-Verweile doch! du bist so schoen-

A Week Away: Weimar and BUDAPEST!

I come home to a rainy, gray Berlin more excited to be here than when I left last Wednesday. The familiar and the non-familiar both have a place in our lives. As much as I fell in love with Budapest’s character-filled streets and wildly exotic-sounding language, I was really content to get back on the S-bahn to Yorckstrasse and understand what people were saying around me. It was an absolutely incredible weekend, and a heartfelt thanks to my knowledgeable host, the one and only Milan Kidd, who is steadily taking over Hungary one scan at a time.

But first, I went on an excursion with BCGS to the small, quaint and history-filled town of Weimar in central Germany. On Wednesday morning the twelve other students on the BCGS program and I departed from the Berlin main station southwest towards the province of Thueringen. I’ve heard a lot about this east-German province, famous for its forests, Christmas bread (called Stollen), its onion festival, and the Thueringen Bratwurst. Robert’s grandfather emphasizes every time it comes up that the people there say the Freistaat Thueringen, the free land of Thueringen, strong and proud of its early wars of succession. I guess we could call it the Texas of Germany…? Robert will surely disagree ☺ Nonetheless it is the small-city that the best of German literature calls home.

Goethe lived there most of his life, as sort of the “big man on campus” attracting other intellectuals like Schiller during Weimar’s “Golden Era”. Goethe was amazing; he basically at one time or another filled every job description possible in this small city – water tower manager, theater producer, statesmen, architect, cook, and most remarkably poet and writer. In a time when book-printing was still rather expensive and libraries had a limited volume of books, Goethe borrowed no less than 2,000 books for his studies. He had around 700 books in his own personal “stacks” next to his office and yet he still needed to borrow books. I guess we can then excuse him for being, well, not the most modest man of his day.
Our three-day visit taught me more than I would ever need to know and then some about Goethe and Schiller. But it also showed to me another side of Germany that had little to do with the Romantics and yet everything to do with the definition of Germany today.

We stayed in a Comfort Hotel on the outskirts of the city and commuted to Goetheplatz in the morning by bus after dropping our stuff off. A group of seven of us had a hefty lunch of Bratwurst and Sauerkraut. In the afternoon we toured the Belvedere Castle (turned art museum), but did not have time to see the impressionists due to the hundred Goethe and Schiller busts and the beautiful concert rooms. During quite possibly the coldest two hours I have ever experienced in Germany we went on a city-tour. Unfortunately the cold made it almost impossible to ask questions, take pictures, or concentrate (my feet were numb after ten minutes). But nonetheless we got a fairly good idea of the impact that the big writers had on the town.

One thing that did not strike me until the next day was how little the tour guide explained of Weimar as the capital of National Socialism. The history-makers write the history, and the woman giving us our tour simply focused on the highlights, pointing briefly to the balcony of the Elephant hotel where Hitler once spoke from before directing us to the plaque about Johann Sebastian Bach. Weimar is, according to some people and guide books, the cultural capital of Germany. And yet there was an unbelievably dark time in which culture and nationalism coincided, something that also took place in Weimar. What I mean more specifically is that while the citizens of Weimar proudly attended new versions of Faust and stood for their country, a concentration camp a few miles outside of the city served as the first and most central seat of the Holocaust.

We left for the KZ (Konzentrationslage) Buchenwald at around 10 am on Thursday morning. I remember feeling inconsolably nervous on our way there, not really wanting to talk to anybody. The KZ was the last stop on a bus line; of course that meant about a fifteen minute ride from the second-to-last stop. So far in the woods, hidden on the north side of the hills. Before we left various people kept telling us to bundle up, because no matter how cold it is in Weimar it’s at least ten degrees colder in Buchenwald. That sounded oddly metaphorical. We finally arrived to find about six new-looking buildings surrounding the parking lot, all built to house the tourist office, a movie-theater to show a documentary about the KZ, and a book store. My history professor said to me later that he previously disliked the idea of having a KZ be a tourist attraction, a place where unenthusiastic high school kids are forced to visit for a day who end up sitting around playing with their cell phones because they don’t want to learn about the Holocaust for the thousandth time (here in Germany, teachers generally go over the Holocaust a thousand times). That was certainly the case when we viewed the Documentary. Around 60 kids fighting to get seats up front… but the camp is so large that we didn’t see them at all after that.

I don’t want to go into details about the KZ. Perhaps I should, maybe those are the details about one’s trip to Germany that really count. That is in fact a very good question: how can a visitor simultaneously enjoy what Germany has to offer while facing head on a history of genocide? But the most important thing to remember from that question is that Germans large and small ask themselves the same thing, except they're not just here for a visit. The question of the "two Germany's", as I have once heard it said, the Germany of culture, of Wurst and Beer, of wonderfully sweet old people and adorable children, and the Germany of WWII will always need to be auseinandersetzt, or compared, contrasted and worked out. There's no reason for visitors to not be involved in that process.

To be quite honest, I'm not sure that I would have made the choice to visit a concentration camp had it not been on our excursion's itinerary for Thursday morning. It's not an experience one can say one is "glad at having done". But still I very much appreciate having been there. One feeling I will never forget is standing on the grounds of the camp while a strong, bitter wind threatened to knock you off of your feet. The weather could not have fit the occasion better; I sort of got the impression that no matter how sunny it was down in the quaint streets of Weimar it would suddenly become chilly and gray as soon as you started up the hill to the camp. We had audio guides with which we could walk around on our own and see the foundations of the barracks, the disinfection rooms, the crematorium with its hundreds of unused urns.

There were few original buildings still standing; the largest two were used as museums, unbelievably poignant museums, featuring some artwork made by prisoners in a struggle to maintain a sense of culture to contrast the cultureless SS guards. There was one section that featured old letters from SS-guards to their superiors, requesting very nicely and politely to punish a prisoner or two for misdemeanors. Of course the actual punishments were not mentioned and the reasoning would be something vague like, “He is not pulling his weight, and he is slowing progress”. The big red check of approval on these papers just makes my head swirl. How, how, how was all that ever possible. My good friend Bong said it succinctly in German, die Taetigkeit der Menschen ist einfach unbegreiflich. The capabilities of Man (to do such a thing) is simply incomprehensible.

Going on a tour of Goethe’s well-kept and fancy home felt a bit surreal after such an experience. And yet I welcomed the change of thought and the passive act of listening to an animated tour guide. Finally a chance to experience some Goethe first-hand, we went to the National Theater in Weimar to see a rendition of Faust that evening. Wow, it was, well, interesting. We had reread Faust: Der Tragoedie Erster Teil, the Tragedy of Faust, Part I in my intellectual history course the week before. Although we spent a good two weeks reading Faust in English in my HUME course my Freshman year at Chicago, I really didn’t understand a thing until we discussed it at length last Tuesday. It’s all about the context, the ROMANTICS. The unanswerable question remains, how Goethe, a man famed for saying, “Romanticism is the sickness; Classicism is the cure”, could write such a romantic play.

Carmen, our director, and Warren, my history professor, invited me and Bong out for some beer after the play (our group of twelve split off, as always). The version we saw was VERY MUCH a new interpretation, and must have been appreciated as such. It took me a while; there were a few too many homoerotic jokes in the first half that I just cringed upon seeing. It certainly did not help that perhaps the same school group that was with us at Buchenwald that morning had chosen to attend the same play. Of course they loved the stripping parts (catcalls were unfortunately common) and chatted through the actual meat of the play, the part when Gretchen prays to Mary Magdalene or the night of the crazy pagan witch-festival. Goodness, well I’d be up for seeing a more “traditional” interpretation although in retrospect this one was not so bad, and even ingenious at parts.

The next day involved packing and some sunshine. Still freezing, but the sunshine was certainly welcome for the hour or so that it stuck around. We visited a large Rococo library, one of the most famous in Germany (that’s where Goethe took out 2,000 books from). I’m pretty sure my Dad would have loved it, except for the fact that there was no engineering section and too many Schiller and Goethe busts to sit anywhere. We had free time the rest of the day before our train home, so Bong and I hid from the rain (it inevitably came, preventing us from walking around the Park by the Ilm river which is supposed to be very pretty), ate a large large lunch of local beer and Sauerbraten and Rotkraut and Knoesel (hard to finish but damn tasty), and took a quick tour of the Schiller house. Of course the Schiller house was much more sparse; he was in debt most of his life and did not make nearly as much money as Goethe did in his lifetime. But as a visitor I found his house much more appealing. Aside from the retro wallpaper that could very well have come out of the sixties… but the best part was that Bong and I found a little workshop space where we could do our own calligraphy! With beautiful long, black feather plumes and ink that stained my hand black. Here is the poem that I copied down. I was very thankful for the cursive we learned back in third-grade at that moment, particularly as I noticed Bong struggling with print letters.

Wanderers Nachtlied

Ueber allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh',
in allen Wipfeln
spuerest du kaum einen Hauch;
Die Voeglein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe


Rough translation: At the top of every peak is calm, in every treetop you can feel hardly any breath; the birds grow silent in the forest. Just wait, soon will you grow calm as well.

No class on Tuesday to make up for the three-day trip. All of the BCGS people went on their various trains back to their apartments and we will see each other again on Thanksgiving. We arrived back in Berlin in enough time for me to write a paper for my German class, and pack quickly for Budapest.

PS: the gift stores all over Weimar featured just about the greatest, tackiest, associations with Goethe and Schiller one could find... a highlight is the salt and pepper shaker (salt is Goethe, pepper is Schiller) that Robert will have the pleasure of using in Breslau. A-Rae Goethe, I missed you! Don't worry, you get your own souvenir!

A (couple of) Month(s) in Pictures

I've been rather sparse in my blog entries lately (see month of October... total entries: 1). Part of the reason is that I'm spending a bit of time wandering around the city, going places on the weekends, and taking time to read for my classes (or attempting to). This weekend has been my chance to catch up on old entries. Hence TONS of information coming all at once. Hope you all don't mind.

Here are a few things that have been going on in my life, in picture form. They range from a monumental election (unfortunately I did not make it on the guest list at the embassy, so my night was a bit less grand as AnnaRae's but still just as celebratory and sleep-deprived!) a visit to Poland (see entry "Breslau (WROCLAW)") to having visitors here in Berlin (so so great, thanks for coming Caitlin!). I am sitting at my usual spot on the tall stool in my kitchen on a cold but uncharacteristically sunny Sunday afternoon with tea. Oh how much fun it is to look through old pictures...

Weltpraesident Obama

(sticker acquired via snailmail from the Swayzes!)

Breslau (Wroclaw)

(Zwerg!)

Schloss Sans Souci, Potsdam

(my intellectual history class at Friedrich Wilhelm the Great's grave)

Caitlin and I impersonating Prussian guards (a few feet short, don't you think?)

Alex-platz

(big brother watching in the U-bahn...)

Robert(!) and Caitlin(!) near the Turkish market

Humor, Stammgaeste, und alles Berliner

--Graffiti in Viktoriapark, near my apartment in Kreuzberg--

It’s taken me a while to get here. Oh, I’m just going to come out and say it: I love Berlin. I can’t resist it any longer. Eventually this city just makes you feel at home. But Berlin has it's own character, it's own energy, something like New-yorker fast-paced self-confidence mixed with Parisian charm. No, it cannot be placed under labels according to stereotypes in other cities... Saying that I love Berlin means for one thing that I’ve come to terms with its dry humor. At first I interpreted it as plain unfriendliness. I entertained romantic thoughts of the warm Midwesterners running to your rescue when you stand on the corner of a Chicago street with a map. But Berlin is something else, and you have to admire the sarcasm. Here is a few examples….

I pick out a movie at the video store. We were celebrating Halloween with the Nightmare Before Christmas (as you can guess, there were not too many festivities going on even though the kids try to convince their parents to give them candy) and luckily Video World had a plentiful supply of Tim Burton movies. I thought to myself, I’m so clever to have signed up for an account already – one euro per day, what a good system! I went to rent my movie, in a slight rush since I wanted to make the next bus home. The man behind the counter said, have you ever been to this branch of Video World before? I shook my head Nein. Well then we’ll need to see ID. My enthusiasm quickly evaporated. ID, why isn’t my Video World card enough? I looked through my wallet and took out my flimsy STA-travel student ID, hoping it would work. I’m sorry, but this is not an official ID. Anybody could get this, said the man, slightly frustrated. I pleaded with him. It’s only Halloween once, I just really need to see this movie, I really am the person in the picture on the ID. He finally gave in. Okay, but go home and bring me an official ID in the next couple of hours. Phew. So later that night after thoroughly enjoying the movie I walked back to the Video store, passport in hand. I returned the movie, and handed him one euro and my passport. The same man looked at it for about five minutes, and then said to me, why did you bring me your passport? Wait… Was he joking? He thought a couple of seconds more, still flipping through my passport. Then he said, no what we really need is an authorized German driver’s license. And fingerprints. Which would be hard for you since you’re American. My face dropped. Did I understand him correctly? There’s just no chance for me then? After a few flustered moments he smiled at me and said, no no you’re good. We have your information already. We didn’t need a passport. Tschuss! Ha ha, funny. That would have been nice to know earlier.

Another example: I was looking in an incredibly large bookstore called Hugen Duebbel for a specific dvd for my dad’s birthday. After much searching I found the dvd section on the first floor. The walls were alphabetized, but I still couldn’t find the tv-series I wanted: Stromberg, the German version of “The Office”, in my opinion the funniest and driest humor of them all. After about twenty minutes of searching I was losing hope. There was so much CSI and 24 but no Stromberg to be found. I saw a man with a Hugen-Duebbel label on his shirt. I asked him (very politely, if I might add) if he could help me with something. He turned to me with an ornery face and said only, with what? Sigh, I thought to myself I should know better than to expect any form of customer service in Germany. I told him what I was looking for. Right away he directed me to the spot, perhaps a bit annoyed that I couldn’t find it on my own. There were four dvd’s there, the first season, second season, and third season, and then one dvd with all three, called the Stromberg “Burography”. The prices were clearly in favor of the combination dvd but I had not quite registered that yet. I thanked him hoping he would leave me to make my choice. After all, my Dad had never seen Stromberg before so maybe just one season would be sufficient. Then in undoubtedly Berlinerisch dialect he said, this is a very very difficult decision. I can see that you are struggling. You could for instance purchase the first season for 15 euros, and then the second season for the same, and then the third also for 15 euros. Meanwhile your friend that bought all three together for 20 euros is sitting at his tv and laughing at you. I looked at him totally confused. What had he just said to me? Then I figured it out when I checked the prices again. Okay, yeah, I think I’ll get all three then. He smiled just for a second and then went back to other work.

It feels like some sort of interaction like this happens just about every day: I think that I’ve misunderstood someone and then I realize that they were just messing with me a little bit in true Berliner spirit. The verb in German for that is jemanden verarschen, perhaps literally translated to making an ass of someone. Loving Berlin means laughing retrospectively at those moments.

Loving Berlin of course also means getting used to a lot of things. The grey days for instance, days where it drizzles the whole day off and on so that of course you don’t bring your umbrella with you and there’s so much fog in the morning that you just don’t want to get out of bed anyways and when you leave classes in the afternoon it’s dark by 4:15 and you’re convinced it must be at least 10 at night. Grey days that occasionally make you want to be in Chicago again where at least it’s sunny in the winter even if it’s 10 below zero and windy. But then the (monthly?) sunny days here are just that much more wonderful and invigorating because of all the grey ones.

Loving Berlin means not stressing out at the grocery store when the line of ten people behind you pressure you to unpack and pack fast like your life depended on it. You need to lay all of your groceries quickly on the conveyer belt being careful to use those little divider things so as to not confuse your groceries with the person ahead and behind you. Then equally quickly you need to transfer them to your bagpack and grocery bags and simultaneously reach into your wallet to pay, preferably with exact change (they hate breaking fifties). Oh geeze, the consequence of this situation is that there is always some sort of soft item that gets squished at the bottom of my bagpack, mozzarella cheese or bread and hopefully not the eggs. Oh Lidl, how I love your prices but despise the way you do business…

And on Friday night I was again reminded why this place has a culture worth exploring. I had just finished my very first longer piece of German literature, a forty page short story by E.T.A. Hoffman called “Des Vetters Eckfenster”. It’s a romantic example of “Flanerie”, a French movement started by Baudelaire that sort of sounds like modern ethnography. This book featured observations from a window overlooking the Gendarmarkt in Berlin. Anyway, excited as I was to finish this story my focus shifted to the people who had just sat at a table with me. The Café Bilderbuch on the Akazienstrasse has become my new favorite place to work. They have delicious hot chocolate (not to mention beer) and they are open until 2 am on weekends. I had been there for about three hours, cozily sitting on a red plush sofa with my dictionary, laptop and small yellow “Reklam” version of Hoffman’s story. Three men around in their fifties asked me (again, Berliner humor) if I had my mind set on using the entire table for my work. Earlier I might have interpreted that as unfriendliness, but I have since learned otherwise; they were just asking me if they could join me. I was finishing my work and they were exploring the menu, commenting on the “typical German food” they wanted to eat tonight (they said that in English with thick accents, since they saw that I was an English speaker from my german-english dictionary). When the food came I asked them if they could tell me more about what they ordered. Sauerkraut and Rotkraut (lots of cabbage, always) and Nuremberg Wurste (sausages) and potatoes and baguettes and Auflauf (casserole). After the food lesson they asked me what I was doing in Berlin and where I was from. I confess! I said that I was from Montreal, which they found fascinating since they’d seen most of Canada but had not yet been to Quebec. Saying that I was Canadian worked in my favor; we talked a bit less about Obama and a bit more about the wilderness and the beauty of snowy days. They told me more about themselves too. They were three old friends, who had gotten to know each other while on a crew team together in West Berlin, and just about every Friday night they meet at a different place to share drinks. One lived for 30 years in Ibiza off of the coast of Spain, and another had a daughter studying economy in Bangkok, and the third was almost a crew champion when he was in his twenties.

As I put my work away they invited me to a beer. I learned that they not only all had crew in common, they had Berlin in common. When I asked where they grew up they all agreed that they were echte Berliners, in other words true, or actual Berliners, born and raised in Berlin. The usual follow-up statement to that is, there aren’t too many true Berliners any more. The conversation seemed to consistently come back to the question of what makes them Berliners and what they love about the city. One said that growing up in West Berlin felt a bit like an island because of the wall, and that’s why the city felt so important. His friend disagreed, saying that West Berlin had everything a person needed, so that the wall didn’t even feel that restricting. And of course the fall of the wall on November 9th, 1989 was one of the deciding events of all three of these men’s lives. For people to come together, west Berlin, east Berlin running towards each other on that night without reservation to celebrate unity and change… that is certainly part of what it meant to be from Berlin. After Obama’s win I think I sort of understand a bit of what it must have felt like, finally having politics reflect what they wanted for so long. Like Anna Rae said in her blog, I definitely feel a change in my relationship to the US. I feel for the first time proud to have something positive to talk about, something good to look forward to. But like I said, I told these guys I was Canadian, so clearly I’m proud of that too.

We talked in the café-turned-bar-at-night for a few hours before we shook hands, said it was a pleasure, paid and went home. They gave me some tips of some old-timer student bars in the area, places where it’s still kosher to smoke inside and where the ceilings are still black because of it.

Before going home I returned to that same Video World and rented perhaps the least German movie possible, “Sex and the City”, for a chick flick night with my roommate Anna. No problems with renting the movie this time.

--Akazienstrasse in the rain--

Breslau (WROCLAW)

Robert helped me find tickets, and recommended that I transfer trains in German stations so that I would be able to read the signs. When I found my train in Gorlitz heading for Poland, I was completely and totally alone. At around 8 at night it was very dark, and the train itself had no lights on. No lights! I walked through the corridor, eerily quiet and old, nothing like the fancy fast German trains I've been getting used to. I stood sort of frozen in the corridor and then heard two voices. A police woman and police man walked towards me. I asked if I was on the right train, and they said, well, if you want to go to Poland you are! I asked if there was any way to turn on the lights, and they, noticing how short I am, laughed and helped me find the switch, way at the top of the empty cabin. I heard them say on their way out, "that girl was french, right?". Slightly proud of myself I felt a bit better and very much looking forward to seeing Robert. A Breslau-native who happened to speak fluent German joined me in the cabin about an hour later, and he gave me a good description of what I could expect.

I arrived at around 10 to find Robert a bit frantic from his first run-in with the Polish police (it's a good story, but I'll let him tell it). We took trams back to his dorm on the other side of town. There was a fair amount of negotiating with the receptionists, who spoke no English and insisted on keeping my ID overnight. From the start I was impressed that Robert could understand what they were saying; it sounded like a big mess of ch's and sh's to me.



I was surprised at how little German and English there was in the city, finding myself a bit disoriented by the Polish. I'm finally comfortable in German and all of a sudden, a whole new language! A language with more cases than latin-lovers would know what to do with. But the city is beautiful, small and old. We spent the weekend taking long walks, first through the market in the old part of town, then to the flower stands, then through the meat hall, then by the universities, and then along the Oder. It was unbelievably peaceful by the river. I was beginning to understand just what Robert prizes from his time spent there - he fishes from early morning till sundown whenever he gets the chance. I'm not ready to go out and buy fishing gear, but I would love a day of walking and taking pictures from its banks. And I didn't think of the river as having a funny name until I wrote this in English.... don't worry, the water is not really... odorous :-).


To my absolute delight (am I allowed to use such a corny phrase?) we happened upon a series of dwarves during our walks. Dwarves! Erika would love this place! Caitlin, too! They were literally tiny little creatures scattered around the old and new parts of Breslau. They are a reference to anti-communist protests in the 80's (I figured that out at http://www.icsc.org/2007EU/Wroclaw.pdf) but for us they are just flat out charming. An oblivious tourist could easily trip on one on his way to a perogi stand.

Oh, and peroges! I have no idea how to spell them, but they are cheap and fabulous. What a great excuse to add a dollop of sour cream to a plate full of carbs... and a dish that starts with an N- that tasted to me just like Montreal cheese blintzes. The cheapest places in town are called something like Milk-Cafes even though they don't serve milk (I haven't figured out that one yet). They're sort of cafeteria-style eateries, where you look at a large menu up on the wall and tell a person behind a cash register what you want to eat. She then gives you a receipt with your order, and you go to the other side of the room to pick it up. This sounds simple, but remember that polish is an unreasonably difficult language. Robert just points to names that sound familiar, and then waits to see what he ordered. Thus Robert's sort of trial-and-error process of learning polish food vocab.

We spent some time with the Erasmus students in his dorm. Surprisingly it was the first larger group of Americans I had seen in a while; many students came to Breslau (for instance Robert's roommate Silvain) to learn and study in ENGLISH since they offer so many English courses at the University. Who would have thought you could do that in Poland?!? I can't wait to spend more time with Robert's roommates (one from Prague, one from Saxony in Germany, and Silvain from northern France... what a great combination) and explore more of the city when I go back there in a couple of weeks. Needless to say the train is as slow as I expected it to be, and two hour delays are inevitable, but the gorgeous countryside and the snip-it of Polish culture (not to mention seeing Robert) is definitely worth it.