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.