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

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

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....

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Bike paths!

Fresh dark breads.

The state of Berlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holocaust Memorial and the Germans

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

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

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

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

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

Travel Tales: Berlin to Madrid

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

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.