Last Message from Prenzlauer Berg

Since I have to return the LAN-cable before I leave Sunday, I'll have to wrap up my five weeks in Berlin with this.

The process of insulating and stuccoing the wall of the building behind mine is coming to a close: they began removing the scaffolding this morning. First they unscrew the bolts holding the scaffolding to the wall, and then put a plug into the hole so that moisture doesn't enter and ruin the whole job.



Now when I look out the back window, I see only a very clean white wall...and it feels a little strange to see nothing, blankness. It almost felt like a sort of optical illusion: was I going blind? Was it really foggy out? (Not totally weird...the weather had been beastly hot, and is now like October in St. Louis. Fog would not be out of the question.) The texture lent by the scaffolding and the green gauze covering defined the space (see earlier post, The Stucco Brigade), which is now not defined at all.

The rooms of my apartment were wonderful, even in the heat of the hottest Berlin summer in 100 years. As of last night, it's quite cool and promises to be for the next several days.


A view with the sun coming from the west (through the kitchen, probably around 8 p.m.)


And the view with the sun coming from the east, probably around 6:30 a.m. The days are long in Berlin in the summer, and at the end of June it was quite a challenge to avoid being awakened at 4:30 a.m. when the daylight began to enter the room and the birds (an Amsel...) insisted on singing.


Breakfast was the easiest and best (most reliably good) meal of my days. Great bread with Quark, honey, jam, fresh fruit, and good coffee guaranteed a good start to the day.

The quality of the food here is another topic for itself: it's amazing how much better the lettuce, fruit and other produce are, because they haven't had to travel 2000 miles to get to the store. It's something I will miss. We are getting more local in the U.S. and that's a good thing. We all benefit.

The labeling here emphasizes those benefits. They don't sell soy milk here by claiming that it's healthier. Instead they claim that it takes less energy to produce it (just grow and process the soy...not grain (using pesticide and herbicide) to feed the cattle who produce the milk). The focus here is different, just like their insistence on recycling, reusing and reducing is much more emphatic than in the U.S. And everyone takes it pretty seriously. They are not self-deceivers like we are. For example, there will be no more drilling for oil in the North Sea (announced today) until the security of the platforms is assured. Not like us, where capitalists pressure politicians to guarantee their right to make money, no matter the cost to the environment. After all, the damage in the Gulf is done, isn't it? While I'm very glad to be returning home...and home it is...I'm concerned about our blinders. And having time away makes me more acutely aware of those issues we don't discuss.

That's it for this blog. My first attempt...hopefully not the last.

How do we observe culture?

Culture...little c...is something that isn't found in opera houses (although there are some cool operas here in Berlin playing right now), or in theaters or even in movie theaters. It's found in bars and restaurants, boutiques and grocery stores, newsstands and...in playgrounds.

The playgrounds in Berlin are here and there, on street corners in neighborhoods, in parks, in public gardens, in squares. Sometimes there are fountains, sometimes there are tables with nets for table tennis (ping pong?). I've also seen one with a place to play boule (boccia ball?). Generally there are benches along the periphery for mothers and /or fathers to sit and observe the play of their child(ren). Sometimes there are bathing pools where little kids play naked, something Americans generally don't understand. That's the little c: the things we take for granted, understand as given, and somehow expect other people to agree with us about. However, the agreement is definitely not something to take for granted.

Playgrounds are usually someplace for children to exercise their bodies and their imaginations. The one across Rhinower Strasse from my apartment has shrubs to hide behind, tunnels to go through, a wooden alligator to walk or sit on, hills and valleys.

That's all. No high tech, no fancy equipment. All natural materials. It's generally small children playing there--from those barely walking to those starting school. There's another playground just across the street for, I think, older kids. This one has a ping-pong table where I saw some teens playing, and there is a rope matrix to climb. And for the adults? Two blocks away there is a track and soccer field.



Living in close quarters (apartments in buildings 5-6 storeys tall on courtyards that magnify every sound, every baby's cry, every bottle that breaks as it is thrown into the recycler) makes having places to go to outside the apartment very important. People spend time in parks because it's cooler there on hot days. They need places to be outside. They sit in cafes on sidewalks, benches by playgrounds, under trees in parks. The public places are truly public, like this playground on Sunday in Boxhagener Platz (Friedrichshain/Berlin).



And this is part of what constitutes a culture--it's public places, shared by all. And the places it provides for it's children for creative and active play. It's so "menschlich" here in Berlin. The stress often associated with city living in the U.S. is less here. At least from my perspective after 5 weeks. And that's how I feel, even after being compelled to listen to some teething babies crying a lot and having the courtyard magnify that sound such that I thought it was in my own apartment. That sort of togetherness is not something I crave, but it is something that reminds me that I am part of a community here (or would be if I were staying).

Spielplatz in Kreuzberg

Taking a Walk with Joseph Roth

The former Cafe Dalles, Volkskaffeehaus. It's the only building I found that still looks like it did when Joseph Roth wrote about it.

One of my projects here this summer has been to walk in the steps of one of the great German language writers, the Austrian Jew Joseph Roth. While in Berlin, Roth worked as a newspaper journalist and wrote, among other things, about the migrant Eastern European Jews who passed through Berlin, some on their way to America, in the 20s and early 30s. These people constituted part of what made Berlin cosmopolitan and multicultural.

There's an interesting book researched and compiled by Michael Bienert called Joseph Roth in Berlin. Ein Lesebuch fuer Spaziergaenger (J. R. in Berlin: A Reader for Pedestrians. It's available in English under the title "What I Saw. Joseph Roth in Berlin 1919-1933"). This book came about as part of the 100th birthday recognition of Roth in 2004, and it tempts the reader to retrace the author's steps, even though the streets he saw no longer resemble what is actually there.

Bienert documents these changes exhaustively in the German version of his book and makes it clear that it's hard to find the streets in Roth's texts in part because the names have been changed. The old Jewish quarter of Berlin, known as the Scheunenviertel, was scheduled to be torn down even before World War I in order to replace the buildings with newer ones. Not the last time housing for minorities failed and was condemned by powers that be. So the descriptions published in Roth's feuilleton articles in the early 20s were already describing a world that was nearly gone. Add in two world wars and 40+ years of the German Democratic Republic and the face of this part of town would barely be recognized by a resident from a century before.




This building, for example, had been the location of the Jewish Hotel on the corner of Grenadierstrasse and Hirtenstrasse. Well, Grenadierstrasse is now called Almstadtstrasse, and, as you can see from the picture, there is nothing that remains of the hotel. The building is vintage GDR and the entire street leaves not a hint of what had been a place full of life and commerce. It's pretty barren and only residential now.



Only a block away (just down the Hirtenstrasse away from Almstadtstrasse) there is the old Babylon Theater, in front of which some important history took place, and which is close to the same as it was 80 years ago. The other night they showed the old silent film Berlin: Symphonie einer Stadt with live music to accompany it. So, from block to block, you can indeed find landmarks where the time traveler in you has an anchor point. You just have to take the walk.

Capitalism wins again--removing your tattoos

Who would have thought that the latest niche in small entrepreneurship would be removing tattoos? The preference in this city, at least in the part I've been spending time, is to have as many tattoos and piercings as you can fit into the space provided by your body. And that's only the visible part. Who knows what's underneath the articles of clothing? And it's not just teens: it's mothers in their thirties pushing baby carriages, construction workers, drunks and beggars, punks, and young women with stylish clothing, and not so young women carrying briefcases. A cross-section of society that is pretty inclusive.

In the finer part of Kreuzberg (61 not 36), where the bourgeoisie still has a very solid hold, at the bottom of the Kreuzberg itself, you'll find a shop where you can have your tattoo removed: tattoolos. And they don't just do tattoos: you can also get that permanent make-up removed that you thought would be so great, and you can get some of those age spots removed while you're at it. And they guarantee that it doesn't hurt (that much).



What does this window ad say? It enumerates the reasons for why you might want to free yourself from your tattoo(s):
The tattoo doesn't suit your new job.
The tattoo was done out of "youthful frivolity" and now just doesn't fit.
The tattoo wasn't done professionally and is no longer aesthetically pleasing or is no longer clear.
Or you want to have your tattoo retraced, but it's too large or too dark to allow for that.

All of those things are complications that I would never have considered. Most of the people I see are pretty happy with their tattoos. Some of them are truly on-going works of art. I'm afraid the permanence of it makes it scary for me--and I'm afraid I don't find the option for removal shown above very comforting at all. I guess, if you want a tattoo, you'd better be prepared to keep it, even if the small entrepreneurs are ready to meet your every need.

The Wall Part #2

The picture here is of the Gedenkstaette Bernauer Strasse (see previous post)...a little piece of history that is visited by mobs of German schoolchildren as part of their history lessons. The small museum there has clips of radio interviews from the days and months immediately following the violent division of Berlin. The observation tower shows how the street changed from month to month as pieces of buildings along the south side of the street (the East) were removed bit by bit. People who had lived there were forced to resettle in other parts of the city more distant from the wall. After all, the capital of the GDR was trying to keep from bleeding out all of its population (brain drain like no other: nearly 2000 people each DAY were leaving Berlin in 1961).



One more photo here is from the sector of East Berlin that looked down on Checkpoint Charlie. The building carries a message painted in three languages, just like the signs that stood at all the checkpoints: Attention. You are leaving the --- sector. However, they've modified it slightly to nod with irony in the direction of the capitalist victory over communism: You are entering the non-profit sector. Kapitalist, beware?

The Wall Falling Still

Actually, there isn't much left of the Berlin Wall. These two photos are from the Gedenkstaette (=place that makes you think/remember) called Topographie des Terrors, built on the site of the Gestapo buildings where people (especially, but not only, political opponents to the Nazi regime) were held and interrogated (and tortured). What remains is a large hot field of stones, with the foundations of the building and the stretch of the wall that ran along the Niederkirchner Str. There is a modern exhibit hall on the site (not pictured) that contains a truly excellent exhibit of the rise of the Third Reich and the history of the site. The traditional building at the end on the left in the second picture is the Martin Gropius Bau, which currently houses a wonderful Frida Kahlo exhibit.

What does remain of the wall in other parts of Berlin is small strips of cobblestones with the words "Berliner Mauer 1961-1989" embedded in them.

Of course, there are other "pieces" of the wall. There's the East Side Gallery (google it for good pictures of world-famous "graffiti") and there is also the Gedenkstaette Berliner Mauer in the Bernauer Strasse. (See next post.) This was the street that was split lengthwise down the middle by the wall. People jumped out of windows of buildings that were in the "east" (actually on the south side of the street) to hit the sidewalk in the "west" (north of the buildings) in the days immediately following the initial laying out of the wall. As the building of the wall progressed, the destruction of those houses on the Bernauer Strasse proceeded as well. First people were made to wall up the windows facing the street. Later, the buildings were demolished above the ground floor and their facades served to double the wall. Finally even those portions of the buildings were carried off. A church (the Reconciliation Church, a protestant congregation) was walled off from those in the "west" who were part of the congregation, and eventually, the GDR government demolished the church. What remains are open fields along the street. A chapel has replaced the Versoehungskirche on the site, and holds daily memorial services for the over 160 documented deaths resulting from attempted escapes.

The last place you'll see the wall is on the many postcards being sold in tourist souvenir stores. Can those really contain a small fingernail-sized piece of the wall? Well, they've got a piece of some wall or other, but I wouldn't bet that it's from the original. We are already 21 years past the fall of the wall, and looking at 20 years of unified Germany. You'd be lucky (?) to get dust from the real thing at this point.

Die Putzbrigade / The Stucco Brigade

The progress on the building that is out my kitchen window (across the second courtyard from my building which lies between the first and second courtyards behind the street) continues. There were more men on the scaffolding that day than had been there in the first two weeks of my stay. During that time, they applied the insulating foam, then they applied a layer of stucco, and this day's work, I believe, was the application of the second/finish layer of stucco.

The only problem with this, fun as it's been to observe the progress, is that on the days that they work, they start at 7 a.m. About the time that I get up. I'm not complaining, but usually I like to shower after I get up, and if I look out my very clear bathroom window (which goes out from the shower), I see them very clearly. And, logically, they could see me very clearly if they were looking at anything other than their work. My strategy for dealing with this minor inconvenience has been to steam up the glass before entering the shower. But with the heat in Berlin of the past week, that has not seemed to be a good solution. Luckily, they haven't been working, so I can continue to bathe in the morning, stubborn as I am. I wonder if I'll get to see the scaffolding come down.

Hidden Paradise(s)?

For those who have been to Berlin, this is nothing new. But for those who haven't, maybe it will be something that entices you to visit the capital of Germany. The building style in Berlin is characterized by the courtyard. The buildings stand right up next to the sidewalk, but periodically there are wide entryways that give you a glimpse of what lies behind the building. This entryway (typically wide enough for a horse and wagen...or a car) leads back into a courtyard and perhaps to another building, behind which you can find yet another courtyard (Hinterhof). The buildings are like concentric squares, with space between that the residents turn into small green spaces, play areas, quiet spots to sit and enjoy coffee or a glass of your favorite beverage.

The courtyards that are on either side of my apartment look more or less uninteresting. Some people have plants on their balconies(if they have one) or outside their windows, but the courtyard itself is simply orderly, not cultivated.
Here you can see a late afternoon (or rather, evening--it stays light well past 9 p.m.) view into the first of two courtyards. The second courtyard, from which I enter my stairwell, you can see in my second post. It's been scaffolded so that the building behind mine can be insulated with foam before new stucco is applied.


Other courtyards are more interesting. Here is one from Potsdam:



Though it might be hard to judge from the pictures, courtyards are quiet spaces, away from the noise of traffic, streetcars and passers-by, who catch a glimpse of peace as they hurry by.

Prenzlauer Berg--home away from home

Prenzlauer Berg--21 June 2010
The place where I will live during the next five weeks is characterized by the picture to the right. Old, classic buildings shoulder-to-shoulder with newly renovated classic buildings. Nearly 20 years of unified Berlin can be measured in the number of buildings remaining to be renovated. Every year fewer.

The building(s) in which our seminar members have our apartments is one such renovated building. It looks more like the building on the left from the street, but from inside, that is, from the courtyard, it's looking rather good. That can be seen from the second picture here.
This is in fact the view from my kitchen window. The man there on the scaffolding on the left is (slowly) replacing the stucco on the brick of the building. The old stucco had to have been removed before...or it fell off. Across the courtyard (and this is the second courtyard from the street) you can see what the completed renovation of a stucco building looks like. The spiral staircase is something new.





That juxtaposition of old and new, disintegrating and gentrified, is repeated here in the stairwell of my part of Rhinower Str. 9. As I walked up the stairs (and there are many: I live in an apartment on the 4th floor above ground (5th floor for Americans= 4.OG)), I noticed that one of the spindles had been replaced with a newly turned (or newly stripped of paint) one. Among the gray sticks, it looked pretty funny--a strange reversal of old and new. It's possible that the cost of renovating didn't necessarily allow for all of the spindles to be stripped of their old layers of paint, nor for new ones to be turned. But to have the single old (new?) spindle among the cheap (new?) ones was a sort of ironic echo on a small scale of the juxtaposition of old and new that pervades much of a neighborhood on the east side of where the Berlin Wall stood. What's new (i.e. gray sticks) isn't necessarily always an improvement. It just takes time and patience to restore what was good.

A beginning

Well, one must start somewhere.
This will be my first attempt at blogging as a way to record and reflect on my experiences in Berlin, scheduled to begin June 20. I hope that as I do this, I learn and acquire a new tool in teaching my students German, and about Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland and other places where people choose German to communicate.
Look for photos and short posts, in English and sometimes in German (or perhaps that will be a parallel blog?). More next week.