Archive for April, 2017

Rathaus Platz Hamburg
22 April 2017

On Sunday I make the trek back home. It seems as though I have been away forever and Vibs tells me it seems like twice that long. An entire season (granted, not one of the best in Minnesota) has passed and the landscape will appear much different than when I left. Much more green and much less white and brown. The weather gods seem to be taking some perverse pleasure in teasing me; after an unseasonably cool Spring here in Hamburg, next week promises to be wonderful, with temperatures reaching the mid-60s and more sunshine. May Day, a major holiday here (and across much of the rest of the world) is supposed to be very pleasant.

As many of you will know, last Saturday, Marches for Science were held in more than 600 cities across the world. Hamburg had one and I attended. The rallying point was the plaza in front of the Rathaus and, as you can see from the accompanying photo, the crowd was of a respectable size. The proceedings started with speeches by the organizers (in both English and German) and then a brief address by a professor from the university. Lots of signs and costumes reflecting the numerous issues people felt needed to be addressed rationally. Perhaps needless to say, Trump caricatures were prominently featured. The event carried on despite a stingingly cold rain shower and swirling winds. At two points along the march route the assembly stopped to hear remarks by certain learned folk about the importance of reason and rationality in a time of increasing ignorance and misinformation.

This past week has seen a continuous round of goodbyes and social interactions. I have also been fortunate to encounter more people whose work gives new direction and focus to my own research. For example, a young Italian PhD student at the Center is doing experimental work attempting to re-create ink recipes found in certain medieval Arabic books. We were able to try making prints using the inks she made and the fact that inks used to write with are not so suitable for printing suggests that there may be, somewhere, recipes for printing ink and that would be awesome to find. So much work to do…

On one of my last days at the Center, about mid-morning, we were told we had to evacuate the building. This information was conveyed in person by one of the stalwart student workers who told me that the fire alarm system was temporarily out of order. (I flashed back to the numerous fire drills we endured over the years at Drake, always on the worst weather day of the season, it seemed) In point of fact, there was a small combustion event that had taken place in one of the kitchens (each floor has a small one where there are coffee makers, refrigerators,  and tea kettles, no stoves). It turned out that someone unfamiliar with the technology had left a package of paper coffee filters on the heating element of a coffeemaker– with predictable results. So, we had some excitement. No major damage was done and we returned to work with a faint whiff of burnt paper in the air.

Up In Smoke
26 Warburgstrasse

Two days to go and suddenly I’m at loose ends. I will start packing today—putting the suitcase out on the spare bed will be a reminder that this chapter is nearly at an end. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I actually did this, that someone thought enough of my work to allocate a sort of investment to it. Of course, that means I am now under some pressure to produce something and so I must re-order parts of my life to make it happen. Funny how life throws you curves when you least expect it. Time will tell what the result may be. Thanks for reading. Auf Wiedersehen.

Odds & Ends (18-22 April 2017)

So, a week to go. It seems that no matter how much planning one puts into a schedule, there’s always a flood of unfinished business at the end. The last several days have been full of “goodbyes,” promises to keep in touch, pledges of “let’s get together one more time before you leave,” and other assorted affairs to be attended to. Slowly, I’m beginning to discard the clutter that seems to accumulate without effort, despite my best intentions of keeping it to a minimum. What notes should I keep? What things can I send home, being fairly certain that I won’t need them in the next seven days? Is there someone willing to take my leftover groceries? It’s such a shame to throw out a nearly full box of muesli. (The answer is yes, my Fulbright Fellow neighbors are happy to have them so they won’t end up in the landfill or wherever they take such things.)

I’ve begun to think about the places I want to visit one more time, the restaurants I want to have a meal in because they serve something special, the coffee shop I found tucked away on a residential street that has REAL homemade pastries and good coffee and where I can sit with the newspaper or a book for an hour or so without being disturbed. Aside from these pleasures, I also have been busy consulting with as many of the bright young minds working in the center as I can. It’s amazing how a casual forty-five-minute tour of someone’s workspace can prompt new ideas, a potentially useful avenue of research that would not have occurred to me otherwise. Not to take advantage of such opportunities would border on the irresponsible.

There’s still time to enjoy the city and to do things. This afternoon a March for Science is being held in the Rathausplatz, the big open square in front of City Hall. It’s one of many similar marches being held in about 400 cities around the world. The purpose is to show support for rationality and the exercise of reason in everything we do, a tough row to hoe in the current climate but activism of this sort is still alive and kicking in Europe and it seems to be taking hold in the States as well. We hope someone is watching and listening. Tonight, there is a city-wide event called the “Long Night of the Museums.” Museums across Hamburg will be open until late and will be hosting all sorts of cultural events. If I can stay up, I just may have to check this out.

And the weather is slowly improving. Hamburg is apparently notorious for quickly changing conditions (sort of like Iowa) so you take an umbrella whenever you’re out. This morning I ran some errands and within the space of two hours I experienced a deluge with whipping winds, a smattering of hail (about 10 seconds worth), a few errant flakes of snow that never even reached the ground, and sunshine. As you can see from a couple of the pictures below, it’s getting green and it’s a bit sad to be leaving just as the warm weather is arriving, but I’ll catch it in Minnesota.

View from my window
Note sun AND dark clouds

Park behind Dammtor Train Station: Ice Cream in 50° weather! But look at the flowers…

A quiet street in my neighborhood. Probably not named for THAT Bieber…

With a month to go, I have been thinking about what’s changed here over the course of my nearly forty-year association with the country. I first visited Germany in 1983 when I was finishing my graduate degree. A return flight from the Middle East had a transfer in Frankfurt and I took the opportunity to break my journey and visit some of my father’s relatives in that city. I remember that some buildings, bomb-damaged during WWII were still standing. Not many, but a few, and there were a number of vacant lots where destroyed structures had once stood. All of that is gone, now. Damaged buildings have either been rebuilt and restored (mostly architecturally important public ones) or replaced with new construction.

The population has changed dramatically, too. Since Germany began to admit Turkish “guest workers” in the 1970’s, the face of Germany has become much more diverse. The recent admission of a million refugees from Islamic countries in the Middle East and North Africa has only intensified the heterogeneity. It is not uncommon, as I think I mentioned in an earlier post, to hear fluent German being spoken by people who are obviously of African origin, or Asian for that matter. In that way, Germany is not unlike many other places in the world where a multiplicity of ethnicities and cultures are showing up where they wouldn’t have been found, at least not in great numbers, even twenty years ago.

The influence of the United States is also increasingly apparent. Commercial television is one example, something else I’ve also alluded to before. There seem to be a great many more English words used than there used to be, too. The standard greeting is no longer “guten Tag,” but “Hallo” or even “hi” among 20-somethings. Passing by a group of students the other day, I overheard one say, “Ich hab’s ge-Googelt” (I Googled it). Well, why should I be surprised? Germans use Google, too. “Hotline” is hotline in German; “cool” is cool.

I took an extensive walk today, the primary purpose of which was to find free jazz performances being held somewhere in the city center (it was a big disappointment not to be able to find them) and I saw several American muscle cars being driven about by their proud owners who were eager to get them out of the garage after a long winter: a 1962 Corvette (sweet!), a 1960-something Mustang V-8, and a couple of others. Motorcycles—a bunch of Harley Davidsons—cruised about in their annoying, rumbling, blatting way, many ridden by too-stereotypical guys in t-shirts and over-ample girths. It could have been Des Moines!

Trying to find anything of the “old” Germany takes time and luck. Of course, we don’t want to look too hard for it in any case, but for some things—like beer for instance—you want to be able to trace a heritage. Bread is a case in point. You can buy the plastic wrapped sort in any grocery store, but most places will still have a proper bakery where you can buy a freshly-baked loaf. But that bread is usually the sort of bread you’d find in any bakery. On one of my strolls, I happened upon a small neighborhood bakery that sold varieties of old fashioned peasant rye bread, the kind of loaf that can serve as a doorstop after three days on the kitchen counter. The shop does a pretty good business judging from the line I had to stand in to purchase an experimental half-loaf a few weeks ago. But the customers were pensioners by and large and I wonder how much longer they’ll be able to keep places like that going. Other minor things also retain a sense of earlier times in Europe. Commercial toilet paper, for example, could easily serve as a substitute for materials used to give a final smoothing to fine woodwork. The Germans are a hardy lot, it seems.

That the “old” Germany is disappearing is a fact and not too many people will be sad to see it go. Yes, there are some things, like high quality craftsmanship and durable goods, that are also harder to find. Even some of my students here lament the “decline” in quality. But the streets are clean, the parks tidy and well tended, the people are still assured of good health care, education, and quality of life, for the most part. The economy is strong. It seems that people are always working. It’s a bit depressing to see beggars, panhandlers and homeless people on the streets. The “safety net” isn’t catching everyone, it appears. The infrastructure, like ours, makes the news because it’s failing in some places. Stretches of highway are in need of major overhauls and the quandary is how to fix them without causing huge traffic jams. Sounds familiar. But I have the sense that here they’ll decide what the best way to proceed is and get the work done. And it’ll be done well.

Another indication of new sensibilities is the official signage one finds posted here and there. This sign, telling people not to fasten their bicycles to the iron fence, is in a type face that we associate with a rather dark period in German history. My reaction to it is one of anxiety because I think of the Nazi period when I see it.

Like these guys…

The last thing I would want to do is to lock my bike up to that fence. But for those Germans born in the 80s, 90s, or 00s, this style of text won’t have that resonance and so it loses its force.

The danger, of course, is that people will forget the horrible things, too, and that could lead to very bad things happening all over again. One always hopes that our values and our institutions are so well established that they will make it difficult if not impossible for those bad things to occur, but history doesn’t hold out much hope for that outcome. Whether we’re all just three missed meals away from total chaos is a hypothesis I don’t want to test.

The past ten days or so have been a bit hectic. It appears that I contracted a rather nasty chest cold somewhere between northern Germany and Copenhagen. I felt pretty okay, but my ribs ached so much that I almost cancelled my long-planned trip to Kinross in Scotland last weekend. By the time I left last Thursday, though, I could tell that the worst was over and I was fairly sure I was no longer contagious. Just in case, I had my Scots hosts swing by a chemist’s shop and I picked up some good ol’ Robitussin. That did the trick.

Loch Leven

Kinross is about an hour outside Edinburgh and my friends’ cottage backs onto a nature preserve that surrounds Loch Leven. The loch is idyllic; lots of wildlife, birds especially, along with cows and sheep. Rabbits abound as do foxes and badgers, apparently, which has compelled the wildlife authorities to build a rather elaborate fence around much of the grasslands bordering the loch so that the birds can nest without fear of having their eggs poached (so to speak…).

Four days of eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, drinking when thirsty and chatting whenever the occasion arose did much to re-energize me. The sun had followed me to Scotland and we had four brilliant days with springtime temperatures. Lots of walking.

My flight back to Germany took about ninety minutes but we lost an hour of time because of the time zones. Nonetheless, I was back in the apartment at a decent hour and managed to get a good night’s sleep before my second seminar on “agency” on Tuesday. That went well and four of us, two students, another professor and I went out for dinner afterwards. The sun had set by then but even though the temperature had dropped, we sat outside at a café with a bunch of hardy Hamburgers and enjoyed our meal. One thing I’ll say about the Germans: they are a hardy lot. There are many cafes that offer outdoor seating, even in March. They simply provide cozy, colorful lap robes for people desiring to enjoy their food and beverages outside in twenty degrees. Kids play outside even on the greyest of days; parents watching over them with their shoulders hunched and hands stuffed deeply in their pockets. With the weather improving, there’s work being done everywhere to freshen paint, repair winter damage and make the plazas and courtyards inviting.

Spring has definitely arrived here. It gets dark much later now (thanks in part to the clocks being set forward last Sunday) and the grass is greening daily. Flowers are everywhere and flowering trees are already beginning to drop their blossoms. Runners have shed their insulated running pants and ice cream parlors are doing great business. The streets are a-bustle with Hamburgers enjoying being outside without raincoats, hats, gloves and all that. Time to turn your face up to the sun.

Plantings in the Gästehaus Courtyard

Spring!
34 Rothenbaumchaussee