Sometimes, being the only American in the room can be a little, er, embarrassing. I find myself in that position quite often, especially in German class.
I've taken nearly five months of German classes since arriving in Berlin. Actually, I should call them integration courses, since that's the official name, and that's also the goal: integration. The German government wants to mold me and my fellow Auslanders (foreigners) into good Germans. So they require folks like me to take these courses in order to keep my residency permit. Mostly, the courses just focus on language, but they also sneak a bit of German culture, politics and history into the mix. Out of five different classes, each with 17 to 25 people, I've always been the lone American. As such, I've also been an object of curiosity in my classes.
Probably about 1/3 of my current classmates come from various parts of Africa, another third comes from Poland and other former Soviet-bloc countries, and the final third is a mix, with folks from China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Brazil. And then there's me: The Newbie. I call myself that because I've only been in Germany for less than a year; most of my classmates have been here for at least three years, some as many as 23 years (Yes, 23 years, and they're still taking German classes. Whether this speaks to their language-learning abilities or to the difficulty of the German language, I can't say). I also call myself the Newbie because I come from the U.S., which is not only part of the "New World," but which also is sort of new, or maybe young, in other ways, which were impressed upon me in class recently.
We were reading a sketch in which a middle-aged guy looked back on his life in Germany, and remembered when the Berlin Wall was built, remembered seeing Kennedy during his visit, remembered the Wall coming down, etc. That prompted my teacher to ask the class what historic events we had witnessed. Everyone had a story: The Africans of Civil War and strife, the Poles of the end of Communism, the Pakistani of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. As one student after another told his story, I scanned my memory for something, anything, that would compare. 9/11? It was dramatic, sure, but I was thousands of miles away when it happened. I compiled a mental list of other big events, and as I did so, I realized that while I had indeed experienced a lot of history, I had mostly done so from some distance, i.e., via the television.
I started panicking. What was I going to say? Should I be honest and tell them about the really important moments of American history that I had witnessed? The revelation on television about our former President, his intern and a cigar? The invention of the iPhone? Or something even more critical to world history: The final episode of Seinfeld? Or Lost? Or the Sopranos?
Damn it's embarrassing to be an American sometimes. Luckily, thanks to someone's narrative about suffering under the hands of Slobodan Milosevic's terror, the conversation changed to: Who was your country's worst despot. I relaxed a little bit as a picture of Dick Cheney, riding in his wheelchair all Dr. Strangelove-like at Obama's inauguration, popped into my head. Finally, I was up. I opened my mouth to speak, but the rest of the class answered for me: "Bush!"
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Berlin's temporary Thai-town
Today, we went to Thai Park. This made me very happy.
When we first arrived in Berlin nearly a year ago, we simply expected that it would be filled with great foods from all over the world. After all, it's a big, hip, happening and perhaps even the coolest city on the planet. Therefore, we should be able to find some hole-in-the-wall, authentic-to-the-point-of-being-kinda-scary, Thai, Vietnamese or Indian food on every street corner. No?
No.
Berlin may be teeming with fantastic, cutting-edge art, dance, lectures, the opera, music and even -- as we experienced just a few weeks ago -- wild parties replete with Gypsy jazz in an abandoned insane asylum. But the food scene isn't quite up to par -- doesn't even touch Portland/SanFran/Berkeley/LA. Sure, we've found great Lebanese fare, and stumbled upon a sublime Italian restaurant not far from our house. But the offerings from Asia have disappointed. They are bland or overpriced or laden with so much MSG that Wendy slips into a hallucinogenic daze shortly after eating.
So, last December we headed way out into the East and visited the Dong Xuan center. It's a cluster of kind of rough-looking warehouses nestled amidst the bigblock apartment buildings of the former DDR, and serves as Berlin's Vietnam-town. Even on the coldest day of the year, with snow piled everywhere, the place bustled. Long hallways are punctured with doorways leading into shops, some tiny, some huge, that sell wholesale clothing, nail salon supplies, cheap plastic items and groceries. A guy can buy a live carp and a cucumber-thingy that resembles extra-terrestrial genitalia, get a haircut and a manicure, and buy a Gucci knockoff, all in one building. And it has restaurants, too. Delicious. Authentic. Cheap. But soon after we began the long trek home, the MSG -- or something -- kicked in, and Wendy tried to pick a fight with a lamppost that she mistook for a Neo-Nazi.
If Dong Xuan was good, Thai Park was way better. We'd heard about it long ago: A park where a bunch of Thai people gather and sell food. I envisioned something like the local Turkish market, only with Thai food and goods sold out of kiosks and booths instead. But when we wandered into Preußenpark, we quickly realized that we were in for a brand new experience.
There are no booths or kiosks here. Instead, the vendors set up on blankets and under umbrellas on the ground, and operate out of minimalist camp kitchens that are at ground level (all the cooks are actually sitting on the ground, operating little charcoal or gas fired grills). It's totally illegal, I'm sure. And eating there during one of the worst food-related e-coli outbreaks ever might not have been completely wise. Still, since the source of e-coli is still a mystery, we could be infecting ourselves with our oatmeal each morning, so we figured we'd go for it.
Offerings ranged from a salty/sweet lime drink, to all kinds of alcoholic cocktails, to octopus on a stick, to what I suspect were fried bamboo worms. We got four pork satays, two rice puffers, two Thai iced coffees, three spring rolls, two bags full of fresh fruit, a bowl of pho-like soup with meatballs made out of what I think was beef offal, and a few other things. We spent no more than 20 Euros for the whole shebang, probably less, but as I was suffering from some weird infection of the eye, I was relegated to lying on the picnic blanket in a slightly feverish state, taking a bite now and then, and watching the surreal scene unfold before me, and didn't partake as much as I'd liked in the perusing and purchasing of the food.
Nor do I have any photographs, which is kind of too bad, but I'm fairly sure the dude who sold me the satay muttered something about the Thai mafia, my nostrils and live, flesh-eating worms if I were to somehow expose these open-air kitchens to the world.
So, instead of photos, I'll try to communicate what I saw while lying in the grass: The Thai folks sit in the shade of a rainbow of umbrellas or under the big trees, the light trickling down through the leaves. Out in the searing sun, the Germans lie out, one after another, offering their flesh up to the sun. Germans are always doing this, as though daring the skin cancer gods to punish them. The pungent aroma of marijuana smoke from somewhere nearby. When we arrive at noon, maybe 15 vendors are selling food. More and more arrive with each passing hour, including a group of kind of beady-eyed guys (see Mafia reference, previous paragraph) who quickly set up a square of folding tables encircled by folding chairs. It turns out to be some kind of gambling racket.
On the other side of us, a makeshift massage parlor has emerged as if from the dust and grass of the park. A Thai woman with cateye glasses vigorously rubs a nubile young German woman clad in a tiny bikini. My eye aches, and inexplicably, an epiphany: I should have become an accountant. The urge quickly disappears. Light trickles through the leaves, and the marijuana odor lingers.
Behind us, some older German folks have set up their own cooking operation, and they sit on parkbenches with TV tray things before them off of which they eat slabs of meat, very white bread, and potatoes smothered in a creamy white sauce. I'm not sure if this is an affront, or an effort to join in. A Thai woman walks urgently from blanket to blanket, carrying a big blue plastic trash bag. She's not collecting trash, but seems to be selling something from the bags. She doesn't stop at our blanket.
Ahhh, but the food. The food. Grilling, frying, boiling. Crispy, salty, sweet and sour. Meat and sprouts and electric-colored cocktails. I lie on the blanket and let the aromas waft over me. My eye hurts. But I am happy.
When we first arrived in Berlin nearly a year ago, we simply expected that it would be filled with great foods from all over the world. After all, it's a big, hip, happening and perhaps even the coolest city on the planet. Therefore, we should be able to find some hole-in-the-wall, authentic-to-the-point-of-being-kinda-scary, Thai, Vietnamese or Indian food on every street corner. No?
No.
Berlin may be teeming with fantastic, cutting-edge art, dance, lectures, the opera, music and even -- as we experienced just a few weeks ago -- wild parties replete with Gypsy jazz in an abandoned insane asylum. But the food scene isn't quite up to par -- doesn't even touch Portland/SanFran/Berkeley/LA. Sure, we've found great Lebanese fare, and stumbled upon a sublime Italian restaurant not far from our house. But the offerings from Asia have disappointed. They are bland or overpriced or laden with so much MSG that Wendy slips into a hallucinogenic daze shortly after eating.
 |
| Dong Xuan Center. |
If Dong Xuan was good, Thai Park was way better. We'd heard about it long ago: A park where a bunch of Thai people gather and sell food. I envisioned something like the local Turkish market, only with Thai food and goods sold out of kiosks and booths instead. But when we wandered into Preußenpark, we quickly realized that we were in for a brand new experience.
There are no booths or kiosks here. Instead, the vendors set up on blankets and under umbrellas on the ground, and operate out of minimalist camp kitchens that are at ground level (all the cooks are actually sitting on the ground, operating little charcoal or gas fired grills). It's totally illegal, I'm sure. And eating there during one of the worst food-related e-coli outbreaks ever might not have been completely wise. Still, since the source of e-coli is still a mystery, we could be infecting ourselves with our oatmeal each morning, so we figured we'd go for it.
Offerings ranged from a salty/sweet lime drink, to all kinds of alcoholic cocktails, to octopus on a stick, to what I suspect were fried bamboo worms. We got four pork satays, two rice puffers, two Thai iced coffees, three spring rolls, two bags full of fresh fruit, a bowl of pho-like soup with meatballs made out of what I think was beef offal, and a few other things. We spent no more than 20 Euros for the whole shebang, probably less, but as I was suffering from some weird infection of the eye, I was relegated to lying on the picnic blanket in a slightly feverish state, taking a bite now and then, and watching the surreal scene unfold before me, and didn't partake as much as I'd liked in the perusing and purchasing of the food.
Nor do I have any photographs, which is kind of too bad, but I'm fairly sure the dude who sold me the satay muttered something about the Thai mafia, my nostrils and live, flesh-eating worms if I were to somehow expose these open-air kitchens to the world.
So, instead of photos, I'll try to communicate what I saw while lying in the grass: The Thai folks sit in the shade of a rainbow of umbrellas or under the big trees, the light trickling down through the leaves. Out in the searing sun, the Germans lie out, one after another, offering their flesh up to the sun. Germans are always doing this, as though daring the skin cancer gods to punish them. The pungent aroma of marijuana smoke from somewhere nearby. When we arrive at noon, maybe 15 vendors are selling food. More and more arrive with each passing hour, including a group of kind of beady-eyed guys (see Mafia reference, previous paragraph) who quickly set up a square of folding tables encircled by folding chairs. It turns out to be some kind of gambling racket.
On the other side of us, a makeshift massage parlor has emerged as if from the dust and grass of the park. A Thai woman with cateye glasses vigorously rubs a nubile young German woman clad in a tiny bikini. My eye aches, and inexplicably, an epiphany: I should have become an accountant. The urge quickly disappears. Light trickles through the leaves, and the marijuana odor lingers.
Behind us, some older German folks have set up their own cooking operation, and they sit on parkbenches with TV tray things before them off of which they eat slabs of meat, very white bread, and potatoes smothered in a creamy white sauce. I'm not sure if this is an affront, or an effort to join in. A Thai woman walks urgently from blanket to blanket, carrying a big blue plastic trash bag. She's not collecting trash, but seems to be selling something from the bags. She doesn't stop at our blanket.
Ahhh, but the food. The food. Grilling, frying, boiling. Crispy, salty, sweet and sour. Meat and sprouts and electric-colored cocktails. I lie on the blanket and let the aromas waft over me. My eye hurts. But I am happy.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Bird in a Berlin Brick Wall (& other textures from this morning)
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| Bird in brick wall that faces our apartment's kitchen window. |
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| Graffiti in forgotten corner of vacant lot next to LIDL parking lot. |
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| Corner, ExRotraprint building |
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| Sign, Wiesenstrasse. |
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Sprechen Sie Deutsch! Linguistic bigotry on a Berlin bus
On a recent Friday afternoon here in Berlin, the sun was shining and the temperature actually rose above freezing for once. It was enough to put Wendy and Elena and me into especially high spirits as we waited for the bus in well-heeled Zehlendorf, eating some treats from the nearby bakery. We talked about how the Germans have a talent not only for making good cake, but also for creating really healthy and tasty baked goods, like the sunflower-seed thing we were eating. As we were speaking amongst ourselves we were, naturally, speaking in English.
Apparently, that's an offensive act around these parts.
Also waiting for the bus was a lumbering woman, perhaps in her sixties, who looked as if she had eaten just a few too many cans of offal. She glared at us and, finally, as we were getting on the bus, she muttered to Wendy, in German: "When you are in Germany, you must speak German!"
"Entschuldigung?" Wendy asked. The Frau repeated herself more loudly. Before Wendy could react, we were hurried onto the bus and headed for the upper deck. The woman was physically incapable of making it up the steps, which is a good thing, because had she stayed near us, Wendy might just have decked her; she seethed for the rest of the day (as did I).
Don't get me wrong. No matter what country I'm in, I try to speak the native language when addressing shopkeepers, waiters or strangers, no matter how garbled my sentences are. I truly want to become bilingual, and have spent the last several months devoting my days to Deutsch classes, so that I can get through a meeting with a bureaucrat without my head imploding. But English is my mother tongue, and when I'm having a private conversation with my English-speaking family, even in a public place, I'm going to do it in English.
On the one hand, the grumpy woman's remark was probably nothing to get upset about: She was probably just having a bad day, upset that she had missed the special on 10 kilos of liverwurst -- and saw this happy American family as the perfect target for her bitterness. It was an isolated incident of rudeness, and one that we should just forget.
The problem is, it wasn't all that isolated.
Since the day we arrived in Berlin eight months ago, the language barrier has been more than just a matter of us speaking English while everyone else spoke German. The linguistic roadblock has been fortified by a sort of morality as well, an under and overtone of: Thou shalt speak German! It manifested itself in the immigration office, when the bureaucrats refused to acknowledge that they understood English (though it eventually became clear that they did). It even manifested itself when we were still in the U.S. When Wendy received her German citizenship (via a German law that gives citizenship to the descendants of those who were de-citizened by the Nazis), the secretary at the consulate in Denver was dumbfounded and clearly irritated by the fact that Wendy, now a German, didn't speak Deutsch. "Perhaps," we should have replied, "she would speak German had your grandparents not tried to exterminate hers." We held our tongues.
This linguistic bigotry isn't limited to us by any means. The big integration/multiculturalism/immigration debate in Germany and other parts of Europe, when it's not concerned with Muslim headscarves, is about outsiders learning and speaking the language. When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech in Germany recently, he urged Turkish immigrants here to learn Turkish first, then German, throwing the native politicians into a rage. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle responded by saying that integration is impossible without learning German and: "Children who grow up in Germany must learn German as the very first thing." T-Mobile, the telecommunications giant, was even taken to task last summer for using English in its marketing campaigns.
Turn on the television here and you can watch almost any ten-year-old, washed up American sitcom you want; and the movie theaters show all the Hollywood hits and then some. But if you're hoping to hear Seinfeld's slightly irritating voice tossing zingers at his friends, you can forget it: Television and films are all dubbed into German. No, not subtitled, dubbed, like 1950s-Godzilla-movies-dubbed. I'ver heard all kinds of reasons for this -- Germans don't like to read (Ha!), the dubbing industry is huge in Germany and abandoning it would crush the economy, etc. But the real reason is that dubbing allows Germans to digest plenty of foreign pop culture without hearing too much of a foreign language.
Germans, in other words, don't want their language to be diluted by foreign influences. They are striving for linguistic purity. Think about it for a minute, and this linguistic nationalism, as I call it, starts sounding rather sinister, especially here in the Vaterland.
Let me be clear: Germany as a society is hypersensitive to its role in 20th Century history. The country is collectively conscious of the fact that it perpetrated one of the worst atrocities in human history, and did so not so long ago, and it has taken great pains to atone for those sins. Its constitution, its laws, and much of day-to-day life has been fashioned with that in mind: Just this week, a Canadian tourist was jailed after doing the heil Hitler salute in front of the Reichstag. Toleranz is not only a buzzword thrown around by lefties, but also a part of the official jargon, and most Germans I've met are not only very tolerant, compassionate people, but also are multilingual and like to speak in English.
Yet, linguistic Intoleranz not only thrives here, but is widely accepted. My German classes have been filled with smart, skilled, well-educated people from all over the world. They are in professional fields where business is either conducted in English, or language only plays a small part (technical fields, electronic engineering, etc). They have been denied jobs here because their German -- though they are perfectly capable of carrying on intelligent conversations -- wasn't quite good enough. An Iraqi economist, who has been in Germany for 10 years and worked eight of those as a bike mechanic in another German city, can't get a job as a bike mechanic in Berlin until he gets a German language certificate (though he can speak day-to-day German just fine). It seems not to matter how adept one is at overhauling a bottom bracket or adjusting a derailleur, he's not getting a job 'til he gets all his ders, dies, and dases in line. He's yet another skilled immigrant who's unemployed because of linguistic discrimination.
Indeed, linguistic bigotry is considered by some to be "among the last legal forms of discrimination left to Western employers." And when immigrants without acceptable German can't get jobs, it naturally causes unemployment to be higher among immigrants. Anti-immigration forces can then hold up those numbers as proof that immigration is poisoning Germany and threatens the culture and quality of life of the natives.
I write all of this from a place of relative privilege: English, of course, is spoken everywhere, even if the bureaucrats want to try to deny it. The world of consumerism and business is saturated with English words; radio stations play almost all English-language music, most of it American "classic rock." And no, it's not dubbed. In spite of that, I'm still looked down upon for speaking my native language. Imagine what it must be like then if your mother tongue is Arabic, or Farsi.
Germany's not the only place this happens. Many American states have established English as the "official language." While proponents of the movement try on the one hand to paint it as a way to unify a disparate nation, they turn around and use alarmist, nationalistic and bigoted language to rile up their supporters. Official language laws may pertain only to official business, but they are often used as justification to prohibit people from speaking their own languages, even amongst themselves. And, aside from discriminating against immigrants, such laws are a slap in the face to Native Americans who are struggling to save their own languages. Still, it's hard to imagine even an ignoramus in some backward state walking up to a family speaking amongst themselves in German and excoriating them for not speaking English. If they did, the southern Utah/northern Arizona tourist industry would die a quick death, dependent as it is on Europeans who do not necessarily leave their native languages at home when they visit.
It's time for Germany to accept that it is part of the global culture, just as it's part of the global economy. Döner kebaps and falafel are more popular than Currywurst, and that's okay. Berlin's identity lies not in its nordic roots, nor in properly conjugating German verbs, but in diversity and cosmopolitanism; it's not about getting the articles right, it's about sitting in the subway and hearing conversations in Polish, Turkish, Arabic and Spanish and German, all at the same time.
And our poor antagonist, the woman who just couldn't stand to hear us speaking amongst ourselves in English, was subjected to just that. Just after the bus started rolling, a group of men sitting around the woman started an animated, loud conversation, audible even to us way up in the top deck. They spoke in a Slavic language, not German. As for me, I'm going to keep studying German in the hope that someday, that woman will scold us again. Then, I'll be able to tell her exactly what I think, in a way even she'll understand.
Apparently, that's an offensive act around these parts.
Also waiting for the bus was a lumbering woman, perhaps in her sixties, who looked as if she had eaten just a few too many cans of offal. She glared at us and, finally, as we were getting on the bus, she muttered to Wendy, in German: "When you are in Germany, you must speak German!"
"Entschuldigung?" Wendy asked. The Frau repeated herself more loudly. Before Wendy could react, we were hurried onto the bus and headed for the upper deck. The woman was physically incapable of making it up the steps, which is a good thing, because had she stayed near us, Wendy might just have decked her; she seethed for the rest of the day (as did I).
Don't get me wrong. No matter what country I'm in, I try to speak the native language when addressing shopkeepers, waiters or strangers, no matter how garbled my sentences are. I truly want to become bilingual, and have spent the last several months devoting my days to Deutsch classes, so that I can get through a meeting with a bureaucrat without my head imploding. But English is my mother tongue, and when I'm having a private conversation with my English-speaking family, even in a public place, I'm going to do it in English.
On the one hand, the grumpy woman's remark was probably nothing to get upset about: She was probably just having a bad day, upset that she had missed the special on 10 kilos of liverwurst -- and saw this happy American family as the perfect target for her bitterness. It was an isolated incident of rudeness, and one that we should just forget.
The problem is, it wasn't all that isolated.
Since the day we arrived in Berlin eight months ago, the language barrier has been more than just a matter of us speaking English while everyone else spoke German. The linguistic roadblock has been fortified by a sort of morality as well, an under and overtone of: Thou shalt speak German! It manifested itself in the immigration office, when the bureaucrats refused to acknowledge that they understood English (though it eventually became clear that they did). It even manifested itself when we were still in the U.S. When Wendy received her German citizenship (via a German law that gives citizenship to the descendants of those who were de-citizened by the Nazis), the secretary at the consulate in Denver was dumbfounded and clearly irritated by the fact that Wendy, now a German, didn't speak Deutsch. "Perhaps," we should have replied, "she would speak German had your grandparents not tried to exterminate hers." We held our tongues.
This linguistic bigotry isn't limited to us by any means. The big integration/multiculturalism/immigration debate in Germany and other parts of Europe, when it's not concerned with Muslim headscarves, is about outsiders learning and speaking the language. When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech in Germany recently, he urged Turkish immigrants here to learn Turkish first, then German, throwing the native politicians into a rage. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle responded by saying that integration is impossible without learning German and: "Children who grow up in Germany must learn German as the very first thing." T-Mobile, the telecommunications giant, was even taken to task last summer for using English in its marketing campaigns.
Turn on the television here and you can watch almost any ten-year-old, washed up American sitcom you want; and the movie theaters show all the Hollywood hits and then some. But if you're hoping to hear Seinfeld's slightly irritating voice tossing zingers at his friends, you can forget it: Television and films are all dubbed into German. No, not subtitled, dubbed, like 1950s-Godzilla-movies-dubbed. I'ver heard all kinds of reasons for this -- Germans don't like to read (Ha!), the dubbing industry is huge in Germany and abandoning it would crush the economy, etc. But the real reason is that dubbing allows Germans to digest plenty of foreign pop culture without hearing too much of a foreign language.
Germans, in other words, don't want their language to be diluted by foreign influences. They are striving for linguistic purity. Think about it for a minute, and this linguistic nationalism, as I call it, starts sounding rather sinister, especially here in the Vaterland.
Let me be clear: Germany as a society is hypersensitive to its role in 20th Century history. The country is collectively conscious of the fact that it perpetrated one of the worst atrocities in human history, and did so not so long ago, and it has taken great pains to atone for those sins. Its constitution, its laws, and much of day-to-day life has been fashioned with that in mind: Just this week, a Canadian tourist was jailed after doing the heil Hitler salute in front of the Reichstag. Toleranz is not only a buzzword thrown around by lefties, but also a part of the official jargon, and most Germans I've met are not only very tolerant, compassionate people, but also are multilingual and like to speak in English.
Yet, linguistic Intoleranz not only thrives here, but is widely accepted. My German classes have been filled with smart, skilled, well-educated people from all over the world. They are in professional fields where business is either conducted in English, or language only plays a small part (technical fields, electronic engineering, etc). They have been denied jobs here because their German -- though they are perfectly capable of carrying on intelligent conversations -- wasn't quite good enough. An Iraqi economist, who has been in Germany for 10 years and worked eight of those as a bike mechanic in another German city, can't get a job as a bike mechanic in Berlin until he gets a German language certificate (though he can speak day-to-day German just fine). It seems not to matter how adept one is at overhauling a bottom bracket or adjusting a derailleur, he's not getting a job 'til he gets all his ders, dies, and dases in line. He's yet another skilled immigrant who's unemployed because of linguistic discrimination.
Indeed, linguistic bigotry is considered by some to be "among the last legal forms of discrimination left to Western employers." And when immigrants without acceptable German can't get jobs, it naturally causes unemployment to be higher among immigrants. Anti-immigration forces can then hold up those numbers as proof that immigration is poisoning Germany and threatens the culture and quality of life of the natives.
I write all of this from a place of relative privilege: English, of course, is spoken everywhere, even if the bureaucrats want to try to deny it. The world of consumerism and business is saturated with English words; radio stations play almost all English-language music, most of it American "classic rock." And no, it's not dubbed. In spite of that, I'm still looked down upon for speaking my native language. Imagine what it must be like then if your mother tongue is Arabic, or Farsi.
Germany's not the only place this happens. Many American states have established English as the "official language." While proponents of the movement try on the one hand to paint it as a way to unify a disparate nation, they turn around and use alarmist, nationalistic and bigoted language to rile up their supporters. Official language laws may pertain only to official business, but they are often used as justification to prohibit people from speaking their own languages, even amongst themselves. And, aside from discriminating against immigrants, such laws are a slap in the face to Native Americans who are struggling to save their own languages. Still, it's hard to imagine even an ignoramus in some backward state walking up to a family speaking amongst themselves in German and excoriating them for not speaking English. If they did, the southern Utah/northern Arizona tourist industry would die a quick death, dependent as it is on Europeans who do not necessarily leave their native languages at home when they visit.
It's time for Germany to accept that it is part of the global culture, just as it's part of the global economy. Döner kebaps and falafel are more popular than Currywurst, and that's okay. Berlin's identity lies not in its nordic roots, nor in properly conjugating German verbs, but in diversity and cosmopolitanism; it's not about getting the articles right, it's about sitting in the subway and hearing conversations in Polish, Turkish, Arabic and Spanish and German, all at the same time.
And our poor antagonist, the woman who just couldn't stand to hear us speaking amongst ourselves in English, was subjected to just that. Just after the bus started rolling, a group of men sitting around the woman started an animated, loud conversation, audible even to us way up in the top deck. They spoke in a Slavic language, not German. As for me, I'm going to keep studying German in the hope that someday, that woman will scold us again. Then, I'll be able to tell her exactly what I think, in a way even she'll understand.
Like a Berlin cowboy...
Today, while I was wandering around the African Quarter -- it's been called that forever, but in recent years it has actually become a magnet area for African immigrants -- I stumbled upon this place: Randy Rudd's Lucky Star Western Store. It wasn't open yet, but the guy across the street told me it had been in there for at least 30 years, and that people riding Harleys and great big cars shopped there (my rudimentary understanding of his mumbled German). Soon I'll go back and get the rest of the story.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Tulip dreams
Winter's hanging on to Berlin with a vengeance. And all I have is this tulip on our windowsill that bloomed in the sun then faded two days later.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
The Ghosts of Humboldthain
Only when winter is here, and the sky is an ashen blanket pulled over the city, do I notice the way a green film covers the trunks of the trees. Only in winter, when the gnarled branches of those trees reach into the pallid mist, and the dead leaves are slowly rotting into the earth, do I notice the thick slab jutting out of the ground of Humboldthain Park. I had walked here before and seen the monolith, but had dismissed it as another piece of neglected landscape architecture. But this concrete wall -- yes I can see that now -- is six feet thick. On its face are old windows, bricked shut, with steel hinges each the size of my fist. There’s only one thing this could be. I search for a sign, a plaque, the remnants of some Denkmal, or monument, or anything that might tell me what it is. But there is nothing. Only this artificial hill, built from the detritus of bombed out buildings, its foundation the old wall of a Nazi bunker that couldn’t be destroyed.
Humbholdthain Park is one of Berlin’s green-space gems. It’s about 2,000 feet long, and almost as wide. A big Sommerbad, or outdoor swimming pool, is tucked in among the trees, along with an elegant rose garden, a small soccer court, and plenty of space. The trees are so dense that even in the leafless winter, one cannot see halfway across the park. And, unlike most of Berlin, the park actually has varied topography: A sort of valley in the park’s center is shielded from the urban bustle by two hills on the park’s edges. For the month or so when a few inches of snow covers the ground, kids on sleds rip down the smaller of the hills; runners do laps up and down the wide, smooth trail of the larger hill.
Like all of Berlin, Humboldthain has its ghosts. Jutting out of the top of the bigger of two hills is a pair of identical concrete blocks that look, even from up close, like overbuilt observation platforms. In fact, this is the northern edge of a massive, World War II bunker. Anti-aircraft guns shot at Allied planes as their bombs laid waste to the city. The bunkers themselves, which were built under Hitler’s orders at the beginning of the war, could hold thousands of civilians during an air raid.
While the towers – or Flakturm – couldn’t save the city, the bunkers turned out to be virtually impenetrable. The invading Russians, after their artillery failed to pierce the thick walls, had to skirt around them to reach the city’s center. After the war, the French occupied the Wedding district of Berlin, in which Humboldthain lies. Using something like 30 tons of TNT, they tried to demolish the bunkers. The north wall refused to collapse. So around the hulking structure the French piled up rubble – some from the bunker, some from a nearby church that had to be demolished, and some from surrounding neighborhoods, which, like all of Berlin, were bombed beyond recognition -- and built a hill.
Strangely enough, I learned most of this from an American TV show after I had lived near and walked in Humboldthain for several months. I did some more Internet research and uncovered a few more facts and wartime photographs. In recent years, people have become more familiar with the big bunker because a group has started giving tours of the “Berlin Underworld,” which includes a trip into the bunker’s innards (the outside walls, meanwhile, make for one of the only “natural” rock-climbing crags around). But the wall that I later found – clearly that of a second bunker -- is never mentioned anywhere. It’s almost as though everyone wishes it would just melt back into the earth, not a shred remaining, not even in our memories.
And that’s understandable. One need not go far in Berlin to find a monument reminding us of the atrocities committed here between 1933 and 1945. The Holocaust Memorial is the most visible and striking, but the Stumbling Blocks – shiny blocks embedded in the sidewalks engraved with details about Jews who were murdered or deported from the building or neighborhood – are equally painful. Dozens of other plaques, monuments and Denkmals are scattered across the city, each intended to remember the past so that we won’t let it happen again.
Just as a conscious effort has been made to remember and learn from those horrors, a parallel effort has been made to erase or simply ignore anything left over from that time that might be used to glorify the Third Reich or war in general. It seems to be a well-aimed jab at Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, and his theory of “ruin value.” He wanted to construct monstrosities that would continue to remind people of the Third Reich long after the Reich had collapsed and the structures had fallen down, much like Roman and Greek ruins still stand as reminders of ancient civilizations. Germans, to their credit, have done quite a bit to eliminate the ruins – not to mention the ruin value – of most of the work of Speer and his colleagues. Hitler’s bunker is under non-descript lot next to a Chinese restaurant, and until just a few years ago there weren't even signs marking its presence. Huge Flakturms in Tiergarten were successfully annihilated after the war, and are now gone.
Still, some ruins remain, like those in Humboldthain. They seem to be telling us that, no matter what we might do to forget, the landscape always remembers.
In his essay, “The Necessity for Ruins,” John Brinckerhoff Jackson writes: "A monument can be nothing more than a rough stone, a fragment of ruined wall as at Jerusalem, a tree, or a cross. Its sanctity is not a matter of beauty or of use or of age; it is venerated not as a work of art or as an antique, but as an echo from the remote past suddenly become present and actual."
Yes. Which is why, with this particular ruin, we can rejoice to see such beautiful graffiti on its face, and why we don’t cringe at the climbers’ bolts sticking out of the concrete next to the bricked up windows. And when I walk over those hills, the dog futilely chasing after rabbits and birds, I can’t help but think about what lies underneath, and can’t help but imagine a certain darkness seeping out of that wall, out of that rubble, and emanating up through the rotting leaves.
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| Bunker Art |
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