I suppose, the lady on the bike) from iminent flattening.

It was at that point that the drunks started yelling at me. "Hey!" One guy shouted. "Pick up that bag!" I looked at them, a bit stunned. They were the same guys who often sat on the little garden wall, just next door to the liquor store on our corner. They drink beer most afternoons for a few hours and animatedly discuss matters of the day in heavy Berlin accents.

Under the circumstances, I was a bit flustered. All I could say, rather stupidly, I guess, is "it's alright...." That sent one of the drinkers into a tizzy. "What do you mean, 'it's alright?!" I caught about 20% of what he shouted at me, but the gist of it was that I was a presumptuous idiot and better pick up my bag or the consquences would not be pleasant. I rode by them, got the bear, thanked the lady in the street, and, on my way back, rode by them again, at which point they abused me some more with a few incomprehensible or untranslatable or inappropriate to print in this family-friendly-blog curses.

It suddenly occured to me how incredibly civilized "our drunks" are. I've never seen an empty bottle, or even so much as a cigarette butt in front of that liquor store. They drink cheap beer from big bottles, and they're pretty scruffy, but apart from that, and apart from their generally unfailing politeness both to each other and to passersby, you could easily take them for professors from the Freie Universität.

The Last Tomatoes

2005-10-30T12:18:00.000+01:00

At our local market, there is a farmer who comes from Brandenburg each Saturday to sell his fruits and vegetables. Horst is a character. He lectures - that's the only word for it - concerning the nature, diversity, origins, and most of all superiority of his products. I have seen him hold customers in rapt attention for 10 minutes, when all they really wanted was a kilo of potatoes. He makes them try different things and note the texture, the aroma (a favorite word), and flavor of items as seemingly modest as a piece of celery.

Brandenburg is the province surrounding Berlin that was formerly part of East Germany. It's known for its sandy soil, but some regions, Werder in particular, are famous for their excellent produce. Horst's farm is in Werder.

It was one of the tragedies of Germany's division that the people of Berlin were cut off from the farmers of Brandenburg. In the West, of course, they were cut off by the wall. In the East, they were cut off by government economic planners, who decided that Brandenburg's legendary pears, plums, and tomatoes were best allocated for export. Apples, I seem to recall, were available at least part of the year. Garlic, I remember complaining, was nowhere to be found.

[A West Berlin friend who knew me during my 4-month stay behind the iron curtain in 1988 says, in fact, that the thing only I ever complained about back then was the lack of garlic. I probably suspected anti-Semitic conspiracy.]

Horst, it seems, is making up for lost time. He not only tries to educate the curious (and not so curious) about the intricacies of farming, but he invites his customers to the farm once a year at planting time. He clearly doesn't care who they are. He spends equal time with well-heeled businessmen, grungy students, and elderly couples, though he does seem to zero on attractive woman a little more quickly. Everyone gets grabbed by the arm. Sometimes in his exuberance, he'll just stuff a piece of fruit in a person's mouth without asking.

He'll argue with you -- he finds it incomprehensible that anyone could prefer flat Italian parsley to the trusted curly north European variety -- but he's remarkably patient too. He probably feels a little sorry for us: with our strange culinary prejudices combined with an essential ignorance of everything that comes out of the ground or once stood on four legs.

I like Horst, but I am truly mesmerized by his produce. Perhaps it's all a dog and pony show, but then, hey, "ruff ruff." I never had such fantastic strawberries, and for that alone I'm grateful. I think of the strawberries in America, tasteless, dry, scentless and with an unnatural crispness, and I wonder how such different products could even have the same name. Whether you're in Binghamton, NY or Brunswick, ME, or Ballwin, MO, American strawberries always seem to come from Watsonville, CA. Is this Watsonville even a real town, or is it just an imaginary place, dreamed up by some corporate brander, like the Hamburgerville (?) where Ronald McDonald, the Hamburgler and friends live in perpetual fun?

One-hundred years ago American social reformers feared that children would grow up never understanding their connection to the farm: never knowing the smell of cut hay or the taste of fresh eggs and milk. We know what happened to that concern.

Now you have to wonder if a generation of kids is growing up who will never have the experience of biting into a strawberry and having the juice drip down their chins, and whose concept of a tomato will always be a shiny, plastic-like decorative element that must be smothered in "special sauce" before it has any taste.

Strawberries in June

2005-10-30T01:34:00.000+02:00

Cheap American Whine

2005-10-27T13:40:00.000+02:00

The Onion had a nice little feature in their "American Voices" section in which they asked ordinary people on the street what they thought about Germany's appointment of a woman Chancellor.

One person responded something to the effect of: "you're trying to trick me into thinking I should care about German politics, aren't you?"

I can well understand that most Americans mostly don't care about European politics. Why should they? The only possible reason I can think of is that there are a few things Americans might actually learn from Germany. After all, in spite of its so-called "crisis" and the seemingly gloomy perspective of the people who live here (moi not included), the country does a lot of things well. Germans are relatively prosperous. The cities are lively and attractive places to live. Health care is almost universal. The schools are excellent. The crime rate is low.

What I can't understand, however, are Americans who only pay attention to Germany (and the rest of Europe) when they feel that their country has been gravely insulted. "Davids Medienkritik" is an entire blog dedicated to exposing supposed examples of anti-American prejudice in the German media. David and friends believe that German papers caricature American politics, demean our culture, and belittle our sacrifices in the cause of international liberty. When they're not busy documenting German intolerance toward America, the bloggers are trashing the Germans' social system, mocking their slow rate of growth, and offering 1001 I-told-you-so's regarding Germany's collapsing economy.

And that's not the only blog of its kind. There are an amazing number of American sites out there whose subheadings could read: "arrogant, whimpy, crisis-plagued Europeans get what's coming to them." The weirdest thing about this phenomenon is that most of these American guys (and they seem to be all guys) live here in Europe.

No, wait, the WEIRDEST thing about this phenomenon is the bloggers' total lack of reflectiveness about the strengths and weakness of American society and their fanatical defensiveness. Blogger-David recently offered evidence of a rising rate of social security payouts in the US as proof that the US social system is superior to Germany's. One of the regular visitors to the site declared that poverty in America is 97% "transitional," and that it's good for people to be poor for a while: It's a learning experience. (Gosh, yes, I feel so deprived at not having had the chance to live in a housing project and get shot at for a couple years. This must explain my mediocre SAT scores.)

Of course there's lots more blah blah blah on these sites of the complex sort of our-widget-production-growth-graph is bigger than their-widget-production-growth-graph, which I won't pretend to have understood.

But I'd just like to know: When did we get so sensitive? What is at stake if a few German papers draw a moustache on Lady Liberty? Why does every American boy start plugging his ears with red, white, and blue silly putty every time someone criticizes his country or suggests, god forbid, that America might borrow a few good ideas from abroad?

Seems to me that there's a simple and seemingly obvious fact that is destined never to penetrate the blagosphere:

Dudes, in a number of very basic quality of life measurements, we (America) suck, and they (Germans) rule.

The bloggers like to mock the paternalistic and costly elements of the European welfare state. But the mother of all welfare programs is the prison system. That's where mostly poor and poorly educated folks are housed for years and years, with every single aspect of life taken care of by the state. In the USA, the annual cost per prisoner is comparable to an overseas cruise. The food, however, is significantly worse, and you don't get to hear the likes of Tony Orlando and Dawn each night after dinner.

In 2003, there were well over 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. That's a ratio of 715 prisoners for every 100,000 people. If all the prisoners in America were put in a city, it would be the 4th largest city in the country, right between Chicago and Houston.

In Germany, in 2003 there were 79,153 prisoners. That's smaller than Bielefeld. It's not even Evanston, Illinois. That's a ratio of 96 prisoners per 100,000 people.

Even if we could agree with our neanderthal friends that every one of these American prisoners deserves to be incarcerated, it would still raise the question of why such an extraordinary number of Americans have become so anti-social that they have to be put behind concrete and barbed wire and guarded around the clock.

And don't start thinking that the great prison boom has made America safer than Germany. No. Not even close.

Leave the prisoners out of the statistics (which is of course what almost all quality of life statisticians DO) and any honest comparative analysis still has the US looking bad.

Regarding infant mortality, the poverty rate, adult health and wellness, education: USA lose, Germany win. A recent Harris poll that was, of course, trumpeted by the all-American blog consortium indicated that Americans are far more optimistic about the future. Germans, in fact, were the most pessimistic people on the list of countries. But even that factoid, while interesting, is hard to square with another fact of life (and death):

Suicide rate among 15-24 year olds
USA: 13.7 per 100,000 people
Germany: 4.7 per 100,000 people

And that's in spite of the fact that Germans are prescribed significantly fewer anti-depressants and use far less meth, pot, crack, and cocaine (the anti-depressants of choice in many American cities).

On the other hand, they do drink more alcohol. But the beer is so good.....

German Politics: Workers' ID cards

2005-10-26T22:36:00.000+02:00

The political situation here gets muddier by the day - at least for the clueless American.

It's not enough that the incoming Socialist finance Minister proposes privatizing the highways. Now the Socialists in Berlin want to introduce a mandatory proof of legality card for all workers in construction, restaurants, and cab-driving. The card will have to be worn at all times and will contain a computer chip containing crucial identifying information. The goal is to do something about the 70,000 illegally employed workers -- many but not all of them illegal aliens.

The Conservative Berliner Morgenpost is, not surprisingly, gleeful. Presumably it will be a while before journalists have to wear these lost-doggie chips as well.

Personal Life: Eve Speaks

2005-10-24T14:36:00.000+02:00

Eve's first words (more or less in order of appearance):

Teddy
Tschuss (goodbye)
Celia
ja
heiss (hot)
dada
mamma
apfel
mein
Keks (cookie)

Most of these words have been said just once. It's as if she's decided to work through the entire German language first before moving on to try and build sentences. The problem of course is that German allows for an almost infinite variety of compound words. This could take a long time.

German Politics: Turning a Corner

2005-10-23T22:07:00.000+02:00

Germany is abuzz regarding Edmond Stoiber's mad verbal assaults on his supposed ally, Angela Merkel. Stoiber, the irrepressibly pompous head of the CSU, has never come to terms with Merkel's leadership of the Conservatives. Even before the "grand coalition" has started ruling, he seems to be promising it will come apart at the seams.

Actually, I think Stoiber's theatrics are a sign that the grand coalition is going to succeed. Merkel and the pragmatic wing of the CDU must be inching their way toward a common agenda with the pragmatists in the Social Democratic Party. Why else would Stoiber be taking up position as the populist right-wing whiner in residence? He is planning to be the standard-bearer for the loyal opposition.

All good. Whatever else one may think about Merkel, she's not the kind of politician to be easily swayed by worries of an internal revolt. She's not burdened by (West German) history and old personal debts, like her fellow Conservatives. One could easily see her building a new base of support in the political center.

The only important question is: Are the Social Democrats commited to working with her, or is this just a temporary, tactical alliance?

The Sacred and the Profane

2005-10-23T22:01:00.000+02:00

Photos: France

2005-10-18T13:28:00.000+02:00

Bienvenue a Paris

Powernap - Metro

Bored with Bourgogne

Angry at French agricultural subsidies

At Monet's Garden in Giverny

German Politics: Wilful Misunderstanding

2005-10-17T11:06:00.000+02:00

I've come to suspect that the American media purposefully gets German politics wrong.

I was in the U.S. when Merkel was finally appointed Chancellor, and the constant tagline on the story was "free-market reformers" triumph in Germany. Obviously it's a simpler story when the media can portray Angie as the new Maggie Thatcher and the Conservatives as free-market cowboys, while the Socialists supposedly cling desperately to the social models of the past. Who wants to get lost in the messy details of German politics? I'm sure American reporters were aggravated when it came out that a future SPD Minister wants to privatize the nation's highways, while the Conservatives oppose it! I can certainly sympathize with any reporter who figures he should just leave that story alone.

But I think the mischaracterization of German politics goes beyond any urge to simplify. The American media has been heralding the failure of European social democracy now for two decades. There has long been this unseemly glee over the "FACT" that coddled European workers with their long vacations, generous social benefits, and incredible job protection will soon have to face harsh realities. "Schadenfreude" may be a German word, but hardworking neo-puritan American commentators have taken the phenomenon to new heights.

If Merkel really were an American style free-market reformer, then this would mean that Europe's wealthiest nation had finally rejected the "European social model." Americans could be reassured that democratic socialism will be swept into the dustbin of history, along with all the other sentimental European fantasies of economic equality, security, and solidarity. Once European social democracy is truly dead, then liberal Americans in particular can purge their last remnants of guilt about poverty and inequality. We can stop feeling bad at not having done enough, at having secretly applauded Bill Clinton's welfare reform and the rightwing turn of the Democratic Party. Even New Orleans won't seem so bad, because we'll know that there's really no alternative, that cowboy capitalism is the only economic model left on the globe with a claim to viability and legitimacy. (Come back, Francis Fukuyama, all is forgiven!)

But it really isn't so. Germans might sell the highways to the highest bidder (but probably won't). They might introduce greater labor flexibility (and should). They might even lower taxes and further restrict benefits (perhaps in itself not such a bad thing either.) Most reasonable people here agree that the system needs reforming. I think that's just as true among the Social Democrats as among the Conservatives. Belief in the German social system, however, runs deep and wide. Both governing parties recognize a moral obligation to uphold the safety net and promote the redistribution of wealth, and they still believe -- in spite of all the hand-wringing and self-flaggelation -- that the basic model works. Certainly they envy American growth rates, but so what? They envy Chinese growth rates even more. Angie Merkel is no more likely to imitate Reagan and Thatcher, than she is likely to start playing Deng Xiao Ping. Europe will remain (obstinately) European, at least for the forseeable future.

A couple things about that election

2005-10-02T19:22:00.000+02:00

Politics in Germany was certainly never this fun before. That must be the biggest surprise about the election. The spectacle of Conservatives eagerly wooing the Greens to join their coalition after months, no years, of demonizing them as hippy freaks on acid made for great theater. One leader of the Conservatives went on TV and radio for a week to publicly profess how much his party had in common with the Greens. As the Greens failed to respond to these overtures, the Conservative sounded more and more like Pepe Le Pieu expressing his love to some inanimate object, a vacuum cleaner or pipe fitting, he mistakes for a fellow skunk.

Now that particular skit is over, but the show goes on.

And the Conservatives are not skunks. The more the Socialists behave like power-mad opportunists, the more the Conservatives grow on me. They are not to be confused with American Conservatives. On issues like the environment, health care, and the social safety net, their stances are to the right of the German Socialists, but to the left of the American Democratic Party. They support the Kyoto Agreement on global warming. They believe that the state has a responsibility to protect the poor and promote social equity. They oppose joining the American-led occupation of Iraq.

There are still 1001 reasons not to root for the Conservatives (And Edmund Stoiber constitutes single-handedly reasons # 1-20), but we should be clear about what we're getting. Angie Merkel ain't no Maggie Thatcher.

How 'bout a grand coalition? What say the leaders from these parties just head out for a giant retreat, get really sloshed, and then play spin the bottle in mixed groups until dawn? See what comes of it. Americans would love the idea of a government based on new alliances, a new spirit of togetherness. Wouldn't it be swell if W. and Ted Kennedy spent a few days drinking at the Texas ranch or at Martha's Vineyard. Surely, they'd come back with a realistic plan to save Social Security?

The Germans, however, are horrified at the prospect of any such inter-party orgies. There is just too much history separating the Conservatives and Socialists, too much emotion, too many tragedies. Germany has never embraced the idea of mass, umbrella parties the way Americans have done. Regardless of their growing similarities in policy, CDU and SPD symbolize fundamentally different things. The SPD is the party of workers, dreamers, and social workers. The CDU is the guardian of religion, the family, and men in silly hats and incredibly unflattering trousers. The one party still sings the International. The other party plays bad accordion music. Both parties still have a basic raison d'etre in their opposition to the other. If forced to cohabitate, they will become caricatures of themselves (think Felix and Oscar) and nothing will get done.

I'm afraid it would never be enough to send German party leaders away to a beer-soaked lovefest retreat. It's the people who need a long, groovy vacation.

Mr. Mom comes to Deutschland

2005-09-23T14:04:00.000+02:00

We still love daycare, but last night was a little weird.

It was billed as "Elternabend," which is German for parents evening, but in fact it should have been called "Muetterabend," as I was the only dad, sitting around a teeny table on teeny kids' chairs with 10 moms. We were there to talk about issues and events at the daycare center.

The first item of business concerned "du" vs. "Sie" (the informal vs. the formal address in German). Eve's teacher, whom I love, got into trouble with her boss because she's been using the informal "du" with us parents. The informal style of address completely fits both her personality and the context of our interactions. This woman spends almost as much time with my daughter as I do, wipes her butt, stresses over her moods and her rashes, etc. etc. We've gotten to know each other quite well. Why shouldn't we "du?" At IKEA, 16-year old cashiers I've never laid eyes on address me with the "du."

Apparently it's a ten-year old policy at the daycare center, and the director has decreed there are to be no exceptions. I wanted to ask if we should perhaps also click our heels together when we greet each other, but I held back. I'm not sure that would have made me very popular.

Later the topic came up of what to do for the Christmas party this year. I was going to suggest something with silly hats, colorful cookies, and cheezy music, but the teacher said she thought the children should do a nativity play, and the assembled moms thought this a great idea. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, one mom said. They can just present the characters, and someone can read from Mathew or the Evangelicals.

This conversation took me by surprise because a) it's a state-subsidized daycare center, b) three of the twelve kids in our group are Muslim or Jewish, and c) god-fearing Christians in Berlin are supposed to be about as numerous as Satanic fetishistic performance artists in Fenton, Missouri. But I stayed out of the discussion and was spacing out, dreaming of Polish pastries, I think, until the teacher (the one I love) suddenly pointed to me and said "Warren can play Jesus! He looks like Jesus, doesn't he?!"

I think she was joking, but I wasn't sure. "Ja," I said, "and I'm a Jew too! Just like Jesus!"

Someone laughed and, fortunately, the topic soon changed. After a while, we started talking about the trouble we're all having getting our kids to eat right and sleep through the night. Finally I felt like just one of the girls.

Photos: Warsaw

2005-09-23T13:28:00.000+02:00

The Countess von Rosenblumitzky in her hotel room

Polish school children at the statue of a Polish hero

Crisis and Confidence: Berlin vs. Warsaw

2005-09-22T12:57:00.000+02:00

Just back from a few days in Warsaw. The contrast with Berlin is striking. Warsaw is the picture of energy and vitality. It doesn't seem to matter how their upcoming election turns out. (In fact, no one seems to care). Berlin feels nervous and tired, and the uncertain election results have ushered in the promise of two more years of collective indigestion. It's like some great reversal of the 19th century cliche in which the young and dynamic West was zooming away from the decadent East.

You can almost hear the Polish border guards chuckling as you cross that line. "Who's decadent now, Werner?"

The most popular German newspaper just put Gerhard Schroeder on its cover photoshopped into the dress of a Roman Caesar. Yipes! But Rome didn't fall in a day...

Boomtown Warsaw

Warsaw is dizzy with progress. Everywhere there are building cranes and the sound of hammering. The new architecture is bold and confident. The office towers have eye-catching shapes and colors. Even the smaller, more modest buildings demonstrate a love of innovation and perhaps a thirst for change. The city has none of the eager-not-to-offend "historic-looking" architecture that currently plagues American cities. No fake brick. No over-polite efforts to "fit into the neighborhood." The Poles seem like they enjoy taking chances, like they believe in the future.

Berlin's also got great new architecture, but there is little building going on at the moment and hardly anything in the works. Even the new, mammoth train station going up near Berlin's government district has a melancholy glow. The building stands alone. Nothing has happened yet in the way of economic development around the station. Meanwhile, the Zoo Station- once a symbol of Berlin's crazy energy -- is going to lose its intercity traffic. Even if the new train station is a success, an old, established commercial district faces decline.

In Warsaw, the go-getter capitalist energy can be felt on the street. Men in beautifully tailored suits, with stylish accessories, bound along the pavement. (Do they all get handmaid suits? Why do they look so fabulous?) A mix of international chain stores and local independent propietors compete for your attention with bright, catchy displays. At seemingly every busy intersection there are men and women passing out advertisements or hawking some service.

The food has a similar air of freshness and vitality. Warsaw's restaurant scene has become very international, with Thai, Japanese, etc. though we stuck to Polish cooking. It turned out to be a gazzilion times more flavorful, fresh, and creative than any of the Polish food I had in Chicago growing up. The chefs are jazzing up things like beet borscht, gonkula, and roast duck. It was heavy with tradition (and fat) but somehow still elegant. And the pastries were incredible. Cheesecakes, strudels, flourless chocolate cake, plum cake, paczki, and the best danish I ever had in my life.

Again, I contrast this with Berlin, where there's also been a renaissance of sorts for native cuisine, but the spirit of innovation rarely goes beyond a few sprigs of arugula. It may be that the top restaurants are great (we can't afford 'em), but the stuff for regular folk doesn't offer much inspiration.

Winners and Losers

So Poland looks good - at least at first - but there's no escaping the sense of one people divided sharply into winners and losers. The new business elites are Polish, but so are the maids cleaning your hotel room, so are the guys hitting you up for change, and the women squatting in the entryway to the churches. There are almost no immigrants - no minorities stepping in to do the dirty work and keep up the underground economy. Perhaps it is because of this that the poverty and the crime is much more self-evident than in Berlin. A friend of ours was confronted by a knife-wielding man in the subway. Another friend witnessed four teenagers beating a guy in the street. Our hotel had security walking up and down our hallway throughout the day. Police were everywhere in the city.

They can't isolate and contain the "criminal elements" in Warsaw the way they do in western cities. There is no "other" to stick in a ghetto somewhere.

While Poles have plenty of reasons to be excited about the future, they also seem obsessed with history. They are furious that Germany is considering the creation of a "Center against Expulsion" in Berlin to memorialize the fate of Germans at the end of World War II expelled from lands now belonging to Poland. They are scared of the Russians, don't like the Ukranians, have some bone to pick with Belarus. They are angry at Germany for failing to support a common "European" policy against Russia, even as they refuse to apologize for supporting America's Iraq policy against French and German objections. (They see America as the "indispensable nation" for protecting Europe against a revived and revanchist Russia.)

And what about the legacy of Jewish history in Warsaw? Though Jews represented 1/4 of the pre-war population in the city, it's difficult to find any acknowledgement of their presence that isn't at least borderline offensive. A bookstore on the most prominent shopping strip advertises books by a notorious Holocaust denier. A shop on the main square sells paintings of "Jewish money-lenders." Street-sellers hawk little wooden figurines of rabbis and klezmer musicians.

Polish elections are about to happen and interest is dismally low -- another contrast with Germany. Voter participation has been consistently under 50% for parliamentary elections. The government decision to join America's "coalition of the willing" was hardly discussed in parliament and got no attention in the press -- until Polish troops started getting killed. The public's paranoia toward the Russians, simmering anger at the Germans, and generalized distrust of east-European neighbors crowds out other issues.

Maybe none of that matters -- politics, history, international relations - if the economy grows fast enough and the paczkis are still fresh and tasty. The "new Europe," as Rumsfeld calls it, is going to invent its own way of getting things done. But I'd rather be in Berlin right now and in the future: decadent or otherwise.

Ramba Zamba: The Theater Troupe

2005-09-18T20:48:00.000+02:00

The Ramba Zamba Theater Company in Berlin

The Third Reich and the Mentally Disabled

No one seems to know how many mentally retarded people were murdered in Europe by the Germans. Historians frequently write that 200,000 people were killed in the euthanasia program, but that number includes the physically disabled, psychotics, and people with dementia. There is still no authorative history of “the feeble-minded” in the Nazi era.

So it is hardly surprising that even most Germans have only a vague idea of what happened to retarded citizens under the Nazis. There are a number of things about this sordid story, however, that deserve to be widely known. First, that support for euthanizing mentally disabled people was an international phenomenon. There was vigorous support for euthanasia in the United States, England, and elsewhere in Europe around the First World War. Secondly, that in Germany even many advocates for the retarded accepted the idea that some lives were “not worth living” and that individuals who manifested no “will to live” should be killed. The debate in Germany prior to the Nazi seizure of power concerned not whether there should be euthanasia, but where to draw the line, i.e. who exactly should be killed. German advocates for the retarded courageously defended the rights of many or even most mentally disabled citizens, but they conceded the point that state-sponsored killing was not an inherently bad idea.

Finally, there was the role of parents. A remarkable survey conducted in the early 1920’s by the director of a German asylum for the retarded found that a clear majority of his patients’ fathers approved hypothetically of the “painless shortening” of their children’s lives. (The mothers were asked only indirectly.) Many parents stated that the best thing might be if their children were euthanized without their knowledge and consent. To what extent did these parents later acquiesce in the Nazis’ actual program of mass murder? Really, we don’t know. There are plenty of examples of protest against the Nazis’ euthanasia campaign, but we lack a broader picture of how German families related to their mentally disabled members and how their attitudes changed over time.

Overall, the historical literature is mostly silent about the lives of the mentally disabled and their place in German society.

Ramba Zamba

This silence is the context for the Ramba Zamba theater company in Berlin. Ramba Zamba is a German slang term for raucousnous, chaos, and madness. Ramba Zamba might offer the best possible start for what the Germans call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung – working through the legacy of the past.

The theater troupe is made up of actors with mental disabilities. But it’s not what you think. They are not doing feel-good theater. It’s not some mawkish, politically correct variety show in which socially underprivileged amateurs plead for public affirmation by pretending to be “real actors.” It’s not about self-expression for the sake of self-expression.

Ramba Zamba does real theater.

Does that mean it’s just as good as “normal theater?” Not if by “normal” we mean a reassuringly familiar story presented by actors who look and sound like they just came off the set of a network sitcom. Ramba Zamba is avante garde, which means that it’s constantly breaking the rules about how to entertain. They’re not afraid to make the audience squirm or laugh at things that aren’t supposed to be funny, or even force the audience to puzzle about what's going on on stage. If you are receptive to them, Ramba Zamba destroys the very idea that there is such a thing as “normal” theater and “normal” actors.

In conventional theater, the audience is supposed to lose itself in the play. You forget that you are at the theater or having a night on the town. You forget that actor X is really too old or too young for the part, or that he’s a black man playing an Elizabethan courtier or a white man playing an African soldier. At Ramba Zamba, however, you rarely forget that the actors are mentally disabled. The company doesn't want you to just sit back and be entertained. They challenge the audience with uncomfortable images and ideas.

Medea by Ramba Zamba

Recently I saw their production of Medea. That's Medea by Euripides, the one I was supposed to read in college.

The play unfolds on a largely bare, open stage in a small, modest theater. Upstage there is a wall of corrugated metal with one opening, a sliding door 6 feet in the air on a small, elevated platform. There are no stairs to the platform, which is surrounded by a metal railing.

Slowly the stage fills up with men and women dressed as vagabonds. They are all shapes and sizes, but mostly heavy set and relatively small. A few of the actors are recognizably down-syndrome. Their clothes are ratty, patched together outfits. Some carry beat up suitcases or backpacks. They shuffle upstage and look longingly at the door above them.

Finally one actor clambers up the wall and onto the platform. He pulls open the sliding door and disappears inside. The crowd murmurs. He returns shortly and addresses them.

The young man, who has down's syndrome, is difficult to understand, though his stage presence is remarkable. He is confident, direct, in control, utterly in character. You crane your neck and concentrate hard to understand him, but strangely the challenge doesn’t bother you. You concentrate, listen, adapt to his cadences and pronounciations.

The young man tells the assembled crowd what he learned from behind the wall. Corinth is a beautiful city. There is bountiful food, lovely houses and streets. There are lovely theaters and a ready audience.

The vagabonds are excited. It turns out they are travelling actors and now, finally, they can imagine settling down and performing on a real stage, with real lights, stage hands, etc.

The young man on the platform interrupts to remind them about the required documents. With wonderful comic timing, he goes through the list of forms that will need to be filled out, dropping sheets of paper to the crowd as he enumerates them. You’ll just need to submit your:

residency registration
Application for asylum
Application for permission to work
Proof of Driver’s license
Proof of graduation from an accredited high school
etc. etc. etc.

The actors scramble for the sheets of paper and groan collectively as they realize that they'll never in fact be able to enter the city through the legitimate channels. A mysterious blind man advises them that they might get into the city if they performed a play here and now, preferably a play with blood and guts and lots of royalty. He suggests they perform Medea. The actors have never heard of the play, but they like the idea of a little sex and gore and a few kings.

They create a stage by brushing together a great circle of dirt. That's where the action will play. They then begin arguing with each other over who will play the leading roles. Three women vie for the part of Medea. One of them notes apologetically that she is fat, but she has just lost weight and will be losing more. Another woman argues that Medea herself was obviously quite plump, and therefore SHE should get the part, since she is plenty fat and plans to stay that way. "But I'm STILL fatter than you," says the first woman. "I should be Medea." The fight continues until it is decided that all three women will play Medea. Three men emerge to play the part of Jason, and this is how the play proceeds, with three different couples acting out the story in different scenes.

The couples are very different from each other. One pair, severely retarded, performs the story of Medea and Jason in an extremely simple, slow-moving, yet lyrical fashion. We see them in love. We see tensions brewing. The simplicity of their gestures and the relative lack of language makes the story all the more universal. It's like a slow dance.

The second couple is far more verbal and physical. There's a kind of explosiveness to Jason that feels like pent up frustration, eagerness to get away to join some other world. With the third couple, Jason is a smooth charmer, while Medea is messy, unhappy, catatonic. Jason is afflicted by the dirt at home (a humorous point since of course the stage consists only of dirt and Jason is wearing a Don Johnson-esque white suit) and medea's failure to maintain order. "Why can't you be normal?!" he yells at her, frustrated.

Interesting Statistics

2005-09-16T12:00:00.000+02:00

Number of inmates in German prisons: 71,000*
Total German population: 82 million
That's roughly: 1 out of every 1154 people

Number of prison inmates in the State of Missouri: 30,600**
Total Missouri population: 5.7 milion
That's roughly: 1 out of every 185 people (or 2 people from each section of Powell Sympony Hall)

Europe bashers have been citing a recent statistic by the Harris polling group purporting to show that Americans are "more contented with their lives" than Europeans in general and Germans in particular.

It's not clear whether the Harris poll included some of the 2 million Americans sitting in the can. I imagine they would say that such folks are "stastically insignificant."

*2002 stats
**2004 stats

One Cultural Stereotype Confirmed

2005-09-15T23:42:00.000+02:00

Left my wallet on the bus (not my fault, swear). 50 Euros in it, plus 21 Euros worth of unused transit passes.

Someone -- I think it was the driver - tracked down my cellphone number, called and left a message a few hours later saying that the wallet had been found.

Picked it up the next morning at the Berlin transit lost and found.

The contents seemed strangely out of place, but in fact everything was there. Money included. It was just all much better organized than it's ever been.

Photos: Going places

2005-09-14T12:06:00.000+02:00

On our way to daycare. That's her prized (Montana) bear she's holding. Kein Kita ohne Bär.

Going nowhere in particular:

Personal Life: Hallelujahs and Diatribes

2005-09-13T23:06:00.000+02:00

We're in love with German daycare. We pay 160 Euros a month. (The Director went into aploplexy when I told her what daycare costs in St. Louis). The building is light, airy, clean and inviting. The classrooms open up onto the back of the building, where there is an alluring playground that feels like an Italian townsquare for the under- 4-set. The facility has its own chef, and the food is fabulous. For lunch, the kids eat things like cauliflower in hollandaise sauce and spaetzle with feta cheese. Eve has become a little gourmand and at home seems to give a resigned sigh if we dare to open a jar of baby food.

The daycare workers are happy, devoted to the kids, and proud of their jobs. Many of them have been with this daycare center for years.And the kids are diverse. Eve's group of 11 includes children from Africa, Jamaica, Turkey, and Argentina.

I drop Eve off each day and find myself wanting to stay. (Perhaps if I could do daycare again, I'd get everything right this time.....)

Nicole spent most of the summer in intensive German classes. She's made stunning progress, and I can no longer get away with making up wholly arbitrary translations of people's comments to us when I have no idea what they've been saying. Since August, she's been doing a comprehensive seminar on German politics and society with the other Bosch Fellows. (In German!) She starts her first internship in October, which will be with the Institute for Urban Studies. The Institute's theme this year is "shrinking cities." Apparently Berlin has been losing population over the past decade, and the urban planners are getting nervous. They're afraid that Berlin could be going the way of Detroit or, well, St. Louis. Nicole, formerly of the St. Louis Development Corporation, may be thrust into the position of resident expert or dark prophet of doom. So far in Berlin we've had little sense of deja vu, except that tonight I had pizza so bad, with cheese so gummy, that I did for a moment think I was back in St. Louis, munching at Imo's.

But the Berliners really are worried about things. The city is massively in debt. The public schools have fallen precipitously in quality and are allegedly plagued with disorder. Many parents have started sending their kids to private schools or moving to the burbs -- mainly to get away from the Turks and Arabs and other "Others." The media speak constantly of "crisis."

For us it's funny what counts as a crisis. The crime rate is a joke compared to the U.S., particularly if one speaks of violent crime. There is relatively little pan-handling, public drunkenness, or drug-abuse. The museums, operas, symphonies, and theaters are fantastic and -- though threatened with collapse - still going strong. Public parks are dirtier than they used to be, but are still attractive places for families.

Public transportation is a marvel. We've always known about the great German U-Bahn and el-trains, but the buses have been a revelation. They are clean, quiet, comfortable and on-time. Everybody uses them. (Giving the lie to the American claim that the middle classes "won't ride buses"). The best thing for us is that they have rear entrances for strollers and wheelchairs, and the entire bus drops down on hydraulics almost to ground level at each stop. Inside the bus is a place to latch your stroller, so it doesn't roll. We've yet to miss having a car.

Which makes me think again of St. Louis. When you compare German and American cities, it's odd that the Germans are constantly wringing their hands about "crises," while we Americans just plow forward with our famous and self-congratulatory optimism. Often this summer, I thought of the bored faces of people on Kingshighway in St. Louis waiting endlessly for buses on a hot summer day or a cold rainy evening in winter. Why DO they put up with it? Like the Indian tribal chief who visited 18th century London, I sometimes get this naive sense of wonder at why the poor folks in America don't simply rise up and slit the rich folks' throats. (Well, I guess sometimes they do). Poor people in

Germany

would never put up with the things that poor Americans usually assume are just a "natural" part of life.
In St. Louis we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build one puny light-rail line from whitey-stop #1 to whitey-stop #2, mainly so a playgroup of wealthy suburbanites can appease their lust for choo-choo trains, while all of public transportation is otherwise a creaking disaster. In Germany that would never happen -- not because the rich people here are nicer or more empathic, but because everyone would be afraid of the consequences.

But really I should get back to pizza....

German Election: The Socialist Come-Back

2005-09-13T22:19:00.000+02:00

Newspapers report that the SPD seems to have made a remarkable comeback over the past month. The Conservatives (CDU/CSU) blew a massive lead, and even in coalition with the Liberals they no longer seem likely to gain a majority.

This could mean a grand coalition between the Conservatives and the SPD, or maybe the SPD momentum will continue, and Gerhard Schroeder will pull off an incredible upset.

I should be happy. The SPD is committed to most of the things I find worthwhile in this country: a strong social welfare system, more or less universal health coverage, unionism, affordable daycare. The Conservatives are wedded to a suspiciously American-looking vision of economic reform. They want greater "labor flexibility" (companies should be able to fire people at will), a simpler tax code (a big break for the rich, a smaller break for the middle class, and higher consumption taxes for everyone), welfare costs should be contained (toss people off the rolls when they won't work).

But it's really hard to get excited about any continuing roll for the SPD in government. They're sooooo sleazy. Schroeder seems like a naked opportunist, a pure politician in the model of Slick Willie Clinton at his worst. Overall the SPD seems less interested in helping the little guy, than in preventing change. Meanwhile, the economy is a mess; the unions seem narrowly interested in protecting their own; foreign policy lurches from one embarassment to another.

Good thing I can't vote.

2005-09-12T21:30:00.000+02:00

Eve in August. There weren't many days when she could wear a real summer dress. Old friends may notice that her eyes are getting darker.

Why Blog?

2005-09-12T21:24:00.000+02:00

Because I'm 40, and it's good to feel trendy now and then.
Because I need to keep writing, writing, writing....
Because my friends almost surely don't want to get all this blather clogging up their email inboxes...
Because somebody somewhere wants to hear my thoughts on German politics, Berlin culture, and my struggles to find decent fish, great chocolate, and reasonable vanilla ice cream.
Because everyone wants to hear about Eve, as she bursts into toddlerhood.