What exactly is a Thüringer Klöße? And other things you learn along the way.

Part 1:

    Yes, it is December, and so it may seem hard to imagine that I just returned from my first site visit.  But, it took a little bit of time before I felt ready to head out and really get this project fully underway.  When I asked my mentor where I should head first, he didn´t even have to think about it.  Thüringen.  Thüringen is a state in the very middle of Germany, a part of former East Germany.  According to my mentor, Thüringen is the friendliest place in Germany.

    Before I left there was research to do.  I identified six historic synagogues in Thüringen: three in the city of Erfurt, one in Mühlhausen, and two located in the small villages of Berkach and Aschenhausen.  Before the trip could take place there were emails to send, plans to make, phone calls to make (making phone calls in German is actually sort of terrifying - I tried to make myself a script, but as soon as some unsuspecting person picks up on the other end of the line, expecting that the person calling will be speaking German, I drop the script and just hope for the best).

    So last Sunday afternoon I headed to the train station and was off on my adventure to Thüringen.

    I arrived mid evening in the city of Erfurt, the biggest city in Thüringen, population 200,000.  I trudged three kilometers through the snow to my pension, settled in for the first of many quiet nights in central Germany.  The next morning, prompty at 8, I had my first interview.

    Wolfgang Nossen is the head of the Jewish Community of Thüringen.  I was pretty lucky to get a last minute interview with him.  After speaking to the two women who "hold the keys" for the synagogues in Berkach and Aschenhausen, the "key-holder" in Berkach recommended that I talk with Mr. Nossen if I wanted to ask any questions about how the building in her village is used, etc.

    So I did.  I learned that the Jewish community of Thüringen is responsible for three of the six synagogues I was interested in learning about.  Their main synagogue is in Erfurt.  It was built in 1952 and is the ONLY synagogue to have been built during communism in East Germany.  The community is also responsible for the restored historic synagogues in Berkach and the small city of Mühlhausen.  They are NOT the owners of the Aschenhausen synagogue, the rights over which the 170 person village of Aschenhausen apparently took the community to court and won in the early 1990s (need to learn more about that).  The other two non-Erfurt synagoges owned by the Gemeinde (community) get visited occasionally for a service or event, but are mostly administered and kept open by volunteers in their respective locations (aka lady in Berkach with a key to the synagogue).

   It was interesting to learn about the Jewish community of Thüringen.  Between the end of WWII and the fall of the wall, the Jewish community of Thüringen may have had a newly built synagogue, but the community was aging and very small.  Then came the Russian immigrants.  There are now 1,200 Jewish in Thüringen, although only 800 consider themselves "members" of the community, and only 500 actually live in Erfurt, the only city with an active synagogue.  Erfurt was one of the three communities to receive one of the rabbis whose ordination I attended, so it may be an interesting community to watch in the coming years.

Wolfgang Nossen, at work in the Jewish community of Thüringen´s main building.

   With no more interviews til Tuesday, I was off to the city of Weimar for the rest of the day.  If you have heard of Weimar, chances are you are conjuring up some image of Germany´s first fledgling democracy from 1918-1933, the Weimar Republic, the constitution of which, was signed, quite logically in Weimar.  Weimar is also known as the home town of Schiller and Goethe, and a major player in the Bauhaus architectural movement.

    Unfortunately I visited Weimar on Monday and Nikolaustag (St. Nicholas Day), which means that instead of soaking in culture, I saw this:

True, that ain´t Goethe, but St. Nick amusing children in front of the city government building (separation of church and state... not quite yet guys) was not bad.  And in addition to wandering through Christmas Markets (this country basically transforms itself into a big gingerbread cookie as soon as the leaves start to change colors)...

... I also soaked up a lot of snow.  So much in fact, that is became relatively apparent halfway through the day that if I didn´t find snow boots, I might get frost bite (it was touch and go for a while there).  I am not going to say that I have a reputation for showing up places with the wrong shoes, but let´s face the facts, I do.  I think I intimidate shoes.  They have no idea from day one that I plan on walking EVERYWHERE and that I do not care what a particular pair of shoes was intended to be worn for.  I will wear them for whatever I plan on doing.  No prisoners taken.  The result is that a lot of shoes just don´t live up to the challenge, and the result is an early, painful death.  So the rest of my Nikolaustag in Weimar was spent locating snow boots.  I reassure myself with the knowledge that Schiller very likey bought snow boots in the very same location.

     Then I was ready to spend the rest of the day blissfully wandering through the snow!

  

     The next day I was off to Mühlhausen... and if you haven´t had enough snow yet, here is a bit of my ride an hour west of Weimar to Mühlhausen, population: 36,000, number of synagogues: 1, number of Jews: (approximately) 0.

   I was picked up at the train station in Mühlhausen by Mr. Sünder, a college friend of my mentor, who currently works with the archives and historical activities of the city of Mühlhausen.  Born and raised in the city, Mr. Sünder was an excellent tour guide.  He took me all over the city, explaining much of the recent history in particular.

   

   The synagogue in Mühlhausen was "rediscovered" in the late 1980s, around the time many of these buildings seem to reenter the radar of their local communities.  The fall of the wall came as quite a shock to this (and to every other) part of the DDR, and the restoration was dropped until the mid 90s.  By this time Jewish immigrants were pouring into Germany, and apparently Mühlhausen hoped to put its historical synagogue back into use.  This hope would not be realized, as the new Jewish immigrants preferred to stay together in Erfurt and other larger cities.  Mühlhausen, at the end of the day, has a beautifully restored, fully functional synagogue... with no Jews.

   When I asked why the people of Mühlhausen were so enthusiastic to have a Jewish community again, there really wasn´t a concrete answer.   Jews, he said, were a part of the history of the city, and when there was the opportunity to restore not just a building but a way of life, the city had hoped to be able to make it a reality.  Today the building is accessible to visitors who can read a small exhibit about the history of the Jewish community in the city.  But, as with many similar buildings in Germany, the very friendly women from the protestant church who keep the building open, will gladly point you to a book if your questions about the community or Jewish life in general go anywhere past the surface.  School groups are likely the most common visitors to the building.

   Mr. Sünder also took me to see the Jewish cemetery, kept in pristine condition by the city (although it was locked for security reasons when I was there).  There are so many more extant Jewish cemeteries than synagogues in Germany, that I can´t imagine looking into them in more depth at this time.  But having seen some pretty dismal Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe and the US to be honest, it was good to see upright stones and legible inscriptions.

  Then Mr. Sünder asked if I had sampled Thüringer cuisine yet.  And so I learned what a Thüringer Klöße is...

I, perhaps like you, was initially fooled by these two spherical dumplings called Klöße.  They look like matza balls.  If you don´t know about matza balls a) I feel sorry for you b) you should just know that they are Jewish soup dumplings made from ground up matzah (crackers), egg, spices, and very likely the loving special touch of someone´s grandmother.

  A Klöße, my friend, is not a Matza Ball.  It is made from potatoes, which gives it an interestingly chewy texture (I have no idea how German cuisine manages to make so many things which in their natural state are not chewy, become chewy... I have never had a chewy potato product before).  I´ll admit that the Klöße went pretty well with deer gulasch (which is amazingly delicious) and red cabbage (um, we are in Germany, so obviously cabbage was a key element in this meal).  The big surprise was that in the middle of the Klöße are chunks of bread.  I can´t really explain this.  It is sort of like dumpling surprise.  

   On the subject of things I have eaten in Germany in the attempt to not offend/be open minded/really get in touch with this culture, Blutwurst.  Blood sausage.  This is not an experience I can blame on Thüringen, since it happened in Berlin.  And I suppose like most of my blog, it clashes pretty starkly with your average (is there such a thing) historical synagogue blog.  But it seems like a feat worth mentioning.  Like nearly everything in Berlin, it happened in the context of a Christmas market (if you can find something else to do in Germany in December, please let me know).  My wonderful, enthusiastic German hosts promised me the best blood sausage in the city.  

   Well, it was the best I have ever had.  That being said, knowing it was ONLY 30% blood, did not help with the appeal factor.  I hate less than a thimble-full, and i think it will hold me for a while (I was just impressed that I kept it down).

   Back to Mühlhausen.  After spending the rest of the day in various historical buildings in the city and holding my second interview, I was ready to retire to the Jugendherberge I had reserved.  It was supposed to be only 2 km from the train station, but in Mühlhausen, that is the equivalent of staying out in the boonies.  Mr. Sünder dropped me off, and then taking pity on me, invited me to dinner at his home.

   This turned out to be one of the hightlights of the trip.  I spent the evening chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Sünder, and I suppose it would be hard to say whether they were more delighted by their "authentic American guest" (their words, not mine), or if I was more delighted by hours of stories about life in the DDR.  Ok, no, I was definitely more entertained.  

Ok, still to come, part 2... Erfurt and the Oldest Synagogue in Germany.

Actual images of the Chanukah Pepper/Dreidel

By popular demand, actual images of the pepper dreidel have been added.  Note the grave candle chanukiah, and really unappetizing Dutch candy/Geld substitute.  Can´t say I didn´t try...

It´s just not Chanukah til you have made a Dreidl out of a Pepper

    (Posting one day late as usual, and as an update, a coworker has now lent me an actual Chanukiah, out of pity for my "creativeness" I think)

Jewish holidays are notoriously tricky to keep track of.  For starters, there are a lot of them.  But, then of course there is the whole lunar calendar, leap month thing, which makes it almost impossible to pin the buggers down.  Still, yesterday when I headed to a Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) with some Germans and they suggested that we eat Kartoffelpuffers, I suddently remembered about Chanukah, the kartoffelpuffer holiday, aka the holiday of lights.

A kartoffelpuffer, for anyone not familiar, is a large potato pancake often served with apple sauce... so in other words it is a Latke.  Latke, for anyone still feeling a little lost, means little patch in yiddish, because the potato pancake resembles precisely that.  And Latkes are a traditional food eaten during Chanukah, mostly because they are deep fried, and Chanukah is a holiday in which all things greasy take the spotlight - a little homage to the little chanukiah that could, way back in the 2nd Century BCE during the Maccabean Revolt against the King of Syria Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  Some very miraculous oil in the desecrated Temple lasted eight unprecedented days, keeping the menorah shining bright until new oil could be made.  Today the oil lasts an unprecedented length of time in our arteries thanks to the holiday of Chanukah.

 So because of the Christmas market, I remember about Chanukah, and I guess Chanukah is sort of a holiday that should have a lot of professional meaning to me, considering my curent line of work in synagogues.  But, I still didn´t really have any motivation to do anything, until suddenly, in the supermarket, I was inspired.

  Inspiration is not something I can define.  It just happens.  If I could put my finger on it, well I would probably be a much more productive person.  But for whatever reason, I decided that I wanted to do some Chanukah stuff.  A German friend happened to be coming over anyway, so I determined that she would be the lucky recipient of my new-found over enthusiasm for Chanukah.

Frozen potato pancakes.  Purchased.

Applesauce.  Located.

These two were easy.  Now came the part of the supermarket trip where I attempt to make Jewish ritual or cultural items out of common items in a supermarket. 

The Chanukiah... the traditional 9 branched candelabra that is lit each night for Chanukah.  Well, I found packets of tea lights sold in groups of 4.  So I bought two packets and one larger candle (my friend later told me she suspected these were candles intended for graves... oh well).

Chanukah gelt.  I was pretty sure I had seen chocolate coins in German supermarkets.  I was certain.  But, I suppose such things are never hanging around when you need them.  So I found some other individually wrapped candies (since I am pretty sure playing dreidel with M&Ms is a health hazard).

And then, the most challenging part.  How does one make a dreidel, a spinning top, from objects found in a supermarket.  

Solution:  A pepper.

I thought it was a stroke of brilliance.  Admittedly I am almost always the first to pat myself on the back over some sort of non-accomplishment.  But, seriously, A PEPPER!!!  I selected a particularly pointy-bottomed, rectangular Pepper, cut out hebrew letters and taped them to the pepper, cut the stem to a little stub, and TA DAAAA!!!

It didn´t really spin that well.  My roommate, who was kind enough to play the game with us, was thoroughly unimpressed, even when I told him that this was an ANCIENT game, and that it usually does not involve a pepper.  Whatever, I was really really proud enough of myself.  Plus, now that I am finished playing with it, I can eat the pepper!!! 

Everything else was great, though.  I showed my friend Adam Sandler´s Chanukah song, and told her and my roommates all about Chanukah.  

To those who celebrate it, or simply like to eat a latke or spin a dreidel when the opportunity arises.... Happy Chanukah from Berlin, where it is -13C and the whole city is covered in a thick layer of snow.

Thankful Germany Doesn´t Know About Black Friday

Thanksgiving.  One of those quintessentially American things, focused on food, football, and family (and maybe a parade or two).  I can´t really say my family has ever had a firm grasp on how the holiday is supposed to work.  We had a turkey, once, last year.  Anyway, I guess I don´t really have such well-defined memories associated with the holiday.  For whatever reason, obscure holidays like Groundhog Day and Day Light Savings (spring forward and fall back) will always hold much more sentimental meaning and warm memories.  The whole family, gathered around, changing the clocks...

But, when one of the other American fellows offered to host Thanksgiving in Berlin, of course I was game.  I´ll even take credit for suggesting that we roast a goose instead of a turkey.  And somehow, through that, the idea of a Duck Duck Goose Thanksgiving was born.  We would make two things with duck, and roast a Goose, and invite everyone we know and adore in Berlin.

First there was the awkward call to the butcher, asking if they had any 13 kg geese.  She laughed at me over the phone.  Apparently they do not feed their animals nearly enough hormones in this country to feed 18 people.

 So, somehow it seemed that if we were going to feed 18 hungry Americans, Germans, Austrians, Russians, Chinese and Australians, we would need to diversify.  That is how we ended up roasting a turkey and a goose.  And, when I say we, I mean I offered a lot of moral support while the other fellow did everything, and I ran a few errands, and poured wine, and washed some dishes.

Perhaps some highlights were when one of our dear Russian colleagues brought Dunkin Donuts, which, as it turns out much more brightly iced than in the US.  No Germans believed us when we said that in the US the donuts look normal.  But, I think its part of the caricaturization of American pop culture for European audiences.  Or, that the goose never actually finished cooking, so the hostess and I ate it for lunch the next day!!! (yum).  Or, that all of our first timer Thanksgiving participants were not really sure if they were eating a goose or a turkey.

Sharing Thanksgiving with a huge group of friends, making a little bubble of real, legitimate American space in Germany, was kind of great.

personal diplomatic efforts that probably will, unfortunately, never get wikileaked

    More than likely the top spy reporters from Wikileaks are way too busy telling us what the Ambassador from  Portugal said over afternoon tea in 1977 to take note of my own diplomatic activities, but as it so happens I have been pretty international the last few days.
     For starters, there was the Belorussian underground cabaret.  Ever since I mentioned some vaguely Belorussian heritage back in July, my friends have been kind enough to point out everything they know about Europe´s last totalitarian dictatorship... aka the old country.  Nevermind that the country of Belarus didn´t exist for any of the time that my ancestors lived there, I´m perfectly content to adopt assorted homelands.  So the Belorussian cabaret happened to be performing at a former (or possibly current) squat around the corner from me (my talent for moving into the classiest neighborhood a city has to offer never fails to impress).  We wandered through a tunnel into an underground chamber that was two stories high with a stage.  The concert was really cool.  I was fortunate to have my very own Russian/Belorussian translating friend, who looked at me at one point during the concert and said, Rachel, I am pretty sure you are the only American in the room.  About half way through the concert, a bold, flashy blend of German Cabaret, American puppet theater Vaudeville and Belorussian... Belorussian-ness (?), it occurred to me that I really hoped the place didn´t burst into flames, because we were so tightly packed into a windowless, smoke-filled chamber... but, it didn´t and here I am to tell the tale.
       My absurd slavic escapades continued when the same friend invited me to the opening night of the Berlin Russian Film Festival, to which she, as a Russian, had received a complimentary ticket.  Considering my new-found love for everything Rusky, of course I accepted.  When I met her at the fully decked out, Soviet-style cincema (as mentioned in a previous blog, apparently there is a strong correllation between the political power of a particular country´s Communist Party and the sparkley-ness of all of said country´s theater curtains), the tickets were gone.  Apparently this was an invitation-only event.  And, I was not invited.

I spotted my friend across the room, waved, and proceeded to walk over to her to explain the situation.
"Sorry", I said, "There aren´t any tickets left, so I think I have to go home."

"Rachel, you just walked past the guards, you are already in", she responded.

Ok, so, I looked behind me only to see 4 beefy guards, who I had obliviously walked right through.  Oblivious is admittedly a word that has been used more than once to explain my interactions in Germany, but this was even impressive for me.  I really do not make a habit of sneaking into things.  I am obnoxiously honest about such things.  But, she was right, I was already in.

The only possible solution was to quietly walk upstairs, sit dead center, and relax and enjoy the show.  We saw the Berlin opening of a movie that is nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film.  It is called Kraj in Russian, Am Rand der Welt, in German, and who knows what it is called in English.  So, if I understood the movie properly (Russian language with German subtitles), it was about the experience of a train driver who returns to Siberia after the Second World War, interacts with Russians imprisoned in the Gulag, and falls in love with a German girl who survived in the wilderness of Siberia during the war, and had no idea that the Second World War happened until she met him.  It was fascinating.  It was also cool to hear from the ambassadors, directors, actors, etc who showed up for the film.  It was also nice to drink their champagne.  Thank you Russia.  First my ancestors snuck out, now I snuck in!!!

    And diplomatic activity number three, my trip to the Bangladesh Embassy.  So I suppose any reader to this blog (if in fact there are any) has noticed my preoccupation with Bangladesh.  At the dinner at the end of the summer where we learned a lot about Bangladesh, I befriended the first secretary of the Bengali Embassy.  Actually I had no idea he was the first secretary.  He was just sitting kind of near me, and we were chatting, and the next thing I knew I was invited to visit the embassy.

So I went.

  Well, once I got on the train to head to the embassy, it occurred to me that I maybe should have read something about Bangladesh before going.  But, it was of course too late, so I winged it.  We had such a nice time.  The First Secretary and I sipped tea and chatted about democracy and life and corruption and who knows what else.  I´m pretty sure that on the classy diplomacy scale this puts me at 1 and real politicians at -4 or so.  Plus Bengali tea, delicious.

Are you scared?

   If you were a conscious news-reading world citizen this week, chances are your awareness of Berlin on the world scape increased (and not just from checking out my blog).  It seems that Berlin is under watch for a terror attack of some sort, or so American and German intelligence say.  Security has been visibly heightened throughout the city, with concerns being raised particularly at the Reichstag, Berlin´s Parliament Building, with its tourist-frequented glass dome.

   As a member of what I would like to name the "terror-ified generation", it is often hard to know how to respond to the threats that have become all too common in our society.  In general it seems that the sounding of this most recent alarm has resonated far more among my American friends than Germans or others I encounter in Berlin.  Maybe part of the explanation for this is that so much of the intelligence information seems to be coming out of the US, from the CIA, and therefore it is being relayed in terms that seem, almost all too familiar to us.  Or maybe Europeans just stereotypically have more of a "what will be, will be" attitude, and don´t stay up at night worrying about things they cannot directly impact.  I mean in a sense even telling the public about such a threat just stirs us up, since I don´t really have the power to single-handedly do anything but be ... cautious? vigilant?  

On a side note, with phrasing like, "The man believed to be trying to smuggle the would-be terrorists into Europe is 54-year-old weapons dealer Dawood Ibrahim, who the United Nations believes is a major backer of terrorism," showing up in Spiegel news, sometimes it is hard not to be a bit jaded.  Seriously.  Do we need Intelligence to tell us that a weapons dealer might be a backer of terrorism?  Maybe we just need to be intelligent.  


  Anyway, maybe you´d rather know how this type of information actually effects my life.  Working in an important Jewish building in Berlin, security is a fact of life and not something new.  Metal detectors, armed Israeli and German guards, and strict rules for accountability and access to our building are standard - standard for most Jewish places in Germany.  It will be interesting to learn how that differs in smaller towns that I will be visiting (fyi my first site visit will be to the Bundesland (state) of Thüringen is in the beginning of December!!).  Jewish buildings in the US definitely have varied degrees of secuity.  But part of my interest in studying Jewish space in Germany is to understand how accessibility to Jewish places is different when the doors are necessarily locked (or appear from outside to be locked).


 I think sometimes I am so determined to understand Germany, to love it and to love to learn about it, and then I shock myself when something happens, and, for a split second, I am scared.


  Saturday night while walking to the tram from my house, I reached the main street only to see the street blocked off by police vans, 50 some police in riot gear standing watch.  I was curious and walked closer to see what was happening, and suddenly what seemed like hundreds of protesters began marching through the street waving flags.  As I got closer I saw just the words Nazi and Fascism, and literally, my heart stopped.  For what was probably about a half a second I was honestly petrified.  A million horrible thoughts went through my mind, more than you could possibly think could go through one mind before I was able to read the rest of the banners: ANTI Fascism, AGAINST Nazis.


   An anti-fascism demonstration.  Well, it would have been nice if someone had posted a flier or something.  Apparently, there are so many anti-fascism demonstrations in Berlin that it would be impossible to announce all of them.  I was totally relieved, but I guess if there are still anti-fascism demonstrations, it means there is still a need for them, and that is sad.


  In hasty conclusion:  Look twice when there are riot police, not everything that looks scary is.


  

Restoring Walls in a City Known for Tearing them Down

(Disclaimer: As per usual I am publishing this post a day late - please read the word "today" as "yesterday")



Walls. Sometimes it seems that walls get a bad rep, criticized for their opacity, rigidness and divisiveness.  Walls, however, are merely shape-givers.  And shape is a pretty important for defining how we understand the world, ie, whatever we are giving shape to.

Twenty one years ago today the Berlin Wall came down.  It was a high wall, made of cement, patrolled by armed guards ordered to shoot anyone and anything that tried to cross it without permission.  On the day the wall came down, thousands of people came together, a nation was reunited, and those same guards put their guns down and hugged the people from the other side, who only hours before had been enemies.  It was a great day for Germany, and a pretty great day for the world, continuing a movement towards unification of Germany (and truthfully Europe),  and democratization of the former communist East.

Seventy two years ago a lot of other walls came down in Germany.  Not only walls, but also windows, roofs, and doors of Jewish-owned stores, homes and synagogues.

Of course Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin Wall don´t really have anything in common besides a few abstract elements: the physically destructive manifestation of a burgeoning socio-political movement, a region, and a day of the year.

I suppose I could and maybe should go on to tell you some interesting facts about both events, why and how they are still relevant today, but I think there are plenty of articles and blogs out there that will do just that, so I think instead I will give you a bit of an update on my life in Germany, and what this day means in relation to it.

Last Thursday I attended my first ever Rabbinical Ordination.  It was located at the Pestalozzi synagogue, a building for which today is certainly significant.  This building was damaged in Kristallnacht, restored after WWII, and became the primary synagogue for the Jewish community that lived in West Berlin.  Today it remains one of eight active congregations in Berlin and is home to a liberal congregation.  On Thursday it was the site of the third class of Rabbinical ordinations in Germany by the Abraham Geiger Kolleg since WW2, and the first ordination of a female Rabbi in Germany since the first female Rabbi ever to be ordained in the world, Regina Jonas, who was later murdered at Auschwitz.

Thursday´s ordination was a pretty intense, but certainly joyous, event, and it was also the first of two times this week that I head the German president Christian Wulff speak.  Events like this are strange reminders than Jewish life in Germany is, in its own way, thriving, developing, and self sustaining, BUT, completely and at times overwhelmingly characterized by the extraordinariness of its own existence.  AKA, as wonderful as a rabbinical ordination always is, as momentous as this particular ordination is, it certainly makes you wonder, will normal Jewish life in Germany ever be considered "normal" enough that the community´s activities are not front page news, worthy of a presidential speech?  I don´t know.  I think a lot of people in Germany quite innocently, and well-intentionally ask themselves this question.  I guess at this point it feels pretty incredible that Germany as a country and German Jews as a community within that country, have come so far in their relationship to one another that both can sort of make the agreement to let Jewish German achievement be part of a political, social and cultural conversation, and to allow these types of events to take place on a public stage.

Hmm, there is no question that World War II and the Holocaust play a huge part in my work here, not to mention my sense of self awareness as a Jew and also as an American in Germany, but I am not sure quite yet how I want to approach these issues for my project or here, with you, in this type of a forum.  I am not sure I know exactly how to form an opinion about a subject that I am confronted with almost everyday, but that I don´t honestly feel I have a right to take a stance on (personally or academically).

And so, when surrounded by the shapeless cloud of the past that sometimes seems to hover over modern Germany, I guess I am learning to study how putting walls back up, might actually be a really useful sort of public therapy and community awareness program.

In the last few weeks I have documented over 70 buildings around Germany that have been restored in some way in the last forty years to reflect their original architecture as synagogues.  As my project is developing I am considering focusing mostly on restoration projects in the new German states, those that joined the country after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Expensive, labor intensive restoration projects in former East Germany have been taking place for the last few years quite frequently, despite a weaker economy than the West, shrinking populations, and severe brain drain.  So, while it might seem logical to classify these projects (and any Jewish or Holocaust memorial projects in Germany) as some sort of post Cold War guilt grappling experience for East Germans, I think it might be possible that rebuilding Jewish historic buildings in former East Germany is a broader way for East Germans to give tangible shape and create space and protection for their own local histories and sense of regional identities and that the fortification of synagogue walls was made necessary by the fall of the Berlin Wall, in other words, a reaction to the identity challenges and social crises brought on by reunification ... So that is sort of where I am right now.  Stay tuned for when I decide I am totally wrong in about 3 days.

Speaking of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I also attended a fascinating conference called Falling Walls on Sunday and Monday.  The conference brought together leading academics from diverse disciplines to discuss the next walls to fall in various fields of interest, from science, to math, to anthropology to art.  The conference began in the art studio of Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic-Danish artist working in Berlin, who creates art that experiments with space, technology, the environment, etc.  His work is pretty cool, and you may have heard about some of his projects, including one in which he turned a river in Tokyo green.  On Monday the conference was held in a really interesting old building on the banks of the Spree River, which helped form what was still considered the most dangerous border in the world 21 years previously on that day, the day before the wall came down.  Some of the most interesting speakers discussed breaking down the walls of blindness, how we understand nature v. nurture, how we think about curing HIV/AIDS, how we envision successful world economies (ie the China model), etc.  For the second time I heard from President Christian Wulff, and the Prime Minister of Belgium, currently the President of the EU rotating Presidency, Yves Leterme.

Everyone starts somewhere

So I started in October.  I´d like to think I moved to Berlin permanently on the perfect day, Unity Day, October 3, 2010.  I took a walk from my new neighborhood along where the wall once stood, and in some parts still does, covered in modern graffiti that some people call art, and some modern art that people call graffiti, that ended at the Brandenburg Gate and its surroundings.  There was a festival, which involved a lot of beer, giant pretzels and doughnuts, and every type of sausage under the sun.  And, when the evening was setting in, politicians gave speeches, men jumped from airplanes wearing German flags, a light show was displayed on the parliament building, someone important said, "After all these years I can finally say I am proud of my country", and former Chancellor Helmut Kohl cried.  It was twenty years since the country of Germany was reunited.  It seems to me that a lot of Germans I meet are sort of over it all, or know the deeper issues that I am still learning, about invisible walls than no one can tear down, or maybe things that were easier when there was a wall, but for me, as an American, and a sort of sappy one at that, I was pretty moved.


On an interesting note, Unity Day 2010 had another, less openly discussed significance.  It was the day that Germany officially finished paying back the debts from World War I, dating back to the Treaty of Versailles.  Obviously, not a coincidence that this day was selected, but a hefty thing to consider in any case.


As I have been learning in this part of the world history is something that even non historians meet on a daily basis.  I was reminded of this just days later when my new coworker was late to work because a WW2 bomb was discovered near the train station in his city.  It turns out there are tons of bombs from WW2 all over the city.  They were dropped by the allies, never detonated, and now are occasionally happened upon, and though they rarely do any harm, have to, of course, be disposed of as safely as possible.


Well, I suppose that is a round about way of saying, I have started work at the Centrum Judaicum.  There will of course be many posts explaining my new job, my research, my coworkers, etc, but for now I will just give you a taste.  Most importantly, I love where I work (the Centrum Judaicum just might be the most beautiful building in Berlin), my coworkers and bosses are great, and although it is taking some time, I think I am actually figuring out how to do my project.  There are a lot of challenges.  I am truly conducting my days in German, as I am the only non German employee, and sometimes I honestly have no idea what people are talking about.  Mostly the result is just hilarity...
Example:  Boss says to Rachel: "Would you like some _________ (indecipherable word)?"  Rachel confusedly asks boss to repeat.  Word remains indecipherable.  Rachel tried to save herself by claiming she does not know what indecipherable word means.  Boss looks at Rachel like she is from distant planet and waves her into the next room where there is a plate of cake.  Boss proceeds to explain to Rachel, V E R Y 
 S L O W L Y what CAKE is. 


And, since my German is clearly already perfect...I decided to start learning Russian.  So, twice a week I attend an intro to Russian class at the Technical University.  Despite the fact that the language of instruction for the class is, of course, German, I think it is going pretty well.  More on that later of course.

And, of course there is the task of figuring out how to be a normal person here.  A list of things normal people have:
1. Bedding - check
2. Food and cooking supplies - check
3. Solid understanding of how to use the washing machine and other household appliances - check
4. capability of getting around city without constant use of a giant fold out map (which has now ripped precisely along a street that I travel often) - work in progress (note: people who use smart phones are cheaters)
5. seasonally appropriate clothing - took some doing, but I now own a winter coat... (and socks)
6. friendships- also a work in progress, but going surprisingly well, thanks to the high concentration of BUKAs in Berlin, and a willingness to talk to strangers in whatever language it takes.  I now have two tandem partners (stop giggling, it only sounds dirty but is actually totally cool).  Tandem is a program where people hang out with people who speak a language they are learning and exchange language skills.  I meet with Germans who want to learn English, and we split our time between speaking English for them and German for me, so that both of us improve our language skills in a non classroom setting.  I did the program in Vienna as well, and found it extremely rewarding.
Well, October started and ended with holidays.  Halloween, not exactly widely celebrated in Germany, but becoming more and more popular each year.  I celebrated Halloween with two friends and their young children at the Zoo in Berlin.  

Here is a little photo series I like to call "Baby BUKAs do not see fence as barrier to entry at petting zoo"

Picture 1: Petting the animals

Picture 2:  It is increasingly hard to reach these animals to pet them.

Picture 3:  Children dive head first into petting zoo.

Like most good things, it involves something like a tree house

   As you can surely tell, I have gotten a bit lazy with this whole blogging thing, though I vow to get better.  In fact, tonight I am hunkering down and I am going to pump out enough blog entries to keep you reading for days (that is an exaggeration, as you would have to be a very slow reader).  And, I am rewarding you with pictures at the end!!!

Alright, so I live in Berlin.  I mean I really live here now.  No hotel, sadly no more maid service, but on the bright side, I have an oven again.

  I would love to say that I searched out the perfect place to spend my year in Berlin, that I carefully researched, visited tons of places, and that my selection was the result of a mature consideration of my needs and wants. 

 But, that would be a lie.  Finding a place to live was a little harder than I thought, so when a decent seeming apartment became available, I jumped at the opportunity.  The fact that it involves something like a tree house, was really just a bonus. 

  To call it a tree house is not completely accurate, although it is made of wood.  It is a free standing loft inside a room with high ceilings.  There are no railings.  I sleep up there.  It is very high.  Every morning when I awake still in one piece, I feel like I have earned the right to walk among mankind for at least one more day.  Some of my friends are worried.  There are threats of installing railings when I am not looking.  For now I just sleep as close as possible to the wall.  I will keep you posted.

  I should probably mention that I have two roommates, which technically classifies my apartment as a Wohngemeinschaft, or a shared apartment.  Thanks to said roommates, I didn´t have to worry about setting up most things in my apartment, all I had to take care of was my room.  That being said, I maybe could have worked a little harder.  It took me more than a week to buy a pillow and blankets.  I am not proud of this.  I am just stating facts.  Now however, I can definitely say I feel pretty settled here, and have managed to avoid making a trip to IKEA (note: I have just accepted lack of furniture as a lifestyle choice).

   As for my neighborhood, I should probably admit it was completely by happy accident that I found a place to live that is actually relatively convenient to work.  It only takes me about 25 minutes for my entire commute, which is pretty great considering how massive Berlin is. 

Sadly, I still get to work about 15 minutes late every day.  It turns out that even if your commute only takes 25 minutes, you must still leave 25 minutes before work starts to arrive on time.   In case you are wondering, yes, everything you think you have heard about the importance of punctuality in Germany is totally true.  My coworkers keep saying, "Americaner sind so Locker!", which means, "Americans are so chilled out!", which I think is code for, "Please try to show up on time."

  But back to my neighborhood.  It is called Friedrichshain (pronounced Freed-ricks-hine).  The part I live in is called Boxhagener Platz, or Boxi, for short.  It is sort of a lively mess in the heart of former East Berlin.  Founded as a working class neighborhood in the 1920s, Friedrichshain was one of the worst damaged parts of the city during second world war bombing.  In fact, after the war, the city took lots of the rubble from destroyed buildings, trucked it over to the 1840s era Volkspark in Friedrichshain, and made two gigantic mountains out of it that are now just part of the park (creative!).  The soviets left their mark too, building the grand Stalinallee Boulevard (later renamed Karl-Marx-Allee).  After the fall of the wall, part of which was located just a few blocks from my apartment, the neighborhood became a low rent, young, student and (graffiti) artist haven on the (slow) road to gentrification.  I live right in the heart of it all on Boxi, where a weekly farmers market and flea market take place.  I also live right next door to arguably the best falafel in the city (but please, let´s not argue).

And, as promised, some things I think are pretty around my ´hood.

(it looks like a smiley face)

Stowed Away

    Still playing catch up mode.  So I left Berlin on September 23 in the mid afternoon to fly to Paris to meet my parents.  Or, at least, I tried to.  The day did not exactly go as planned, even though I held up my end of the bargain.
I checked out of my hotel.
I took the Ubahn to the airport.
I checked in.

But, unfortunately France was slightly too preoccupied maintaining its Republican Values and exercising the right to civic spirit to go to work that day.  In other words, France, was on strike.  Why, you might ask??  Had someone been denying the people bread again?  Was absolute monarchy knocking on their front door?

No and No.  This time the evil crime was increasing the retirement age from 60 to 62 and pushing back the age from 65 to 67 for those who want to ensure full retirement benefits.  If hearing this doesn´t make you want to shout "Sacre bleu!", trust me you are not alone.  In case France hasn´t heard, the life expectancy in their dear country is among the longest in the world - averaging 80.7 (77.1 for men and 84.1 for women), which makes them just about tied with Israel, Macau and Canada at number 8.  The US comes in at an astonishing 38, with a life expectancy of 78.2 ( 75.6 for men and 80.8 for women).  (Germany, FYI, comes in at number 20 with 79.4 years and is tied with Belgium, Great Britain, Malta and the US Virgin Islands)  All in all, in my personal opinion, the French could stand to work a little longer - most of the developed world probably could...

 But, on this particular day I was much more bothered by the strike caused by this issue, than the issue itself.  In the US, we just don´t seem to use strikes so often, we prefer tea parties...  When I checked my flight before leaving for the airport, it was the only flight still headed to Paris - too good to be true I should have known.  It was canceled half an hour before takeoff.

As the mob headed towards the ticket counter to trade their flight in, I considered my situation.  Already checked out of my hotel, no place to stay in Berlin, family and hotel waiting for me in Paris.  I had to get to Paris.  Flights were out of the question.  I headed to the train station...

At the train station I initially met with zero help.  I was told that no trains to Paris (or France for that matter) would be leaving.  I asked about trains going NEAR France.   I was told that just getting near France would be a futile action.  So.  I asked someone else.

Another lady at the station told me I could take the train to Mannheim, Germany, then wait out the strike, and take the first train to Paris.  So, with her help, I bought a ticket that left for Mannheim at 10:30pm and arrived at 4:50 in the morning.  I didn´t have a reservation for a seat, but she assured me that was no problem.  I boarded the train, and decided to stay standing until a seat became available.  In the meantime I chatted with a man hoping to exchange his seat for one in a quieter location.  Then the conductor came to collect tickets.  I showed him my ticket, but of course I had no reservation.  That was when he told that I would have to get off the train.

WHAT?!?!  I had a ticket.  I had purchased said ticket.  It was 11 at night.  We were literally in the middle of nowhere.  My new friend argued on my behalf.  Who ever heard of throwing a young girl with a ticket off of a train in the middle of the night?!  Apparently... this guy.  The eyes of those around me seemed to say, we would help if we had any clue how...  Then around came an elderly gentleman who was working for the government surveying about satisfaction with the train.  WE ARE NOT SATISFIED, exclaimed my new friend, explaining my situation.  The government worker expressed his disapproval, but explained that unfortunately he had no say in the matter (apparently train conductor > German government)  I totally wanted to tell the conductor that actually HIS government was paying me to live in Germany to be an ambassador so that they would have a better relationship with my country, and he was honestly blowing it.  I also wanted to tell him some other things that I would rather not repeat on a blog that my grandma reads.  But, you get the picture.
It was a bad situation.

Luckily as I pondered my fate, the conductor had moved on the check tickets in the neighboring car.  The train slowed to a halt.  I ran to an empty seat, changed my hair threw a different jacket over my head, and just before the hood covered my eyes, the guy across aisle winked in understanding.  For 6 hours I switched seats, took looonnnng bathroom trips, pretended to sleep, and evaded the conductor.  Finally, I got out at Mannheim.  It was five in the morning.  Trains to Paris wouldn´t start until nearly 7.  I sat down in the station.  All the sudden I had this crazy deja vu.  It hit me.  I had been to Mannheim once before, at 4 in the morning.  Four years earlier, on my first solo voyage, I had made my way through Mannheim on my way to the Black Forest in the attempt to fulfill my dream of gallivanting through the Black Forest as if in a fairy tale (dream fulfilled, btw).  I sat for a moment and pondered the meaning of life.

When that was through I headed upstairs, where I was befriended by two Norwegians.  Apparently there are a lot of Norwegians in Mannheim.  They asked where I was headed, and I said Paris, so they said, us too!  It was feeling a little bit Wizard of Oz-y, until I realized they were just bored of being in Mannheim (so was I ).

When the ticket office opened at 6, I was first in line to buy my ticket to Paris.  That is, until the lady behind the counter told me all the trains to Paris for the day were sold out.  Something about a general strike in Paris... yeah, yeah, I´d heard of it.  Still, it seemed shocking that all of the trains were booked solid, I mean, even first class?!?!  OH, she said.  Well you didn´t ASK about first class (come on people, can we think outside the box a little?).  So I proceeded to buy the most expensive train ticket of my life (the Norwegians were obviously no longer interested in Paris), and learned that first class really IS better.  They feed you breakfast, and the seats are more comfortable.

And that was how I made it to Paris.  Only 12 hours later than planned.

Headed to Berlin

    I have to say, I am pretty embarrassed that it took me a month to get around to writing another blog entry, especially since the last month has been incredibly eventful.  For one thing, I moved.  For another thing, I moved again.  I have actually been in basically constant movement for the last month, so now is probably the perfect time to get serious about this blog thing.  So where to begin...

   Last time you heard from me (ok minus that whole hacked email, scam from London, mass email stuff) it was my last night in Bonn.  Well the next morning, we boarded a bus, all 30 of us, plus our organizer, Friederich, a few Siberian spouses and babies, some bicycles, a million suitcases, some potted plants, etc.  And by et cetera, I actually mean that I brought along enough apples and honey to feed a small army.

  It was erev Rosh Hashanah, and so like any good descendant of a nomadic people I was on a caravan headed across ancient Ashkenaz (Germany) in the direction of Berlin.  The trip took eight hours, mostly because there is a law in Germany saying that bus drivers are entitled to a break every two hours.  In other words, we experienced every rest stop between Bonn and Berlin.  Among other things that would have been interesting to study, I got a good look at how different nationalities behave on long bus rides.  The Russians were clustered together in the front of the bus.  The Americans all wanted their own seats.  And the Chinese sat in the back of the bus and had apparently packed the equivalent of a five course meal, which they shared around for the next 6 or 7 hours!

  As evening approached, and we neared our destination, so too began a tradition that dates back generations.  This is the ancient tradition whereby the lone Jew heads to the front of the bus, sits in the tour guide´s seat, puts on a microphone and proceeds to tell her American, Russian, and Chinese friends about the Jewish New Year, in English and German, teaches everyone to say L´shana Tova (happy new year), and then stumbles from seat to seat handing out apple slices and squeezing a blob of honey on them.  The Chinese were pretty excited to hear that I ALSO have a lunar calendar :) 

It was actually really great, and I can´t imagine a better way or better people with whom to have welcomed the year 5771.

 Once in Berlin we had two weeks of an intensive study tour around the region.  I guess it is fair to say that we saw some of the best and worst of Germany, and that hopefully through that, we became more sensitive to each other and to our guest country, but also critical.  While it was frustrating sometimes that our programs and tours took place without any follow up or group discussion aside from that which we organized ourselves, I think we got an opportunity to be incredibly critical - of Germany, of our own countries, of one another. 

A brief overview of where we went and what we did:
The Neukölln Opera - Not actually an Opera at all, this is more like a new age musical theater that deals with real issues experienced in Germany.  I loved it.  We saw a performance about women who feel unsatisfied with their lives in big cities and head to smaller towns to try to do something with the vacant space and major population decrease that has occurred in East Germany since the fall of the wall.

The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp - Maybe not the way I would have ideally spent the second day of Rosh Hashanah, but visiting this camp, used mostly for political prisoners of the Nazis, was really powerful.  The camp was used as a Soviet prison after the war.  As has often been cause for discussion among us BUKAs, how do Germans, and the rest of the world for that matter, talk about the crimes of Stalin and of Socialism with regard to a country still emotionally sorting its way through Hitler and Fascism.  This subject of course came up again when we visited the former Stasi Prison, and were shown around by a former inmate, imprisoned for writing a contentious book during the DDR era.  Negotiating how Americans in comparison to Russians think about and talk about the Second World War has been really eye opening. 

A visit to the Reichstag, Berlin´s Parliament building, gave us the opportunity to talk to leaders of the country´s main political parties (except for the Green Party - they bailed on us).  The term "integration" was consistently used to talk about the success or lack thereof of immigrant populations in Germany.  What an uncomfortable word.  Here, and at our visits to Berlin´s largest (and incredibly beautiful) mosque, and the office of Integration and Migration, the experiences of Germany´s immigrant populations and their descendants were brought to light.  Can someone deemed non ethnically German ever be German without giving up everything about their own identity?  And even then, will they ever be truly accepted?  Jewish history would seem to show that even the most integrated Jewish population in the world in the 1940s, namely the German Jews, were victimized with horrendous consequences.  If the word stays the same, can the definition possibly change?  Certainly Germany is not alone among countries in the world who need to reexamine how they define belonging and inclusion in a national social framework.  Perhaps we all have a lot to learn.

There were lots of other interesting trips - We went to Potsdam and visited the palace of Friederich the Great, where girls were not allowed (not even Friederich´s wife!) and Friederich was later buried next to his 12 dogs (wife was not even allowed to visit in the afterlife).  We took a tour of the site of the Potsdam Conference, where Stalin, Churchill and Truman met in 1945.  And, we took a trip out to the city of Wittenberg, where Martin Luther posted his famous 95 these which brought about the Protestant Reformation along with one of the bloodiest wars in history.

Near the end of our seminar we came together for a program called Länderabend, a chance for the thirty of us, and a handful of BUKAs from previous years, to feed and entertain one another according to our national traditions.  Well, it was Yom Kippur, so to avoid temptation, I have no clue what was eaten.  (Also, if you recall from a previous post, Chinese, Russian and American cuisine may not have been intended for one plate).  Well, while everyone was having dinner, I put the finishing touches on the American skit, which a bunch of us had spent the last few hours putting together.  I won´t bore you with the whole skit (though I do have it on tape if you are that interested, including a hilarious ballerina skit by the Russians), but I will share with you the lyrics to the song we wrote.  As a bit of background, one of the Americans wrote a song called 16 Länder in Deutschland, to teach her son about the provinces of Germany.  To the same tune we wrote 30 BUKAs in Deutschland:

§Chorus: 30 BUKAs in Deutschland, 30 BUKAS in Deutschland, 10 aus Russland, 10 aus China, 10 aus USA, Das ist Prima!! (That is awesome!)

The Fei boys are telling Chinese Tort Law what to do
Ozge will bring Turkey into the EU
Veronika is fixing higher education
Laura hopes to rescue the Afghani Nation

Long and Xi Jing will help merge and acquire
But make too much and Emilie will get you fired
Yelena is fighting skin cancer
Vadim is searching for a peaceful answer

Sarah writes the news
Rachel works with Jews
Sergei tells us how much pensioners might lose

Jen and Phil will make the world better for gays
Johanna works with Turkish women who like plays
Iulia will look at Deutsch Philosophy
Kefei knows just how stressful that can be!

Igor will make sure we have milk to drink
Inna and Tsia-Xan tell us how we feel and think
Bing will help the world communicate
Natalya studies cities as they populate

The environment makes us worry,
Loni, Katya, Emily please hurry
And Chan-Zoung will make our budgets participatory.

Gao-Wei is telling us to volunteer
Xing-Ja is a banking pioneer
And if you still noticed that someone is missing,
Head to an ancient site cuz Olga´s digging!!!!




Probably you had to be there...  Now that we have all gone our separate ways, all I can say is I miss my BUKAS.

Conclusion: Being the Russian General Consul for Bonn is the best job ever

  Once again, my apologies that this blog post is a bit late.  On Tuesday, September 7th, 2010, I had quite possibly the most fun I will ever have at a General Consulate of the Russian Federation in Germany.

   Ok, let´s backtrack.  Every year the BUKAs get invited to visit the Russian Consulate in Bonn for meetings and dinner.  This year was no exception, so on our last night in Bonn, we thirty BUKAs prepared for our last big hurrah in Bonn. 

   If you ever receive an invitation to dinner at the Russian Consulate, you may first ask yourself, "What should I wear?"  According to Herr Friedrich von Matzahn, keeper/handler/counter/babysitter of the BUKAs, smart casual (which by the way does not translate into German) is the appropriate attire for the Russian Consulate.  Given the tense (for lack of a better word) relations that often exist between our two countries, the American BUKAs decided we should up the smart and down the casual, so we all put on our nicest clothes in hopes of making a good impression.  Little did we know we were about to meet:

Jewgenij Schmagin, Consul General of the Russian Federation in Bonn, Germany, and yes, he does always have a shot of some sort of alcohol in one hand while he wildly gesticulates with the other.  Mr. Schmagin has been on the job for three months, a fact which he restated about 25 times over the course of the evening.  After meeting Mr. Schmagin, who is incredibly friendly and hospitable, one can only imagine that his previous post was as Consul General to a summer camp.

    First the Consul General served us cookies and sat with us at a long table and basically repeated in more or less terms how happy he was that the Cold War was over, how much relations between China and Russia have improved in the last few years, and how, all things considered, he thinks the US is an okay place anyway...  He then delivered a speech in which every sentence included some variation of the phrase: You cannot imagine how big Russia is.  It went something like this:

  "Dear Chinese, American, Russian and German friends, you cannot imagine how big Russia is.  Russia is so big that we can hardly imagine how big it is ourselves.  Russia is so big that we need to spend many days on a train to get from one side to the other.  Russia is so big that we are on two continents.  Russia is so big that at the same time some places are very very cold while other places are very very hot.  Russia is so big that it takes up nine time zones.  Russia is so big that in some parts of Russia the day is beginning while in other places it has already happened.  Now that you have been in Germany for some time, you are maybe thinking, oh my, Germany is big.  Tell me, do you think Germany is big?  Is Germany big?  Certainly you are all thinking, my, Germany is quite big, yes?  (we are all staring at him confused until finally the head of the Humboldt Foundation, a soft-spoken man to the right of the Consul General in the picture above says:) Um, no, Mr. Consul General, everyone is well aware that Germany is actually a very small country."

   Then the Consul General proceeded to give us a tour of the Russian Consulate, which he reminded us multiple times is technically part of Russian territory.  "Now you have all been to Russia."

Then he fed us lots of wine and caviar and the Bishop made a toast.

Then he taught us how to play Gorodki, a traditional Russian game in which you throw sticks at a target.  (It was somewhere around round two of Gorodki that we realized dressing up for the Russian Consulate might have been a mistake).

Then we had a cookout, during which the Consul General insisted on serving all of the Americans hamburgers (sort of a low blow, but being as he was consuming vodka like it was water I figured stereotype shmereotype).

Then it was time for traditional Russian singing and accordion playing.  And then the Consul General decided that each of the four countries represented should take the stage and perform a traditional song from their country.  The Russians went first, and performed a traditional folk song.  Then the Germans performed, and I swear if I had not known better I would have thought they had rehearsed.  They broke into different parts and sang in a round and had harmonizing, and it was just really really organized. Then the Chinese sort of kissed up and sang some Russian song from the 1950s that is very popular in Chinese translation.

  

 See what I mean?  They were pretty proud of themselves.  All the while the Americans were having our usual "oh shit we missed out on a solid nationalistic song-singing education" moment.  What could we sing?  Yankee Doodle?  Too cheesy (heh, macaroni, get it?).  She´ll be comin´round the mountain?  Too folksy.  

   And then suddenly, we knew.  The song that said it all.  The song that perfectly explained our existence as Americans in Germany, as Americans at the Russian Consulate!  The song that said, so what if we are the fattest country on earth!  So what if we export hamburgers like it is our national pastime!  So what if the closest we get to a folk culture education is square dancing in middle school gym class!  So what if we call football soccer!  So what if every time we try to play the Russian stick throwing game our sticks accidentally get lost in the woods!!!  We stood together, shoulder to shoulder, counted off and began:

First I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinkin I could never live without you by my side, but then I spent so many nights just thinkin how you did me wrong and I grew strong and I learned how to get along...

By the time we hit the chorus to I Will Survive the accordion had joined in and the Consul General was dancing.  It was like every bad wedding DJ, drunken karaoke mistake, Bar Mitzvah hallucination all melted together into one perfect cultural exchange.  It was a proud moment in BUKAdom, a proud moment for America, and I dare say, a meaningful step forward  for Russian-US relations.

The surface of the moon.

  Week one of orientation is over, and I´m sitting here in hotel room 4009 in the Tannenbusch Acora for the last time.  Tomorrow, bright and early, we board the bus and officially move to Berlin. (Note: in the haste of moving this post and others were left as drafts, thus they are being published a bit late)

  So, Bonn.  I promised in my first post that I would hold judgment and let Bonn be a place that I got to know personally.  For those of you who have been dutifully reading along without doing any supplementary reading, let´s review history for a moment.  I am in Bonn, not Bern (that is Switzerland).  Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany (just for fun, the 19th largest city in the US is Memphis Tennessee, which has a population about twice as big as Bonn, at 680,000 compared to 320,000).  Although it was certainly much more than just a village, Bonn basically rose out of obscurity in 1949 when it was selected as the new capital of West Germany.  Why Bonn?  Well, Konrad Adenauer, first Chancellor of West Germany, selected little Bonn basically as a small, hopefully temporary, location for a new German capital with the hope of showing the world that Germany was not a place to be feared anymore. 
         Bonn.  Although the name is not in any way etymologically related, it might be helpful to think Bonn equals bon, good, harmless.
    And, you might say Bonn was pretty bon.  It did its job.  Bonn sustained West Germany through the cold war, rebuilt the image of Germany in the eyes of the world, and delivered it safely and soundly into a reunified Germany in 1990.  For the next year, the German government and the German people debated between their two choices for capital cities, Bonn v. Berlin.  Don´t think for a minute that the choice was easy.  After forty years, people felt pretty comfortable with Bonn, and Berlin still represented to the world and the German people the same demons of the past, but, after much deliberation, on June 20, 1991 (my fifth birthday, in case you were curious), the decision was made to move the capital to Berlin, and only 9 years later (ha!), the process was complete (our trip to Berlin will take ONLY 9 hours tomorrow).


    Pause for an unnecessary cultural/historical allusion.  Sometimes when I think about Bonn, I think of Apollo 13, or at least the movie with Tom Hanks that I watched a lot as a kid.  Germany is the mission, set into motion by the cold war (um, yeah, like the space race), and Bonn is the lunar module Aquarius that had to act as a lifeboat and take on the crew for four days (or forty years) because of oxygen problems (communism?) that prevented the crew from staying in their main command module, the Odyssey (think Berlin, for the hell of it), which they were later able to repair enough to use for a safe return into the earth´s atmosphere (reunification!)  So what ever happened to Bonn?  (FYI Aquarius burned up upon reentering the earth´s atmosphere a few days later.)

      Fortunately for Bonn, things worked out a lot better.  Once most of the government offices left, a bunch of international organizations, big businesses, etc, decided to take over their buildings.  In Bonn, there is life after reunification.  It´s just different.
     For example, today me visited a major solar panel company, Solar World, with headquarters in Bonn.  And, on Thursday we visited Deutsche Welle, a news organization that broadcasts radio, TV and internet in over 30 languages around the world, bringing the German perspective to places around the world, particularly places in which freedom of the press might not otherwise be possible.  Interestingly enough, Deutsche Welle is located in a building in Bonn that was originally planned and constructed for the German Parliament.  The decision was made to move Germany´s capital to Berlin before the award winning building was even finished, leaving the people of Bonn (and the German taxpayer´s) in a bit of a lurch.  Imagine for a moment if the Capitol Building in DC was converted into a radio station...
     We also had a chance to visit the German Defense Ministry, which maintains its primary headquarters in Bonn, and has a smaller office in Berlin.  Defense and participation in foreign wars is understandably a touchy issue in Germany.  I found the Captain that we met with to be one of the most interesting people in our week of endless meetings.  He informed us about the current status of German troops in Afghanistan, the Congo and Kosovo, as well as the issue of conscription in Germany.  Currently all men in Germany have to serve in the army for nine months (if I understood correctly, they would like to change it to 6 months).
      The main thing that stuck out for me in our visit to the Defense Ministry was what the Captain had to say about the image of the soldier in Germany.  Despite conscription for all German men, Germans in army uniforms still get strange looks when they walk down the street in uniform.  He said he knows career soldiers who wear their civilian clothes when they go to and from work, just to avoid the stares.  When visiting the US, he said, regardless of the fact that he was wearing a German uniform, people would stop him in the street and shake his hand and thank him for his service to his country (I wouldn´t be surprised if the aforementioned Americans did not realize that the soldier with whom they were shaking hands was not in fact wearing an American uniform...)  It is only natural though, he said, that after fighting and losing two world wars, symbols of war make the Germans uncomfortable.  Speaking of uncomfortable:
      Yesterday´s trips took us outside of Bonn to two other large enterprises that play major roles in Germany today.  They were interesting, but somewhat unpleasant places to visit.  One was this:

     This is an open brown coal mine.  When I think about mines I generally think of tragedies in which people get stuck in narrow sooty shafts under the ground or eventually develop the black lung.  In open coal mining people are hardly used at all.  Gigantic, billion-dollar machines manned by around 4 people claw away miles and miles of earth to expose soft brown energy stored just a few feet below the surface.  The crazy thing is that whole towns have to be moved to keep them out of the way of these giant earth eating machines.  The town of Königshaven is an example of one of these towns.  We visited New Königshaven, which was rebuilt with the same plan as old Königshaven, right down to the street names, but almost all of the buildings are new.  I am still trying to mentally envision how they dealt with the Königshaven cemetery I saw signs for...

     After visiting the coal mine, we took a trip to a gigantic Bayer chemical plant.  Before touring the plant, we were guided through a museum exhibit about the history and current work of Bayer.  I am sure I wasn´t the first person to see Bayer´s exhibit about history and feel like something was very clearly being left out.   The museum included one panel on the history of both world wars, which showed some busy factories and a picture of "forced laborers".  Our tour guide said that Bayer was a part of the war effort, and that there was discussion after the war about whether or not the company should continue to function, and of course the decision was made to keep Bayer as a tool to help rebuild the German economy.  Questions we asked about some of Bayer´s more controversial involvements in the Third Reich were met with hostile, incomplete responses.  As for the bus tour we took through the chemical plant, once of the BUKAs put it best when she said:  

This is just like driving through a movie set, if you were making a movie about chemical plants.