I woke up early this morning to make sure I got to work on time, or rather early knowing that today I would lead my first tour of the Centrum Judaicum (in English, thankfully) for a school group from England.  The tour went well enough.  It was the first of many, and I know they will get smoother and better as I go, so no worries there.  A much more substantial impression was made on me in the process of preparing my tour.  One of the things that I like about the CJ, something similar to the Vilna, is that tour guides are given a lot of freedom in tour preparation.  Every tour group is different, every tour guide is different, and this is important to remember.  Especially when it comes to explaining religion and religious buildings, it is really crucial to be able to adapt tours to fit the circumstances.

At the Vilna I was ready to give tours basically half way through the first day I worked there.  Without sounding crazy, it is a bit hard to explain that I think of that building, the Vilna Shul, as an old friend, an elderly neighbor to whom you bring groceries and whose sidewalk you shovel in winter.  When I think of the number of hours we spent together, how well we knew each other, needed each other, explained and represented each other, I can´t help but personify 18 Phillips Street as a sort of love at first site (literally), a building that I moved across the country to be a part of, and that I miss at times, quite earnestly.  Although it has its own idiosyncracies (buildings, like people, are one of a kind), part of me felt that telling the story of Vilna was like retelling stories that my grandparents told me, and that their parents told them.  And when I took people on tours of the Vilna, no matter where they were from, or how old they were, I told them the story the way that I was told the story of Eastern European Jews, like a warm after-dinner conversation with family - equally rich in fact and anecdote and legend.

It took 4.5 months for me to be ready to give a tour of the New Synagogue Centrum Judaicum.  For one thing, German Jewish history is something I am still learning so much about.  There are the Schutzbriefe, the letters of protection, allowing limited numbers of Jews to settle in the Prussian Empire.  It is the home of the Jewish Enlightenment, and the Christian one for that matter, in fact Martin Luther and Moses Mendelssohn (father of the Jewish Enlightenment, and the guy who translated the torah into German) were born in cities just a few km away from each other, albeit a few centuries apart.  There is the process of 19th century emancipation, and the changes of identity that German Jews experience as they consciously think of themselves more and more as regular Germans who happen to be Jewish.  In this is the decision to build a building like the New Synagogue, simultaneously a symbol of permanence and pride in their Berlin community and an exotic "eastern" style Moorish architectural statement - a reminder that even an equal can remain to some extent an outsider.

And, of course, German Jewish history, particularly in Berlin, cannot be separated from the history of the Holocaust, even if I stand behind my belief that it is important not to let Holocaust history be the end or the beginning.  Still, it is an essential, gigantic, overwhelming part of German Jewish history.  And that being said, it´s a part of history I am still learning how to talk about, let alone teach about.  So, I guess I was a bit shocked at myself that reading up on the experience of Berlin´s Jews in the 30s and 40s to prepare for my tour kind of shook me up.  And I think part of it was that I am so fond of Germany, so comfortable here, so intrigued by the language and the people and the culture.  Though the holocaust never feels far away or long ago here, and my work certainly puts me in contact with this history more than the average person, I can usually (honestly I have to) approach it unemotionally (and that is not to say insensitively, but calmly and respectfully).  But reading about 800 years of German Jewish history in one night took my breath away.  Fortunately it was back by 10:15 this morning when it was time to talk to 24 high schoolers.

Later in the day I was invited by some friends to attend my first Fußball game in Germany.  It may seem like a strange activity to pair with this blog, but the game (which ended in a tie between Hertha Berlin and Energie Cottbus) was held at the Olympic Stadium, which was built for the 1936 Olympics, when Hitler presented his Third Reich to the world.  Just as much is remembered from that Olypics that was visible - the first running of the Olympic torch through various countries, the first televised games across the city - as what was not seen - namely the controlled, dehumanizing society Hitler was creating.  It is certainly not the last Olympics in which a government created an illusory society for the world stage.  The Olympic Stadium in Berlin is one of the few buildings from its era that sustained very little damage in the war, and so it is one of the few remaining examples of National Socialist architecture.

We were kind of wimpy and sat in the "family" seating section, as opposed to the general fan section, where you don´t actually have seats and just stand and jump and sing the whole time.  Next time I definitely want to see what it is like to be in that section though.  

I completely enjoyed my first really authentic German sporting experience, even though it was freezing cold, and by the end I couldn´t feel my feet.  As an American, football/soccer is a sport I am still learning to be enthusiastic about, but I am certainly trying.  A lot of people say that soccer (specifically during various World Cups) has been key in bringing a sense of pride and healthy patriotism back to a country that is understandably slow to wave its own flag. 

There were odd moments too.  Positively quirky was the jolly music played everytime Berlin, the home team scored a goal (it makes you want to grab a partner and skip in a circle), the way the man next to me gleefully shouted, "Du Scheiße!(you shit!)" every two seconds, the constant rhythmic jumping from the fan section, and the singing of pro Berlin songs to the theme of "Take me home country road".  Less pleasant was the way the fans extended their arms, often in enthusiastic cheer or anger, in a way that we all couldn´t help agreeing was eerily reminiscent of the Hitler salute.  Of course it wasn´t.  It had nothing to do with it.  Shame on us for reading too closely sometimes, for nitpicking at Germany.  But to an outsider, a first timer, it was too close, and in that stadium it just felt wrong.  In any case we happily created our own variation of a more friendly, open palmed, perhaps, arm gesture they might want to consider adopting.

Anger is a meadow.

February 2011.  They gathered in the streets.  Mobs of people.  And they were angry.  Angry with the status quo.  Angry at the will of the leadership.  And there were police.  In riot gear.  No one knew exactly what role they would play.

Rocks flew.  Windows broke.  Glass was everywhere.

No, this wasn´t Egypt.  It was Friedrichshain, Berlin, Wednesday, February 2, right in front of my apartment.  And no, they weren´s angry with Angela Merkel.  One of the last squats in Berlin had been cleared out days earlier by the police.  It was the end of an era.

After the fall of the Wall, Berlin became a haven for artists and hippies, a symbol of the grunge alternative culture of the 90s.  Neighborhoods like Kreuzberg in the West and Prenzlauerberg and Friedrichshain in the East were colonized by flocks of young people who didn´t want to pay rent or live by someone else´s rules.  But even hippies grow up sometimes, and little by little the city and a newer gentrified generation moved in, and alternative Berlin became a thing of the past.  That is, except for a few corners of Friedrichshain and other areas that held on for dear life.

Supposedly 2,500 police arrived at 14 Liebigstraße to clear the place of the 20 or so leftists living there.  Later that night 1,500 people protested.  I happened to walk right through the protests, by accident, as usual. A friend had offered to help me move a table into my apartment, and so we found ourselves carrying a coffee table through the streets of Friedrichshain just as the protesters were assembling themselves, not ideal, but it went ok, and now I sort of have furniture.

If the protests had been one day later, it would have been particularly awful, as Malka, the friend who had visited the week earlier, was on her way back to Berlin from a poorly timed trip to Egypt that ended in an emergency evacuation through Jordan and Frankfurt.  I won´t go into much detail, as that is her story to tell.  Basically I ended up with a few extra Malka days.  As a refugee camp we were a lot less scheduled than during the first part of her Berlin visit.  It´s even possible that I made up for my failed hostessing skills.  She got to meet my friends, the other fellows and friends and co-workers from Germany, and got a much more authentic look at my life here in Berlin.

The definition of Anger in german is actually meadow...

The worst hostess ever

There she is.  The worst hostess ever.  That´s me in case you have accidentally stumbled upon this blog via a Russian travel website - which consequently actually seems to have happened according to google statistics.  (In other fun news, this is me posing under Napoleon´s hat in the German History Museum in Berlin.  I once saw Napoleon´s (supposed) seat cushion in a museum in the Caribbean, and ever since I have basically been reconstructing the guy, one inanimate object at a time)

But anyway.  The worst hostess ever.  I suppose I am not as bad as that lady who lives in a Gingerbread house, entices young children to visit, locks them in cages and then fattens them up before eating them.  I am definitely nowhere near THAT bad.  I just get really excited about having guests.  Too excited maybe.  A little to eager to make sure everything goes perfectly...

 It is amazing what I learned about myself and my host country when two friends from Boston came to visit in January.

They were my first visitors, and I should give them a lot of credit for flying to Berlin in the middle of January.  Lucky for us all, January in Berlin was incredibly mild.  We haven´t had more than flurries basically since the beginning of the year.

Malka and Hannah arrived on a Sunday morning, and I met them at the airport (actually I woke up at 4 in the morning out of excitement).  It was pretty incredible to seem them after about 8 months and to get news of Beantown, currently under about 3 feet/1 meter of snow.  People from Boston taught me what winter really is, so it is fitting that the girls brought me long underwear and wool socks, even though they had to peel theirs off just about as soon as we reached my apartment (it was about 50 degrees F).  They also brought me chocolate chip cookies, baked by Malka´s mom.  YUM.  And, 3 boxes of matzah ball soup mix.  I have whined about my need for matzah ball soup for weeks now, and the call was finally heard.  Malka offered to bring me matzah meal so I could make my own, but I refused.  What I miss is the mix since that is what my grandma uses (she also puts the matzah balls in wantan soup broth . uhh just like in the old country...)  The cookies were rationed out by the three of us over the course of the week - the matzah ball mix I am saving (just having the boxes in my room on my table is a weird little snippet of home).

What we did:
Well, they got the Rachel style tour of Berlin, which means I walked too fast for way too long until they exhaustedly reminded me about things like, uh, food (I can´t help if I was raised to believe that eating lunch is a sign of personal weakness).  We looked at lots of buildings (Hannah is an architect), and I didn´t really know what most of them were, but I guessed anyway.  We stared at the canal a lot (I like water).  I gave them my first official tour of the Centrum Judaicum, and took them to the Berlin Wall memorial.  We sat in cafes and walked through farmers and crafts markets.  I introduced them to the Döner kebab (Turkish immigrants´fast food contribution to German cuisine... some kind of processed meat roasted on a spit, stuffed into flat bread with salad - it´s more popular in Germany than sausage!).  We visited the city of Potsdam, former capital of the Prussian empire, toured palaces and learned that gardens suck in the winter - no flowers and all the statues get covered with wooden boxes, visited one of the Russian BUKAS who lives in Potsdam who overfed us with all of the "german" food and beverage she had in her fridge (a very jet-lagged Malka fell asleep on her kitchen table).  We went to the city of Dessau to visit the Bauhaus - an important early 20th century achitectural school.


 We got a private tour (the benefit of being a tourist in Germany), and I attempted to translate the very very enthusiastic guide who talked for two hours with us (they were good sports) and then we stopped in Wittenberg where they saw the home and famous church where Luther posted his 95 Theses (ok, I sort of stole some of the tourism ideas from the Humboldt foundation study trip).  And while I worked they toured about a million museums (many of which I have not even visited yet) and due to a lack of cell phone, we had to be pretty old-fashioned and actually plan places and times to meet up.  Ok, I was sort of bossy, over enthusiastic about something, under enthusiastic about... others... but all in all, it was a great trip.

Observations we made together about Germany:
Every commercial property is either a bakery, a döner stand, or a shoe store.  Even non-German cuisine manages to incorporate cabbage in a shocking way.  Public transportation here is amazing (I told you I am sort of obsessed with public transportation).  They actually tell you when the next train is coming... and then it comes on time.  Americans smile a lot more at strangers (oh I have so much to say about this - I think the further east you travel in Europe the less socially acceptable it is to smile at strangers... apparently in Russia it means you are basically an idiot).

They learned some German words: I was really critical of pronunciation, despite the fact that my own is atrocious.  Some favorite words were "entschuldigung" which means "pardon", and is truly just fun to say, and "tschüss" which is "bye" and sounds like a combination of the word "juice" and "Jews"!  It can also be said in a sing song voice, "Choooooooooss" or made cutesy "Choooseeeee".

Then Hannah had to head back to Boston, and Malka stayed for a few more days.  At Malka´s suggestion we spent the day in a small town near Berlin, called Werder, relaxing, wandering around, enjoying the Sunday coffee and cake (kaffee und kuchen) culture in a small cafe in rural Germany.  Then we took two days and visited Dresden, a city I had not yet seen.

Malka had her first experience in a hostel (now that is a truly German travel experience), I learned about Malka´s obsession with cheese... she really likes it a lot... attended Malka´s first Opera (!!) - Carmen- at the famous SemperOper:

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 saw the famously restored Frauenkirche, a church that was totally destroyed in WW2 bombing (literally there was a bit of a wall remaining:  (the dark area is the only part from the original building)

 and now the church is brand spanking new - not an uncommon occurrence in German post war, and post reunification "restoration" if you could even call complete rebuilding that.)  

We also visited the new synagogue in Dresden

 a giant cube shaped building meant to allude to the ancient temple, but which looks more like an Egyptian tomb.  Inside it is quite beautiful, 

 and I found it quite interested that the synagogue and the community center are divided by an empty courtyard where the old synagogue, destroyed in Kristallnacht, once stood (see, even on vacation I am still always at work).  New synagogues in Germany tend to represent some of the most innovative architecture of the last decade - and although my focus is of course historic buildings, it is quite understandable that congregations in large cities composed mostly of new immigrants from the former USSR, are making their own new, fresh marks on German city scapes.

All in all it was great to have Malka and Hannah visit.  I hope they enjoyed their first experience in Germany.


(Pictures of the first part of the trip will be added later.  Hannah has a fancy camera and was our personal photographer!)

February Resolutions

  Much like blogging, it often seems that by the time I get around to making New Year´s Resolutions, the optimal time has passed.  Rather than lazily letting life pass me by, forever remaining the same, flawed person you knew (and loved) last year, I have decided to initiate February Resolutions.  And, while I can´t tell you what those resolutions are (if you say them out loud then you can actually be held accountable for them, you know), I´ll just insinuate what a shame it is that it took me until now to get back on the blogging train.

 The New Year.  There are a lot of moments in the year when I like to be pensive and think about where I was last year, what has changed, the highs, the lows.  In fact, I will pretty contentedly take any and all opportunities to do so... where was I last February 9th... But, for some odd reason, New Years really doesn´t do that for me.  No matter how great or awful the year has been, by the time December 31 comes around, I am just ready to move on with it already.  Unfortunately I learned the hard way four years ago that if I am not actually awake at midnight to physically experience the change of the year, it takes me about 5 times as long to actually acknowledge that a new year has begun, and then I am off kilter for most of the year.  Yeah, I know, lame and pathetic.

Much like the ill-fated New Years of 2006-2007 (it was really one of the more absurd nights of my life), 2010-2011 was also celebrated in Italy, this time in a small village with new friends, gathered around a fireplace.  Without the familiar televised image of Time Square - an illuminated, electrified ball dropping,  thousands of people counting down, wearing ridiculous hats and sounding noise-makers, finding a face in the crowd to kiss, the holiday was nearly unrecognizable.  A minute or two after midnight, everyone began shouting Tanti Agori (which they had been shouting for days regarding nearly every occasion - Christmas, a birthday, anything worth wishing congratulations or well wishes) and kissing everyone in the room, everyone... twice.  And that was it, 2011.  It was real, the future, and I was in it.

A few days later it was time to leave Italy, this time by train.  For 17 hours.  It wasn´t supposed to be 17 hours.  But this is a new year, and none of us knows the rules yet.  In any case, it was a beautful 17 hours.  If they could figure out how to build the tracks, I would happily take a train to the moon.  I could write a whole blog about how much I love and appreciate public transportation, but for now I will just tell you that despite delays, missing a train, changing trains 6 times, and getting locked in the wrong train with no electricity (and being the only person with enough survival instinct to bang endlessly on the train door until someone noticed us), I still love trains.  Love ´em.  It helped that I met the most delightful Italian Social Anthrologist, with whom I shared the journey, cups of coffee, breath-taking views of the snow-covered Alps, and observations about the world.

At the end of the day, I was back in the Berlin Train Station, homeward bound, and then back in the Centrum Judaicum, doing my thing.  And this is 2011.  And this is where I will spend it.  And that´s alright by me.