German Language 101:

I have a little black book I carry around with me pretty much everywhere I go. It’s a big help for taking note of addresses, bus lines, times and dates of appointments, and so on. But I also use it as a catch-all for other information I think seems interesting or useful, including, for example, my own German telephone number—it’s about thirty digits long and occupies exactly no place in my memory, even after almost 5 months of use.

A lot of people have a notebook like this, I think, but for me it’s a variety of behavior I probably modeled on my dad’s use of a little pocket calendar that he always carries in the pocket of a sports coat. That is, “The Peripheral Brain,” a term coined by my mother to describe the cannot-be-overstated importance of this particular pocket calendar, the secret, illegibly penned information it contains, and the ensuing Total War freak out when this little book is temporarily misplaced (i.e. it’s still in the pocket of the other navy blue sports coat.).

Anyway, every since coming to Germany, the work of my own little black book has probably quadrupled because of how many new things I need to remember. Just to get through an ordinary afternoon, there’s always at least a handful of words I *really* need to know how to say in German—perfectly normal, common place words—that I’ve read, learned, sworn to memory, and immediately forgotten a thousand times before.

My first week in Heidelberg I encountered this exact frustration over the same little words so many times, I started making lists of Key Words that I knew I would eventually need (and forget) while going about my day. I’ve done this so much, actually, that the book has started to function as an abridged, unalphabetized dictionary that keeps a sort of humiliating record of my daily priorities. September 19th’s, case in point:

This list, I think, (in addition to an absurd amount of prepositional confusion) should make it pretty clear how I’ve really been finessing my way through Germany.

--> At the University: “I am too frustrated, I want to register on the school.”

-->In the copy shop: “Have patience, but sorry I break this strange printer.” :(

-->Pretty much everywhere: “I want to bite a delicious sandwich. Recommendation?”

And it would be nice to think that last one on the Verbs list was deliberate irony but, unfortunately, I didn’t find my monstrous forgetting very lustig at the time.

In the several months since Totally Inept September, though, I’m happy to report that my German has gotten much better. Enough so, at least, that I can later recognize when I’ve said something completely ridiculous, and sometimes even (Schadenfreude) when other people do. The following anecdotes constitute a mini, beginner’s course in German language, what not say:

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An English-speaking friend in a coffee shop, talking about weekends plans: “Zuerst können wir in meinem Haus vorspielen!”

The barista, who overheard this massively failed direct translation of “First we can pre-game at my house,” was kind enough to tell us, “umm that’s not what you mean, vorspielen is something …totally different.”

Thanks to her very subtle hint, we were able to figure out the translation of her original sentence: “First we can foreplay at my house!”

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Me trying to be nice to the next person using a bathroom stall that had run out of toilet paper: “Es gibt keines…Po Blatt.”

Translation: “It has no ass paper.”

I guess it passes in terms of descriptive accuracy, but as it turns out the actual word for toilet paper in German is, compared to my hideous invention, so, so much easier: Toilettenpapier. Keep it in mind while traveling, folks.

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Boyfriend, Matt, during a telephone interview for admission to grad school: “Es freut mich, dass wir über das Telefon gesprochen haben.”

Translates to: “It pleases me that we spoke about the telephone.”

German prepositions + grad interview =

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One of the many, ever-pedantic Hygiene Questions to arise from the Hygiene Chapter offered by our foreign language textbook: “And what do we use when we brush our teeth?”

Reply shouted by an over-zealous language student to the left of me: “ZAHNBRÜSTE!!”

Sadly, no.

His answer translates, amazingly, to “tooth boob.”

And actually this is a pretty reasonable mistake. Dyslexics beware, the word for toothbrush is “Zahnbürste.” Another useful one FYI, travellers.

Wir Sind Umgezogen! Or, from the Gallows to the Altstadt: we moved!

As many of you know, the strain of student dormitory life on the 12^th floor of a condemned building in the middle of a construction zone was, to say the least, becoming dire.

Maybe the following pictures are a good example of how the terrible student living conditions in Neuenheimer Feld incite…

a.) discontent

b.) psychological unrest

c.) creepy behavior

d.) all of the above.

d.) all of the above?

About 4 days before we moved out of the old building, this gallows made a sort of disturbing appearance on the 11^th floor, where we got out of the elevator to reach the 12^th, which is only accessible by the staircase. Anyway I’m not going to venture a guess as to what motivated its (very sturdy) construction. I’ll just say I’m pretty stoked to be out of there.

Below are the pictures of our new place, which is located on the 4^th floor of a small building in the Altstadt, a block away from the university library, across the street from a bakery (!!), around the corner from a grocery store, a fifteen minute walk from where we go to classes (so long, public transit!), and we know some really nice people who live in the building. You'll notice that we have (it now seems important note) a walk-in bathroom, and the very last picture is a view of Peterskirsche from our window!

Berlin Part V: Forgotten Painters, Lost Art, and Not Getting Lost in Berlin (Modern Art & Logistics)

I think the Jewish Museum and the Topography of Terror Museum complement each other well in terms of what they have to offer regarding German, Jewish, and WWII history. But I also think I would not have been completely satisfied by my experience with either without having seen the Neue Nationalgalerie of modern art. In fact, I might as well just say don’t go to Berlin without going to an art museum.

It’s hard to take in a lot of the history without a heavy, very sad feeling about what people are capable of doing; it’s hard to see monuments to war victims everywhere and sections of the Berlin Wall all around the city without thinking about the incredible injustices of history.

But by seeing the art of these same periods of history, one has the opportunity to see, too, creative works as individual expressions of dissent, each of the paintings standing in opposition to dictatorship, censorship, propaganda, genocide. So that’s not to say that leaving the art museum I felt awesome about humanity—see Otto Dix's 1934 painting "Flanders" (below) and see what I mean. But great works of art always stand against corrupt institutions of power; it’s important to be reminded of how that is possible, even under the most extreme forms of oppression.

Lotte Laserstein’s “Evening over Postdam” was the first painting I saw in the museum—a recently acquired piece, it was hanging so as to be immediately visible upon entering the main galleries. It’s a very large painting that, recalling da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”, depicts a sort of disconsolate looking family or group of friends, crowded onto a small balcony. The meal on the table is notably meager, and the city of Potsdam spreads out in the background behind the unhappy, uncomfortable group.

This piece made the connections between the art in the museum, and World War II and Jewish histories seem incredibly urgent—in particular, in terms of what aspects of those histories are available today as a result of the Nazi oppression at the time. As a Jewish painter with her career beginning to take off just as the Nazis were rising to power, Laserstein had more or less been forgotten by Art History because of work she was forced to give up, exile she was forced into. Her work has only recently (in 1987 through an exhibition and sale of her works, including “Evening over Potsdam”) been rediscovered and given some retrospective place of importance in the Modernist artistic landscape leading up to and throughout WWII.

Another crazy, very freighted piece in the museum was a photograph of Franz Marc’s 1913 Expressionist painting “Tower of the Blue Horses,” which hung among the other original paintings in the collection. The presence of the copy of the work draws attention to the absence of Marc’s actual painting—the explanation for which is really interesting.

Apparently, the painting was on exhibition in the late 1930s when it was confiscated by the Nazis and labeled as Degenerate Art, art that was contrary to what were considered by the Nazis to be “correct” aesthetic values that appropriately reflected their social and political ideology. But after a visit by Hermann Goering, the painting went missing and was later seen as a part of Goering’s personal collection in the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin. After the war, the painting disappeared once more and, it is widely believed, was smuggled to and stashed in a bank vault in Zurich! Wow—like, give it back already. Anyway it is very sensational! But sad, too, obviously—it would be nice to see the original and will be very exciting if and when it ever resurfaces.

Not to dwell too much on specific personal favorites in the museum, I should talk about one of the major exhibits that’s entitled Modern Times, after the movie by Charlie Chaplin. They had a flatscreen TV at the beginning of the exhibit, and it played a continuous loop of a piece of the movie—if you haven’t seen it, check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30&feature=related

(The quality of this video isn’t great, unfortunately, I’m sure you can find a better one but—interesting fact—Germany has really strict intellectual property laws; a lot of what you’re able to see on youtube in the States is not available here.)

Anyway this movie is so funny, and gives a really brilliant context for the art on display in the exhibit. Man and the machine! And whatnot.

A key piece in the Modern Times exhibit was Hannah Hoch’s 1919 “Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany,” which is about as funny as Charlie Chaplin’s movie, albeit a totally different form. Hoch makes a collage of news clippings to create really amazingly ridiculous caricatures of various public figures and illustrate the kind of crazy, swirling chaos of politics at the time.

Lastly, just a few more pictures of great ones to see in the museum.

Berlin Logistics:

Restaurant Recommendations:

Anand’s: Albrechtstrasse 12, Berlin 10117. Easily the best Indian food I’ve ever had. In fact I liked it so much (I’m always doing this, incredible creature of habit that I am…) I ate there twice. Right near the Friedrich St. train stop, it’s convenient to the East Side Gallery and Brecht’s theater—of course, probably lots of other things, too. I had the ever-popular palak paneer and, a new favorite of mine, palak jal fraizee.

The Weinerei: Veteranenstrasse 14, Berlin 10119. Located in Prenzlauer Berg, a kind of grungy wine bar with an amazing concept: pay what you think you owe. More or less. You pay 2€ for a glass, and it’s suggested that you pay 2€ for each successive glass you drink. Though it isn’t enforced, I think the idea is that no one should want to abuse such a great and already very reasonable system. There are half a dozen choices of both red and white wines, all self-serve. Food is available, too—limited to just pasta and salad (you can’t be picky, but it is vegetarian)— on the same “honor system” as the drinks. Take public transit to Rosenthaler Platz.

Frarosa: Zionskirchstrasse 40, Berlin 10119. I haven’t actually been, but if you like the sound of the Weinerei and you’re looking for dinner, too, check it out. It’s very close to the Weinerei and operated by the same people on the same business model, except (I think because it’s much smaller) you can only get a table if you’re ordering food, which is on the more familiar, pay-per-item menu system. It’s also very cute inside—low, well-worn velvet couches, drapes hanging floor to ceiling, dim lighting, candles, sexy ladies painted on the walls! Also convenient to Rosenthaler Platz.

Where we stayed:

We are lucky enough to have two amazing friends, Aaron and Lily, who currently live in Berlin. We stayed with them for 2 nights, and then spent 4 nights in an apartment of our own, kind of. Check out berlin.sofort.de. It was very affordable (45€/night) and reasonably convenient to a train station and things we wanted to see without being overwhelmed by downtown hotel, tourist-trapping expense and stodgy restaurants—in fact, it was in a very cute neighborhood around the corner from a very good bakery J. Also, the pictures on the website of the studio we chose were exactly as the room appeared in real life (this is key when budget traveling and, unfortunately in my experience, not always the case)—very clean, comfortable, and minimalist/Ikea-savvy. No complaints! Though if you go this route, don’t forget to bring your own bath towel, as they’re not included and there’s no front desk to speak of—the studio was located on the 3^rd floor of a regular apartment building.

Getting around the city:

Unlike our visit to Strasbourg, where one can really do without public transit entirely, in Berlin we used the train system a lot. You kind of have to, because a.) it’s freezing cold and b.) the city is huge. If you’re staying with friends who live there and your friends have monthly transit passes, on the weekends and holidays you can travel with them for free as their guest. If not, and/or during the regular work week, I recommend the Tageskarte, a full day (24 hours) ticket. It costs 6.10€ but it really beats walking in the snow! Or getting caught without a ticket by undercover train police (sounds really scary, right??) who issue 40€ fines to any and all Schwarzfahrer (it supposed to just mean “illegal traveler,” but it literally translates as black rider! Germany, are you kidding??). But it is the very best public transit system I’ve ever seen—a perfect 10/10! Trains every 3-6 minutes! Trains going everywhere! Trains connecting everything!! Just don’t be a Schwarzfahrer, I guess.

Berlin Part IV: The Topography of Terror Museum

The Topography of Terror museum is a great big, self-conscious cube of a building, sitting a long ways back from the road on a vast lawn (or snow field, in winter), bound on the north side by remains of the Berlin Wall. The museum is built upon what’s referred to as the “site of the perpetrators”—that is, the topographical location from which the Nazis planned and carried out most of their crimes. Entrance is completely free. And that’s great, but really the only way it could be, right? Germany seems to know where profit is socially acceptable and where it isn’t, and it is definitely to the city’s credit that this museum is open and available to anyone with the desire to see what’s inside.

This mandate, that something of such importance be made “free to be seen,” is the first thing I want to ramble about, because it seems very central to the greater design of Berlin and its on-going critical conversation regarding its history. For example, recent construction on the official German government building, the Reichstag, includes a dome on top made entirely of glass windowpanes, maximizing its literal transparency; anyone can see into the building and, theoretically, I guess, know what government officials are doing. In this way, the building stands to embody the German government’s new ideals after Reunification and the fall of the Berlin Wall—to have a government that does not obfuscate its proceedings, etc. The same transparency of architecture can be seen in the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus (which contains the Parliament’s library, archive, classified information, and press documents).

So back to the Topography of Terror Museum—my boyfriend, Matt, made a really interesting observation about its architecture—that this building exists as a foil to the transparent contemporary government buildings, as the TT museum is built with a slatted facade over its own large windowpanes. While entrance to the museum is free and allows equal and total access to its resources (including a digital archive of NS documents, records, correspondence, etc.) the building itself conceals the objects and activities going on inside, thus serving as a reminder of how terror—a dictatorship, total loss of civil liberties, genocide—arose.

Inside the museum, I was surprised to find the display made up entirely of text and image—all original objects that belonged to or bear association with the National Socialist Party are kept elsewhere. It is an unusual sort of museum in this respect, and I admit that I was a little disappointed at first. Who doesn’t want to see the material evidence of massive world history? But it is easy to appreciate what the museum does provide, which is an historical documentation of the NS dictatorship by way of concise descriptions, quotation, and photography, with a particular emphasis on the perpetrators of terror.

Given this focus of the exhibit upon the war criminals, the mechanisms of their administration and seizure of power, I learned a lot that I didn’t already know about the National Socialist Party. The plain facts of Nazi leadership are completely shocking and horrifying, and yet throughout the museum I was especially affected by the photographs—not just of concentration camps or the NS rallies (there were those, too), but very revealing and personal photographs of, for example, a Nazi Christmas party; the faces of dissidents; the public shearing of women accused of “intimate contacts” with prisoners of war; guards from Auschwitz at the SS retreat in Sola-Hütte (“an idyllic mountain landscape”); former members of the SS guard, hiding their faces from the cameras at the second Treblinka trial.

The range of the photographs is impressive, and what they depict extremely emotional; in my opinion, it is very important to see. The Topography of Terror museum makes for a heavy afternoon but, should emotional and psychological weariness set in, there is an amazing and enormous book available (in either English or German for 15€) that contains the entire display—the text in 12 point font and the photographs in black and white.

Berlin Part III: The Jewish Museum

Wielding our 3-Tages-Karten, one of the things at the top of our Berlin to-do list was to visit the Jewish Museum—I’d heard great things and wanted to refresh my memory regarding Jewish history leading up to and during World War II, in particular.

As we walked through the door of the museum, the first thing important thing I saw there was an aggressive reminder of how much history lives with us and persists daily in our contemporary world: a security checkpoint, more rigorous than that at the entrance to the Louvre and like I’ve seen in no other museum I’ve been to in Germany. Very much like the airport, visitors empty their pockets, walk through a metal detector, and send their bags through the x-ray machine on a conveyor belt. Needless to say, I felt a little ashamed that I was there to “brush up” on the history that makes this kind of security precaution completely necessary.

The museum itself was designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and is shaped like an enormous zig-zag. I’ve never been in a building like it—it’s very beautiful and very disorienting. Libeskind says the structure’s unusual shape is not supposed to represent anything; rather, what is important is the spatial experience that visitors have within it. Trying to write about it reminds me a little of trying to describe coming down the narrow staircase in St. Michaelis’s church of Hamburg when the enormous bells started to ring: words don't suffice, but anyone on the staircase could feel the tolling through the entirety of her body. Though much more quietly, so, too, with great buildings. Nowhere in the Jewish Museum does the Jewish Museum disappear or fall away from the consciousness of the visitors. It is fully present all of the time, which is what the museum, in turn, demands of the visitors—I thought this was really amazing, and it’s so fun to be inside of for several hours at a time.

My favorite thing about the design of the museum is that Libeskind created empty spaces, referred to as voids, in several parts of the building. The voids, which are meant to represent the absence of Jews from German society, are openings that cut vertically from the top of the building to the ground floor (about 20 meters), sort of like large, irregularly shaped elevator shafts. In the walls of these shafts, narrow windows allow one to look out into these spaces while walking through the different levels of the museum.

One of the voids, known as the Memory Void, contains an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, entitled “Shalekhet” or “Falling Leaves.” There are over 10,000 metal, 2-dimensional faces scattered throughout the space of the Memory Void, which are dedicated to innocent victims of war and violence. Also, the faces are created by a negative process—the features of the faces do not protrude from the metal discs, rather they are places where the material has been cut away—reiterating the voids throughout the museum. But, again, it’s the space in which the installation appears that makes it so arresting; it is quite dim, narrow, and angular, and it echoes when you speak or walk inside of it. One can’t help but whisper, though when we went in no one else was there. The Memory Void felt as bleak and isolate as it sounds.

The museum exhibits themselves were really great, too. Along one of the corridors, or “axes” of the building, windows opened into display cases containing various possessions and personal belongings of Jews who had lived in Germany in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Beside the objects were descriptions and pictures of the individuals who had owned them, brief accounts of what became of them under Nazi power (most were sent to labor or concentration camps and died in there), and correspondence they maintained with friends or family as long as they were able. It was sort of eerie to be able to read parts of these letters in German.

Another exhibit was all about a Jewish tradition called Sukkah, which seemed very important within the context of Libeskind’s architecture. If you’re not familiar, a Sukkah is a small, temporary dwelling, which is meant to be constructed with three walls and a roof of foliage in late September through late October (during the Hebrew month of Tishrei) for worship during and celebration of Sukkot. This is a tradition I really don’t know much about beyond what I saw in the museum and have read on Wikipedia, so if anyone can say something more and detailed about it, please leave a comment! I would very much like to understand this better. But what I did learn by way of the exhibit is that the Sukkah are meant to serve as a reminder of the make-shift dwellings where ancient Israelites lived during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt, and symbolize abstract places of belonging. I really liked this in relation to the building of the museum—the two kinds of structures both work with cultural memory and displacement, and interact in some way with the idea of the structures as manifestations of the transitory (the museum, for example, is covered in a layer of zinc; as it gradually oxidizes with exposure to the elements, the building will turn the color blue! Exposure to “damage” or change seems to be a key principle of the construction of Sukkah as well, i.e. three instead of four walls.)

Lastly, the Jewish history exhibit is really impressive, and because of it I recommend going to the museum early in the day so you can spend as much time as you want to go through it. It is so gigantic and comprehensive—covering everything from Jews in the Middle ages through World War II, from telling the stories of important Jewish figures in history to detailing a number of Jewish traditions (synagogue architecture, for example, or the Kosher diet)—that I was in the museum for close to 4 hours and didn’t come close to finishing this exhibit. I was chased out by employees very promptly at closing time (which was 8pm on a Sunday).

(the arial picture obviously isn't one I took myself--I borrowed it from the Jewish Museum's website, which is cool and gives a lot of great images of the building if you're curious!)

Berlin Part II: Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, and my Walking Tour

Finally getting to travel to Berlin was like putting a face to the name of someone you’ve heard so much about; someone you’ve never met who’s somehow a friend of all of your friends; someone you’ve stalked on Facebook but, though there are thousands of pictures, most of them are blurry or out-of-date, their wall comments are incomprehensible, and their “interests” are so general—“art, music, German, history, cheap rent...”—it sort of sounds like a list of freshman year General Ed. requirements.

So Berlin and I finally got to hang out, and I sort of understand these rave-if-vague reviews. Berlin is a giant city and there’s so much to do. I think it’s easy to leave feeling like you didn’t get to see enough of it even if, like me, you spend 6 full days tromping around in the snow trying to see everything you’d heard about plus everything you hadn’t. It’s hard to give a precise and accurate description of a place so diverse and abundant with itself.

Though it’s true I didn’t prepare much in advance for the trip, with retrospect I think one of the better if unwitting sources of information I had about Berlin was a good memory of a great movie. Before traveling to Berlin, I recommend watching Wim Wenders’ 1987 movie Wings of Desire*. It is beautiful, shot in black and white, in German (subtitles in English of course), and is sadly the basis for imitation that birthed Brad Silberling’s 1998 blockbuster City of Angels, featuring Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage. And while I never appreciated Sarah McLachlan’s mawkish contribution to the soundtrack (that is, Angel), as a 12 year-old I guess I might have been convinced by Meg’s 429th performance as an adorable, unjustly burned heroine of a former, destructive relationship, now recovering and finding solace in the arms of…oh why not, an angel.

But I really, really recommend Wings of Desire instead. Because the dialogue is excellent (Wenders employed Austrian novelist/playwright/poet Peter Handke to write much of the script), the shots are amazing, and the movie really avoids cliché in a way wholly unlike its Hollywood counterpart. And through its Berlin setting Wenders conveys a very profound sense of how full of remembrance and monument the city is. As the movie is produced before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s among several really great movies that allow you to see the city before that change took place in ‘89.

Below are the pictures of my end-of-2010 city walking tour, spread out over several days:

The Brandenburg Tor

The Jewish memorial

Graffiti in the frost on the stone slabs of the Jewish memorial

War memorial, Neue Wache

The Berliner Dome

Checkpoint Charlie

Leaving the American sector, Checkpoint Charlie

Bertolt Brecht!

The German National Library (figures prominently in Wings of Desire)

The Russian War Memorial

Siegessäule (The Victory Column--under construction, but also makes a great appearance in Wings of Desire)

more Siegessäule

Part of the Berlin Wall along the Spree

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall)

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall)

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall).

So other than a compulsion to see in person the beautiful monuments and buildings shot by a talented director of a late 1980’s German film, my trip was governed largely by two factors. The first being (I realize this theme is becoming tiresome but bear with me…) the cold, and the second being frugality, or cheapness in the disguise of frugality in the disguise of a 3-Tages-Karte. In Berlin, I learned that one can purchase a ticket that allows 3 days of unlimited museum-going for 9.50€ (student discount)! Which is obviously a great deal, and as I noted in the Strasbourg post, a day—or several days—of museums goes very well with insane winter temperatures(-11 C?!).

Coming next to the blog: The Jewish Museum, the Topography of Terror Museum, the Berlin Modern Art Museum.

*originally entitled Der Himmel über Berlin for release in Germany.