Remainders: First Impressions of Home

Back in October, I went home to Arkansas for a week. Although it was my first time back in the States since I had left ten months earlier, I wasn’t expecting much culture shock. After all, what is ten months abroad in the grand scheme of things? And yet, there were a few things that surprised me upon my return to the U.S., during those seven hours I was stuck in the Charlotte Airport and getting reacquainted with my country.

For starters, everyone seemed really large, and by large I mean extremely fat. I don’t mean to be unkind. They just were bigger. Much bigger. Germany has one of the highest rates of obesity in Europe, yet even the roly-poly Germans are nothing compared to the cross-section of America that I saw walking through the Charlotte Airport. I’m talking about people so large they needed to be pushed around in wheelchairs, even though they were only in their 40s. You just don’t see that in Europe, and I guess I had forgotten how common in was in America.

Diet alone can’t explain the difference in girth. The German diet is mostly meat and potatoes, just like the American diet, and the Germans have an incorrigible sweet tooth, e.g. Strüdel, Pfannkuchen, and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. In warmer months they’ll even eat ice cream every single day. I suppose the difference comes down to their exercising more. Germans do walk a lot. Most downtown shopping districts here are completely off-limits to cars, and then there’s the whole Nordic walking craze. But I seem to remember the Nordic Track being very popular in the U.S. about 15 years ago, and I don’t remember that it did much to minimize the national waistline.

Then there was the beer. The Germans invented beer, or, rather, the Germans are know for their Bier, but would you believe that it was actually the Egyptians who invented it? Anyway, I’ve always been fond of a good beer. Offer me the choice between a nice glass of wine and a good beer, and I’ll almost always choose the beer. I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur, but I’d always found that there were plenty of good American-brewed beers: There’s the Abita Purple Haze from New Orleans, or Rogue Dead Guy Ale from Oregon, or the amazing line of ales from Unibroue in Quebec: Trois Pistoles, Maudite, Fin du Monde – too die for! And then there were perfectly good fall-back beers, available all over the U.S., such as the Massachusetts-brewed and bottled Sam Adams.

However, while sitting in the airport Chilli’s, I order a Sam Adam’s Oktoberfest, one of their line of seasonal beers and a former favorite of mine from my years in Boston. I nearly spit out my first sip. It just tasted weird – not like beer at all. Perhaps it was just that I had recently been to the original Oktoberfest and the comparison was too stark. Of course, after drinking half of my “super-sized” beer – a full liter – it tasted just fine, but the initial taste was incredibly strange and unappealing, indeed.

On the other hand, I had forgotten how nice Americans are, at least in comparison to Germans. It’s not that the Germans are cold, per se. They are incredibly warm with one another. When they meet each other on the street they’ll kiss each other on the cheek and hold hands while they catch up on family events, but they will rarely acknowledge even the presence of a stranger. I often go for long walks around the old Würzburg castle, a narrow road that winds through the vineyards and is only wide enough for one person. When I meet a German on the road and do that delicate dance of inching past them, they rarely say “Hallo” or “Servus” or “grüß Gott,” let alone "hi" or "hello." I’m never sure if it’s because they can tell right away that I’m foreign, or if it’s just because I’m foreign to them. But I always acknowledge their presence with a nod or a word or greeting, and it makes me feel very slighted not to get so much as glance in return.

But back in Charlotte, back in the South, everyone is friendly and familiar, everyone acted like they were my long-lost friend – the barista at Starbucks, the cashier at the bookstore, the waitress at Chilli’s. And oh, what a difference it makes! I noticed this on our recent trip to England as well. The waitress complimented me on my coat, the janitress made jokes with me, the bus driver gave me the student discount even though he knew I wasn’t a student. Probably it’s an Anglo-Saxon thing. Or maybe it’s about speaking the local language like a native, but little charities like this make all the difference in the world. And boy, how they make you feel at home!

Remainders: Oktoberfest, Pt. I

I few months back – October to be exact – I finally did what all of my German friends and colleague warned me not to do: I went to the Münchener Oktoberfest. My German school friends who went last year all vowed never to go again. My teacher warned me about the inevitable bar brawls, and a friend who lives in Munich actually witnessed one, broke it up, and handed the culprits over to the police – before vowing never to go again.

Still, I don’t think one can live in Bavaria for a year and resist the pull of such a world-famous event. Even far-flung friends of mine succumbed to its draw. Jesse timed his visit to coincide with it. Jeff, Dan #1 and Dan #2 came over from Boston for it. And Paul took the night train over from Prague. (I like to pretend they were all coming to Germany to see me, but I guess I know better.) Anyway, I figured with five strapping lads escorting me to the Theresienwiese, I would be all right. Little did anyone suspect that in the end it would be yours truly who saved the boys from angry mobs. But, I’ll get to that later.

Just getting there nearly proved too much of a challenge for us at first. We had decided to take the 4:00 am train to München – in order to beat the crowds, you see – only to find that we had booked a ride on the Oktoberfest Express. Pimply-faced youths in traditional Dirndls and Lederhosen seemed to have come to the train station straight from the diskos, and they brought the party with them. It was standing room only on our train, and everyone had a case or two of beer, which they emptied over the course of the 5-hour journey while singing folk tunes till they were hoarse. And to think, I brought along a pillow, so that I might catch a few Z’s! Too tired to join in the fun, Jesse, Jeff, Dan #1 and I stared at each other through puffy, sleep-encrusted eyes and cursed the energy of the young.

By the time we reached München, though, even we were raring to go. We met up with Paul and Dan #2 and followed the exodus of people from the train station to the fairgrounds. It was truly a migration of Biblical proportions, but we didn’t need a prophet to show us the way to the Promised Land.

However, the popularity of Oktoberfest is nearly its downfall. There are roller coasters, carnival rides, and games of chance, but the real attractions are the beerhalls, dozens of massive tents run by each of the major Munich breweries: Augustiner, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, etc. Each tent can seat thousands, but as we quickly discovered, they filled up within minutes of opening. We arrived at a quarter past nine and were turned away at every single door. Finally I managed to sweet talk our way into Ochsenbraterei – at last my German skills were useful for something! – but even though we were “in” we couldn’t get a table, and without a table you can’t get served.

Discouraged but not defeated, we moved on to “Oktoberfest Plan B” and headed across town to the original Hofbräuhaus. As I mentioned before, every day is like Oktoberfest at the Hofbräuhaus, with a full Oompah band, steaming Weißwürste, and never-ending rounds of Pilsner, Hefeweißbier and Dunkelweißbier. You could have fooled us that we weren’t at the “real” Oktoberfest – especially after the third or fourth Maß!

Later in the afternoon, we moved the party over to Chinesiches Pagoda in the Englisher Garten for giant pretzels and even more beer. I considered that I was doing my sex proud by matching the boys one-for-one with the five liters of beer we drank that day. Only later Jeff informed me that they hadn’t wanted me to feel like a lightweight, so they had been taking drinks from my glass whenever my back was turned. Everyone except Jesse, that is. Jesse was doing no team proud that day. But what happens at Oktoberfest, stays at Oktoberfest …

At about 6:00 pm we threw in the towel and took the train to Augsburg, where we had rented hotel rooms for the night. Oktoberfest is such a big tourist attraction – some 6.4 million people attended the two-week event this year – that every hotel room in München had been sold out for months, and we were forced to overnight some 100 km away. But we weren’t the only ones, the train to Augsburg was packed full-to-bursting with fellow Oktoberfest revelers.

So, we ended the day much the way we began it: positively swaying under the combined excitement of a couple thousand people. The second-class cabins became so overcrowded that the normally law-abiding Germans ignored the strict seating rules and moved the party into the first-class. The conductors gave up trying to chase us out. And this time, the boys and I were wide awake, partying with the best of them.

Next: Oktoberfest, Part II …

The Little Blue House

Although Edmonton itself was a big disappointment, I’m more or less happy with the house we’ve rented. It’s just like the description and the pictures the landlord sent us: “Older Character Home with Established Raspberry Patch.” Kevin and I call it “the little blue house.”

I just wish I’d thought to ask for pictures of the neighborhood before we signed the lease. Quel horreur! In our defense, we tried to do our research. We checked city websites and looked at aerial photos on Google Earth, but from hundreds of feet up in the air you can’t see that our tree-line boulevard is a major thoroughfare full of dilapidated houses, mumbling vagrants, and back alleys full of refuse. When stepping foot onto our driveway for the first time, I accidentally stepped on a used condom! Welcome to the neighborhood, I guess.

Still, I’m determined to stick it out for the remainder of our time in Edmonton, which I hope will be of short duration. In part, I don’t want the trouble or expense of having to move again until we leave the city for good. And after more than a year in various rented rooms, I ready to be settled. But more importantly, our house really is pretty cute, if you look past its chipping exterior and frightening neigbhorhood. And anyway, it was the nicest one we’d seen in our months-long rental search. I just hate to think of my future home as a prison. I worry that I’ll never want to step outside my front door.

But let’s focus on the positive, shall we? If it must be a cage, it will be a gilded one. The house has lots of windows, hardwood floors, and real plaster walls. The Art Deco furnace doesn’t work, but at least the landlords left it in place. There’s nothing more charming than a mantelpiece – except maybe a mantelpiece with a working fireplace. Anyway, I love the sun porch. It has wall-to-wall windows, and yet is remarkably warm and cozy. When the Alberta winter stretches out into April, or even May, I’ll just sit out there on my wicker settee with a cat and a book, surrounded by sunny windowsills full of narcissi.

The house consists of five rooms: a living room, dining room, kitchen, and two bedrooms. There's a a basement that's as big as the entire house, but even though it's "finished," it's completely uninhabitable. The living room and dining rooms are really just one room, separated by a couple of short built-in bookcases. This masks the fact that both rooms are incredibly tiny (just 12’ by 13’ each). The kitchen is even smaller – too small for a table and chairs, which means that we’ll have to eat all our meals in the dining room – but I think that’s kinda nice, actually. I hate the waste of little-used formal rooms.

The front bedroom will be ours, and the smaller one will be for guests, should any of you want to visit us in our little prairie homestead. But the tiny guest bedroom will also have to double as a study and accommodate wall-to-wall bookshelves in addition to a little day bed. Still, it should be cozy and bohemian looking, and with my little writing desk tucked underneath the window overlooking the garden, it will probably be my favorite room in the house.

As for the yard, well, it needs some work, but I was forewarned about that. Except for the raspberry bushes lining the fence, it’s complete empty. My plan is to build raised beds for herbs and vegetables near the house and create a thick, circular border of cutting flowers along the back fence, with a small plot of grass in the middle. But before I can begin with any of that, I’ve got to build up the soil. Alberta is said to have the richest soil in the North American prairies, but you wouldn’t know it to run your fingers through the dirt in my backyard. It is incredibly dry and rocky, after years of neglect. So my priority this winter will be to start a vermiculture in the basement. All that uninhabitable space might as well be good for something. Hopefully, I’ll have a cheap, rich source of compost come spring.

On the bright side, I’ve got a cute house and a garden with potential, none of which I could’ve had if we’d stayed in Boston. True, the neighborhood is pretty seedy, but maybe if I spruce up my own yard with flowering shrubs and an annual border, my neighbors will, too. And then before you know it, maybe the whole neighborhood will start to transform. Well, a girl can dream, at least. Actually, my next-door neighbor on the left already has a cute little kitchen garden out back, as evidenced by a fresh harvest of potatoes drying on her patio last week. I figure a neighbor who gardens can’t be all bad. Now, if only it were catching…

Edmonton

Kevin and have just returned from a quick trip to Edmonton to survey the city we will call home for the next couple of years, and our initial appraisal could not have been more discouraging. Everything about Edmonton is the opposite of what I think makes a good city; everything about Edmonton is at odds with the life I have tried to create for myself as an adult. I can truly say without bias, and I hope without self-pity, that the city of Edmonton – my future home – has no redeeming qualities.

To prove that I went there with an open mind, let me emphasize that my first impressions of the city were not necessarily negative ones. As Kevin and I drove to our hotel in the Old Strathcona neighborhood near the university, I was pleasantly surprised to find a bustling nightlife. Just like in the club districts in more cosmopolitan locales, young people were spilling out of bars and clubs up and down the main drag; the only difference here was that the clubs were blaring country music, and a surprising number of the clubgoers were wearing cowboy hats.

But I don’t discriminate. I actually like country music, and I own a well-worn pair of red cowboys boots myself, which I’m looking forward to pulling out of storage. And who cares if half the establishments were strip joints? It’s all part of the city’s Wild West appeal, right? I’ll even try to overlook the lapse in taste that allowed somebody to name one of them “Filthy McNasty’s.”

No, the disappointment came the next morning in the cold, cold light of day. And by cold, I mean 18 degrees Fahrenheit. The bright, unrelenting light of the far North revealed Edmonton to be one of the most hideous cities I had ever seen. It’s what I imagine Detroit looks like – Detroit being the code word in my lexicon for a gritty industrial city, darkened by the exhaust of too many cars and blighted by urban decay. In the so-called “downtown” I saw few restaurants, even fewer shops, and mile-long stretches of abandoned factories and automotive junkyards. And in the downtown neighborhood where Kevin and I have rented a house no one seemed inclined to dispose of the household garbage littering their front yards, much less plant a tree or a flowerbed. There wasn’t the faintest sign of beauty anywhere. In fact, I doubt that in such barren soil anything beautiful could ever grow.

Despite my aesthetic objections, Edmonton’s biggest problem actually seems to be its out-of-control urban sprawl. It has the lowest population density of any city in North America, with about one million inhabitants spread across some 264 square miles. Although it’s a wealthy city – the entire oil-producing province is riding a huge economic wave – it’s also a young city. Very little was built there before 1945, and so it was designed with the driver, not the pedestrian in mind.

Today it’s a tangle of highways and exit ramps, stretching 12 lanes in some places. It seems that whenever a new school or subdivision or shopping center was needed, the modus operandi of the city planners – if Edmonton even has a city planning commission – was just to build farther and farther afield. Older neighborhoods were left to languish and decay. After fifty years of rampant sprawl, the city is now so unwieldy that any mode of living, sans automobile, is unthinkable. The only way to make the city truly livable, in my opinion, would be to bulldoze the whole thing and start from scratch, but I think someone might object – inexplicably.

As it is, the city has no heart, no real urban core, like a Boston or a Chicago or even a Little Rock. Instead of a city center it has a mall, the West Edmonton Mall, the largest mall in North America. In addition to shops and restaurants, it’s home to a water park, two movie theatres, a golf course, an Olympic-size skating rink, and a Sea World exhibit complete with real-live sea lions, sharks, and flamingos. It’s as big as many cities and to a certain extent even tries to mimic the better-planned ones. There’s a Bourbon Street wing, a Chinatown wing. There’s even a wing called “Europa,” a faithful reproduction of a French boulevard right down to the wrought-iron balconies and window boxes full of annuals. But of course these flowers are made of silk, and behind the fiberglass façades, there are no real shops, no real apartments. I am embarrassed to say that during our three days in Edmonton, Kevin and I went to the West Edmonton Mall twice, for a total of 20 hours. But in our defense there was just nothing else to do, nowhere else to go.

I suppose being dependent on a car is not oppressive for most people. Most Americans drive cars. But I don’t, at least not for the past eight years, and Kevin never has. And frankly we prefer it that way. I’ve liked not having to drive, to pay car insurance, to deal with the DMV. In Boston, I loved that I didn’t need a big house full of nice things because my neighborhood was my home. The coffee shop down the street was my living room; the movie theatre a few blocks away was my home entertainment system. I knew by name my local barista, my neighborhood video clerk, my Russian seamstress and the lovely Japanese couple who served me sushi every Friday. And because the neighborhood was communal property, everyone worked to keep it nice. To borrow a phrase from another raging social debate: “When everyone drives, something is lost.”

… And something else is accumulated, too, in the form of CO2 emissions and political enmity in the oil-exporting countries of the world. I suppose I enjoyed a certain degree of smug superiority that came from not owning a car. Now my carbon footprint will be as big as everyone else’s and I, too, will add fuel to the fire in the Middle East and fan the flames destroying our environment.

I could just not drive, you say. Edmonton does have a bus system. It’s true, I could. But frankly, I wouldn’t even want to walk the four blocks from my house to the nearest bus stop. Although our house is as cute as portrayed in the pictures, we neglected to ask about the neighborhood. And it is depressing. When I walked around it last week with Kevin, I felt terribly vulnerable – threatened even. We passed angry guard dogs snarling behind chain-link fences, posses of thuggish-looking youth on tricked-out bicycles, and piles of drunken homeless people blocking doorways and bus shelters. I suppose in a city where everyone who can drive does, the only people left on the sidewalks are people so poor or so incapacitated by substance abuse and mental illness that they can’t pass a driving test, much less make a car payment.

The curious thing is that such neighborhoods aren’t exactly foreign to me. When my family moved to Little Rock 12 years ago, we bought a house in a racially and socio-economically mixed neighborhood in the historic downtown, but just on the edge of what was considered “safe,” or gentrified. Walking my dog around the neighborhood, I routinely encountered drunks and the mentally ill. On Friday and Saturday nights squad cars patrolled my street for prostitutes and actual helicopters (“ghetto birds” my brother and I called them) hovered above the nightclub across the street to discourage parking-lot drug deals.

Still, I never had a single problem in all the years I lived there. I was never accosted and never felt at risk. Although once, when stopping at a liquor store, one of the neighborhood drunks told me I needed to get back in my car and drive away, immediately. “It’s not safe for you here, white girl,” he said helpfully and with such earnestness that it was hard for me not to laugh. I was one block from home. At the same time, I scoffed at my friends whose parents wouldn’t let them leave their comfortable white suburbs to visit me in “the Hood,” and I berated them for what I perceived as their latent racism and lack of worldliness.

And yet now, I wouldn’t even walk my dog around my Edmonton neighborhood. I would drive him the half-mile to the dog run in a nicer neighborhood, and I hate that. So what’s the difference? Did I become more conservative with age, more close-minded? Would I feel more “at home” if my Edmonton neighbors were black instead of Asian and Native American? I don’t even want to start down that road. Theoretically, we could break our lease and move somewhere nicer. Don’t think I haven’t considered it. But the fact is that in Edmonton there isn’t really anywhere nicer. There are safer, more gentrified neighborhoods, but they are plastic suburban communities full of their own horrors. There is no Edmonton equivalent to my Brookline apartment or my Coolidge Corner studio.

The funny thing is that to the unbiased observer, Edmonton is not that much different from my hometown of Little Rock. Little Rock suffers from the same effects of urban sprawl, and everyone in the city is forced to drive. I even know people who will drive from one end of a strip mall to the other rather than walk the hundred yards. And yet, I would insist that unlike Edmonton, Little Rock has real charm. And it’s not just that my family and most of my friends live there. The city has historic integrity and a promising future, and it’s actually a really nice place to live.

In the past ten years, I’ve watched with wonder as the Little Rock has experienced downtown revitalization bringing in hip bars and boutiques, a presidential library, a thriving farmers’ market and million-dollar condos. Every time I returned home from Boston I was surprised by how the gap between the two cities has narrowed, both in amenities and in mindset. But there is none of that in Edmonton, at least not that I can see from the window of a moving vehicle.

And yet for someone out there, Little Rock is their Edmonton. And so, does it follow then that for someone else, Edmonton is their Little Rock? Is there actually someone who finds Edmonton a beautiful, livable city? And if so, where do they live and are there any apartments available in their building?

Despite my whining, I am determined to stick it out in the house we have rented. I will plant a garden and will make my home an oasis of beauty, even if it’s in the midst of a vast wasteland of ugly. I’ve also promised myself not to become trapped in the gilded cage I’ll build for myself. I’ll venture out to explore new neighborhoods and have new experiences. I’m planning on taking a German class and a cooking class while I wait for my work visa to go through, and maybe I’ll meet a few people there who will make Edmonton feel as much like a home as Little Rock does.

And I supposed that if there is any silver lining in all this – that is, if I can see clearly through the tears of my disappointment – it will be the destruction of my snotty elitism, my blue-state exceptionalism. After all, I did not exempt myself from buying gas in Boston because I was virtuous, but because I didn’t need it. Now, I’ll no longer inhabit that rarified society whose residents can afford to turn up their noses at people who drive cars, who live in ugly neighborhoods, who go to malls – in other words, like most Americans and Canadians. I’m sure there are many people the world over who would count them quite lucky.

And anyway, if I do get to homesick for a different way of life, I can always go to the West Edmonton Mall and sit down at a table in Café Europa and imagine myself somewhere else.

Tea and the Queen

Kevin and I just returned from an amazing week in England: Seven whole days without rain, and the most beautiful fall foliage and Technicolor sunsets I’ve ever seen. I had half a mind to set down my bags and stay forever, but everyone kept warning me that such weather was extremely rare and that after months of cold, steady rain, I’d be eager to be quit of the place. I am not entirely convinced.

The first leg of our stay, and the real reason for our trip, was for Kevin to give a lecture at Oxford and be wined and dined by the Physics department there. Nice work if you can get it, huh? Fortunately, English hospitality extends to consorts, and I was allowed to tag along.

The English do very well by their guests, which is saying a lot coming from a Southerner. Kevin and I were put up in a suite of rooms in an 18th century country house owned by All Soul’s College. Of course, in the intervening years, the City of Oxford has greatly expanded its borders, and now the country house is in the middle of town. But it still retains an old walled garden out back, and so every morning I could look out our sitting room window at the dew on the lawn and remaining roses on the vine and pretend I was in a Jane Austen novel. (Apparently older colleges, like Merton and Christ Church, are so old and land-rich they have enough space out back to keep deer!)

Lovely as the city looked from my window, the siren song of London was calling me. I had been to London twice before, but the city offers so much in the way of museums and shops and landmarks, that I had barely scratched the surface. My plan for the trip had been to take the shuttle bus into London every day, while Kevin earned our keep chatting up the Oxford dons. So on Tuesday, I caught the early bus to town and set to work. A stroll through Hyde Park? Check. Tour of the National Gallery? Check. A live concert at St. Martins-in-the-Field? Check. See the queen? Check.

To explain: I was walking by Buckingham Palace as part of my to-do list, when Elizabeth Regina herself emerged to greet King Abdullah, Keeper of the Mosques of Mecca and Medina, who stopped by on his Grande Tour visiting the European heads of state. So, it was not so much a personal audience as a glimpse in passing. Still, it was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen: The Palace and Mall were swathed in equal numbers of Union Jacks and Saudi flags; and interspersed between Britons in feathered hats and pin stripe suits were throngs of school children draped in Saudi flags. Meanwhile, marching bands and cavalry brigades paraded by as if the Empire had never fallen. According to the bobby (do they still call them that?), Elizabeth and Abdullah were headed down to the Mews to dance a Waltz. I’m sure it must have been some party, but I didn’t stick around long enough to witness it. I had a date in Oxford for cream tea.

Now, I do not know if “tea” is still a daily tradition in Britain, but during my week there, I had it every day at 4:00 on the dot. After one of those enormous English breakfasts of eggs and bacon and sausage and toast and marmalade and … and … and … – you’re really not hungry until late afternoon.

Anyway, I liked it so much that I plan on re-importing this tradition to North America. I mean, what’s not to like about a menu that consists of bottomless cups of tea and homemade scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream?! I realize the term “clotted cream” probably has some negative connotations – clotted arteries, anyone? – but as far as I’m concerned, it is the ambrosia of the gods. It’s made by slowly reducing unpasteurized milk for several hours until it reaches the consistency of cream cheese. But unlike Philly Lite, clotted cream is as sweet as ice cream and 55% fat. Needless to say, after a solid week of generous helpings of the stuff, I’m looking a little more solid around the middle.

That evening, Claudio, our host, and Anna, his girlfriend – old friends of ours from Boston – took us on a walking tour of Oxford: into the gated colleges and down narrow alleys crowded with Tudor houses. By night, Oxford itself appeared to be so interesting that I decided to spend the rest of my visit exploring its treasures. After all, once you’ve met the queen, what else is there to do in London?

Berlin Highlights: the Holocaust Memorials

There's no question that Berlin has brilliant architecture to spare, but I find it interesting that besides the Reichstag, the city's two most interesting pieces are memorials to Germany’s darkest moment: the Holocaust.

Peter Eisenman’s ""Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" is quite simply one of the most interesting and emotional pieces of architecture I’ve ever seen. Thousands of concrete stelae cover a space in central Berlin that’s roughly the size of a football field, and each stele is said to be unique – in terms of height and thickness – representing, in a way, the uniqueness of the individual victims of the Holocaust. For a contemporary viewer like me, who’s heard the figure “six million murdered Jews” repeated again and again until it almost loses all meaning, it was a powerful reminder of the individual nature of this colossal tragedy.

More astonishing, though, was the site’s uncanny resemblance to the Jewish cemeteries of Old Europe, with its crowded disorganized rows of wilding-titling rough-hewn stones. Of course, all but a handful of these cemeteries were destroyed during Hitler’s reign of terror, and apparently it was not uncommon for the Reich to reuse the stones as street pavers. The only extant example I’ve ever seen is the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, and Eisenman’s memorial perfectly captures the feel of that unusual space. I find it really fitting that a memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews also manages to pay tribute to, and in a way to recreate, a such an important symbol Europe’s ancient Jewish culture – without it seeming contrived.

Visiting the memorial is also deeply unsettling physical experience, one that’s to make you feel small and vulnerable. As you walk down a subtle slope and deeper into the memorial, the stelae, which appeared about waist high from the outside, suddenly shoot up like trees in some petrified forest. The towering stones, leaning as they do at noticeable angles, looked as if they might fall at any moment, and the cobblestone paths between them are uneven and undulating, as if the Earth is rolling beneath your feet. It reminded me a bit of being eight years old and walking through the “Casa Magnetica” at Six Flags, where everything was built at a 45-degree angle, and yet the memorial always manages to stay above the level of some amusement park ride.

In the center of the field the stelae reach their greatest height, some ten or twenty feet tall, and no matter how bright the sun is shining very little of it ever reaches the ground. It is a very deep, dark place. From this vantage point, the rows of stones stretch out as far as the eye can see, curving slightly at the ends so that there seems to be no exit. It’s very easy to become lost inside. Once Kevin and I became separated, and it was twenty minutes before we found each other again – calling out for one another over the tops of the stelae.

On the day we visited, I noticed several younger tourists used this very sense of disorientation to play an excellent game of hide-and-seek. However, some of the older visitors were really put off by this, deeming it inappropriate behavior at a Holocaust memorial. But Eisenman, himself Jewish, has emphasized from the beginning that he didn’t want to dictate the memorial’s interpretation or even its use. “People are going to picnic in the field. Children will play tag in the field. There will be fashion models modeling there and films will be shot there. I can easily imagine some spy shoot 'em ups ending in the field,” he told Der Spiegel. “What can I say? It's not a sacred space.”



But the Germans had other ideas. Fearing that the memorial might become a target for neo-Nazi graffiti, they insisted on coating the stones with an anti-graffiti sealant. But Eisenman was against this from the start, saying that the memorial could serve as an important litmus test for public sentiment. “If a swastika is painted on it, it is a reflection of how people feel,” he said. “And if it remains there, it is a reflection of how the German government feels about people painting swastikas on the monument.” So far, no graffiti of any sort has appeared.

In addition, the private foundation that owns the site has also installed an “education center” beneath the memorial, also against Eisenman’s wishes. It explains, in very apologetic tones, the history of the Holocaust and points out the meaning of the memorial and the lessons the visitor should take away. It never ceases to amaze me how the Germans can never let a thing just be. They are big on intention, interpretation, and didacticism here. Fortunately, you can completely avoid this room, which is underground, and interpret the memorial for yourself. You might not know it’s there at all unless you go looking for it.



Just a few blocks away, is Berlin’s other big Holocaust attraction, if one can call it that: the Jewish Museum-Berlin. A few years ago, the museum got a new look: a building from the American architect Daniel Liebeskind, the one with the funny black glasses who won the competition to design site plan for the new World Trade Center. Titled “Between the Lines,” the Berlin building is a “deconstructivist masterpiece” (or so says the museum’s Web site), and immediately after its completion it was opened to the public – long before it held any exhibits. The empty space itself was unusual enough to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Like Eisenman’s memorial, the Jewish Museum is designed in such a way as to create a sense of insecurity through uneven and sloping floors and walls that jut-out at odd angles. (I apologize for not knowing which architect first came up with this concept; both structures were built around the same time.) But the Jewish Museum caused even more of the “Casa Magnetica”-effect than the Holocaust memorial: I actually felt a little dizzy and nauseous inside, especially on the staircases. Even more than Eisenman’s project, though, Liebeskind’s building attempts to give a physical form to the idea of the Holocaust. Its footprint is an enormous zigzag, which Liebeskind calls a “broken Star of David.” OK, then. If you want to be literal about the extermination of the Jews, I guess a broken six-point star is the way to go.


Critics of the museum have claimed that the space is overly thought-out at best, and downright kitschy at worst. Compared to Eisenman’s more stripped-down space, I would have to agree. The main exhibit space consists of three long halls, or “axes” as Liebeskind calls them, awkwardly named “The Axis of the Holocaust,” “The Axis of Emigration,” and the “Axis of Continuity,’ which – you guessed it – correspond with the typed of stories they tell. Still, Liebeskind’s boutique design is not the real purpose of the Jewish Museum. The exhibits, which chart the stories of a few dozen real families through the years of the Holocaust using their letters and photos and artifacts, are why I went and why I’d go back again an again. I guess the most that can be said for the axes is that they don’t detract from the brilliantly curated exhibits they hold.

However, Liebeskind’s “voids,” five enormous empty spaces at the end of the axes, are amazing. There are five voids in all, but the two that stood out most were the “Memory Void” and Liebeskind’s own masterpiece, “The Holocaust Tower.”

The “Memory Void” houses an installation by Israeli artist Menasche Kadishman titled Schalechet, or “Fallen Leaves” in English, but the 10,000 or so three-dimensional plates that fill this void are about as much like leaves as, well, a fish is like a submarine. The heavy, iron slabs are coarsely cut into the shape of human faces, and they play with the same ideas of individuality and repetition as Eisenman’s stelae: Each face is hand wrought and so is a little bit different. And here, too, the visitor is encouraged to participate – by walking across the room, on top of the exhibit. Of course, walking on top thousands of metal faces is terribly disconcerting, not to mention the enormous racket it makes in an empty concrete hall. I couldn’t help feeling the way a cat must feel when he wanders into a puddle by mistake: I just wanted to get back out again, as fast as possible. I have a hard time putting in to words exactly what this has to do with the Holocaust, nonetheless, it was a rare experience, and one that everyone should experience for himself.

Finally, Liebeskind’s real pièce de résistance is his Holocaust Tower, a bare, concrete room, semi-detached from the rest of the museum, and one which is neither heated or insulated. The temperature inside is always the same as the temperature out-of-doors, and the room isn’t lit. The only light in the space comes from a long slit near the ceiling, which allows in a narrow stream of radiant natural light. I’ve heard this room compared to a gas chamber and to a cattle-car, one of the infamous train cars used to transport Jews to the concentration camps. Both of these descriptions are pretty apt, although I prefer to see the space as a less blatantly symbolic. Quite simply: You feel trapped here, and the light streaming in from above is a reminder of you of the world you are cut off from as well as a sign of hope. And that’s a pretty remarkable feeling and a pretty remarkable space.

Disclaimer: I apologize for going on and on about Berlin’s architecture. I realize this is no less than my third post on the subject, and I promise it will be my last. My excuse must be that, while at my former job, I worked on two websites related to this topic: one on Daniel Liebeskind, and another on Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. Although I spent months researching and writing on these projects, I never visited either site in the flesh until now, and although it is now some years later, I guess I had a few ideas still rolling around in my head.

Rear Window

The couple with the colicky baby moved today. They lived across the courtyard from us, and this afternoon, on the way back from the store, I saw a huge moving van parked on the narrow street in front of their door. I assumed someone else in the building must be on their way out: the student in the attic apartment or the older couple, but not this little family. No one moves when the have an infant. But no, tonight, when I sat out on my balcony and looked across the way, their apartment was the only one with all the lights off.

Although I won’t miss the midnight wailing that sometimes would go on uninterrupted until dawn, I’m sorry they’re gone. They were the closest thing we had to neighbors here, which is odd, considering we’d never even spoken to them. Still, it felt like we had a wealth of shared experience. They had the apartment directly across from ours, and the courtyard is small and the view unimpeded. So every night when we would sit down to our dinner, I could see the young wife at her kitchen window still fixing theirs. And when I would do housework early on a Saturday morning, I could often see the husband, still sleepy-eyed, holding his 9-month-old daughter by the window, so she could watch the swallows dart from the eaves in search of their breakfasts.

We’d even see them close up once, in the park on a summer’s afternoon, strolling with their daughter, no doubt to calm another of her fits. There was that first blush of recognition and then feigned avoidance. It would be just too awkward to acknowledge the previously anonymous person who's seen you walk around your apartment in your underwear – or less. And then there was the Doppelgänger aspect to it all. They looked just like us. The husband looked just like Kevin and the wife just like me, although maybe a couple of years older. And no doubt if we have a little girl, she’ll resemble that colicky one across the way. But I've heard that one should never meet one’s own Doppelgänger, although I forget why.

And now, as irrational as it is, I’m left wondering why our twins left us without a word. Perhaps the husband got a new job. (The wife didn’t work as far as I could tell.) Perhaps the other neighbors got fed up with the midnight screams. Or perhaps the wife got tired of what she perceived as my snooping. (I’m always taking pictures of the view over their building.) Perhaps they left to get away from us – our too close proximity and our too close resemblance. Whatever the reason, I’m sorry they are gone. I enjoyed watching them, seeing what our life – Kevin’s and mine – will look like in a few years: husband, wife, a kid, a fichus. I enjoyed watching it, but only at a safe distance. Whenever the colicky baby cried, I could just shut the windows and go back to sleep.

What happened to Jack's face

I’ll bet your reaction just now was similar to mine when Jack met me at the Freiburg train station, looking like he’d just been attacked by a cheese grater. What happened to his face?

“Well, this is what’s bound to happen, at some time or another, when you ride a bike in Freiburg,” he said, trying his best to crack a smile despite the pain. “It’s all my fault, actually,” he explained. “I was tailing a car too closely and didn’t notice when he stopped.” His bike was totaled, and he hit the pavement face-first. Actually, he’s lucky it wasn’t worse. He was not wearing a helmet. Still, you can imagine my concern, not only for Jack’s face, but also because this was my introduction to the city’s famous cycling culture – and just a day before we were schedule to tour the region by bike.

Freiburg is one of the most cycle-friendly cities in all of Europe. According to the tourist literature, there are actually more bicycles in the city than there are citizens. Wherever you go, you encounter cyclists of every stripe: dreadlocked co-eds and businessmen in suits, white-haired pensioners and parents with young children. I even saw one man riding despite a sprained ankle. He carried his crutches in one hand while he steered with the other!

I’ve always been a fan of city cycling and wished that it were more prevalent in America. I mean, what’s not to like about it? It’s cheap, it’s environmentally friendly, it’s an enjoyable form of exercise, and it reduces the volume of city traffic. Unfortunately in America’s car-centric culture, it’s not always practical. One summer, when I was living in Boston, I tried cycling to work everyday, but I felt so under threat from the “crazy Boston drivers,” who don’t signal, don’t share the road, and often fail to see cyclists, that I was forced to give it up after only a month.

Since then, I often fantasized that if I were Supreme Dictator of the Whole Wide World, I would shut down all inner-city motor vehicle traffic, except for public transportation, and give the roads over to the cyclists, who, in my experience, are a remarkably polite and law-abiding bunch. But, alas, I’m not. In America the car is king, and all other vehicles have to jockey for their right to be on the road. So I was really curious to see what life was like in Freiburg, where cyclists rule and automobiles are relegated to the outskirts of town.

But it turns out that it is not as safe or peaceful as I had imagined. In fact, as a pedestrian in Freiburg, I felt under threat from the cyclists! For one thing, German cyclists are allowed to ride on the sidewalks, which seems pretty unreasonable since they’ve already been given the roads. You can’t imagine how incredibly nerve-racking it is when they weave in an out of the crowd at full speed, passing you within inches – without any warning. I’m sure they think that they don’t pose a danger, but they can’t know when you might take it into your head to turn off in a new direction.

Futhermore, German cyclists are not the conscientious citizens that American cyclists are. They don’t wear helmets, they don’t obey traffic signs, and they don’t feel the need to ride in the direction of traffic.

So I’ve begun to wonder if it’s not American cyclists’ minority standing that makes them such a virtuous bunch. In order to survive the hazards of city cycling, American cyclists have to be hyper-aware of the behavior of everyone around them. If they’re not, they’ll be run off the road by some woman in a tinted SUV, who’s talking on her cell phone while trying to sip her Starbucks. Maybe it’s just the tyranny of being in the majority that makes European cyclists such careless custodians of the road.

On the other hand, it could be that most people are just bad drivers – no matter what their mode of transportation. Perhaps the American cyclists are a self-selected group of naturally prudent people, who would make excellent drivers, too. But in Freiburg, almost everyone rides a bike, and so, at any given moment, the majority of people on the road are likely to be idiots behind the wheel.

Whatever the reason, you can be sure that the next day, when Jack, Kevin and I rented bikes to tour the Durbach vineyards, I observed the rules of the road with vigilance. I wasn’t able to find a helmet, but I never went too fast or followed anyone too closely, else I wind up with a mug like poor Jack. That is, at least not in while we were riding in Freiburg. Once we got to the country, you had better believe I sped down the steep roads like I owned them, as if I were the Supreme Dictator of the Whole Wide World.

Dresden: The Frauenkirche

On my first day in Dresden, I headed to the Neumarkt to see the Dresden’s most famous landmark, the Frauenkirche. As I mentioned before, the church, one of the finest Protestant churches in the world, was reduced to rubble during the famous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. Only one fragment of one wall was left standing. When the war ended, Dresden fell under the rule of the Soviet-backed Communist government, which decreed that the ruins of the church should remain untouched, as a memorial to the victims of the war – and also as a useful propaganda tool against the West.

However, after Reunification, Dresdeners immediately began an international fundraising campaign to rebuild the church. (An interesting fundraising letter addressed to the Queen of England is on display at the Staatmuseum, reminding the Queen in no uncertain terms that she should pony-up, as her government had destroyed the church in the first place. It doesn’t say how much she gave.)

Anyway, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche is an amazing technological feat. Using historic blueprints and “the latest computer technology,” they’ve managed to rebuild the church exactly as it was before the bombing, and, wherever possible, they’ve used the remaining stones from the original church. But of course, it is impossible to match sandy new stones to the original dark grey ones, which had been seasoned by hundreds of years of soot. So the result is a strange salt-and-pepper effect, which is a little off-putting at first, but after a while kind of grows on you. Ultimately the distinction between old and new seems fitting.

But inside the church, and elsewhere in the Neumarkt, all of this emphasis on building things back exactly as they were has a striking ersatz feel, like Disney’s imagining of what Dresden must have been like before the war. For obvious financial reasons, the builders of the new Frauenkirche had to use plaster and synthetic materials to recreate the original pink marble columns and gilded puttis. And the difference is obvious. Surrounding the Frauenkirche are a dozen new-old high-rises, where the lack of the appropriate patina is even more noticeable. Their smooth stucco facades and generic Baroque detailing makes you feel as if you’re being tricked, as if you’re walking through a Hollywood back lot instead of a real city.

I hate to be a critic of such a noble endeavors. After all, I understand the impulse all too well. When Little Rock was struck by a tornado several years ago and much of my historic neighborhood destroyed, my immediate reaction was to want it all put back exactly the way it was. I feel very much the same way about New Orleans, even though it’s not really my town. But I hope than when New Orleanians do start to rebuild, they won’t do as Dresden has done. There must be a way to recapture a sense of what was lost without attempting recreate it stone for stone. I’d rather walk through a slightly less beautiful city than through a fake one.

Dresden Greets Its Guests

At some point it should have occurred to me that Dresden might look a little different than Würzburg, that bucolic Bavarian town I’m happy to call home. After all, I knew Dresden’s history: Once Germany’s most beautiful city – “Florence on the Elbe” – on the night of February 13, 1945, an Anglo-American bombing campaign reduced it to rubble, killing an estimated 35,000 people. More than 50 years of communism followed, during which time the city was rebuilt as a “Soviet replica state.”

But had I stopped to think about these details, I would have relegated them to the distant past, having little to do with Dresden as it stands today. After all, I am only just old enough to remember Peter Jennings announcing on “World News Tonight” that the Berlin Wall had fallen and forecasting the eminent reunification of Germany, and that was almost 20 years ago. Surely any differences between East and West would have long ago disappeared, or so I thought. But I guess cities have a longer view of history than 25 year olds. And as Faulkner famously wrote, “The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.”

As it was, I was completely unprepared for the change of scenery as my train made its way East. Tidy, well-tended Bavarian villages gave way to gritty industrial towns, where half the buildings seemed abandoned to rust and decay. Dresden, entered from the West, seemed like only the biggest of these.


Actually, Dresden makes an interesting contrast to Würzburg. Both were nearly bombed into oblivion by the Allies, but where Dresden languished under communism for half a century, Würzburg “rose phoenix-like,” the tourist literature likes to say, part of West Germany’s “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder). And so today, where one of Würzburg’s farmers might live in his family’s 19th century farmhouse, it’s been completely renovated, landscaped, and equipped with a two-car garage. A farmer outside of Dresden, in rural Saxony or Thuringa, might live in the same type of house (with its steeper Eastern-style roof), but it’s surrounded by rusting farm equipment, fallow fields, and comes with an old outhouse on the grounds.

[I recently read in Tony Judt’s excellent Post War that in 1989, shortly before reunification, 60 percent of East Germans lacked central heating, 25 percent lacked a bath, and one-third had only an outdoor toilet. Judt also writes that during the period when the Marshall Plan was pumping $14 billion into Western Europe, Stalin extracted the same amount from Eastern Europe.]

The view from my window was more East than West, not unlike what I’d seen on a trip to Eastern Slovakia and Hungary years earlier, but I never would have expected to see the same conditions in the “wealthy” Germany of 2007. It was as if traveling East, I was traveling back in time.

“The past is not over. …” Indeed.

So it’s interesting, then, to find myself in Dresden at a moment when the city is busy erasing this unfortunate period of it’s history and replacing it with an exact replica of the city in all its Baroque glory.

Everywhere I go in Dresden, I see bulldozers tearing down the old Stalinist-style high-rises, those shoddy, soul-destroying concrete blocks that housed droves of drably clad workers. (The “New Brutalism,” one critic called it.) Across from the train station, a whole row of these relics awaits the chopping block. The first supports a 20-foot-tall neon sign, long dark, which reads: “Dresden Grüßt Seine Gäste” (literally, “Dresden Greets Its Guests”). I can just image the implicit message of such propaganda, cir. 1960: “Welcome to Dresden. See our amazing Communist architecture.”


Meanwhile, not two blocks away, a massive building project is underway in the historic Neumarkt. (I love it that in Europe a square called “New Market” is still four hundred years old). A dozen yellow cranes are erecting Baroque-era high-rises to frame the city’s famous Frauenkirche, a symbol of all that Dresden lost during the war and has since regained. Completely destroyed in bombing, the post-war Communist government refused to allow it to be rebuilt, preferring to leave its remains as a reminder of the evil West. Rebuilding started immediately after Reunification and was finished by 2006.

Once these candy-colored buildings are completed, the square will look very much like it did on the morning of February 14, 1945. That’s pretty amazing, when you consider that virtually nothing was there 24 hours later: not the Frauenkirche; not the palatial Zwinger museum; not the Residenzschloß, former home to the extravagantly wealthy Electors of Saxony. Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden as a German prisoner of war, described the scene that day in his novel/memoir Slaughterhouse Five: “Dresden was like the moon now. Nothing but minerals.”


But it’s not as if the locals want to erase this memory from the collective consciousness. On the contrary, that fateful day and its immediate aftermath are the centerpiece of the exhibits at the Staatmuseum and the subject of a popular DVD on sale all over town and available in six different languages. It’s more that they seem to want to forget that Communism ever happened. And I guess I can’t blame them. Baroque palaces are a lot more attractive that Soviet-style apartment buildings, and they have the added benefit of bringing in more tourists.

It’s not hard to imagine how beautiful Dresden will be in a few years, a true destination, “Florence on the Elbe” once again. And if the Staatmuseum ever wants to run an exhibit on what Dresden looked like before the Great Rebuilding, I’ve got a few photos I can loan them.

Home, sweet Gästehaus

After a hectic morning of enrolling in German school (more on that later) and relocating our many suitcases to the train station, Kevin and I bought two, one-way tickets and boarded a train Würzburg, our new home.

I’m always excited by the prospect of moving: the thrill of a new routine, the potential of finding an even better life the new place. Inevitably, though, some trifling detail will disappoint – a lack of morning sunlight, or poor water pressure – thereby draining me of all my rosy optimism. I’ll fall into a gloom, only to emerge slowly, as my preconceptions are replaced by the happy surprises of reality.

Moving to Würzburg was no different.

As our train made its way through the countryside, the towns became smaller and smaller, tiny hamlets, really, and the architecture became more and more modern and utilitarian – not the Old World town houses I had been imagining. I began worrying whether I could really live in such an uninspiring, out-of-the-way place for a whole year. But, when Würzburg finally came into view, those fears momentarily subsided. Würzburg was larger that any town we had seen outside of Frankfurt; it seemed to be about the size of Little Rock, but much more dense. From the distance, I could see a number of tall Gothic church spires – usually a good sign.

But after we arrived, when we emerged from the dank, smokiness of the local train station, our first impression was of a run-down, former Eastern bloc city. There is nothing nice to be said about the Würzburg Hauptbahnhof. It is dirty and smelly (a new odor that I am not yet able to fully describe) and the plaza just in front is mostly populated by the drunk and homeless. Not that this is uncommon by American or even Boston standards, but it's not what you normally see in Europe’s temples of social welfare. In fact, the only time I have ever seen anything like it on this side of the pond was on a trip to the Hungario-Slovakian border – not exactly a vacationer’s paradise.

As quickly as we could, we piled into the first available taxi (no small accomplishment considering the size of German cars and the girth of our luggage) and headed home, or rather, to the university-run guesthouse that would be our home for the near future. Unfortunately, our taxi driver was not the best ambassador for her city. Her magenta (magenta!) hair was the same shade as her bulbous drunkard’s nose. Her car wreaked of “stale cigarettes and cheap perfume,” as the saying goes, and all I could do not to throw up during the ride was to focus on the passing scenery: more boring, Soviet-style apartment buildings. From the train station to the guesthouse I could see nothing that would suit the front of a postcard, nothing to write home about.

At the Gästhaus (one of those modern European high-rises that are all windows and look to be constructed of Lego), we were met by Herr H., the building superintendent. He took us up the elevator to our apartment on the 6th floor (the three of us and all of our luggage fit into a single elevator!), and then he explained, in German, the elaborate Hausordnung (house orders) of which the Germans are so fond. I pretended to understand all of his detailed instructions about sorting the trash and the dates and times when one can buy tokens to use the washing machine, etc. And then he left us to explore and unpack.

Kevin could read the disappointment all over my face. Even though I was on the verge of tears, I kept saying aloud, so as not to disappoint him, “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s really going to be OK.” And then, suddenly, it was. Walking around our apartment, I realized at once how large and airy and well-arranged it was: three big rooms – a bedroom, living room and kitchen — and a hall and a bathroom. It was three times the size of our last Boston apartment. The kitchen was stocked with pots and pans and dishes; the beds were turned down with fresh linens.

Then, to let in some light (for there was a promise of sunshine for the first time since we’d arrived), I threw open the curtains of the floor-to-ceiling windows that run the length of one of the bedroom walls. And this was what I saw:

And then I rushed into the living room, where, across from the desk, was an identical wall-to-wall set of windows, and this was my view:

My very own castle! Then I knew that everything would be OK, really OK ... better than OK.