andrewcurry

Abi Basch, the playwright who lived down the hall from me in the dorm in Kiel, is back in the States for a month putting on one of her plays, Voices Underwater. For anyone in the San Francisco area next week, I highly recommend it. I took the little headshot of her at the bottom of the page at a German Marine memorial down the street from the dorm. Portrait stuff is fun, but really, really hard.

The great folks at Flak posted a few of my photos from up north on their site. i think I've linked to both from here before, but just in case -- Oct. 13 and Oct. 19.

A belated update on my whereabouts is in order. I arrived in Berlin for the Fulbright orientation a little more than two weeks ago. I faced the prospect of looking for a place to live, made daunting by my still-halting German, which gets even more halting when I’m calling total strangers who’ve posted ads for housing on-line.

I started my search in Frankfurt an der Oder, the small town where I’m going to school. For weeks, people had assured me housing would be a breeze. Frankfurt’s depressed, they said. There’ll be plenty of rooms available, they said. People will be begging you to live with them, they said. They were wrong. I called 10 or 12 places (anything I found on line or posted on the bulletin boards in the university’s student center) and found nothing. By the end of the week, I was in a panic.

Friends of mine had very generously let me stay in their guest bedroom on short notice, but as my prospects in Frankfurt looked bleaker and bleaker, I decided to try looking in Berlin.

The first place I went to see had invited 50 people to interview at once. They were having a big “get to know everyone” party in their still-under-construction apartment. They planned to invite the five or six people they liked the most back a few days later for a finalist round. The whole thing was unpleasant, to say the least – like a frat rush or beauty contest, except in German and in an unfinished apartment with people sitting on the floor and smoking. The people were pretentious in an aspiring, but not quite successful, bohemian sort of way. Needless to say, I wasn’t one of the five lucky finalists invited back. Thank God.

The second place I went to was totally different. Three young Germans in a mid-size apartment were looking to fill their fourth room; they interviewed me at the kitchen table. We chatted for half an hour. I tried to be as charming as possible. It apparently worked, because they called me late that night and offered me the room. I moved in a week ago.

I have a big room with a balcony and 12-foot ceilings. My walls are painted sunny yellow, which may come in handy in mid-winter. I have a wood floor and an internet connection. Two of my housemates are students, and one is a sort of teacher. They like to cook and eat together. So do I.


I live in Friedrichshain, which is the cool part of Berlin now (although cool in Berlin hops around from week to week like fleas on a dog). The apartment is in the former East, and my neighborhood feels like it. Although our building is regular-sized, we’re surrounded by massive Soviet-style apartment blocks. Downtown and the big eastern train station are both five minutes away by bike. From my balcony I look out on the Friedrichshain “People’s Park,” one of the nicer places to run and walk in this part of the city. I also look out over a busy street and a double set of tram tracks. The noise is sort of soothing. Really.

I rode across Berlin yesterday with my new housemate Mathias and one of his friends from school. On the western edge of the city there’s a really beautiful bike path – about as wide as a small two-lane road – and lots of very quiet streets that run along a huge lake. I hope to go out there more often.

On the way back, we swung by the Olympic Stadium. I immediately recognized it. It’s a massive place, with seating capacity for 70,000 fans. It was built for the 1936 Olympics. I think every history class in the U.S. learns about Jesse Owens and the 1936 Olympics, often as a sort of idealized tale. Black athlete beats Aryans, confounds Nazi Germany’s racist expectations, is snubbed by Hitler, shows the world how tolerant and open America is compared to the Third Reich, and so on.

There’s more than a little myth to the story, of course. Hitler wasn’t actually in the stadium when Owens won his four gold medals, Owens’ own president (Franklin Roosevelt) never acknowledged the achievement, and America in 1936 was hardly a beacon of racial integration.

Oddly, I have heard the stories so many times I felt as though the stadium were somehow an American place, as much a part of my history as Germany’s. Doubly odd, because it’s a classic example of Nazi monumental architecture: imposing, severe, somehow inhuman. Somehow I expected it to have been leveled in the war, or torn down afterwards, like the Nuremberg stadium that hosted Hitler's best-known rallies. And I was even more surprised to learn that the 2006 World Cup final game will be played there, historic resonance be damned. Maybe not everything’s about history, all the time. Maybe it’s just a building.

You know that song? The one that always gets stuck in your head? The Germans have a word for it: "Ohrwurm." With apologies to Ricardo Montalban, it's literally "ear worm."

And according to my housemate Mattias, there is a specific word in German for "leaning back in your chair." It's "kippeln."

A novel experience today – I was the first American someone had ever met. The social science faculty had a welcome breakfast for incoming students, and I sat next to a Russian from Kaliningrad. He was really excited to meet me, and said he had taught himself English. Considering his English was a bit better than my German, I was very impressed.

Kaliningrad is an odd pocket of Russia cut off from the rest of the country and wedged between Lithiania and Poland on the Baltic coast. Naturally, it used to be German, as did much of the Baltic coast. The vast majority of the Germans fled west after WWII. Judging from his name – Sergej Schneider – I suspect his family is part of the small community of Germans still holding out, a remnant of the days when Germany stretched from Holland to Russia.

I had my first day of school in yesterday. It turned out to be the day all the first year students arrived to pick up their IDs, get their class schedules and the like. In a sense, I’m a first year student, but basically I was the old man at freshman orientation. I spent the hour-long train ride across from two girls who looked about 19. They spent the whole time excitedly passing the orientation booklet back and forth, checking their makeup, and discussing which of the week’s activities would help them get to know the most people. Also, checking their makeup.

Viadrina University is in Frankfurt an der Oder, a small town about an hour train ride from downtown Berlin. It’s literally on the bank of the Oder river, which is in turn the border between Germany and Poland. Founded in the nineteenth century, it had a long hiatus during the years Frankfurt was a tightly controlled East German border town. It was re-opened in 1993 as a bid to bring the two countries closer together by getting German and Polish students to study together. Poles used to commute across the bridge, which is about a quarter-mile away; now that Poland is part of the EU students live all over the place.

Most of the actual events involved bureaucracy. Naturally, my main goal – my student ID – was missing (see German inefficiency, below) and I was told to come back some time today.

The morning’s best moment was the university president’s speech. A former cabinet minister, Gesine Schwan is an energetic 60-something woman who’s incredibly well-liked in Germany – even my apolitical housemates knew who she was, and were of the opinion she should have been President (an appointed, largely honorary post here, as opposed to Chancellor). She gave the welcome speech to an overflow crowd of perhaps 500 in the university’s largest auditorium.

Most of it was pretty standard, but at one point she moved from a discussion of how important diversity and integration was to the central mission of the school directly into a few minutes in accented but very good Polish. The Polish students in the audience gave her an ovation. It clearly made a big difference to them that she (unlike the vast, vast majority of Germans I’ve met) bothered to learn their language. I hope to meet her while I’m here.