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.
No comments:
Post a Comment