Forschungsjahr

Upgegradet worden

2011-07-18T16:47:00.000+02:00

The German film, Shoppen, (2006) focuses on the phenomenon of speed dating. It's a masterwork of economy, telling the story of eighteen single men and women in a series of short scenes that leave big gaps in the viewer's information, but provide just enough key details to make us believe we know a lot more. It's a quality I admire in film and one I try to apply in my own paintings. The characters in Shoppen are all living in München, all are single, and all are eager to find a life partner, or at least a temporary liaison. The film addresses a problem that faces many in the US as well as Europe: as conventions and traditions are examined and discarded, what structure can take their place? In an earlier generation, Germans married earlier. Woman didn't enter the workforce as regularly as today, and members of the opposite sex could meet in such thoroughly outmoded institutions as church social groups. As far as I can see, religion still plays a very important role in Germany, but it's a political one. Few Germans would be so foolish as to spend any time worrying about a spiritual need that could be met in a church. That's what Art and Kultur are there for.

One of the characters we meet in Shoppen is Frank. He's a self-described "gatherer," as opposed to, hunter-type, leading what is apparently, an amazingly dull life. He stumbles into the speed dating experience almost by accident and in his first interview responds to the question "What's been the most wonderful surprise in your life?" by saying that he was once "upgegradet worden" on a return flight from London*. How sad," I thought as I watched the film for the first time, "that one has no more significant experience than that to share with a potential life partner." And then it happened to me.

On my recent return from Europe, I too was upgraded, and now I can understand Frank's response. Instead of being jammed into a tiny space and forced to make a choice between either a peanut OR a pretzel, I lounged in pampered luxury while my sommelier worked out which wine I would drink with my smoked almonds. My seat reclined to form a rudimentary bed and I was presented with a teeny tiny tooth brush and correspondingly tiny tube of paste. With my main meal I was given over 8 pieces of cutlery, three of them knives. This from an airline that less than two hours previously confiscated my nail clippers, presumably worried that I would threaten the cabin crew with a really aggressive pedicure. Just look at these pictures:

Chose a knife. Any knife.

Crisp radicchio and an excellent oil and balsamic vinegar dressing, but which white should I drink to complement it?

The strawberries were a little under-ripe. I sent them back.

Another big plus in first class: movies are free. Even the recent stuff you have to pay for in coach. I watched a great film about an alien invasion of earth. Directors like Fellini, Truffaut and Scorsese, have techniques for insuring that plot is advanced and momentum is maintained in their films, but in my alien invasion film, the director just made sure that some marine said, "Go! gogogogogo!" every 3-4 minutes. This kind of action film also benefits if a helicopter blows up from time to time, and I believe the director of this one managed to break a record for rotary-wing aircraft destroyed. As you may imagine, dialog was minimal, but they still managed to work in some hilarious redundancies like "evacuate you out." And every once in a while, some marine would shout out "Let's get to that police station and save the civilians," just in case a viewer forgot what was going on. If you're thinking I'm being facetious in my praise of this film, you're mistaken. There's kind of a ban on alien invasion films at my house and I crave this kind of cathartic release. This movie was so good, I watched it a second time in Italian: "Andiamo! andiamoandiamoandiamo" No real need for subtitles, but you might need them for the Shoppen trailer below.

*Ich bin ma' upgegradet worden von dem Rückflug von London... da bin ich in den Business Klasse gerutscht, es war nicht übel und echt überraschend.

Der Man in Schwarz

2011-07-05T22:33:00.000+02:00

US American culture is readily embraced by Germans. But even in a market that's as receptive to American culture as Germany is, some US artists seem to be more readily accepted than others. In literature for example, John Irving is a big favorite here, as is Philip Roth. Cormac McCarthy, on the other hand, or Michael Chabon don't seem to appear in bookstores here anywhere near as often.

One classic American musician who is incredibly popular in Germany is Johnny Cash. Here in Deutschland, Mr. Cash's music appeals to people in a way that isn't clouded by the artificial categories that are so important to marketing in the States. Cash's music crosses all boundaries in Germany, appealing as easily to a burnt out old hippie-type as to a twenty-something punk. I hear Johnny playing as background music in department stores and on the radio and his CD's stand in the bookcases of almost every home I visit here.

My own radio interests here don't include Johnny Cash. I admire him and his music, but I don't travel to Germany to spend my time listening to American popular music. In Essen the radio dial is dominated by the WDR stations, with WDR Eins focussing on current popular music and WDR 5 offering a broad range of news and cultural offerings. I doubt if many of my acquaintances here listen to WDR5 very often: it has a reputation of being just a little spießig. But I enjoy the variety and novelty of the station. There's just nothing like it in the US.

I often wonder how Germany can offer this kind of entertainment: what's the business model, and how do they pay their bills? The answer is, of course, that Germany is a socialist economy. Until recently, the government ran all radio and television. If you own a radio, you pay an annual tax on it, and those taxes go to supporting public programing, like WDR5. The catch is, WDR has to serve a wide audience to maintain the government support they depend on and their constituents include organizations like the Catholic and Evangelical churches (which, incidentally, are also state-run institutions here.) And that's why WDR5 can sometimes be just a little stodgy. Every morning at 6:05, I listen to a piece produced by a prominent religious figure in the region and they're rarely very dynamic. The speakers are all so damned earnest, so unctuous, so anxious to please. They talk slowly, and their arguments are formatted in a way that reminds me of the ads the white-haired guy on Wild Kingdom used to do:

The hammerhead tortoise has a shell to protect him from wild predators and you need protection too....

But this morning's piece, by Diplom Theologe Markus Potthoff from Essen was really quite entertaining and he made his point with a quote he attributed to Johnny Cash:

Das Christentum ist nichts für Weicheier

Loosely translated, it means something like, Christianity is not for sissies. It's entertaining for me because it uses some of the great vocabulary German has to describe sissies: Weicheier, Shattenparker, Warmduscher... And ironic too, because, no matter what they do to escape it, all of these religious commentators wind up sounding like a bunch of Weicheier. But today at least, I listened eagerly to the Kirche in WDR5 address, and I'll continue to be a faithful listener, even following the station on-line when I'm back in the States. Tomorrow at 6:05 there will be another preacher greeting me from the electronic pulpit, but at noon I'll be listening to a Hörspiel about a fictional dominatrix who runs a shop in the government quarter of Berlin, beating up on Muttersöhnchen for fun and profit. Public radio in Deutschland makes for strange bedfellows and reminds me every day that I'm not in Kansas anymore.

Barbarossa

2011-06-22T23:57:00.001+02:00

Cobblestones are extremely practical. In Germany there are lots of words to describe them and the surface they make. In general, the surface is called Pflaster, from Latin, plastrum. It refers to any of a number of different stone surfaces that cover roads, sidewalks or plazas. I'm only familar with the one word in English, but it really isn't accurate for most of what I see in Germany. A cobble is rounded at the edges, usually from rolling around in a river bed for a couple of hundred thousand years. Most of the stones I see used in Germany have relatively sharp edges, and when they're rounded, it's usually from the traffic that rolls over them.

Many times I've watched as a new electric line or water pipe was laid under a Pflaster sidewalk in Germany and marveled at how simple it is. The stones are removed to uncover a 10 - 20 meter stretch and then, as the pipe is laid, the earth is filled back in and the stones are replaced. The stone surface is porous and flexible. Unlike the concrete sidewalks common in the States, as trees grow, the layer of stones stretches naturally to accomodate the the root ball. In the town I live in, the city forester has another solution: cut down the trees.

There's a down side to Pflaster too. The individual stones make wonderful ammunition for the many demos that take place in Europe. I watched a movie just last night that dealt with the years of student protests in Germany and it made me wonder why the Pflaster tradition has lasted so long here, while in American asphalt and concrete are king. The movie was Neue Vahr Süd, the latest in a series of books (and movies made from those books) from Sven Regener. Herr Regener is one of the driving forces behind a German alternative rock band called Element of Crime and he's written some surprisingly successful books. The books have appeared in reverse chronological order, (or at least, I read them in that order) beginning with Herr Lehman, which reaches it's climax with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was translated into English by John Brownjohn under the title Berlin Blues. The book I read most recently is, Neue Vahr Süd, which climaxes with a demonstration at Weserstadion, where stones are thrown and some find their mark.

I'm not sure why I enjoy these books/films so much. Frank Lehman, the main character, doesn't do much. Mostly he moves though life like a modern-day German Hamlet, allowing things to happen to him. But it's also true that he can't keep his mouth shut in a difficult situation, where discretion really would have been the better part of valor. He's an interesting Mischung of conflicting characteristics like many of us, and I find that I'm completely sympathetic to his situations. I also find it fascinating to revisit historical events that I'm just barely familiar with from another point of view. I read about the Red Brigade and student unrest in the Norwalk Hour when I was a paperboy, and I experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall mostly on NPR. Now, through Sven Regener's books I'm experiencing them both from a completely different point view. I guess that's what this "Art" thing is all about.

And today is the 70th anniversary of the opening of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Somehow that seems like just another link in the chain. Sven Regener's books deal very much with German history, but his character, Frank, was born far too late to have any direct experiences with the Second World War. In the early 1960's, when Frank Lehman was born in Bremen, the last of the German soldiers held by the Soviet Union had already been released. Some prisoners were held for more than ten years after the war's end. And the Soviet troops held as prisoners of war in Germany had all either died of hunger in captivity, or been shipped back to Russia, where Stalin gave them all a long furlough in Siberia. All in all, it makes this question of concrete or Pflaster seem pretty insignificant.

Uninformed

2011-06-14T22:58:00.000+02:00

There are many news stories that cross the Atlantic from east to west. Germans know all about congressman Weiner and the "nutiny" that occurred in a prominent Republican candidate's campaign staff. But by contrast, how many Americans are aware of the resignation of Germany's Verteidigungsminister? It was a huge story with serious implications for Germany's current government, but I saw very little about it in the US press. And how about Horst Köhler? The president of Germany resigned almost exactly a year ago, but it went almost unnoticed in the US.

Americans have the reputation of being uninformed about the world, but in some ways, it's not really our fault. Our media just doesn't cover the more subtle world events. Now, if a starlet should wear a particularly stupid dress to a Hollywood event, or stumble momentarily while approaching the podium, Yahoo will crow over her misfortune until every 2nd grader is buzzing about it on the playgrounds of Topeka or Des Moines. But the resignation of the president of the world's 4th largest economy? Whatevah!

I did read several stories about the current E. coli outbreak in Europe and I'm wondering why Americans were interested. In some way, I think this story about random and sudden death must awaken the same kind of Schadenfreude as a badly dressed ingenue. Any German will tell you, Schadenfreude ist das beste Freude, but it doesn't do anything for America's image abroad.

Horst Köhler is on the front page of this week's Zeit with an exclusive interview about his decision to resign in May of last year. I read the story with great interest, but the comments to the online version of the story were even more interesting. Köhler was an immensely popular figure, and like his predecessors, was elected almost by acclamation. His resignation shocked most Germans, and while he didn't give a reason for his decision at the time, most people assumed that he resigned in the face of strong criticism of a casual remark he made while meeting with German troops in Afghanistan. The story in Die Zeit doesn't really have any surprises: it merely confirms what everyone already thought. But the in a world where online comments are typically relegated to stuff like: "Sez who?" or "You and what army?" the comments on Köhler were remarkably on target. Readers registered their feelings of betrayal and asked why Köhler accepted the position if he wasn't up to the stress. I felt that the juxtaposition of Köhler's complaints ("The attacks were outrageous!") and the trumanesque heat and kitchen comments online did nothing to rehabilitate him. I still feel that Köhler is an intelligent man, probably a genuinely "good" man. In fact, he's a guy that reminds me of our own Jimmy Carter. But like Jimmy, he's clearly not build for the dirty game of politics. Arguably the most important quality that we need in our politicians.

Today's papers in Germany were once again featuring a story from across the pond, but this time with a local spin. Dirk Nowitzki, German citizen and member of the Dallas Mavericks was being hailed as a super star, even making the front page of the illustrious Süddeutsche Zeitung. I know because a young woman stopped me in the Bahnhof today to try to sell me a subscription to the Südeutsche. Her big selling point was that it's a "very serious newspaper". With a front page story on American basketball? She had a hard time explaining that. Dirk is a big story here, but if he wants to make it big in the States, he'll need to do something really significant, like get a bad haircut. And I guess I'll subscribe to the Süddeutsche Zeitung when they inaugurate a column devoted to news of Brangelina.

Feiertage

2011-06-06T20:43:00.002+02:00

Back in May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made some awkward remarks about her southern neighbors and their attitude toward work. Her comments are still reverberating three weeks later as the problems in the European Union continue to grow. In the speech she made to some party loyalists, she suggested that the EU should equalize the legal holidays in all its member states, broadly hinting that the southern European “domani” attitude toward work was perhaps responsible for the economic breakdown in Greece and Portugal. Speaking as a US Amerikaner, who was driven to the brink of starvation by the frequency and frivolousness of Germany's holidays back in the bad old days when grocery stores were only open until 1 pm on Saturdays, Merkel’s remarks struck me as hilarious. Critics across southern Europe quickly pointed out that in fact, on average, Spaniards and Portuguese work longer hours than Germans and have an older effective retirement age. Basta!

I can understand Merkel's frustration with Greece and Portugal because of my own frustration with the Germans. I often travel to Germany in the spring, and my plans are always being derailed by the string of holidays that loom over late May and early June: Christihimmelfahrt, Pfingsten, Buß- und Bettag, and my personal favorite, Fronleichnamsfest, which translates into something like, Happy Cadaver Celebration. Well, I’m exaggerating a little, and Buß- und Bettag is actually in autumn, but it’s my blog. I was curious enough about this issue to search for more information today on the subject and came across an account of Merkel’s speech on this fascinating blog/website: Holidays to Abu Dhabi. Here’s a quote attributed to Merkel from the article:

“(People) in countries similar to Greece, Spain and Portugal should not retire progressing than in Germany. We should all make the same efforts, this is important,” she told a celebration eventuality in Meschede, horse opera Germany.

In the words of the immortal Hank the Cowdog, “Huh?” I read further in the article and it’s all nonsense like that. With unemployment in Europe so high, you’ve got to ask yourself why the website doesn’t just hire themselves a writer moderately familiar with the English language. I’m particularly struck by the last phrase: in Meschede, horse opera Germany. Merschede is no garden spot, but to me it seems disrespectful to refer to it as a "horse opera". I’ve always felt that was a decidedly pejorative term.

So maybe it’s not the love of holidays that’s doing in the Euro Zone, it might be badly written blogs, with little or no proofreading. Southern Europeans are justly outraged about Chancellor Merkel’s inaccurate portrayal of them as lazy layabouts, but Germans in North Rhine/Westphalia’s Sauerland have just as much right to indignation under the circumstances. And so it goes, charge and counter charge, in an escalating spiral of tension that pushes Europeans to the breaking point. Before this crisis is over, they’re all going to need a little time off.

Southern Europeans, hard at work

Memorial Day

2011-05-30T23:24:00.000+02:00

I'm spending my first Memorial Day in seven years in the US and I have to say, so far, it's been a let down. When I was kid, Memorial Day was a real holiday. We began the day by getting a collection of flags out of the closet and preparing to drive into town for the parade. There would be the inevitable fight over who would get the flag with fifty stars, and who would have to make do with an older 48 star flag. Memorial Day signaled the official first day of swimming in the river behind my house, and usually ended with the first barbeque of the summer, although they were called "cook-outs" back then. Some fifty years later, I live in northern Utah and I woke this morning to heavily falling snow. No one will be swimming anytime soon in Cache Valley.

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I can listen to Inforadio Berlin as I shiver in my Logan kitchen eating breakfast. It's 31 °C in Berlin today, sunny and clear. In 1960 as we waved our flags for the veterans and scouts marching by in Wilton Center, Berlin was a grey city, the last outpost before Leningrad: all that stood between us and godless communism. Today, in Berlin, commies and capitalists alike are reclining in Strandkörben and ordering Margaritas, imagining they're in Cancun.

The sun is melting some of the snow here in northern Utah as it climbs toward noon, but the sky is pelting us alternately with hail or a cold rain. Cancun sounds good to me too, but I'd gladly settle for the Kanzlerstrand along the Spree in Berlin or just sitting on the hood of our 1957 Bel Air back in Connecticut. In fact, almost anything would be preferable to the bizarre spring we've experienced here in the Inter-mountain West. I'm planning my annual trip to Germany, but won't leave for two weeks still. I'll be in Berlin for the last week in June and I can only hope that the great weather Europe has been experiencing this spring will hold.

This blog has been pretty moribund for the past nine months but I expect that to change starting now. The truth is, I've been pretty busy since September with university business, but with graduation behind us and the summer ahead, a lot of the pressure is off. For the foreseeable future I expect to be sharing my time again between working in my studio and semi-regular posts to my blog. I missed a lot of interesting stories coming out of Germany this past year, but there will be new ones, and nothing can stop me from writing updates on stories that are no longer in the news. But for now, I'll get out the snow shovel and clear a path to the garage. The only Margaritas I'll be drinking today will be frozen ones.

No Regrets

2011-01-15T01:23:00.004+01:00

Chez Louisette

I'm not a big fan of cultural stereotypes. It seems to me that I know plenty of sophisticated Americans, punctual Mexicans, sloppy Germans, and at least one or two people of Irish decent who don't drink. But at the same time, I can't help but make very simple observations about groups of people as I travel. Two weeks in Paris convinced me that the French like nothing better than to wallow in their French-ness. They revel in it in a thousand different ways. Across the Rhine in Germany, that's not the case. To the extent that one can indulge in cultural stereotypes at all, it's good to keep in mind that these things are in constant flux. But I remember attending several parties in Germany during the year 2001-02, and before we had passed the 9:30 mark, someone would always say with predictable regularity, "I don't think of myself as a German, I'm really more of a citizen of Europe." I might have responded, "Yeah, but the rest of Europe sees you as a Kraut", but I was far to tactful.

Whatever the Germans might be thinking about their own cultural allegiance, the French have no such reservations. And spending time in the company of a big group of people who are enjoying being themselves is really a lot of fun. I had the opportunity to do just that, a week ago today, when I attended what was billed as the "largest fleamarket in the world!" just north of Paris: Le Marche Aux Puces De Clignancourt. It was really big, but unfortunately, also very cold. My fingers grew numb pawing through bins of wonderful French junk and winding down narrow aisles and alleyways filled with antique glass, china, furniture, 78 rpm recordings, chapeaux, books... After a long morning, I was glad to find a restaurant (Chez Louisette) in a cul de sac across from a curio booth selling Zippo lighters. But it turned out to be more than a meal. It was a mind-blowing experience and lesson in the art of being French.

We entered to a din that almost drowned out an older woman with jet black hair who stood less than six inches to my right, channeling Edith Piaf at the top of her considerable lungs. There wasn't an open seat in the joint, but a group right in front of us got up and offered us their seats. We maneuvered ourselves into position at a four or five meter-long table, jammed with people. Waitresses squeezed by with platters of food that had an obviously strong Alsatian influence. One wore a whistle around her neck which she used to get the attention of any diner who had the temerity to relax and ease their chair back a few centimeters into the narrow pathways between tables.

The woman singing was Manuela, a local legend. But she was followed by other singers who did mostly French favorites with lots of sing-along parts. While performing, each singer was unavoidably jostled by patrons and servers alike as they tried to move through the mass, but none of them seemed fazed in the least by the distraction. After each chanteuse completed her set, she worked the room with a basket for tips. Manuela was particularly effective, encouraging patrons to dig a little deeper, in a goodhearted but strangely firm manner. We stayed for at least four sets and these gals pretty much cleaned us out.

None of the photos that I took come anywhere near close to capturing the energy and intensity of Chez Louisette, but a quick scan of the blogishpere gave me my choice of videos on YouTube. I'll include a couple here, but I think it's a place you really have to visit to understand. I've been in a number of similar situations in Germany over the years, but the German cultural soundtrack isn't songs from the war years; it's mostly stuff like Bad Moon Rising or songs by the Eagles. You might hear a Deutschrock hit from the Wirtschaftwunder years that would trigger the kind of enthusiasm in a Köln Kneipe that I witnessed at Chez Loiusette, but can I imagine a roomful of middle class Germans enjoying an afternoon of Sauerbraten and a rousing chorus of Lili Marlene? Ich don't think so.

_________________________________________________

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Is Paris Flooding?

2010-12-26T17:39:00.000+01:00

I leave for two weeks in Paris later today and the news of airport closings in Europe and in the States is just a little unnerving. I wonder what I was thinking when I made these plans back in September? Every year I hear horror stories from recently returned travelers and I laugh up my sleeve at them. Who, I ask myself, would be foolish enough to travel at the Christmas season?

Apparently, me.

Then, earlier this morning, I got an e-mail from a family member who is in the city of lights. She informed me that the Seine is flooding. They closed the airport last week for three inches of snow, so what will this mean? I wanted to learn more, and went on-line searching for current info. Here's what I found on a "chat" forum:

Due to all of the recent heavy snow east of Paris, the Seine is at its highest level in 4 years and rising fast. What does this mean?
-- Well, the Left Bank expressway is already closed because it will almost certainly go underwater in a day or two.
-- Half of the tourist boats, especially the big ones, are already cancelled because they can't get under the bridges anymore. The other boats have had to shorten their itinerary.
-- Next to be closed will be the Right Bank expressway (Voie Georges Pompidou) if the river keeps rising. This can wreak havoc with traffic flow near the Seine.
-- Finally, the RER C to Versailles could close if it starts flooding.
If you are going to Paris in the coming week or in January, this could affect some of your plans. (Italics mine, added for emphasis)

If there is any Internet service left on the continent, I'll post an update later this week.

Schlink

2010-11-27T23:50:00.001+01:00

For reasons that are not really very clear, not even to me, I subscribe to a weekly e-mail newsletter that lets me know what films are playing in the Programmkinos of the Ruhr region in Germany. I live in Utah now, and the likelihood that I would attend a showing of say, Броненосец Потёмкин (The Battleship Potemkin) by spontaneously hopping a flight to Düsseldorf, hovers right around zero. I should cancel my e-mail subscription, but I don't. I think I keep it for the same reason that people buy exercise machines that gather dust in the basement. A combination of wishful thinking and just plain foolishness.

A Programmkino is what we in the US would call an "art cinema" or something like that. My first art cinema was the Avon in Providence, RI, where I saw Seven Beauties and my first Woody Allen films. I think we might have called it a "revival cinema" or even a "revival house." I visited the Avon Cinema website to check, but they don't call themselves anything but "The Avon Cinema." They are still there though, and still showing Grand Illusion and The Seventh Seal to each new class of first-year students at Brown, RISD, and to the odd townie.

I don't really know why I read this newsletter every week, but I do and I was surprised this week to see that Berhard Schlink is appearing on stage at the Lichtburg to read from his latest book, Sommerlügen. If I were in Essen now, instead of northern Utah, I would certainly be attending this event! Schlink is a great author and all-around clever guy. But in spite of my excitement, I find two things about this announcement disconcerting: first, I'm irritated to be missing an event I'm sure I would have enjoyed, and second the picture of Schlink makes him look uncommonly goofy.

I admire Schlink, but don't think I had ever seen a picture of him before. I'm not so shallow as to judge people only by their personal appearance, but I was sort of hoping the author of The Reader would radiate a little more gravitas. I've read almost everything he's written and in some cases the "reading" was actually listening to the novel read aloud on CD or tape, by the author himself. His voice sure didn't sound like the guy pictured above.

Schlink was trained as an attorney, but began writing in the late eighties with a detective novel called Selbs Justiz. I didn't learn of his work myself until about 2001, when I read Der Vorleser for the first time. As most Americans probably know, the novel is about a teenager who has an affair with a woman in her thirties. She vanishes from his life when he graduates Gymnasium, but he meets her again, when as a part of his law training, he winds up attending her trial for war crimes. It's a fascinating book, with many of the attributes of detective fiction, but none of its drawbacks. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 39 languages. It was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list.

So was I over reacting? Maybe the image in the Essenerfilmtheater newsletter wasn't so bad. I checked it again, and there was still something distinctly avian about Schlink's appearance. He looked like a seagull. No, an albatross. In fact he looked to me like that Disney character in the Rescuers Down Under. Wilbur.

I've heard it said that we dislike most in others, that part of them that reminds us of ourselves. As I looked for more images of Herr Schlink, my initial perception was confirmed. Most certainly bird-like, but he did begin to remind me more and more of myself. Mouth a little thin, nose somewhat beak-like. And like me, Schlink is probably a sterling fellow, in spite of not looking like a movie star. In fact, the best of us have flaws. One has only to think of Barak Obama's ears.

And the good news here is that the book Schlink will read from is a new one. He's retired from his position at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin now and maybe he'll have more time for writing. I'll look forward to reading the new book this summer, maybe while I'm back in Rhode Island. I really ought to check out the Avon cinema in Providence again too. With any luck, they'll be showing The Reader while I'm there and I'll be able to get my favorite balcony seat to relive old memories. I really ought to subscribe to their newsletter so I can keep up on the schedule.

El Greco

2010-10-30T21:36:00.001+02:00

Bouzouki

When I'm in Germany I eat a lot of Turkish food. One of my favorite spots is Saka, just north of the Florastrasse stop on Rüttenscheiderstrasse. It's a combination dönerkebap and pizza place but the guys there also make up a traditional Turkish stew of one kind or another most nights, as an option to the standard offerings. It was my Stammdöner the last time I was in Essen for an extended visit and the guys behind the counter always had a friendly word for me and brought out a tea if the meal took a little longer to prepare than they thought was appropriate.

You don't see many Turkish places here in the states, but frankly the menu in most Greek places is pretty similar. And to an outsider, one who knows little or nothing about things Turkish, Greek or otherwise eastern Mediterranean, the cultures seem to have a great deal in common. I realize the Greeks and the Turks have sort of a thing going on for the past 4-500 years or so: genocide, atrocities, blah, blah... but I just like the food. They both do great stuff with eggplant: where's the difficulty?

Last night I had the pleasure of dining in a nice Greek place in Sarasota FL. I'm attending a professional conference here and although I'm a firm supporter of the Arts, sometimes the party line gets a little extreme. Listening to some of our speakers, you'd think a decent painting would be proof against leprosy and a really good performance of Rigoletto would cure cancer. I needed a break from hyperbole, and this Greek place was perfect. The food was delicious, but what I loved even more was the spontaneous floor show. Not entirely spontaneous. There were musicians there: a keyboard guy with a drum track and his eighty four year old father on a balailika-like instrument called a bouzouki. They were good but were quickly joined by a vocalist and a monster bouzouki guy who remained very impassive while he poured out this music that had the place laughing, weeping, but mostly dancing. The vocalist didn't need much of a range of pitch to sing songs that went on for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, but he was a master at manipulating the microphone for great dynamic range.

Greek "homies" encourage a fellow dancer.

The dancing was equally impressive and alternated between line dancing and a kind of proto-break dance format. Men seem to dominate in the dancing, and they often squat and clap while each dancer takes a turn doing a solo thing. Apparently there is even a tradition of throwing a handful of dollars at the dancer, presumably if they are particularly good. After a lot of dancers had done their thing, they brought an infant out, barely able to stand, but damned if the kid didn't do a turn or two. He collected big time. I would have taken a turn myself, but it seemed that actually picking up the thrown money was somehow déclassé.

I was impressed with the dancing and with the music and the inclusiveness it demonstrated. These activities were clearly not reserved for the vituosi, but were instead open to the elderly, those not yet old enough to talk, as well as the accomplished. But when the guy in the wheelchair got into it, I thought, that rhetoric I'm hearing at my professional conference really is true: the Arts are in truth a powerful force for good. At the next conference I'll suggest we include the culinary in those other arts and see if I can get any support for a change in the by-laws.

Loki und Smokie

2010-10-21T23:58:00.000+02:00

Loki Schmidt, the wife of former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, died at her home in Hamburg today at the age of 91. I don't think I've ever written anything about Frau Schmidt in this blog, although her husband Herr Schmidt has come up more than once. They were an interesting couple: they met in grade school, they both smoked like chimneys, and both lived extremely long and productive lives. They were (and Herr Schmidt still is) what many would refer to as "a hot ticket".

The first video is part of an excellent documentary about the Schmidts. The second is a parody of the two of them discussing the question of vaccination against the swine flu. Einfach genial.

Prophets

2010-09-29T21:41:00.001+02:00

As I sat in my balcony seat at last night's performance of the Blind Boys of Alabama and Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, I couldn't help but contrast the attitude to the concert of my community in northern Utah, with the reception I imagine this act might have received in Germany. The audience here in Utah was enthusiastic and appreciative, but no one could deny, it was also small. Verily, a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house. I think a similar concert, with two such giants of American Roots music, would have drawn a much larger audience in Germany, where people have a proper understanding of what's best about America, even if they are sometimes confused by our bizarre hand gun legislation.

On another note: the date of my last Forschungsjahr post before this one is August 9, 2010. That's over seven weeks ago: a shameful lapse on my part. I don't think a blog can endure that kind of neglect in the long term. My current position at the university requires a good deal from me and in the tension between available time and the demands of an unruly faculty, my blog is the loser.

I'm still writing the posts, but only in my head. It's the time for editing, proofreading and layout that's lacking. I'm committed to continuing my work with the blog, but for the time being, it could be that posts will have to remain short. I guess I'm lucky, in that, like the Blind Boys and Ralph Stanley, my audience is a dedicated one, however small. I hope you'll all bear with me as I get through this academic year, with the promise of lots of time for aimless rambling in the next.

Blue Bikes

2010-08-09T19:06:00.008+02:00

I picked up my Aggie Blue Bike this morning and it's a gem.

An Aggie Blue Bike is a bike that a community member can rent from the Student Bike Center at Utah State University for a three month term, renewable pretty much as often as desired. The bikes are all used, some of them ill-used, but all have been lovingly rehabilitated by a dedicated student staff. Bike rental is free, but most people have to endure a tiresome online safety quiz before they can take possession of their bike. I was lucky enough to pick up my bike at a time when the apparently finicky system was "down". I'm a big believer in bike safety, but was grateful to have been spared that part of the bike rental process.

This kind of bike sharing is not entirely without controversy in the cycling community. Depending on whom you talk to, bike sharing isn't very effective in increasing the total number of bike trips in any given area. Many people feel that money being spent to develop new bike sharing programs like the metroradruhr program in the Ruhrgebiet, could be better used to improve bike infrastructure for riders. I re-visited this blog post at Ecovelo today and found a lot of the arguments against bike sharing to be fairly compelling. But I'm not convinced that any of those arguments are really relevant to the situation here on campus at Utah State. And in any case, I'm a bike sharer now, for better or for worse.

And these kinds of programs are growing in the US and in Europe too. Germany has had a nation-wide program in place for many years, sponsored by the Deutsche Bahn and very high tech. I don't know how successful it's been, but I can give anecdotal evidence that DB rental bikes sightings are becoming more common all the time. In many European cities, Barcelona and Paris, just for a few examples, large bike sharing programs are in place and the distinctive bikes are a familiar feature of the city center. Bike sharing is particularly big in the Ruhgebiet, as the map below demonstrates: the cluster of cyclist icons at the map center is the heart of the Ruhr, from Duisburg to Dortmund and each icon represents a bike sharing program. I've never used bikes in any of these programs, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I suspect that these bikes can only be really useful to a relatively small sector of the population.

Which brings me back to my Aggie Blue Bike. It's a clumsy monster of a bike and would hardly be useful for most of my riding purposes. But I plan to use it only on campus for those visits to places like the library, Student Union or our administration building. It's more than a fifteen minute walk across campus from my office and most of the way is level, paved and ideal for rolling along on big balloon tires. If bike sharing can ever make sense, then certainly this is the proper application. I'd like to see the program grow and serve more campus community members.

And I've got an even stronger, more personal reason for wanting the program to succeed: my Aggie Blue Bike is remarkably similar to the bike I learned to ride on nearly fifty years ago. I was only five at the time and needed to mount the bike near a fence or some other object I could climb on. My feet reached the pedals, but not the ground, so stopping could be a tricky maneuver. I needed to start up on a downhill run, and if my neighbor, Mr. Corr, was handy to give me a push, so much the better. But in many ways, it was the perfect bike for a kid. It was built like a Panzer and could be ridden at high speed right into a tree, house or car without any significant negative effect. It was a real looker too with a two tone red and white paint job and my dad used a stencil to paint my name on the chain guard. When I brought up this option with the USU Aggie Blue Bike staff members, they looked a little indignant, so I backed off. If I personalize the bike, I'll have to do it without their help.

Fort Wetherill

2010-07-20T22:45:00.003+02:00

I spend a good deal of time thinking about the past. Not my own past so much as the Past, with a capital "P". It's particularly in your face here on Conanicut Island, where I'm spending a couple of weeks on summer vacation. I don't know if it's the pace of development, (slow) which leaves things like a Revolutionary War gun battery facing the West Passage up Narragansett Bay more or less unchanged after 200 years, or just the fact that lots of stuff happened here, but either way, I'm constantly being confronted here with History.

I took a spin around the island the other day on my Flevobike and wound up riding through the state park at the old Fort Wetherill. Wetherill faces Aquidneck Island (Newport) on the East Passage and has been an important part of the coastal defense of Narragansett Bay, like it's counterpart on the West Passage, since revolutionary times. I was struck by a photo on exhibit there that showed the fort as it was during World War II, when it was the site of an antisubmarine net that stretched across to Fort Adams on the Newport side. The net, or the structure that supported it, is clearly visible as a series of white dots that lead across the bay, with a gap at the center that allowed ships to pass. Most of the buildings in the photo are gone now, but several have been nicely restored. The antisubmarine net is gone as well, but scuba divers still explore the remnants.

The net was guarding Narragansett Bay from German U-Boats, quite likely U-boats made by Krupp, the Ruhrgebiet industrial giant so often sited as the greatest contributor to the industrial heritage currently being celebrated with the Kulturhauptstadt activities this year back in Essen. It's true the U-boats wouldn't have been manufactured in Essen: they were made at a separate plant in Kiel, many miles to the north. But I can't help but feel some irony about the whole thing. And looking at the big picture, it's hard not to come away with a sense of optimism about where the world is today.

I guess I'm hopelessly naive in my optimism, but it seems relatively harmless to me. I quite enjoy riding my bike around the island, and in previous years I've had as much fun riding the Industrial Culture Route in Essen, Duisburg, Dortmund and the like. My plan for world peace involves lots of similarly naive dummies who like to ride bikes around and mind their own business. It's got to be better than lots of hard headed realists who want to blown other people up. In all of my thinking about the past, I hope I've managed to develop some insights as well. I've been told those who can't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. And looking at these photos make me think that would be a real drag.

Still-Leben A40

2010-07-19T17:29:00.016+02:00

The average speed on the freeways of Los Angeles can be as low as 5 miles per hour during peak traffic periods, but that's nothing compared to the average speed on the A40 yesterday. The A40, or Ruhrschnellweg, as it is sometimes called, is the main Autobahn through the Ruhr region and yesterday it was closed from Duisburg to Dortmund as the entire Ruhrgebeit sat down to a 60 kilometer long Kaffeepause. Average speed never crept above zero as the classic German picnic benches and tables were stretched end to end and the Autobahn was closed to vehicular traffic for the whole day. Not everyone was sitting down though: 1 million of the 3 million estimated participants were there with bicycles and plenty were just walking or skating or running. It was the biggest and most talked about event of the Kulturhauptstadt Year and I'm sorry I missed it.

But I've got plenty of photos, videos and even a 3D virtual Kaffeetisch that WDR has put together to help me experience the event vicariously. And I'm not sure I could enjoy a gathering of 3 million people anyway. So, I'll check out the pictures online and download a video or two. Hope you enjoy them too.

Der Ball ist rund, das Spiel dauert vier Wochen

2010-07-05T17:12:00.003+02:00

Not for our boys though. Spain played an amazing game and triumphed in the end. So... we have to set our sights on 2012 and the Europa Pokal. Something tells me interest in that one is likely to be even thinner in the bars and cafes of Logan, UT than the World Cup games were.

In 1990, Gary Lineker said, "Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win." Not this year Gary, not this year.

The celebration at Logan Country Club after Spain's win yesterday.

Two more for Klose as Germany rips Maradona's Argentina apart‎

2010-07-02T22:45:00.015+02:00

I came away from today's match between Germany and Argentina with a couple of fairly strong impressions, but one stands out as a truth of überwältigende proportions: Mick Jagger looks like Death warmed over. Michael Ballack, on the other hand, is in great form, cheering from the sidelines as his team scored goal after goal against a team many thought would knock Germany out of the competition this year. And Angela Merkel, the German Kanzlerin who wrote the book on dowdy, was ecstatic in a trademark red blazer. Bill Clinton missed this match altogether.

Merkel needed a win badly after a very lackluster performance by her party's candidate for President of Germany in this past week's election. Yes, he won, but not by a very convincing margin. That couldn't be said for the National Eleven from Germany. They scored in the first three minutes to take an early lead, and then continued to rack up goals until, mercifully for Argentina, the final whistle blew at 90 minutes.

My companion and I picked another Logan bar this time, in the hopes of tracking down the elusive Utah soccer fans, but with no better luck. The only other warm bodies in the room were employees who floated through from time to time to ask what we were watching. If one is in need of some quiet time alone, it seems all one has to do is pick a bar in the United States that's playing a World Cup game.

An alert Forschungsjahr reader made me aware this past week of another important German contribution to the World Cup Culture with the Zeit video embedded below. In the stadia of South Africa, the average fan just bleats out a wavering drone-like tone, but leave it to the Germans to bring some organization to the playing of the vuvuzela. Enjoy the video and lay in a supply of Würstchen for the game on Wednesday.

Fußball in Amerika

2010-06-23T22:55:00.012+02:00

I took time out today from my extremely busy schedule to watch a World Cup game between Deutschland and Ghana. I'm not much of a sports fan, but it's hard not to become involved in Fußball if you spend any time in Germany. I was a Yankee fan when I was 5, 6, and 7 years old, played football (very badly) in high school, and since 1994, I'm a periodic Fußball fan.

Isenberger Platz, Essen

My interest typically peaks every four years at the time of the World Cup and I believe what I find attractive about soccer at that time, is the intense excitement and camaraderie that surrounds the game. When I'm in Germany, I prefer to watch the games in Isenberger Platz, a small plaza not far from the center of downtown Essen. It's a tree-filled square with a children's playground at its center and a combination of apartment buildings, second hand stores and cafes and bars on the margins. For some reason, there is a distinct Dutch slant to a lot of the businesses and one pub in particular, De Prins, recreates the atmosphere of the Netherlands as far as they are able. When World Cup games are being televised, they mount a large screen facing the square at De Prins and a friendly crowd packs in, sitting on parked cars and folding chairs. I find the vibe there particularly gemütlich.

The vibe at the White Owl in Logan this afternoon was decidedly different. The game was on one of five different wide screen TV's with the sound down. Serbia vs Australia was playing just three feet to the left moving down the bar and some American baseball team was playing on another channel. My companion and I were essentially the only patrons at the bar, so the bartender had no problem turning the sound up for us.

The soccer crowd at the White Owl

In 2006 Ghana beat the US team in a game I watched at De Prins, but the German team dominated Ghana in today's game. The German team controlled the ball for most of the game but scored only once. Ghana was obviously frustrated by the uncanny ability Germany demonstrated to work as an organized unit, but Ghana players could really take advantage of a slip-up on the German side and they came close to scoring several times. Philipp Lahm made a couple of great saves and prevented Ghana from scoring, but the hero of the game for Deutschland will certainly be seen as Mesut Özil, who scored Germany's lone goal. I've got a soft spot in my heart for Özil, who came up through the Rot/Weiss Essen team† and now plays for Bremen.

The German win was exciting, but something seemed to be lacking at The White Owl. I listened to hear the bar patrons begin singing "Finale, whoa ooooo ooooo oooo!" a traditional response to a win back in Isenberger Platz, but the only sound was the bartender listlessly shifting glasses on the back bar. A couple of distracted customers wondered aloud if this win would be good or bad for the US: a rhetorical question not worth answering. I'm ready for Germany gegen England now, but I'll keep my expectations low regarding the team spirit evidenced by the tired rummies at the Owl. I'll either bring my own vuvuzela, or just keep a low profile. Either way, I'm hoping to be back in Essen for 2014.

__________________________
†Essen's premiere soccer team, Rot/Weiss Essen has had another bad year and it's very existence is threatened now. On my recent visit to Essen, I was able ask the Bürgermeister what the future might hold for this club: "Sie müssen schon wieder in der Fünfte Liga absteigen. Sie müssen mühsam und Schritt für Schritt wieder aufsteigen." It's a sad day for an illustrious club with appparently no support coming from the Mayor's office.

Airport Culture

2010-06-11T13:48:00.009+02:00

The difference between Germany and the US is nowhere so clear as in the airport terminal building. The German airport is quiet and calming. Video monitors are set to news channels, but without sound. At the Düsseldorf Flughafen, acoustics are set up to deaden sound with high ceilings that are painted black in the boarding lounges. While waiting for your flight, you can listen to the murmured conversations of people across the room. The only exceptions to the uniform dress-code of black alternating with gray, are blue jeans (which several Germans told me recently, don't count) and the Americans heading home in brightly colored T-shirts.

In American war films, the Germans were always shouting things like, "RAUS, RAUS!" to American POWs. But there's no shouting today at the German airport, not even in the usually intense security screening area. At American airports, the security screening crew always includes a few young men whose only job seems to be banging those gray tubs together while shouting "LAPTOPSOUTLAPTOPSOUT!" At the German airport, a well mannered employee asked me if I had any fluids in my bag, seeming to suggest that maybe my word would be enough to satisfy him.

On my arrival in Atlanta, I entered the large passport control room, prepared to navigate the maze of retractable belt stanchions. Huge signs in English gave conflicting instructions about which lines passengers should go into, but the signs were superfluous. An older woman who looked as though she was ready for a costume party dressed as a charwoman stood directly in front of the largest sign, waving her arms and repeatedly shouting,

"OLLERROLLOLLERROLLOLLERROLLOLLERROLLOLLERROLLE!"

The sound echoed in the cavernous space and I wondered how the non-native speakers could possibly understand her. I wondered, in fact, how the native speakers could understand her. I decided the waving arms were designed to encourage me to continue on past her and the big sign that read All Passengers with an arrow pointing to the right. Somehow we all managed to jump the hoops and continue on, into the pandemonium that reigns in the rest of the terminal.

During my four hour lay over in Atlanta, I decided to go into a restaurant where I could sit down. The cacophony was off the scale in this hole in the wall place of about 100 sq. meters. There were three huge TV screens, each tuned to a different channel. The one closest to me was less than eight feet away and an old guy was on, blaring at me about a new way to treat diabetes. But in spite of the volume, I couldn't hear a word he was saying. I was surrounded by single men in their early forties jabbering into their Blackberries. The wooden chairs in the restaurant were built with a sounding board Stradivarius would die for. Each time a customer pulled back away from the table, a deep rumble resonated from his or her chair, drowning out even the incessant beeping from those golf carts US airport employees drive around all day.

I ordered a beer from my waitress and she immediately responded with a counter offer: if I add a shot to that order, I can get it for only $3 more. I had already been up for twelve hours, but for the good people of Georgia, it wasn't yet noon: and they're already pushing boilermakers? I declined the bump, and then the waitress asked to see my ID. It seems Atlanta has a liquor control policy that rivals even the surreal code of the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. But maybe they know what they're doing. In a German airport, a beer is certainly enough to smooth over any anxiety or tension. But clearly, the American airport requires stronger stuff.

Satellite

2010-05-30T18:30:00.009+02:00

There are lots of Americans on the streets of the Ruhrgebiet right now. Maybe it's the effect of the Kulturhauptstadt celebration going on this year, or it could have some other cause I'm not aware of, but they're impossible to miss in a crowd. There's something about the American accent that gives the voice a sharper edge. It cuts through a background pattern of other voices that blend easily with one another. And then there's the content. Americans prefer one phrase that I hear often when walking in a crowd and it's instantly recognizable:

"And I'm like..."

I never get to find out what they're like, because the conclusion to the phrase is optical, not aural. Presumably at the proper moment, the speaker makes a face of some kind to demonstrate just exactly what they are like. In a crowd of moving people, it's usually not possible to identify the speaker and satisfy my curiosity. I move through the crowd, knowing that I'm surrounded by people who are like something, but never knowing exactly what. It's just a little frustrating.

With Europeans speaking English this is never a problem. Since it's not their mother tongue, they haven't yet mastered the skills of discourse with a severely limited vocabulary. Where Americans can carry on a conversation for several minutes, cleverly limiting themselves to only a handful of words, Europeans are forced to fall back on a wide vocabulary. It was nowhere so clearly evident as in the Euro Vision Song Competition I watched last night on TV, televised from Oslo, a city where the citizenry is notorious for having to depend on a knowledge of grammar and vocabulary as a kind of coping skill in English.

I don't think the average American is aware of Euro Vision, but in Europe it's a monster event. What intrigued me about last night's performance was primarily the role that language played, and in particular, the English language. In the early years of the competition, it was understood that each country would perform in their own national language. Later, strict rules insured compliance. But in 1973, the rule was relaxed and that was the year ABBA won with Waterloo. The floodgates were officially opened on English and everyone got on board.

In last night's performance, well more than half of the singers performed in English and it clearly demonstrated a curious fact: English speaking countries are no longer leading the way when it comes to grammar and pronunciation development. These aspects of language are always in flux, and previously they shifted according to trends within the regions where English was spoken as a primary language. I believe now, foreign speakers are influencing English more than we are.

The German entry to this year's competition, Satellite, sung by the 18 year old sensation from Hannover, Lena, is a good example of this trend. Lena speaks beautiful English, (hampered as she is by a too large vocabulary and a lot of useless knowledge of grammar) but her pronunciation is naturally not that of a native speaker. When she sings, she subtly shifts the stress in certain words, or alters the glottal stop in others, creating a pattern that's a little tricky for me to understand. But the fact is, it sounds great. The words are slurred and inflected in a way that comes across as innovative and really appealing. Satellite is a little too "Pop" oriented for my tastes, but no one could deny that it's catchy. Plus, Lena's somewhat spastic stage presence was a welcome relief from the schmaltzy, over produced performances of some other contestants. (Yes, I'm thinking about Russia here.) It was a fact recognized by the voting public: Lena won in a landslide.

Lena interviewed after her win by Norwegian media cyborg, Erik Solbakken.

As the voting was announced last night from the capitals of Europe, I believe I'm correct in saying that the only country that did not give its results in English, was, predictably, France. Which puts the French in the odd position of having about as much influence over the shaping of spoken English as we have in America. Like the French, we Americans speak as little English as possible. We like to stick with one verb tense, (when was the last time you heard someone say "And I have been like...." or "I would have been like...?" ) a handful of simple words and many of us have abandoned adjectives and verbs almost entirely. Meanwhile, our language sails on without us, growing all the while. I can imagine a time when many of us won't be able to understand spoken English at all. And how does the average American feel about that? They're like... "Whatever?"

Their apathy is probably attributable to a blind faith in the power of the American Pop Cultural Juggernaut. It seems to roll over everything in its path and always triumphs in the end. It probably will in the case of spoken English too, in spite of my concerns. It certainly didn't escape my notice that in this competition, which is closed to non-Europeans, it was an American, Julie Frost, who co-wrote the winning song with the Dane, John Gordon. I admire the French for their courage, but I hope they're buying shares in Disney. Enjoy the video.

La Fura dels Baus

2010-05-23T14:18:00.009+02:00

I was in Duisburg Ruhrort on Thursday evening for the opening of the Duisburger Akzente, a festival of cultural events, and I enjoyed a performance by La Fura dels Baus, a Catalonian dance/theater troop known for spectacular interactive performances. Thursday night's event didn't disappoint, even with the Kulturhauptstadt media machine in overdrive.

And yesterday I experienced another event planned for the Pfingsten weekend: yellow hot air balloons that float above the Ruhrgebiet, marking the site of each former coal mining shaft. I was at the Landschaft Park to witness the spectacle and I expected to see the whole of the Ruhrgebiet spread out before me, dotted here and there with hundreds of bright yellow spheres. What I hadn't reckoned with: the Ruhrgebiet is flat as a pancake; there's plenty of smog even with the industry mostly gone; the balloons were fairly small and they only went up about 80 meters. The result was a little disappointing when viewed from the Aussichtsturm at the Park.

I'm sure it was exciting for those who were releasing the balloons at the various mines, and probably it looked pretty cool from an airplane. But from any given earth-bound point in the Ruhrgebiet, it was a little less spectacular than the hype may have suggested. The photo above, taken from the top floor of the Essen Rathaus looking north toward Zeche Zollverein, shows the event to better effect.

The Akzente, on the other hand, was everything it was cracked up to be and more. Newspapers report that over 80,000 people came to the Mecatorinsel in Duisburg to view the show and it's unlikely that any went home less than satisfied. Two huge cranes lifted the performers high into the air and they swung out over the audience, lit by a combination of colored lights, projected images and enough fireworks to celebrate Independence Day in even the most pyrotechnically inclined of US cities. Supposedly, the performance entitled Global Reingold, was an homage to Gerhardt Mercator, who was born and lived in Duisburg (who knew?) and Wagner, but with angels flying overhead and a sixty foot high marionette giving birth in the crowd, it was hard to keep the conceptual aspect of the work straight. When the puppet's water broke, there just wasn't time for deconstruction: we all broke and ran. My shirt wasn't completely dry until I arrived home in Essen well after midnight.

Gesichtbuch

2010-05-07T21:23:00.008+02:00

I've been a Facebook member for less than a year and find the experience pretty underwhelming. But if actions speak louder than words, then I guess I'm still enjoying it at some level, since I'm still a member. I check my Facebook page everyday for a while, then I'll forget about it for a week. When I'm logged on, I might troll around in other people's photo albums, just to see what they're up to, and when I do, I'm invariably astounded at how many "friends" my "friends" have. I'm hovering around 140. But several people I know on Facebook have "friend lists" that run to four digits.

I read today in Die Zeit that Friedrich Nietzsche has nearly 150,000 "friends." I never even thought of the guy as being that outgoing. That Goethe has 23,070 "friends" comes as no surprise, but I was shocked to find that Heinrich Böll has only 714. Then I remembered, I only have 140. Sartre has 57,033; Camus 37,227; Astrid Lindgren has 77,291. How far do I have to look before I can find an author with fewer "friends" than I have? J. K. Rowling has 30,374 and Gunther Grass has 1848. Most of those so called "friends" have probably never even read his famous play, Death in Venice.

So how do I pump up my own stats? I'm starting to get "friended" by some interesting people I don't already have any contact with, but I've been reluctant to commit to a real "friendship." It's obvious that they're serious people, since they only accept "friends" who are over 18. I guess they don't want to waste their time with a bunch of teeny boppers. If I want to grow my "friend" base, I guess I'll have to take the plunge, maybe with Treena, who promises to show me pictures of her new piercing if I "friend" her. Then I could "friend" all of Treena's "friends." I don't think I'll ever surpass Nietzsche, but it would be nice to at least to pull even with Hitler. I mean, the guy is the most evil dictator the world has ever known and at 457, he's got almost four times the number of "friends" I've got.

Or maybe I should just make the jump to Twitter.

Erstes Futter

2010-04-13T21:12:00.007+02:00

Although there is currently an open slot for a saint named Christopher, (see post, Hang on, Saint Christopher) I don't anticipate being elevated to the Canon when I die. I simply have too many faults. But although I recognize my own imperfect existence, I have a generally positive self image. I'm more or less pleased to be me and think most of the time, I'm a pretty good guy. So it comes as a shock when I'm accused of wanton cruelty or blatantly immoral behavior.

As it turns out, my actions have come under attack most aggressively at this time of year, in April, the cruelest month, when lilacs are bred out of the dead land and it's time to prune the willows. When I was a kid, cutting pussy willows was a time-honored tradition. I remember encountering pussy willow catkins even before I entered kindergarten and thinking that they must indeed have been a kind of transspecies creature, formed by crossing kitties with what we always called a "pricker bush" in my neighborhood. It struck me as a fine idea. When I was a little older, I encountered pussy willows in the classroom too and I retain fond memories of these delightful harbingers of spring.

Here in the US, I have a willow growing in my backyard and can cut pussy willows with abandon. Not a spring goes by when I don't cut a few of the earliest shoots to put in a vase in the dining room. But during the years I've spent in Germany, finding a pussy willow wasn't always easy. Sure, there's plenty of rural territory in Germany, but I've always been stuck in the city and avoided taking cuttings from my neighbors, most of whom, I in any case didn't know. You can imagine my pleasure then, when on my most recent stay in Germany, I found a willow growing along a public path. It was a former railroad cut, not maintained as a park, and I reasoned that no one would object if I cut a few shoots to bring home. We wanted to decorate the apartment festively for a party on the weekend.

I was in high spirits until our first guests arrived. It seems that in Germany, children aren't taught to see catkins as the first symbol of spring, but rather as the "first food for the bees." With those pussy willow shoots on my table, all anyone could think of were the the poor starving bees, lying cold and hungry among the crocus in some lonely German pasture. Conversation was difficult and got harder as each of us imagined we could hear the plaintive buzzing of a dying hive, the victim of my thoughtlessness. I didn't like this image of myself as bee-killer, so when the guests went home, I researched this cultural attitude toward the pussy willow thoroughly. It turns out, bees do depend to some extent on willows in the early spring. And this "first food for the bees" thing does run pretty deep in the German psyche. Again and again I uncovered evidence on-line of indignant German speakers, reacting to crimes against the bees. I made a decision to be more sensitive to cultural values and lay off the pussy willows while in Germany.

Willows in America don't respect this new attitude on my part though. They grow like Topsy and this spring the cute little pussy willow I planted behind my house was getting up around five meters high. I hope no one in Germany finds out, but this weekend, I cut it off at the ground and the bees be damned. New shoots will come up and I intend to maintain it as a bush from here on in. Maybe I'll put out a saucer of sugar water for the bees, but come on: rural Utah is lousy with willows. Surely the bees can find some other sucker to provide their first food. And when he dies, I'll nominate him for canonization myself.

Sinn Féin

2010-03-17T18:51:00.006+01:00

For several years following my acquisition of an advanced degree in Fine Art, I followed a career path common to painters and artists of all kinds. I tended bar. I worked at an Irish bar in Westport, Connecticut and sometimes on St. Patrick's Day a group of customers would bring a small bottle of food coloring in with them in order to dye their beer green. Doubtless, they thought this would endear them to the Irish regulars. On the contrary, this marked them as helpless amateurs. If they continued with that kind of silly behavior, we sometimes had to take our shillelagh from under the bar and rain blows on them, driving them out into the parking lot.

No, we, ourselves, those of Irish ancestry, are not known for our delicacy or formal manners. It was one of the things that drew the American painter, Robert Henri, to the island. Henri, author of The Art Spirit, was an important figure in American Realism and a leader of the so-called Ashcan School of American painting. Critic Robert Hughes referred to Henri as "vulgar" and he meant it as a compliment. To the best of my knowledge, Henri had no Irish heritage himself, but traveled often to Ireland. One of Henri's more famous paintings is a portrait of Johnny Commins, an older resident of Achill, Ireland, who sat for Henri during one of his many visits. The painting is titled Himself and is a good example of a distinct use of reflexive pronouns by the Irish. You could also hear the construction coming from Barry Fitzgerald in a film such as, Going My Way. I don't speak any Irish myself, but I believe this use of the reflexive is intended for emphasis. We use reflexive pronouns the same way in American English today and you sometimes even hear them referred to as "intensive" pronouns.

Himself, by Robert Henri

Not so with the reflexive pronoun in German. The language is simply chock full of verbs that require reflexive pronouns and it's a minefield for English speakers learning the language. In English, reflexive pronouns are usually optional. You can say "I'm shaving myself'" but why bother? Is it really likely that you're shaving someone else? In German however, the verb to shave is sich razieren, with the sich part being the reflexive pronoun. Forgetting to include the reflexive pronoun often changes the meaning of the verb dramatically and in the case of the verb for shaving, it simply doesn't exist without the reflexive part. Americans learning to speak German can have some cheap laughs by translating German reflexive constructions literally into English. When leaving a German I class for example, a student of German could bring down the house with a translation of a common German parting salutation: "We'll be seeing us!" Or how about a direct translation of the German expression ich freue mich! (=I happy myself?)

Yes, we Americans can laugh, but if we thought about it, we might realize that there is an important truth revealed here: a reflexive construction is one in which the subject and object of the verb are the same thing. It follows, therefore, that one only uses reflexive pronouns (myself, ourselves, etc.) when there is a matching subject for them. Right now in American English, we're experiencing a flood of reflexive usage that I can only imagine some people must feel sounds more refined. I hear it on the radio, around town and on campus, from faculty as well as students. A typical example would be something like, "The nachos were brought by, like, Bobby and myself." Ugh! Combined (as it often is) with the passive voice, it's like scratching your fingernails across a particularly nasty grammar chalkboard.

How did this usage become so popular? Did Seinfeld start it? Was it politicians, that group which popularized such classic expressions as "At this point in time...?" Or maybe this construction was encouraged by those adults who were always correcting grammar by saying, "Bobby and I!" when their children proudly announced "Bobby and me went swimming!" I don't know. And ultimately, I don't care, but my feelings about this stilted use of the reflexive pronoun are about the same as my feelings about yahoos who drink green beer on St. Patrick's Day. One should always keep a shillelagh close at hand.

Balkan Pop

2010-03-09T23:06:00.004+01:00

A normal day for me, on campus at Utah State University, involves wearing many hats. I might begin my day in my office, responding to e-mails. Some will deal with a search going on in a neighboring department where my expertise as a generic run-of-the-mill "artist" justifies my participation. In a meeting later that day I might be sitting around a table with a group of important administrator types, interviewing a candidate for a high level position such as Dean. At noon I might be on the phone with a gallery director in the Bay Area negotiating the dates of an upcoming show. At surprisingly rare intervals, I might even be standing before a class of undergraduates, trying to explain the importance of abstract systems in the construction of a painting. Yesterday, in fact, I did all those things and more besides. The variety of my day can be a challenge under the best of circumstances, but I am handicapped by a brain that plays a sound track for me during virtually all of these activities. Sometimes the rhythm builds in a way I can't control and I feel an almost irresistible urge to get up and dance. I live in near constant fear, that in the most inappropriate of situations, I may find myself standing on the boardroom table, belting out a line like "Disko, disko, Partizani!" from the internal soundtrack. Would I ever live down the embarrassment?

I think a lot of us suffer from at least a mild case of the Idee Fixe. In the pre-iPod era, you'd be on your way out of the house in the morning, and before you could react and turn it off, the radio would inject a song like Ballad of the Green Berets, or These Boots are Made for Walking' into your head. It would play all day and there was no way to shake it. Today the problem is different. I can easily control what goes into my head most of the time, so the danger isn't that I'll spend a day running through the theme song to F Troop. Now my concern is that really, really good music will get in and take over my body. And lately, the music I'm most afraid of is the fabulous Balkan Pop from German recording artist, Shantel.

Shantel is the stage name of Stefan Hantel, born in Mannheim on January 1, 1968. Hantel grew up in Frankfurt and got his start in music as a DJ. I read an interview with him recently in Die Zeit and find his music outrageously compelling. In the interview he describes how he grew up playing a variety of musical instruments and was influenced by his grandparents who came out of Bukowina, an old Duchy of the Habsburg Empire. Hantel got involved in the Techno scene of European dance clubs but was sidetracked by gypsy brass bands from Eastern Europe that appeared on the scene after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The sound of these Balkan brass choirs reminded him of his early childhood and he began incorporating eastern rhythms and harmonies into the DJ mixes he did in German dance clubs. Many years later, he has numerous recordings and a film sound track to his credit and he has become a kind of cottage industrial giant of Balkan Pop.

Shantel has a great website and I'll post a link to it in the Forschungsjahr sidebar. I could try to describe his music, but it's better to just listen for yourself. As a start, I'll include a music video from his 2007 album below. He has a new CD out as well, Planet Paprika, that I haven't heard much of yet, but I'll be getting around to it soon. Delayed gratification builds character. And given the addictive nature of Shantel's music, a strong character is highly recommended.

Wuppersprung

2010-02-24T19:23:00.010+01:00

I watched another film from Tom Tykwer last night: Der Krieger und die Kaiserin or The Princess and the Warrior, as it was released in the US. Tykwer is probably best known as the director of Run, Lola, Run, one of the few European films that has played to a financial success in the US market, and I'm sure the distribution companies were hoping to score again with The Princess and the Warrior. If you read the description at Netflix, they bill it as a "heist" film. It's a heist film in the way that the Old Man and the Sea is a book about deep sea sport fishing. Promoting the film in this way is just one of the reasons that so many European films flop at the US box office.

I enjoyed the film and especially the sets. A lot of the action takes place in a psychiatric hospital where the main character, Sissi, played by Franka Potente, works as a nurse. The exterior shots of the hospital are fabulous and the interior made me want to develop a minor psychosis so I could spend some time there. Initially, I was very impressed with the level of psychiatric care in Germany, but then discovered that the set was built for the film. I guess that doesn't mean that German psychiatric care is lousy, but it took the edge off my desire to experience it first hand.

But the best set was the city of Wuppertal itself. Tom Tykwer grew up in Wuppertal, and I've visited it a number of times. It had its heyday at the opening of the nineteenth century as an industrial center, primarily producing textiles. The geography of the region, a long, narrow and steep river valley, hampered continued development and eventually the industry moved north to the Ruhrgebiet. But it left in its wake some beautiful old houses and a linear city, built along the banks of the Wupper and the Schwebebahn line that was constructed over the river. Tykwer uses the Schwebebahn and the steep hills the city grew up on to create some beautiful imagery and distinctive locations throughout the film.

Schwebebahn means something like "suspended pathway" and it's the name for the monorail train that Wuppertal built during its golden age, presumably to give up as little valuable land as possible for public transit. Many Americans are familiar with it because of its most famous image: Tuffi the elephant falling out of a car into the Wupper River in 1950. The Wuppertal zoo director at the time thought it would be a good publicity stunt to take the elephant, a three year old female, for a ride on the famous Schwebebahn. As you (or anyone who gave it more than five seconds thought) would imagine, Tuffi didn't take well to riding in a car that travels suspended from a monorail over a river valley. She ran through the car, smashing windows and injuring passengers. Eventually, she fell out of the car and was captured on film in an image that I can only describe as skuril. I think a good translation for that might be "bizarre" or "fantastic," but neither really seems to do the photo justice.

The Princess and the Warrior has a more or less "happy" ending for the two misfits the title refers to and I'm happy to report that Tuffi's story also comes out OK in the end. The zoo director was sacked as well as the blockhead transit official who approved the ride. Tuffi landed in the water and swan to shore, uninjured but for some minor cuts and scrapes. The accident location is still remembered with a painted image of Tuffi on a neighboring building and city ordinances forbid the transit of elephants on the Schwebebahn today.

Metropolis

2010-02-16T17:54:00.011+01:00

 On February 12, 2010, a restored copy of the legendary silent film classic, Metropolis, by Fritz Lang was shown as a part of the Berlin Film Festival. Metropolis is a remarkable film, and has influenced several generations of film makers since its 1926 premiere. Star Wars, Blade Runner and Batman were all shaped by Lang's distinct vision of a futuristic cityscape. Originally over two hours long, Metropolis was cut substantially after its premiere in an effort to make it more profitable. Over the decades, much of the original footage was lost and until recently, no one dreamed that the film could ever be restored to its former glory. Then, in July 2008, a negative of the original premiere cut of the film, including all the lost scenes, was discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The negative was a mess and required considerable restoration before it could be shown again, but I assume that it will be available to all of us again soon.

The restored film was shown at the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin, but was also shown simultaneously on a screen at the Brandenburg Gate in what is known in Germany as a "Public Viewing." The phenomenon of a free public viewing is a tradition I enjoy in Germany but have never experienced in the US. I live in a relatively small city, one where a gathering of more than fifty people who are neither watching a football game nor singing hymns would be eyed with suspicion. So I don't wonder that public viewings are rare here. But do they take place in larger American cities? In Essen in 2006, I had the pleasure of watching many of the Soccer World Cup games in open air settings, but I doubt if anyone can publicly televise similar events in the US. I confess to almost total ignorance of the Super Bowl, but I doubt if the people in New Orleans or elsewhere were able to watch the recent game in a public setting. There is just too much money at stake to show games for free in a public place.

But in Germany the concept of Public Viewing has a long tradition, dating back even to the Summer Olympics of 1936 when public Fernsehstuben (=TV lounges) were made available for people to watch the games. The events weren't called Public Viewings then, that's another Denglisch word, but they enabled the average German citizen to feel a participant in the events and take pride in them. It's what we in America call Socialism. And it's not just a casual socialism, where the German equivalent of Andy Hardy says, "Hey, we can put on a Public Viewing in the old barn!" Public Viewing is a trademark protected name, owned by a company in Magdeburg with a logo and everything. How does a company make money by showing films and sporting events to the public for free? That's a question a guy raised in a free market economy just can't answer. Maybe they get a cut of all the Würstchen sold.

The plot of Metropolis is just another example of the pink tinge that colors many things European. In the film, society is divided into two classes: the wealthy, who live high above the Earth in luxurious skyscrapers, and the workers, who live and toil underground. Naturally, the workers are salt of the earth types and the son of wealthy Johann Fredersen, founder and ruler of Metropolis, falls for Maria, daughter of the worker class and a sort of ultra Polly Purebred character. OK, it's not the most original story, but not many people praise Metropolis for its plot. Excepting maybe Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels. According to Siegfried Kracauer in his book, Von Calagari bis Hitler, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Films, Lang related the following about his connection to the famous National Socialist propaganda minister, "(Goebbels) told me that years before, he and Hitler had seen my film Metropolis in some small town and that at that time Hitler declared that he would like me to make Nazi films." The legend is, Lang took the next train out of Berlin, not stopping to pack a suitcase. He lived in Paris for a short time, but ultimately wound up in Hollywood where he continued a long and illustrious directing career.

I'm currently planning my own return to Berlin and the timing couldn't be better. I'll be there during the 2010 World Cup and I'm looking forward to watching the action on a big screen at one of what I'm sure will be several Public Viewing opportunities. I'll be sure to watch the restored Metropolis beforehand to get in a properly Socialist mood. Capitalists will have to wait a while to purchase the DVD version, but until then, we can all enjoy the restored trailer below.

The Guns of Essen

2010-02-07T00:31:00.016+01:00

When there's a lot of snow on the ground, I lose my enthusiasm for riding my bike around town. The cold doesn't improve the situation, but mostly I object to the shrinking road shoulder. Banks of snow and ice push out into the street in places and a relatively pleasant morning commute becomes that much trickier. Then there's the air quality: worst in the US when we're under an inversion and cycling just increases my exposure. Still, I can't really bring myself to drive, so most days I walk to work. It's still cold, the air is still dirty and the average Logan sidewalk looks like a section of the Chilkoot Trail. But when I walk, I can listen to a book on tape and that makes it all worth while.

Last week I was "reading" The Guns of August again, Barbara Tuchman's classic book about the first month of World War I. It's a fabulous book and outrageously entertaining. I know hindsight is 20/20, but there is hardly a general or statesman in the whole 544 pages (or 14 disks) that doesn't come out looking like a complete ass. Field Marshall Sir John French, leader of the British Expeditionary Forces, landed in France only to execute a series of brilliant retreats. His troops could only make contact with the enemy when he made a mistake and forgot to retreat fast enough. The French, under Joffre, felt any battle could be won with proper Gallic élan, thereby neglecting to provide troops with items such as weapons and ammunition. The Germans seemed to have every advantage, but had an incomplete understanding of the value of diplomacy. After a gratuitous violation of Belgian neutrality to open the war, they felt the best way to win back world public opinion would be to execute woman and children in villages along the way to Paris. Mostly the Americans escape the worst of the stupidity by remaining neutral themselves, but the American ambassador to France reinforces the European view of American naïveté by suggesting that when the Germans arrive at the gates of Paris, he'll go out and "talk" to them.

I'm probably being too critical here. Albert I, King of the Belgians, shown here walking with the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel II, acted admirably. He was also very tall and sat a horse well. And Joseph Gallieni, French retired territorial General, whose intelligence, strength of will and resourcefulness saved the French from defeat, certainly deserves our respect. The Germans, under Moltke, had transport figured out to the timing of every axle of rolling stock and the second it would cross the French border, but Gallieni delivered his troops in a fleet of taxi cabs and stopped Moltke cold.

A big part in the first month of the war was played by German arms manufacturer Friedrich Krupp AG of Essen, Germany. It was their siege guns that allowed the Germans to overrun Belgian forts so rapidly. So imagine my surprise as I crested Old Main Hill on campus last week and spotted a ThyssenKrupp delivery truck in the parking lot behind our administration building, just as Ludendorff surrounded Liege in my headphones. It turned out to be nothing more serious than a routine elevator inspection. But it made me wonder about the resemblance of certain Utah State University administrators to General Erich Ludendorff.

Krupp AG merged with Thyssen, another Ruhrgebiet industrial giant, in 2000 and their new world headquarters is nearing completion in the Altendorf neighborhood in Essen. It's the sort of development that makes me really think the world might be getting better. Instead of invading one another's countries, almost everyone in Europe is busy now planning to sell bratwurst or some other local specialty in Essen as a part of the World Cultural Capital celebration. Krupp isn't building siege guns, but is instead insuring my safe transportation to the dean's office on the third floor of Old Main and back. The "Krupp Belt" that wraps around downtown Essen to the west, a phalanx of belching smoke stacks in WWI, and a heap of rubble at the end of WWII, is now a beautiful park with a new north/south boulevard and public transit line. The transformation has taken over one hundred years and I try to keep the long view myself as I walk the frozen trails of Logan, an urban planning waste land in the air pollution capital of Utah. If Europe survived the foolishness of their leaders, there must be hope for Cache Valley too.

Folkwang Eröffnung

2010-02-01T00:34:00.008+01:00

I'm busy in Utah completing a report that assesses my department at the state university. It's an an important document and will soon be lining wastepaper bins in offices all over campus. While I look for more places to insert vital buzzwords such as "diversity" or "disaggregate," Forschungsjahr readers will have to make do with this exciting video about the newly renovated (and expanded!) Folkwang Museum building in Essen. My favorite part is the neu-Deutsch phrase, Besucher Facilities. I wish I had THAT guy's help with my report.

zwanzigzehn

2010-01-17T22:50:00.010+01:00

The official World Cultural Capital celebration opening took place a few days ago in Essen at the Zeche Zollverein and here am I, stuck in Utah. Luckily, there's no lack of information about the event, and from what I can see it was a blow out Essen will be talking about for years to come. Americans often have a romantic picture of Germany, in which a layer of crisp new snow lies on all the pretty cottages. The truth is, as I've mentioned in previous blog posts, snow is fairly rare in the Ruhrgebiet. So an opening night celebration in an open air arena at the heart of the Zollverein campus mustn't have seemed like a particularly risky enterprise. But on the night of the ninth of January, the snow was flying. Far from ruining the event, it seems to have heightened the drama.

Grönemeyer was there, the Minister President, Helge Schneider, Dietmar Bär and Klaus J. Behrendt (the Tatort Kommissare from Köln,) the former Minister President... it seems only I couldn't make it. I'll include some pictures I borrowed from Spiegel below, but the most exciting images I saw were included in WDR's video presentation, which you can view here: 200.000 feiern Ruhr 2010. I thought in the new, digital world, everything would be free, but it turns out WDR doesn't allow me to embed their videos in my blog. Mist! So, click on the link, watch the video, enjoy the pictures. I need to get busy booking my flight for a visit at the end of this semester.

Schimanski beim Frühstück

2010-01-02T01:51:00.017+01:00

I continue to give a great deal of thought to the figure of Horst Schimanski, the legendary Duisburg ARD Kommissar in the TV Serien, Tatort. The more I think about him, the more I'm convinced that he is essentially like a kind of anti-hero that I recognize as distinctly American. It could, of course, be that there is a European tradition for a similar kind of anti-hero. But one of the benefits of writing a blog, is that one needn't cloud the issue with a lot of facts.

To follow my line of thought, first watch the video I've embedded below. It represents the German TV public's very first encounter with Schimanski and shows him waking up in his Duisburg Wohnung:

The scene brings me back immediately to the opening of the classic 1966 Paul Newman detective film, Harper. I haven't seen the film in many years, and the Internet, normally so obliging in providing me with almost any image, text or information that I could want, lacks a YouTube clip of the scene. But the scene made a strong impression on me and I can remember it well even after 30 years. The Newman character, Lew Harper, wakes during the opening credits in a pile of rumpled clothing on the couch. Behind him we see the snowy B&W test pattern of a local station flickering on the TV set.

Just as Horst wanders around his kitchen looking for a relatively clean pan to cook an egg, Lew searches for the makings of a cup of coffee, finally realizing that the coffee can is empty. He hangs his head in exasperation and then suddenly looks to his right at something outside the frame of the screen. To people like me who are knowledgeable in the ways of scrounging, the next step is obvious. He walks to the trash can, steps on the foot pedal opening the can and reveals yesterday's filter with the damp, rancid grounds spilling out over a brownish banana peel. It's the equivalent of Schimanski downing the raw egg.

The figure of Lew Harper, like Horst Schimanski and a long line of other anti-hero detectives , culminating perhaps in a figure like Jim Rockford, share many characteristics. They are thoroughly fallible, (usually demonstrated by the chaos of their personal lives) rock hard, but ultimately vulnerable. They aspire to Sam Spade but can't follow through as he does with the line "You killed Miles and you're going over for it." They are often manipulated by the Mädels in spite of their tough guy persona. Nor can they give up, even when faced with a legion of goons who tell them they should forget the whole thing, if they know what's good for them.

I feel a strong resonance with the Ruhrgebiet culture that has elevated Horst Schimanski to the status of a kind of folk hero. My heart goes out to the poor people of Hannover who have to make do with Charlotte Lindholm, a pitiful excuse for a decent Kommissarin. And please don't think this is a gender thing: as a very young child, I can remember rushing around the house with my mother in a chaos similar to that experienced by Schimanski. My mom always seemed to be five minutes late for something and with a mess of kids living in a small house, she rarely had any more free counter space than Schimanski to put down a pan. More than once I watched her crack an egg in a mug and down it raw while buttoning her coat to rush out the door. She would certainly have had a soft spot in her heart for Schimanski too. Kommissarin Lindholm has a dedicated following of passionate viewers who can relate to her thoughtful, politically correct style of investigation and it must be admitted, she always wraps up her Fälle in the required sixty minutes. I guess I just don't like the way she eats her breakfast.

Politically Korrekt

2010-01-01T21:55:00.009+01:00

Germans love our president. If President Obama took it into his head to run for German Chancellor after he's through in the White House, I have no doubt he'd win hands down. But Germans have come up with some rather odd ways of showing their appreciation for Mr. Obama. Take the "Obama-Fingers" shown above, for example. What's that all about? Even if Mr. Obama were actually going to eat junk like this, I can't believe he would dip it in curry sauce. Some people (I'm talking about German people here. American people are largely unaware of the Obama-Fingers product, excepting those 100-200 loyal readers of Forschungjahr) have responded very negatively to Obama-Fingers. They feel that the product is racially insensitive. "Fried chicken has long been associated with African-Americans in the US..." they say. I can't really see the problem myself, and don't find the product to be a racial slur. Stupid, yes, but not racist. In fact, I question the possibility that any frozen food could be racist, but that's just me.

But how about a doll? Could a doll be racially insensitive? Here I think German doll maker Marcel Offermann has shown that the answer is a resounding "Yes!" Offermann is famous for his dolls representing figures such as Pope Benedict XVI, the Dalai Lama and Lady Diana. But as he turned his hand to Barak Obama, he decided to just use a generic dark skinned doll head. He admits that the physical resemblance to Obama could have been closer. "The doll works more on a symbolic level," he said. "It's a symbiosis of the clothing and the fact it's a black doll." Although "90 percent" of the feedback so far has been positive, he admits that "10 percent of people said the doll doesn't look like Obama." I figure that means 90 % of the people asked must be blind. Just for the record, let me state here that all black people do not look alike. Not that Herr Offermann is too concerned. The Barack Obama doll is available in a limited edition of 999 and as Offermann points out, "The pope doll sold out in two-and-a-half weeks." Alle Achtung!

But my favorite example of Obamamania is the cover of the Berlin-based daily Die Tageszeitung: normally considered a bastion of political correctness. Founded in 1978, it has always been seen as a left-leaning alternative to the mainstream press and is outspoken in its attack on xenophobia in Germany. In a cover story about Obama's run for the presidency back in May of 2008, the paper referred to the White House as "Uncle Barak's cabin." "The headline is intended to be satirical," said deputy editor-in-chief Reiner Metzger as he defended the paper against critics. Well, that's a relief.

I'm just happy that our president is so popular and that I can retire the red maple leaf I always kept handy while traveling in Europe, at least for a little while. I'm not very touchy when it comes to racial insensitivity and I don't see the point to getting all worked up about an Obama doll that could easily double as a Muhhamad Ali doll in a pinch. There are hate crimes enough to go around without looking for offense where none is intended. At 139€ a piece, the Obama doll is out of my price range. But I'll be on the lookout for other German Obama memorabilia on my next trip. And with any luck I can get on his campaign staff for the 2017 Kanzelerwahl.

White Christmas

2009-12-25T00:24:00.008+01:00

The weather has dominated the news in the US for the past week or so and the same is true for Germany. The Ruhr region doesn't get many serious snow storms as a rule, but this past week they were hit hard. I picked up on the story listening to WDR and went to some local print news sites to get more detail online. My search brought up some references to the recent snow, but I was quickly sidetracked by news about a new children's book being featured in a series of pieces in the KinderZEIT. KinderZEIT is a regular feature of the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. It has stories aimed at children and they're going to be publishing one of the tales from Ritter, Räuber, Spökenkieker by Hartmut El Kurdi each week until mid-February. Herr El Kurdi is a Jordanian born writer, who grew up in the UK and Germany. The perfect multi-kulti credentials for this book of Ruhrgebiet folk tales, given the Ruhr's reputation as Europe's ultimate melting Pott.

Like everything that happens in the Ruhrgebiet right now, the publication of the folk tales volume is timed to coincide with the Kulturhauptstadt year, 2010. The festivities will bring a lot of attention to Essen and the surrounding cities and I imagine sales for the book might be just a little stronger than would otherwise be the case.

I enjoyed the first story, but was again sidetracked as I read the profiles of loyal KinderZEIT readers in the web page sidebar. It seems kids can send in short bios and get an early fifteen minutes of fame if the newspaper chooses their bio for publication. The format is reminiscent of the "Dewar's Profiles" that used to run at the back of the New Yorker and similar magazines in the US: passport style photo in the upper right and short answers to a series of standard questions, such as, Where do you live? What do you find particularly nice about living there? What doesn't appeal to you there? What makes you sad? What word do you always misspell? I was fascinated by the questions alone, never mind the answers the kids gave.

Thinking back to my own childhood, I'm wondering, were American kids in the 1960's allowed to be sad? I don't think so. Not that we weren't ever sad, it's just that society didn't really allow for the possibility that we would ever think about it in the abstract. I think what made me most sad when I was younger were the Saturdays when my father would abruptly announce that he would be cutting hair after lunch. Not his own hair, of which there wasn't enough to bother talking about, but our hair: we the children. Those Saturdays always ended with me looking like some skinny reform school type, tried as an adult and prepped for the electric chair. I knew school on Monday would be a living hell and wondered why a parent would make his child look that bad on purpose. But by Tuesday I had already forgotten that haircuts existed and lived in a fool's paradise until the next Saturday my father would decide to make my brothers and me look like a band of youthful collaborators.

As I read the profiles in the KinderZEIT I was surprised to see that the German kids were made sad by things like fighting, war, death, or in two cases, noise. I fought constantly as a kid and don't remember being sad about it. Angry, yes, but only if I lost. And noise? I loved noise and reveled in noisy things. Reading these profiles, I wondered if maybe it's only the children of Zeit readers that get sad about noise. Probably kids whose parents read the Bild Zeitung get sad about stuff that I could relate to, like having to go to bed in the summer when it's still light out. But not all Zeit reader children are so sophisticated. One child, when asked what he particularly disliked about his home town (Marburg,) replied "Hundehaufen." In my neighborhood we called it dog doo and we didn't like it either. I couldn't have responded in any meaningful way to a question about a world free of war, but if we just could have made the front lawn safe for playing "Duck, Duck, Goose," that would have meant a lot to me.

The Hundehaufen in Essen are all safely hidden today under a glittering blanket of white snow and presumably the children, whether Zeit readers or Bild readers are looking forward to the excitement of Christmas tomorrow. The quintessential Christmas for me is still the year my brother got a toy cannon, one that shot real wooden shells. We took advantage of my parent's absence for a short time to get the range on the Christmas tree and lay waste to a number of glass ornaments. It was great fun, but for tomorrow, I'm hoping for a Christmas that would make a KinderZEIT reader happy: quiet, no fighting and everyone in Marburg gets a shiny new Pooper Scooper under the tree.

European problems

2009-12-09T23:24:00.004+01:00

The problems I face in Logan, Utah at this time of year tend to revolve around snow removal and idling vehicles. A walk to the store will probably involve at least one resident who thinks that the sidewalk is a good place to throw the snow as they clear their driveway. And after making the way clear for their Lincoln Navigator, they often leave it in the fire lane at a local shopping center while they run in for a few things. Sometimes I find it hard to maintain my normal buoyant and upbeat attitude. Then life sends you a video like the one below and you can't help but laugh as you realize others are suffering too.

I guess Misery really does love company.

Desperadoes

2009-12-04T16:55:00.010+01:00

Buried deep in the psyche of most U. S. North Americans is the concept of The Road. I don't mean to try to claim road stories just for America: Homer did a pretty good job with The Odyssey and presumably journey tales figure in many of the world's cultures. But in America, The Road is deep and significant. Sometimes, Our Hero is on the road of discovery. He's on the road to find out. But more often than not, road stories are about being pursued. My appreciation of road stories began with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and continued with books like On the Road, but my favorite road tales were quickly dominated by film. The list of road films is long and illustrious: It Happened One Night, Five Easy Pieces*, Rain Man, The Get Away, Thelma and Louise. I saw so many of these films growing up, I think I took it for granted that ultimately we'd all be on the run one time or another. It wasn't a future that I found entirely unappealing.

Germans love road films too, as far as I can tell, and more than one German film director has abandoned his or her Heimat and landed in Hollywood to make one. Some even stay at home and give it a try. I'm thinking here about Adolf Winkelmann and his trilogy of Ruhrgebiet cult films. Die Abfahrer is a classic road movie and has a small but dedicated following. But the truth is, being on the run in Deutschland is a far cry from floating down the mighty Mississippi on a raft. As two escapees from the JVA Aachen demonstrated this past week.

The JVA is a high security prison but in spite in that, two Kumpels, Michael Heckhoff and Peter Paul Michalski, both of whom were sentenced to life without parole, walked out last week and held most of North Rhine/Westphalen in suspense for several days as they eluded capture. If they had broken out of Leavenworth, Folsom or Angola, their plan would have been clear: steal a car and make a run for the Mexican border. Along the way there would have been plenty of opportunities for mayhem, high speed chases, and a killer sound track. Mexico is too far away to be a reasonable escape plan for German escapees, but they might at least have lit out for Italy, Spain or Turkey. Instead they called a taxi after breaking out and decided to go to Mulheim. "We're going on the assumption that the presence of a taxi waiting outside the prison was not a coincidence." said the State Attorney General Robert Deller. That would be my guess too.

I would also guess that these two convicts had never seen a good road picture like Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry or even The Straight Story. If they had, things might have turned out differently. As is was, the cops just went to Mulheim, former home of Heckhoff, and waited. No chase, no wrecked police cars, no nothing. Hollywood isn't likely to be negotiating for the rights to this story.

But the drama wasn't over yet. The pair split up in Kettwig and the second man, Michalski, was now "on the lam." If it were a decent screen play, he would have crossed the Dutch border on a Rhine river barge, made it to Rotterdam, and joined a swarthy crew bound for Honduras. This guy decided to go to Bielefeld. No sense of adventure. The cops picked him up by homing in on his Handy (mobile phone) and when they nabbed him, he was riding a stolen bike in a downpour. The cops took him into custody and his comment was, "I'm glad it's all over..." Yeah, I'd be glad it was over too if I was puffing along a busy highway shoulder with trucks splashing dirty water up on me.

What these guys really needed, was a 57 Chevy and four or five hundred miles of Route 66 to play around with. I'm glad the two of them are back in the slammer where they belong, but in a way, it's sad. I enjoy living in Germany and hope to be back there soon, but if I'm ever on the run, be it on a bike, motorcycle, Dodge Charger or even a rider mower, I'll want to do it in America where these things are properly understood.

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* While doing the research for this post, I found some amazing stuff I can't help but share. Here's the Diner Scene from Five Easy Pieces.

And click here for a news report on Welt TV
Verbrecherjagd

Viscosity

2009-11-21T17:14:00.011+01:00

At Utah State University I teach students in the Art Department how to paint. For many painting instructors, that might mean primarily a focus on theory and concept. I'm talking here about the kind of people who never miss an opportunity to use the word "reference" as a verb. But in the courses I teach, I do spend a considerable amount of time actually talking about the physical activity of painting. I don't think it hurts anyone to know how to mix color or to use a system based on local values to create order in an image. But even given my willingness to deal unashamedly with the mechanics of painting, I can't always shield my students from the esoteric stuff. And the fact that I keep coming back to, is that in painting, viscosity counts for a lot. And the truth about viscosity, is that it's virtually impossible to explain it verbally. If the paint has the right viscosity, it's easy to make it do what you want. If the viscosity is wrong, you can forget it. Recently I learned, it's the same when you're making Spätzle.

About this time a year ago, I was in Essen, enjoying an expat Thanksgiving dinner at Seitenblick. I ordered, ate and later wrote about a fabulous meal of Kurbisspätzle, or Pumpkin Spaetzle, pan fried with sauerkraut. We decided to try making it at home about a week ago, but we didn't get the Zähflüssigkeit right and our noodles turned into a kind of spätzlemässig brick. It was still good sliced and fried with the sauerkraut, but I think we'll cook a turkey this Thursday just the same.

The contrast between then and now is interesting in other ways too, and the blog allows me to go back and see more or less exactly what I was doing a year ago. Then, I had just gotten started on several paintings and managed to complete at least one of the larger oils. Now, I'm working intermittently in the studio and starting to think about preparations for the exhibition I'll be doing in January. A year ago, I was spending time with Thore, a one year old German native, trying to bring him up to speed on the American blues tradition. I don't really know what's happening with Thore now. He never calls, he doesn't write... If he's like many of his countrymen, I imagine he celebrated Tag der Deutschen Einheit recently and is trying his best to avoid the Schweinegrippe. When he's a little older, I'll ask him if he can help me out with some Spätzle tips. Until then, I'll just stick to painting and try to get the viscosity right.

Neue Bilder

2009-11-04T00:43:00.011+01:00

A Visiting Artist from Korea has mounted a beautifully executed exhibition of 20 white canvasses here on campus in Logan. The canvasses arrived direct from Utrecht Linens on our loading dock two weeks ago and went straight into the gallery. Other than a single number on each, the canvasses are unchanged from the way Utrecht sent them out. I've never been much of an art collector, but this show is so impressive, I've made arrangements to purchase the entire thing. Twenty flawless canvasses do have an eerie kind of beauty to them and I'm at least a little sad that as soon as I get my hands on them, I'll begin the process of screwing them up with a lot of painting.

It's easy to forget, but fundamentally, I am a painter. And now that I've been back in Utah for about 15 weeks or so, I'm actually getting some work done too. My studio here in Logan is less than a fifth the size of where I was working in Essen, and my employer here seems to think I have nothing better to do than teach classes and write an unending stream of "mission statements," but in spite of everything, I have managed to get back to work. I'm busy now finishing a series of paintings I began this Spring in Germany and left more or less intentionally incomplete. The work is going far better than I expected and I'm already making plans for new paintings.

And with my soon to be accomplished purchase of the decidedly "conceptual" exhibition now up in the Twain Tippetts Exhibition Hall in the Fine Arts building, I shall not want for surfaces to paint on. If everything continues to go well in the studio, I'm planning a trip to San Francisco in the early Spring that will lead eventually to an exhibition there in the coming year(s.) I can only hope that any exhibitions I wind up doing will be as successful in the sales department as the one currently on view here in Logan.

Rauchverbot

2009-10-23T04:08:00.017+02:00

I watched Fritz Lang's M the other day. It's a great film. Visionary, innovative: a masterpiece. But what really amazed me about the film, was how much smoking was going on in Germany between the wars. Nearly every character in the film smokes incessantly and at times it seems as though the set must be on fire as clouds of the dense white fog drift across the screen, often totally obscuring characters and action. Many characters smoke cigars, some pipes, others cigarettes and lots are smoking with bizarre equipment I can't even identify. I saw funny little pipes with tiny cigars sticking out the top, cigarettes in holders that might double as a monkey wrench in a pinch, cigars that looked like gentleman's hosiery wrapped loosely around a fistful of oak leaves. I'm glad I don't smoke, but if I lived in Berlin during the Weimar years, I don't think I could have resisted.

The Germans are, of course, still dedicated smokers. The first time I lived there in the early 90's, smoking was permitted everywhere with the welcome exception of specific train cars. Lunchtime at the university cafeteria put me in mind of an iron smelting plant I visited once as a kid in Pittsburgh. Dinner out had to be planned for a place with outdoor dining and forecasted winds of at least 7 on the Beaufort Scale.

Since those days, the European Union has dragged Germany kicking and screaming into the modern anti-smoking world. During my most recent year there in 2008-09, new laws were passed by each of the German Länder that outlawed smoking in many public places such as restaurants. Each State has its own laws but as soon as they were passed, a variety of interest groups began negotiating for exceptions. We were initially delighted by the ability to dine out smoke-free, but the reality was, that in most restaurants, there was always someone smoking. Usually it was wafting out from the kitchen, where the waiters and cooks were lighting up. Sometimes it was a diner at the table next to yours, which, the waiter patiently explained, was the "smoking area." But more often than not, it was just people ignoring the ban. Few people, pro or con, seemed to know what the law really said about banning smoking and fewer people cared. Normally very law-abiding, this was an aspect of German behavior that I wasn't ready for.

Over time, we identified a few places where the ban was enforced and avoided the rest. On the train platforms, smokers were relegated to small areas marked by a painted box and mostly smokers seemed happy to restrict themselves to those areas. Ultimately, I forgot about the issue entirely. Entirely, that is, until I watched M again this week. Could it be that the smoke was Fritz Lang's clever symbol for man's inhumanity to man, or maybe a veiled thumbing of the socialist nose at a growing fascist movement during the 30's? Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were, after all, each outspoken about their opposition to smoking. I'll have to give Metropolis another viewing and see if the filming there was equally smoke filled. Until then, smoke 'em if you've got 'em.

Hände hoch!

2009-10-18T01:14:00.008+02:00

Will I write a post about the German artist who is doing an installation featuring 1000's of garden gnomes giving the Hitlergrüß? No, it's just too easy. Go to www.zeit.de and read about it yourself. I'm weary of all this "former times" stuff.

Instead, I watched a real American movie this weekend and want to comment on that. It was a movie from the 90's, a relatively innocent time in America, and starred a bunch of people who haven't done many films since then, but it also featured Charlie Sheen in a starring role. It was called something like, Navy Sea Lions and was all about the dedication of a select group of guys who work hard, recreate hard and smoke terrorists when they're not busy playing hilarious pranks on one another. The film begins with a wedding: one of the Navy Sea Otters is planning to marry. He feels guilty that he's abandoning the team, even if only in spirit, but his commanding officer tells him that commitment is the highest goal. Two things are made clear by this opener. One, this character will be the "sensitive one." Two, he'll die in reel three.

There was a lot not to like in the movie, but it was oddly satisfying as well. Watching the Navy Walruses on R&R for example was a real embarrassment. Driving wildly in golf carts, beating up innocent citizens, littering: these guys have a carbon footprint as big as all outdoors. But when stirring music plays as they all leap from an airplane somewhere over the eastern Mediterranean, it's enough to make even William Penn find some minor mid-east nation and liberate stuffing out of it.

It's a paradox to me that today people seem to fret constantly about violence on television and in film. And God help anyone who would buy his or her child a toy gun. When I was a kid, I never left the house without being properly armed and our "toybox" was a former military footlocker, chock full of paraphernalia my dad brought home from WWII. What kid in 1962 didn't have a combat helmet? I had several and received in addition, a full Zorro outfit complete with cape and Zorro shotgun for Christmas one year. Zorro never used a gun of any kind, but I never let that dampen my enthusiasm and chanted "The fox so cunning and free!" as I carved a large "Z" in our family's bathroom door.

The thing is, we were comfortable with violence, but knew that in a situation in which our lives were threatened, we would only need to shoot the gun out of the other guy's hand. On one favorite TV show of the day, Seahunt, Lloyd Bridges never fought with a gun, since all encounters had to take place underwater. It wasn't possible to shoot guns out of hands on that program, but it was understood that the knives one brandished in the underwater fight scenes could only be used to cut air hoses. There was the obligatory "underwater struggle for the knife" scene in Navy Manatees too, but the Charlie Sheen character uses the knife to cut his assailant's throat. I thought these guys were supposed to be trained in underwater combat?

There seems to be a cycle of ever increasing violence in America today and it's affecting Germany as well. It seems hardly a month goes by that I don't hear a story about some nitwit shooting as many people as he can in a public space. The death counts are lower in Germany, where the perpetrators are denied automatic weapons, but I read recently about one dedicated would-be mass murderer there who went at it with a knife. So I was relieved and gratified when I visited a local store yesterday to pick up a new pair of work pants and saw the sign pictured below. It may lead to a boycott of the store by people who see it as a violation of their Second Amendment rights, but I for one think it's time we draw a line in the sand on this issue.

Störungsmelder

2009-10-08T04:11:00.015+02:00

Update: Die Winkelständer

Loyal Forschungsjahr readers will remember a post I did just under a year ago about clothing racks in the shape of swastikas that were proliferating in Kik outlets all over Germany. What's up with that story? Have the racks remained in place, slowly but inexorably converting all shoppers to a form of paramilitary fascism the free world abhors, or did the German High Court outlaw the asozial racks? I was curious and did a few searches earlier this evening. Using a variety of search terms, such as Kik, Nazi, Winkelständer, I searched on Google for updates. Each search led me right back to this blog. Apparently there is no new information about the controversy. I am the final word on Nazi-influenced clothing display.

I'll continue to seek out closure on the issue, but for the time being, we have to be satisfied with another shocking and insidious neo-nazi plot to win the hearts and minds of unsuspecting Germans through discount clothing. I'm referring to the infamous "NS-Style" hoodies that, until recently, were being sold at Real. I first learned of the threat through a blog called Störungsmelder. A recent post there describes the hooded sweat shirts on sale at a large German chain called Real. The hoodies are brown (!!!) and have the phrase "NS-STYLE" and "Advanced Man" across the chest. For American readers without the background to understand the difficulty, NS could stand for National Socialism, the formal name for the Nazi party. And "Advanced Man?" Might it not be a reference to the wearer as an Übermench, or superior person? Yeah, I guess so, and while we're at it, let's not forget that Santa is an anagram of Satan.

The Störungsmelder writer approached the Real manager and the issue reached the highest levels of Real administration. After a few days the Press Spokesman for Real, Albrecht von Truchseß, called the reporter back and said he found the situation "Extremely irritating." When asked about where the blame might lie, von Truchseß excused the manufacturer who was "probably some guy from Bangladesh, without a clue about National Socialism." Instead, he said Real took responsibility and that the slip up was simply human error. About 1000 sweat shirts were pulled from the shelves and young, fashion conscious neo-nazis will simply have to go elsewhere for their fascist outfits.

My attitude toward this event was one of mild amusement until further reading led me to the difficulties faced by the English sports clothing brand Lonsdale. According to information I read at a variety of sites, Lonsdale is a favorite of neo-nazis throughout Europe. With the Lonsdale logo on your chest, it's possible to wear a jacket that covers the beginning and ending letters of the brand logo yielding the following:

LONSDALE

NSDAP was the abbreviation for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and apparently that's close enough for the skinheads. Lonsdale has done a lot to combat this association with the radical right, including refusing to deliver clothing to known right wing retailers and creating the "Lonsdale Loves All Colours" ad campaign. Who knew?

Lonsdale has been fairly effective in discouraging this negative association with their brand, but neo-nazis are not deterred. A new brand, Consdaple, was founded by a German far right politician in imitation of Lonsdale, to supply neo-nazis with clothing that displays the full "NSDAP" acronym. It's a kind of determination I can easily identify with, having used the batik process to create my own "FRODO LIVES" T-shirt when I was in junior high, but I can't condone the content. And clearly I was way too cavalier in my amusement with the original Kik Winkelständer story. Bad people may in fact really try to communicate with specially shaped clothing racks and it's up to us to stop them.

Mud Heart

2009-10-01T03:54:00.008+02:00

This past weekend I spent some time in southern Utah: Capitol Reef country. After a year in the Ruhrgebiet, there's a lot to be said for the red rock landscape. As much as I enjoy Germany, the frequent rain, overcast skies and urban "betonscape" can have a long term effect on my mood, and it's not a positive one. More than once I found myself in the position of trying to explain to a German citizen I met at a dance class, or in a local Kneipe, why I was spending a year in Essen and invariably their reaction was confusion. I came from where? And I had decided freiwillig to come to Germany for a year? Und warum?

Travel in the other direction is far easier to understand and I saw plenty of it in Capitol Reef. At times it seemed I was visiting Düsseldorf an der Fremont as I passed people on the trail or heard visitors pulling up in the motel parking lot. To be sure, German wasn't the only language being spoken, but French was more common than English and Italian ran a close fourth. I was delighted to see that not everyone has been scared off by the draconian visa process we put the rest of the world through and was happy to hear familiar expressions like, "Verdammte Scheiße!" sprinkled in with the ubiquitous "Oh my heck!"

We were doing our part to build the tourist economy, since we were in Capitol Reef to meet two friends from Essen who were making a grand tour of the American West. They arrived directly from the Grand Canyon in a massive black Dodge rental that looked as though it had been designed for a pair of professional hit men. They were delighted with the auto, so I didn't ask about gas mileage or if it came with an integral gun rack. The vehicle wasn't exactly my style, but I could see that it would be a good choice for cruising Route 66.

We spent time in the Pleasant Creek area discovering new petroglyphs and also hiked the Sulphur Creek canyon. The latter begins as a broad, open drainage but quickly narrows to a dramatic slot canyon that requires some climbing. No ropes or technical gear are required and it's an ideal hike for the last warm weekend of the summer season. As we walked to the creek from the trail head, we passed areas of drying mud that were cracking in familiar patterns with the exception I photographed above. It seemed a fitting valentine image and expressed our feelings about the weekend eloquently. Now we get ready for snow.

Dreamgirls

2009-09-19T21:38:00.005+02:00

On a recent trip to Seattle I learned that a Capitol Hill landmark, Vivace, had been knocked down and the lot paved over. It's being done in the name of light rail mass transit, so I can't complain too much. I'm facing similar changes in Logan, where building seems to go on at a furious pace, in spite of what I'm told is a pretty serious recession. There's a MONSTER new Walmart in Cache Valley now on the south end of town. It's easily the ugliest building I've ever seen, with the other monster Walmart a few miles to the north running a close second. There's no light rail planned for Logan but at least it's good to know that everyone's consumer needs are being met here in the Intermountain West.

But the loss of Vivace was a blow. The coffee there was outstanding and it had a tradition and a vibe that the new place a few blocks further up Broadway just can't replace. The old location wasn't perfect. For one thing, the restroom hadn't been cleaned since the King Dome was demolished. If you anticipated a call of nature, it was best to bring a hazmat suit. A little inconvenient, but it just added to the legend. Legendary or not, many buildings along Broadway were knocked down during the year I was in Germany. By contrast, during the year I'm in the US, I anticipate that no buildings in Essen will be razed. Even with the current renovation of the Bahnhof and other preparations for the 2010 Kulturhauptstadt celebration there's just very little demolition. Germany is stable. People stay put. For the most part, the new must accommodate the existing, and where it doesn't, such as the new Limbecker Platz development in Essen, most people are not pleased. There are some people in Logan who are not pleased by our second Walmart store, but mostly it's just me and a few other malcontents out on the fringe.

On the road back to Logan from Seattle I unknowingly stopped at what is apparently another Washington coffee monument. It was very early on Sunday morning and I had pulled off I-82 in Yakima to find some breakfast. Nothing seemed to be open along the main street and I was ready to get back on the highway when I noticed a little hut in a parking lot with cars idling in front of it. It was an espresso drive-thru called Dreamgirls, according to the Yakima Herald, one of several businesses springing up that people are calling "Sexpresso stands." The concept is simple: your coffee is served to you by a young woman in her underwear.

I think this may be a bonus for some, but I found it just a little disconcerting. When you give your order, where are you supposed to look? Is it impolite not to leer? Should you hand the payment for your purchase directly to the barista, or just tuck it into her waistband? Is it appropriate to make casual conversation, such as "Isn't it hard to walk with your underpants all wedged up in your butt crack like that?" I teach life drawing from time to time and have no particular problem with naked people. But then, they're usually not making me a double latte. The bottom line (no pun intended) is that Dreamgirls was open and the coffee was excellent: what's to complain about?

When I returned to Logan I was curious about the Dreamgirls and gave them a quick google. There were news stories and blog postings listed. Lots of photos and they have a MySpace page. I visited the page and was suitably underwhelmed, but they do have their fans and some even leave them comments. Here's an example of a recent one:

WHATS SUP BABY GURL ...JUST SHOING LUV TO U R PAGE BUT YEAH GET BAK AT ME

I guess that just about sums it up for me too.

Titles Translated

2009-09-15T00:31:00.000+02:00

In his book, Bambi vs. Godzilla, David Mamet claimed that Shadow of a Doubt was Alfred Hitchcock's best film. I watched it again this past week and I'm ready to agree. From the opening scenes of Newark with the Pulaski Skyway looming overhead to the gee-whiz innocence of Santa Rosa, California, I was completely captured by Hitchcock's meticulous control of each image and the economy with which he drives the story. Filmed during the war years, I was curious to see if the film was released in Germany and looked it up in the IMDb (Internet Movie Database.) Yes, it was shown in Germany, but only after 1947 when it was released as Im Schatten des Zweifels, a sensible title and essentially a direct translation of the original. That kind of common sense is more often the exception than the rule.

About a year ago I wrote a post about another film, Krabat. It's based on a wonderful children's book written by Ottfried Preußler that's a classic in its original German, but virtually unknown in the English speaking world. I wondered why, until I heard the title of the English version: The Satanic Mill. My guess is, the books were probably brought directly to the landfill, still hot from the presses. The original title, Krabat, is simply the name of the main character. What was wrong with that? Were they trying to appeal to some previously untapped diabolical niche market?

Titles often suffer in the other direction too. The German market seems to prefer titles that explain and clarify as opposed to the American preference for the laconic. So, while on this side of the Atlantic movies are trending more and more toward one word titles, in Germany those titles are often given a little boost. The 1989 James Belushi film, K9, becomes Mein Partner mit der kalten Schnauze in the German speaking world. Hitchcock's 1948 film, Rope, became Cocktail für eine Leiche in German. And the 1980 comedy Airplane was translated as Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug. A translation like that doesn't do anything to dispel the stereotype that Germans have no sense of humor.

Sometimes it seems as though translated titles are a reasonable response to the expectations and conventions of the target culture, but often they're just a mystery to me. When Disney made Erich Kästner's German classic, Das doppelte Löttchen, into the Parent Trap in 1961, the name change probably made a lot of sense. After all, would the average American know that Lotte or the diminutive, Löttchen, is a standard girl's name in German? The Parent Trap is a snappy update and makes the title accessible in English. Then the film was dubbed into German and released under what may be the

clumsiest title I ever heard: Die Vermählung ihrer Eltern geben bekannt. Does the passive voice really set the tone we want for a children's comedy? When Disney remade the Parent Trap in 2002, German translators had a chance to get it right and title the film Das doppelte Löttchen, but instead they opted for Ein Zwilling kommt selten allein. OK, I'll admit, it's an improvement over the first attempt (it was a pretty low bar) but does, "A Twin Comes Seldom Alone", really hit the nail on the head? Ich don't think so.

Mostly I enjoy the translation of concepts from one language to another. I looked up the English expression "dumb down" today in an Eng/Deutsch on-line dictionary and discovered the wonderful expression, "das geistige Niveau herunterschrauben." I can't wait to use it in a sentence. But bad titles always bring out my inner curmudgeon. The American title, Vanilla Sky, for the Spanish film, Abre los ojos, just seems dumb to me. Also, bad titles often reveal too much about a film. The German title for Hitchcock's Vertigo: Vertigo - Aus dem Reich der Toten, is a good

example. The viewer needs to be puzzled by the events of Hitchcock's story and the German additional subtitle, "from the empire of Death," changes the viewer's experience of the film for the worse. Ultimately, I think we can lay the blame for all these bad titles at the door of marketers that don't trust their consumers. Hitchcock had faith in his audience and his audience rose to his expectations. With too many titles, marketers try to "dumb down" the content and almost always to the detriment of the film or book being translated. Luckily, the making of bad titles seems to have its own built in punishment and is therefore probably self limiting. Just ask the English language publisher of Ottfried Preußler's Krabat as they sit on 100,000 unsold copies of The Satanic Mill. Sie haben die geistige Niveau des Titels herunterzuschrauben versucht und sind selber schuld.

christophertterry.com

2009-09-08T19:45:00.004+02:00

I've been working on a new website since last January that would offer an overview of my work as a painter. My first website was developed back in the mid 1990's: the dark ages of the Internet, and I needed the services of specialized technicians to update it. The new site is flexible. I can configure it and customize it myself and, most importantly, keep it up to date with my newest work. The site is ready to go live now and includes some of the work I did in Germany this past academic year. I'm currently re-stretching the paintings from the sabbatical for an upcoming show and as I get them stretched, I'll be photographing any that were overlooked in the confusion of the move. As those images are ready, I'll be posting them too. Please visit christophertterry.com and let me know what you think.

When words fail

2009-09-02T00:04:00.006+02:00

I still enjoy keeping up with events in Germany even though I'm living back in Utah now. In previous years that could be a little tricky, but the miracle of high speed Internet has made it almost too easy. I can remember years ago, sitting in front of a tinny short-wave radio trying to raise something interesting on Deutsche Welle and having to settle for a listing of ship sailings out of Bremerhaven. Now WDR offers all of their audio content free on their web page. I enjoy the music on Funkhaus Europa, but I also like listening to the news on WDR 2. Sometimes I have trouble choosing among all the great options and it doesn't make much sense to try to listen to them both at the same time. WDR 5 offers a lot of their content as podcasts and so I don't always have to choose. Today, for example, I listened to a good piece that was broadcast yesterday as a part of their Auf Ein Wort feature.

Today, September 1, is the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland and the Polish/German relationship was the subject of yesterday's Auf Ein Wort. In the Ruhrgebiet it's common to meet people with Polish surnames. Mostly, their grandfathers or great grandfathers came in the past to work the coal mines or in heavy industry. I know Poles who visit Germany regularly and Germans with Polish friends and in-laws. So on the surface, it might appear that the relationship is an easy and friendly one, but then again, it's hard to forget the speed and efficiency with which the German Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Poland. And no other victim of Nazi aggression has a stronger reason to complain. Fully ten percent of the Polish population died in the war. It's not a thing many are likely to quickly to forget, nor would we expect them too.

Most of what I know about the invasion of Poland comes from my multiple readings of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel, Maus. I read it first in German as a part of, what in my house, we call the "comic book method" of language study. I only got about 40% of the text that first time through, but the pictures helped a lot. As a rule I don't usually read books that are written in English in translation but this book is probably a good exception to that rule. The main character is Vladek, Spiegelman's father, and his difficulty with German syntax comes across as more genuine in German. Plus, the Nazi/cat soldiers are scarier auf deutsch.

German Chancellor Willy Brandt made a famous gesture of reconciliation with Poland in 1970 when he fell to his knees after placing a wreath at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto, but it wasn't well received by everyone at home. According to a survey done by Der Spiegel after the event, 48% of West Germans felt the gesture was over done. His opposition tried to use the symbolic action against him in a vote of no confidence held by the Bundestag in 1972 and Brandt survived by only two votes. If Poles want to see that as a fresh affront though, they should also remember that a short time later Brandt won re-election by a landslide: the best showing ever by his party (SPD) in a national election.

According to Wolf Scheller, the author of the Auf ein Wort piece I listened to, we shouldn't have any over ambitious expectations for friendly relations between this current generation of Germans and Poles. German and Polish catholic bishops celebrated a mass together today to commemorate the 1939 invasion, but the wounds are deep. Scheller suggests that it will take a new generation of citizens and that Germans and Poles need to get to know one another better for true reconciliation to take place. But gestures like Willy Brandt's certainly can't hurt. He was asked often about his actions and explained them this way:

Under the weight of recent history, I did what people do when words fail them. In this way I commemorated millions of murdered people.

After reading Maus again this past year for the third time, I'd say his actions were justified and courageous.

Lüchow's

2009-08-27T20:46:00.007+02:00

I'm looking at old photos again in my role as family archivist. I've discovered lots of interesting stuff, but I was puzzled for a while by images like these:

The mystery was cleared up as I realized that these were pictures of the famous Hudson River Crossing. My father worked for Consolidated Edison in New York and as near as I can figure, he spent most of his working life on the several transmission towers that cross the Hudson River for ConEd. According to a contemporary press release from Henkels & McCoy, one of the contractors on the job, "This wire crossing is the longest and heaviest crossing yet attempted in the East, demanding technical expertise and ingenuity to link Orange and Rockland utilities with Con Edison." My father may, or may not, have provided some of the ingenuity to accomplish the job. I'm not sure about that. But one thing is certain: no Con Ed employee ate more lunches at Lüchows in support of the project than my Dad. He tested, evaluated and ultimately purchased insulators, cable and other hardware for the crossings and salesmen attempted to sway his decision by plying him with the excellent German food and drink served at Lüchow's, a Manhattan legend since 1882.

Lüchow's was just two short blocks south of Irving Place where the big Con Ed building was. An easy walk for Con Ed employees and even easier when someone else was picking up the check. During the 1960's Lüchow's was owned by Jan Mitchell, a Swede who bought the place from the original owner, Herr August Lüchow. His only change to the landmark eatery was to install air conditioning. The original oil paintings, including a Van Dyke and a Goya, remained in place and the kitchen continued to serve the excellent Wienerschnitzel, Sauerbraten, pigs knuckles and Schlemmerschnitte that made the place famous. In the 1970's, Lüchow's moved uptown to the Broadway area and it closed for good in 1982, one hundred years after it's opening.

I imagine interest in heavy German food must have waned in the face of a lot of nonsense about cholesterol and so forth. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a quiet renaissance in traditional cuisine is taking place today. When I first lived in Germany in 1994, I asked my downstairs neighbor if he could recommend a nice German place in the area. He turned his head in thought and after a while said tentatively, "There's a good pizza place on the corner..." I asked if maybe there was a place that served German food, as opposed to Italian food prepared in Germany, but ultimately he couldn't help me. I came to find that he wasn't alone in his ignorance about his own national cuisine. German food had a bad rep in those days. It was the butt of insider jokes at parties. People under 30 were surprised to learn it even existed.

On my most recent trip, that situation had changed. At homes where in the early 90's the talk was only of the finest olive oil, roasted egg plant and sun dried tomatoes, suddenly I was being served Rouladen and Schweinebraten. These were foods that for many years, people associated with the Nazi past and they were avoided. Now, it turns out, German food is good, and you don't have to be a Fascist to appreciate it. Social Democrats, Greens, members of the of the Christian Union; they can all sit down to a plate of Salzkartoffeln mit Spargel und Schinken and enjoy it.

Lüchow's is gone, an NYU dormitory stands on the site at 112 East 14th Street. As far as I know, the only place you can buy German food in America is Wienerwald, a fast food joint where the food isn't necessarily authentic. I'm glad I got to eat in Lüchow's in the old days and I'm looking forward to learning more about the secrets of Knödel next time I'm back in Germany. Until then, I'll focus on the roasted egg plant and have to be satisfied with an occasional German pilsner from our state liquor store.

From Bauhaus to my house

2009-08-21T21:45:00.011+02:00

Every year I teach a course at Utah State University about the Bauhaus. It's a pretty idiosyncratic course since it's based on my own personal interests. I'm not an art historian, so I can't claim the course has any real academic rigor. What it does have going for it is that I teach it as a part of a study abroad experience and have access to all kinds of primary sources that would be out of the question for an on-campus course. There are some readings for the course and I do require written assignments as well, but the bulk of the class happens in casual conversations in museums, over dinner or traveling on the Straßenbahn. I try to relate the artifacts of the Bauhaus to political history, to the particularities of German culture and to our own current attitudes about design. A best case scenario for how the course works: while under way to a museum somewhere in the Ruhrgebiet, I tell the student group that I need to stop into a bank for a minute and they should wait for me in the lobby. I leave them for a while and inevitably a sharp eyed student notices that the lobby furniture is vaguely familiar and says, "Hey, isn't that like... a Marcel Breuer chair?" When I return, discussion is underway and they have a million questions for me. There's no better way to drive home the point that the Bauhaus was about developing products for mass production, not painting and drawing.

This year is the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar and cities around Germany are celebrating with some fabulous exhibitions. I find the situation ironic, since after a full year in Germany with lots of travel and museum experiences, I didn't see even one of the exhibitions that are getting so much press now. Now that I'm back in the US, I'm trying to figure out how that happened.

It's really not so very surprising when I think it through. I've been to the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin 10 or 20 times. Likewise the Albers Museum in Bottrop and the Museum Für Angewandte Kunst in Berlin. I've visited the Gropius building in Dessau and seen countless works by artists that worked as "Masters of Form" during the Bauhaus 14 year run. I may be a little over saturated by Bauhaus stuff.

I also find it a little paradoxical that my own house in Logan is so much not in keeping with the Bauhaus aesthetic. One could maybe make an argument that it fits into the William Morris "Arts & Crafts" thinking, but honestly, it's just a farm shack with a series of not very well thought out lean-tos. If there's a foundation under that part of the a house that serves as a kitchen, I can't find any real evidence for it. Walls, floors and ceilings meet at something approximating 90 degrees but follow Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle more often than not. Still, I like my house and admire the vernacular wisdom that went into building it. On days when the temperature breaks 100, my house is cool. The ground floor walls are lined with mud-brick and it's oriented in a way that minimizes heat gain in summer.

The "desirable" homes in Logan, built in the last ten years, tend to be in the neighborhoods up on the hillsides. Many are 5000 square foot barns that feature a three story wall of windows facing southwest. Heat gain? No problem, there's a central air conditioner in the back yard. Out in front there's probably a Sport Utility Vehicle with a bumper sticker exhorting readers to reduce their carbon footprint. These kinds of houses win awards from architectural journals, but if I were in charge, their designers would win different kinds of awards. The kind that would involve jail time.

Coincidentally, that's exactly what happened to the students that were still around when the Nazis showed up at the Berlin factory building that housed the Bauhaus on 11 April, 1933. It was just a few weeks after the Reichstag fire and Hitler had been Chancellor for only about three months. The school had been on the decline for several years already but the Berlin police† made it official by arresting about 32 students and searching the school for Bolshevik propaganda and evidence of decadency. As I gaze out at the McMansions from my own back yard, I ask myself, where are the Nazi paramilitary units when you really need them? And I'm comforted to know, that regardless of what some people might think about my house, no one would ever be likely to see it as decadent.

_________________________________
†There was tension between the regular Berlin police and the NSDAP jackboot types and it's the subject of an interesting series of novels by Philip Kerr. I haven't actually read any of them all the way through yet, but I think they're pretty good. They were the subject of a recent NPR piece you can read/listen to here.

Walküre

2009-08-16T01:27:00.004+02:00

When I was growing up, there was a series of advertisements I often saw in the magazines grown ups read. Each ad featured a man, very well dressed and wearing an eye patch. The eye patch always stood out in a way that made the ads difficult for me to understand. Were they promoting this particular one-eyed guy? If so, who was he? At eight I had better things to think about and didn't waste much time on these ads, but now I know that they were considered by many to be ground breaking. The man who conceived of them, David Ogilvy, has been hailed as the inventor of direct marketing (a dubious distinction) and a trend setting genius. I also know now that the images were shirt advertisements. The model for the series, which became the signature images for Hathaway Shirts, was Baron George Wrangell, emigre nephew of a White Russian general. There was nothing wrong with either of his eyes. The patch was intended to make the ads distinctive, and since I still remember them, I guess it worked.

I was thinking about those ads this morning after viewing the most recent film from Tom Cruise last night. The film, Operation Valkyrie, came out while I was in Germany and got a lot of attention there. There are at least two German films that deal with the same story and in addition to showing them, German television also ran interviews with the daughter of Colonel von Stauffenberg (the character portrayed by Cruise in the film) and some documentaries about the German internal war resistance. Anyhow, I saw the Tom Cruise film last night and it was a real yawn. I went to bed wondering why the film was even made, and woke up convinced that it was all an excuse to get Tom Cruise into an eye patch.

When I was a kid, and the Hathaway ads were running in magazines, any normal kid wanted to be a cowboy. I had cowboy boots, a couple of six guns, holsters, a lariat, and of course, a cowboy hat. Several, in fact. But today everything is pirates. At the store where I do most of my shopping, cutlasses are an impulse purchase. Infants fly the jolly rodger from the seat of their disposable diapers. I don't understand the romance of the pirate, but it's big. I think Mr. Cruise and his agent figured that with all the good pirate roles being grabbed up by Johnny Depp, they needed to look elsewhere for eye patch possibilities. Cruise did look good in the patch, but it wasn't really enough to sustain the film.

The von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler failed as we all know, and anyone who's read Tolstoy knows that virtually ALL military operations go to hell in a hand basket as soon as things get rolling. In that way, they're a little like sabbaticals, or like my sabbaticals anyhow, in which my best intentions and plans fall to pieces in the first weeks I'm gone. This time around I had problems with banking, credit cards, Internet access and a home phone, which I never managed to get installed. But on my return to Utah, I discovered that even our mail was completely fouled up. I, of course, filed a change of address card, and I had one person lined up to check any mail that got through that. A second person started forwarding my mail around December and ultimately the very helpful tenant who was renting my house began opening anything that looked like a bill in order to keep us out of debtor's prison.

Still, when we arrived home last week, one of the first things we did was open a stack of Christmas cards from 2008. Most of them were not the kind of commercial cards that feature a snow covered cottage or a smiling Santa, but rather personal photographs of the sender's family. In fact, most of them were photographs of only the children of the family, none of whom were wearing pirate regalia. Does this signify a return to the true meaning of the holiday? Who knows. I'll just say Frohe Weihnachten and try to get on top of my own holiday greetings in 2009.

Syllabus

2009-08-12T21:29:00.008+02:00

When I taught at the Universität Gesamthochschule Essen back in 1994 I was immediately struck by the contrasts between the German and American university systems. During the year that I was there my understanding of and consequent insight into the German system grew and ultimately I came to feel the two systems were far more alike than I had realized, but initially I was confused to say the least. As I sit in my office now, trying to write a syllabus for a course I haven't taught in over ten years, I'm more than a little nostalgic for that first Grundübungen: Zeichnen course I taught. With no real "registration," students could (and did) show up or not as they pleased. In the US I'm expected to develop a curriculum with a logical progression. Each week's activities should extend and develop concepts discussed in the previous week. But back in Essen in 1994 there was no expectation that the students present today would have any knowledge of what happened last week. Each week's activities had to stand alone and the students were responsible for putting it all together in an order that made sense. It completely eliminated the need for planning on my part. I was a very popular instructor and most weeks curious students overflowed into two, sometimes, three, classrooms. If I could find a chair for each student, my Learning Objectives Assessment Rubric was fully satisfied.

Chairs won't be a problem when classes begin here in a little over a week, but the need for a syllabus for my Drawing I section has my brain fully engaged. I know intuitively why drawing is important, but explaining its significance concisely is a real puzzle. I believe strongly that defining objectives makes me a better teacher, but at home we haven't located the silverware yet. It would be nice if I could wing it just this once.

I really need a few solid weeks of undisturbed unpacking to get my life back on track, but the needs of the job are distracting me in a variety of ways. Last night for example, after less than 36 hours in Logan, I was already attending an opening reception for an exhibition featuring the work of two visiting scholars here at Utah State. Having been a visiting scholar myself several times, I know how important it is to make visitors feel welcome, so I put aside the search for knives and forks and attended the opening for two Korea artists, vowing to myself that I would not stay long. Five hours and a couple of bottles of soju later, I was performing "Beyond the Sea" in the basement of a local Korean restaurant. I thought I did a pretty good job, but the Karaoke machine has an automated scoring system and my younger, less experienced colleague beat me, hands down. Clearly I need a copy of the Karaoke Objectives Assessment Grid.

Andalé!

2009-08-09T14:16:00.006+02:00

I imagine it goes without saying that I enjoy spending time in Europe in general and in Germany in particular. There are a lot of things I like about being there that I'm already missing now that I've been in the States for about two weeks. But there is at least one thing that I DON"T like about Germany. They don't have good Mexican food there. There are Mexican restaurants, but they are laughable. The cooks are mostly from Sri Lanka and can't tell a taco from a tamale. I intend no slur on the fine people of Sri Lanka. Presumably they are fine chefs when it comes to cooking Sri Lankan specialties.

When I landed two weeks ago at JFK, I was disoriented, jet lagged and hungry. I had to drive my giant black Jeep Liberty to Connecticut through intense NY rush hour traffic and the whole way I was thinking of what I could eat. I made it to Hamden and found my hotel, then drove to the closest restaurant: Andale. It featured a mouse with a large sombrero on the light-up sign and there was plenty of parking. The building was a converted residence. I entered and ahead of me was a long bar with two young men nursing Buds and a barmaid who looked about twelve. Her response to everything I said to her was, "No problem." But the place was completely empty of diners. I imagined the underage barmaid thawing my dinner in a microwave.

When the barmaid turned waitress approached our table with two glasses of water, my wife asked her if the Chile Rellenos were fresh. My scornful laughter at the question was cut short by the waitress, "Yes, our cook makes everything from scratch. It's no problem." Wow! A cook. This required a complete reevaluation of the menu. I decided to try the Enchiladas de Mole and was not disappointed. By accident we had discovered surely the finest Mexican restaurant in New England, disguised as a rundown roadhouse. We arranged our return trip to enable us to visit Andale again last night. Again it was empty and again the food was fabulous.

Today I board a flight to Salt Lake City and I'm preparing myself mentally to get back to work on campus: teaching, organizing my office and studio, dealing with the seemingly unending budget cuts from the legislature. It's not a particularly happy time. But I'm trying to focus on the benefits of living in the Intermountain West. Eating good food from those huge white platters that are an inch thick and scratched as though they were dragged behind a pickup half way across the Baja peninsula, for example. Food brought to you with serious asbestos gloves. Carnitas. Frijoles. Corn Tortillas. Life is good. And I've got some time now to plan for my next sabbatical.

Hurricane of '38

2009-08-03T20:45:00.010+02:00

On September 21, 1938, Winston Churchill condemned the coming annexation of Sudetenland by Adolf Hitler's Nazi government in Germany. This area in what was then Czechoslovakia was primarily German-speaking, but had been denied Germany in the reshuffling of Europe after WWI. Hitler's move to annex was a big story internationally, but on this side of the Atlantic the story was quickly pushed aside as a late summer hurricane moved north at previously unheard of speed and made landfall on eastern Long Island, with its far western edge just brushing NYC.

A loyal Forschungsjahr reader recently left a comment and a question asking if I could report on the 1938 New England Hurricane. Can I ever. One of my earliest memories is of my father's stories of the Hurricane of '38. One story involved a double date with a couple of gals from Brooklyn on the night of the storm. My dad was working in Manhattan and after a movie (presumably on 42nd St.) it was decided that the group of young revelers should take a drive out to Jones Beach. It was a silly night to take such a drive. Even though NY City didn't get the full force of the hurricane, they were still driving in a blinding rain and trees were down on the way to the huge public beach on Long Island's south shore. My father described how he pulled into the parking lot, disoriented by the wind, rain and darkness. He saw lights and commotion ahead of him, stopped the car, and one of the gals (I'm reasonably sure she would have been named Doris) opened a door and stepped out. Into ankle deep water.

Record hide tides drove water inland all over New England and most older buildings in towns like Providence, Bridgeport and New London have brass plaques showing how high it went. The 1938 Hurricane may be nameless to this day, but its presence is still very real to New Englanders and to Rhode Islanders in particular. About 600 people died in the hurricane, and most of them died in Rhode Island. My wife recently met an older man at the hardware store here in town whose sister died in what may well be the most tragic event of the '38 Hurricane. It took place at Mackerel Cove in Jamestown on the afternoon of the 21st. Mackerel Cove is a narrow strip of sand that connects the main part of the island to the southern Beavertail chunk where I live. I ride over this strip every day and yesterday I stopped to photograph the 1938 highwater markers that have recently been placed on all the telephone poles along the road. On the afternoon the hurricane hit, a school bus tried to cross here to Beavertail, bringing a group of kids home, some of whom lived at the light house. The bus stalled in the waves and the kids held hands as they tried to cross to safety in the rising waves. Seven of them drowned that day including the sister of the man my wife spoke to. The bodies were washed up on shore all along Narragansett Bay.

The destruction from the storm was so wide spread that even into the fifties, after the results of Hitler's move into the Sudetenland had played out fully and Germany was well into the Wirtschaftswunder period, some damage could still be seen around New England. More often though, towns and people rebuilt. My dad went back the next summer to Lamphier's Cove and rebuilt the family summer dwelling. Lamphier's Cove was a community of New Haven residents who moved to the shore for the summer months. Property owners all pooled their tiny plots and created a resident association, sharing a spring for fresh water and some communal outhouses. It all sounds vaguely socialist to me, hard to reconcile with the fact that, as far as I know, my father voted for Nixon every time he got the chance. But every summer the Terry family moved to the end of the trolley line in Branford and lived in a tent on Lamphier's Cove.

It was the tent and the wooden platform it rested on that went north with the hurricane and in the summer of 1939, my father worked with his brothers and my grandfather to rebuild. In its second incarnation, the tent became a two room cottage where I spent a lot of summer weekend days myself, alternately pulling eels out of the questionable waters of the cove, or avoiding the attention of my two maiden aunts who lived there with my grandmother. These two aunts were well-meaning, but in an effort to appear "with it" they often used the expression "Super!" Imagine my surprise when I landed in Germany thirty years later to find that "Super!" was a completely standard expression, having no undercurrent of dorkiness associated with it. Some people use the alternate, "Supi!" but I never hear either expression without thinking of Harriet and Dottie and those filthy eels at Lamphier's Cove.

Beavertail Lighthouse

2009-07-30T22:10:00.005+02:00

The island I live on when I'm back in New England is pretty special. Not really big enough to attract much attention, it's been bypassed by most developers. There's a shortage of water on the island as well, and that's shaped the zoning laws that control building. Jamestown just isn't attractive to the companies that want to provide us with burgers, pizza and $5.00 flavored lattes. I don't think we'll ever see a McDonalds here. Just across the Newport Bridge, recently renamed the Claiborne Pell Bridge, (the same US senator that the Pell Grants are named for) things are very different. Compare and contrast these two images:

Jamestown, RI (Conanicut Island)

Newport, RI (Aquidneck Island)

Mostly I stay on my side of Narragansett Bay, where yesterday was foggy and 100 percent humidity. I took a ride down to the lighthouse at Beavertail Point, just a mile south of my house and when I arrived, my glasses were coated with tiny beads of water, even though it wasn't raining. I took some pictures of America's third oldest lighthouse, and also some of the old gun batteries that are sprinkled around the southern tip of the island. Conanicut Island was invaded by the British back in 17 seventy something and a gun battery further up the coast that controlled the west passage to Providence was burned by them. The gun emplacements I was looking at yesterday were built during the Second World War to protect us from the Germans, but I don't think they saw much action. And I believe that the majority of the "British" who landed during the Revolutionary War were actually also Germans. Hessians, to be specific, who were fighting for the British as mercenaries.

All of which convinces me that I can find excuses to keep up this blog, that is essentially one American's commentary on things German, indefinitely. I've have a few comments in the last week from readers speculating about the future of Forschungsjahr, a blog that was supposed to document a sabbatical year in Germany. My year is just about over now and I too have been thinking about what the future might bring to the blog. I imagined originally that I would be reporting on progress in Essen toward the Kulturhauptstadt 2010 preparations and similar issues. Instead the blog turned into a soapbox, from which I spouted about just about anything that grabbed my interest. Germany, the Ruhrgebiet, Essen, and my experiences there were strong threads running through most of my posts, and I believe that will continue to be the case. I may have to stretch a little to make the "German" connection work, or maybe I won't even bother. Either way, this soapbox is just too much fun. I'm not giving it up.

Stateside

2009-07-28T02:19:00.007+02:00

Against all odds, I made it back to Rhode Island. The final days in Essen were chaotic and stressful. Despite all my efforts to keep my life lean while I was on sabbatical, stuff accumulated. I jettisoned most of my clothing as I packed, but I had a year's worth of paintings to transport, a bicycle, books and plenty of odds and ends. When I saw it all together, loaded into a friend's Citroën Berlino, it became very obvious that my decision to rent a "compact" car at JFK to haul it all to Rhode Island was absurd. Still, we checked the bags the evening before our flight without real difficulty, turned over the Wohnung the next morning to our landlady, got a ride to the airport from Thore and his mom, and I crossed my fingers things would work out when we arrived.

The box I packed my bike in got wet on the plane and and was a damp rag, barely holding together when we arrived in New York. I loaded the mountain of suitcases onto a cart and laid the bike carefully across the top for the trip from baggage claim to ground transportation. Presumably the mysteries of plate tectonics were responsible for the slide that brought the bike and all supporting cases to the floor of the main entrance hall. Aftershocks were to follow, but I didn't know that as I built the tower up again.

At the car rental agency, as I waited in line, I heard one of the agents tell a prospective customer without a reservation, "Sorry, if you have no reservation, we can't help you. We're out of cars." I had been expecting to be able to upgrade my own reservation to a "full size" vehicle, or maybe an eighteen wheeler. Sweat dripped from my brow as I watched the woman helping me complete the paperwork. Plan "A" was removing my shoe laces and using them to lash the bike to the roof. There was no plan "B." Then the woman behind the counter looked up at me and asked, "We don't have a compact car available at this time. Would you accept a Jeep Liberty instead?" Always cautious, I asked, "Will there be any additional charge?" Nope. No additional charge. I agreed to accept the Jeep and when we reached the Throgs Neck Bridge we stopped for a short victory dance.

I could never have gotten it all done without help from lots of friends. Many thanks to all of you, and a special thank you to Thore who came by on the last full day to help with packing. He was a blur of activity all morning, but finally settled down for a rest long after his nap time had come and gone.

Two weeks here and then it's on to Utah and yet more culture shock.

Not the heat

2009-07-21T08:02:00.004+02:00

In a previous post I complained about a slow Internet connection at my Wohnung. The people at T-Mobile must have heard me, because now I have no connection at all. It's all part of a trend here. Almost as if Essen can sense my impending departure, things are coming to a close all around me. Rubens, my favorite coffee roaster on Emmastr. is closed and the family that runs it is on Urlaub. Ditto for our local Turkish place where the boys behind the counter make the finest aubergine pizza this side of Istanbul and always have a complimentary baklava ready for us. We didn't even get to say goodbye.

The upside to Rubens being closed was that while I stood outside and read the sign, I remembered that I wanted to photograph the great window display they have there. The result is shown above. It's a sure-enough dollhouse coffee shop and while my photo doesn't do it justice, it makes me want to buy a coffee roaster and go into business every time I see it.

With just four days to go, I'm doing a lot of thinking about the sabbatical experience. I realize that there are things I just won't be able to get to now. I've accomplished a lot, but not everything I wanted, and it seems I just have to accept that. I wanted very much to improve my pronunciation of the illusive "ü" sound in German, but I've made little progress there. I can say the normal "u," as in Schule, but the more extreme "ü" stumps me. Two words in particular make my poor pronunciation a real problem: schwul and schwül. Schwul means "gay" and schwül means "humid." In most cases, I get away with my accent being seen as charmant, but given the wide gap between the meaning of these two words and my almost total lack of ability to even hear the difference (much less pronounce it,) I find that in this case, my accent just leads to confusion and embarrassment.

I was discussing this on a hot, muggy day recently, as my wife and I were walking through the vacation-deserted streets of Essen. We were both over heated and sweaty and I was trying to work through the impending departure and accept the inevitable. She was supportive and philosophical and reminded me of something I hope I won't soon forget: When it comes to temperature and good pronunciation, it's not the heat, it's the homosexuality.

Abbau

2009-07-12T09:55:00.005+02:00

Hard to believe, but just eleven months ago I was busy building work tables for my studio. Now those tables, a miracle of vernacular furniture design, are a real problem. I don't know what to do with them as I pack up for the return trip to Utah. At one point, I had this idea that I would be able to easily sell most of my stuff before I left. It turns out my thinking was overly optimistic. I've listed a couple of things on craigslist.de but the only responses came from Lagos, Nigeria and the potential buyer requested that I include a couple of new Toshiba laptop computers in the shipment.

I'm giving a different site a try now: www.markt.de Let's cross our fingers that I get some action there. Otherwise my beautiful tables will wind up in the Sperrmüll.

Independence Day in Oelde

2009-07-05T08:41:00.005+02:00

There's a hot debate going on in Germany right now about who has the slowest internet connection. Many voices are heard and there are thousands of candidates, but a consensus is emerging: it's me. I have the slowest of the slow. This has been going on the entire year but I've made a point of not getting into it here at Forschungsjahr. It's like the elderly woman I spoke with yesterday in Oelde said: "There's too much complaining today!" So, even though my internet connection is genuinely lousy, I'm resisting the urge to complain.

I was minding my own business in Oelde, a small town on the eastern edge of the Münsterland, when the elderly woman approached me with her walker. She squeezed by me and I said "Excuse me," as I tried to make room for her. She paused, looked at me and said (more or less) "There's no need to excuse yourself. There's plenty of room here. I'm not a complainer, like so many people today. Everyone would be happier if they went through a World War as I did." She followed up in a slight Polish accent, giving a quick summary of her daily schedule during the war: up at 5am, milk the cow so her little sister would have something for breakfast, and so on. She was a hot ticket and we traded world views for a minute or two before she headed off for the town center to do her shopping. "I'm blind as a bat and the only way I can get home is by counting the buildings as I go by to keep track of where I am," she said. "Aller Achtung!" said I.

I thought that was it, but as she inched away she caught sight of my bike in spite of her near total blindness. "Affengeil!" she said. A direct translation would be something like, "Monkey horny!" Not the kind of comment I expect from a woman who is clearly well into her eighties. Technically geil means horny, as in lustful, desirous of sexual activity, but really it's a slang word expressing impressed approval. When I was a kid we said "wicked!" Some kids, not me, said "boss!" which I always found ridiculous. Later, when I was in college, people started saying "bitchin'." Not much of an improvement. Today, my students mostly say, "awesome." But this old gal in Oelde says "Affengeil!," which I think is rad.

And another thing that's pretty geil: last night I saw fireworks, Fourth of July Fireworks, ON THE FOURTH OF JULY! In the States, Fourth of July Fireworks are generally set off on the 5th, the 6th, the 8th... Any date will do, so long as it's not the 4th. I'm a pretty conservative kind of guy and I think we ought to celebrate the Fourth on the 4th. Or not at all. Why the City of Essen decided to celebrate American Independence Day at all is a mystery to me, but they did a fine job of it. We sat in our darkened living room and had a great view of the sky over Gruga Park where the rockets' red glare silhouetted the houses and trees across the street. This is the kind of display I'd like to see in Logan, Utah and I considered writing a letter to our current mayor about it, but ultimately decided, there's too much complaining today. When I want to see a decent fireworks display on the Fourth, I'll just come to Germany for a visit.

Horst Karl Georg Schimanski

2009-06-28T23:27:00.006+02:00

When I was younger, during my high school years and later while I was in college, I did a lot of different jobs but they all involved physical work. I painted houses, did carpentry and landscaping. I raked leaves for the widow of Robert Benchley and painted an armoire more than 20 times for the former wife of a minor Getty millionaire. She couldn't make up her mind on the color, but I only started notching the damn thing after coat five or six. Working on a crew of guys installing septic systems was a particularly tough assignment, not because of the work (which was back breaking) but because of the hazing I was subjected to by my coworkers. I was the "college boy" and they delighted in demonstrating their superior intelligence.

My point is, I didn't just fall into this Professor thing. Yes, I am erudite, I've read Der Zauberberg in the original language, and have seen all the Fellini films twice, but I also know how to change my own oil and just yesterday seriously considered buying a bottle of Lambrusco. And I like reading a good solid Krimi once in while. Fast paced stuff in the Raymond Chandler vein is what I'm after, and right now I'm reading a real potboiler by Jonathan Kellerman, Twisted. The plot revolves around a series of apparently unrelated murders that all happen on June 28 in successive years. Today happens to be June 28, and that's a little eerie, but more importantly, June 28, 2009 is the twenty eighth anniversary of Horst Schimanski's debut on ARD's Tatort. I've mentioned Tatort in previous blog posts (See, Ruhrort, Rad Curiosities and A Vast Wasteland) but I've never given Schimanski his due. Now all that will change.

According to BILD am Sonntag, Kriminalhauptkommissar in Duisburg, Horst Schimanski is the most popular Tatort Kommissar of all time. He appeared in 29 episodes of Tatort over the years, and when he retired from that show, ARD whipped up another series for him entitled, (what else?) "Schimanski." But he wasn't always the big hit he became over time. After his first episodes were shown, a lot of the reaction was negative. One Ruhrgebiet newspaper responded with the headline, „Werft den Prügel-Kommissar aus dem Programm!“ (= Thrown Detective "Slugger" Out of the Lineup!) The real Police Commissioner of Duisburg commented on the first episode by saying that the character of Schimanski wouldn't be allowed to work bike theft in his city. But something about Schimanski appealed to the public and actor Götz George continued serving up the gritty Schimanski character to viewers for many years.

I find Schimanski something of a paradox myself. Or maybe I should say, I find his warm reception by my German friends and acquaintances paradoxical. I need to be careful here not to reduce anyone I know (and especially anyone I know who actually reads my blog) to a cultural stereotype, but I know the kind of people who might request a Ruhrgebiet wine at the liquor store, because they've read that buying locally reduces your carbon footprint. Schimanski on the other hand, is the kind of guy who flicks his cigar into the Rhein before breaking the jaw of some nouveau riche arms dealer with a left jab. But my ecology minded friends love Schimanski. A Duisburger Tatort episode is quite likely to open with Schimmi and a Kumpel exiting a house of prostitution, stinking drunk, and administering a bawdy slap on the butt to one of the gals as they stumble down the front steps. What do my (post) feminist friends think of that? They love him.

The answer to the paradox is probably that Schimanski is not just a macho jerk. He weeps in almost every episode. And although he is mildly frauenfeindlich, he's the first cop to offer his coat to a wounded prostitute at the crime scene. Plus, Schimanski ushered in a new pride in the Ruhrgebiet. In the early 80's Essen, Dortmund, Duisburg and the rest of the Ruhrpott were suffering from a very poor self image. According to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine (WAZ), the Ruhrgebiet wanted to be everything, just not the Ruhrgebiet. But Schimanski was very much a Ruhrgebiet kind of guy, and proud of it. Suddenly being from the Ruhrgebiet could be sexy. Public relations campaigns proclaimed that "The Pott Cooks!" and Industrial Culture was discovered. I don't know if Schimanski caused that. More likely, he was just surfing the wave. But it was an important turning point for the most populous region in Germany and Schimmi became a symbol of the change.

Now, with less than a month to go here in Germany, I've decided I need a Schimanski Jacke. It's a standard type M65-American military jacket and was worn by Schimanski like a uniform. They're not easily found now that the Schimanski legend is 28 years old. The original is in the Duisburger Kultur- und Stadthistorischen Museum, but I'd like to find one for sale in a store. It won't do anything to enhance my image on campus, but I've got my low brow side to consider too. With a Schimanski Jacke in my wardrobe, maybe those guys in the orange pinafores at Home Depot won't be so condescending when they tell me the self tapping screws are on aisle 34.

On The Road: Hösel and Kreis Mettmann

2009-06-25T20:08:00.004+02:00

The weather here has been cooler the past two weeks and we've had plenty of rain too, although mostly the storms don't last very long. When the sun breaks through, you think to yourself, "I should be out enjoying this fine weather." But when it starts raining again, you realize it's just as well that you are working inside where it's dry.

This week we've had several really warm sunny days in a row, so I decided to play hooky today and take my bike out for an extended spin. I've become pretty savvy over the course of a year, learning a lot of tricks for getting around by bike and foot and avoiding traffic. I put that knowledge to work today and began my ride by crossing Gussmanplatz, passing the Krupp Krankenhaus and taking the secret footbridge over the Autobahn. It's a secret I share with five to ten thousand other residents of the Rüttenscheid area, but it took me sometime to find out it was there. Using it allows me to get almost all the way to Stadtwaldplatz without using any high traffic roads. From Stadtwaldplatz I can take Lerchenstrasse down to Werden and then follow the path along the Ruhr as far as I like.

Then I struck out away from the river toward Düsseldorf. Leaving the river means climbing and I went up some very steep hills, but when things flattened out again, I was riding through farm land and competing with horses and tractors for the right of way. The landscape I rode through was sort of surprising. The towns, Hösel, Heilingenhaus, Ratingen, et al., were mostly just names on a map to me until today, but they were an odd mix of rural and suburban, with a higher emphasis on auto travel than I expected. Hösel has a grade crossing where the S-Bahn line to Köln crosses a main street. Two lanes of auto traffic are protected by gate arms that swing down to stop cars, but they are complemented by cute little baby gate arms that swing down for the bike/pedestrian lane. An appropriately quaint little bell chimes while you wait and I had the privilege of seeing the S6 to Köln go by in the company of a mother and her two boys, who were about 3 and 4. I can remember my own fascination with trains at that age (which hasn't faded all that much) and I could sense a similar excitement and tension in these kids too. In the United States today, finding a real train to look at isn't easy. The under ten set in Hösel, on the other hand, has it good.

Eventually I found my way back to the river, this time going downhill on a narrow lane that wouldn't qualify as a sidewalk in Utah, but supported two way traffic here. I hopped on an S-Bahn train at Werden to ride back up the other side and home and had an interesting conversation on the train with a guy who noticed my bike and asked me about it. He's interested in commuting to work on a bike and wanted to know if it were possible to buy one like mine. I told him I bought mine on eBay Deutschland, but also told him that there is a Dutch website, marktplaats.nl, where sensible Liegeräder are thick on the ground. We talked about the pros and cons of the different bike types and then it was my stop. Just before getting off I encouraged him take a look at the website I mentioned and he said, "Well, unfortunately I don't speak any Dutch." Neither do I," I replied, "But if you look up a few key words, it's not that tough to read a listing for a bike, especially if the pictures are good." "Oh, he said, I thought you were from the Netherlands."

I guess I could choose to be irritated that I can't pass for German, but I love the fact that I'm not recognized as a U. S. North American by many. It may be a moot point right now, but if Palin is back in 2012, I want my cover to be airtight.

Wladimir Kaminer

2009-06-21T10:44:00.005+02:00

While I'm working I often listen to audio books in the studio. People ask me if I don't find listening to the text distracting, but in fact, exactly the opposite is true. That part of my brain that isn't occupied with painting wanders and distracts me when I don't give it something to do. Listening to a novel or nonfiction book keeps me on track and doesn't interfere at all with the part of my brain that's concerned with visual issues. This year I've listened to a lot of interesting stuff, but one of my favorites has been the essays of Wladimir Kaminer, a native Russian who immigrated to Germany in 1990.

Kaminer writes in German although he only started learning the language when he came here from his native Moscow. The big bonus for me is that he reads his own essays, which mostly deal with his existence as a Russian living in Berlin, with a fabulous Russian accent. He rarely addresses the language issue specifically but made an exception in an essay I listened to this past week, Deutsch für Anfänger (=German for Beginners.) I appreciated his insights not only about German, which he compares to Legobausteine, but also about the relationship between language mastery and writing in general. Essentially, he sees language as a tool, a hammer that he uses to whack his essays into shape. That his mastery of German is incomplete seems to be a non-issue for him. He goes on to say that, for a writer that has something to say, less than perfect language skills shouldn't be a problem.

Kaminer's comments about language are a welcome affirmation of my own view of the significance of technical proficiency in the visual arts. Many of my students at Utah State University focus most of their effort on learning how to paint, whereas I believe the more important question is, why are they painting? Or to put it another way, what do they have to say? I'm sure Wladimir Kaminer works hard at his language skills and is probably still improving, but in the meantime, he's writing. His essays are humorous, insightful and informative. What some might have seen as a weakness, i.e. his quirky Deutschkenntnis, he has made into his greatest asset.

When I'm back in the classroom in a few months I'm glad that I'll have some experiences from my sabbatical I'll be able to share with my students. When they ask me for "tips" on how to make a shiny object look "realistic," I'll read aloud to them from Deutsch für Anfänger. That should work well, right? I doubt if Kaminer is available in English yet, but maybe I could use his works to get my foot in the door as a translator. While I consider my career options in post-financial-crisis Utah, you can enjoy Wladimir Kaminer's view of Barak Obama, courtesy of YouTube.

Ein Mann der Tat

2009-06-18T18:03:00.004+02:00

It's a cliché, but true: the president of the United States really is the most powerful man in the world. One word from Obama and the biggest economy on the planet veers off in a new direction. He can support clean air initiatives or let them die in endless debate. As commander-in-chief he controls an arsenal that would have even Barry Goldwater thinking twice about the wisdom of deterrence theory.

Still, my guess is, Obama doesn't feel very powerful. At every turn he probably finds himself compromising, adding layers of pork to a simple bill just to get it through Congress or choosing his words with care to avoid offending the earthworm lobby.

But in Germany his decisive action in dealing with a buzzing fly has everyone talking. I don't know with any certainty what it is about his swatting of a fly during a White House interview that so delights Deutschland, but delighted it is. I think Germans probably can't help but see the fly as a metaphor. For some it might be the banking crisis, for others the terrifying specter of a Palin presidency. Either way, Obama deals with it effectively and keeps his cool. Can you imagine Nixon in this situation? He'd bring in the FBI to find out which left-leaning media type brought the fly to the interview to louse him up.

Is this video clip playing in the States too? I don't know, but I do feel better knowing that the guy with his finger on the button can demonstrate his resolve without the need to rattle his saber every other day.

Ruhrort

2009-06-11T18:17:00.011+02:00

I find surfaces in the US pretty boring as a rule. Roads, sidewalks, interior floors: there's not usually much going on there. Surfaces in Europe are a very different story. Almost everything is tiled here in one way or another. When workers need to work on the gas lines beneath the side walk, they just pull up the paving stones and set them aside. When they're finished, they replace the pavers and a week later no one would ever know they had been disturbed.

I started taking photographs of interesting surface patterns soon after I arrived here in September and I've been collecting new ones ever since. It's an occupation that turns every walk into a treasure hunt.

Two weekends ago I spent some time at the Innenhafen of Duisburg, a city neighboring Essen to the West, and I made a comment to an acquaintance saying that I thought it was too bad that Essen didn't have a harbor too. That led to a discussion in which I found out that Essen does have a harbor. Imagine my surprise. I've spent most of my time in southern Essen along the Ruhr. The Ruhr is pastoral. There are some old tow paths, but mostly it's a rural and residential landscape. Not so on the north side of Essen where the Emscher River flows. Here the Rhein/Herne Canal was dug to facilitate the transport of coal and other commodities. On Wednesday of this week I visited the forbidding north end of Essen, walked the Rhein/Herne Canal and saw the harbor, which, for the record, is tiny. It's dominated now by recycling facilities and among other things I watched while small bricks of shredded clear plastic were excreted from a chute into an open container for transport, presumably to some other even more desolate location.

Learning about the canal made me curious about this whole shipping thing and I followed up today by visiting Ruhrort, a Stadtteil of Duisburg. Ruhrort got it's start in the Middle Ages and it's the biggest inland port in Europe. It's the home of a great museum devoted to shipping on the Rhine and its related network of canals and rivers. The best part of the museum is that it's housed in a former bath house for the laborers of the steel works across the street. The architect did a fabulous job preserving the baths and adapting them to the needs of the museum. I could go on forever about this place, but I was supposed to say something about paving stones and tiles.

Here's the connection: water is a great mode of transport for heavy stuff. Heavy stuff that isn't particularly valuable, kilo for kilo. So... a harbor is where the stone, sand, gravel and other building materials typically enter a city. That meant that as I walked around the harbor in Essen I found a paving stone shop. For a guy that likes taking photographs of tiles and such, it was like I died and went to heaven.

Ruhrort and the seedy docksides of the Ruhrgebiet are also where most of the Tatort episodes featuring the legendary Schamanski were shot in the 1970's and 80's. It's a topic that's worthy of its own post here on Forschungsjahr and I plan to get busy with it soon. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite paving patterns from the past year:

Europawahl

2009-06-07T18:34:00.014+02:00

In a previous posting I gave some of the details of the neighborhood I grew up in. Our neighbors ran a refuse business and used part of their backyard as a parking space for the garbage trucks. The houses were all small and unusually close together, since they were all built by brothers (long before I was born.) Their mother lived in the original house on the property and by the time my family came along in the years after the end of World War II, although the houses had changed hands several time, we were still the only family in the neighborhood that was not related by blood to the original builders. Across the street was an estate that belonged to the family that owned Bloomingdales, but on our side things were decidedly more proletariat. Most fathers in the neighborhood had blue collar jobs, and when some of them came home in the afternoon, they would come down to the river bank with a bar of soap to bathe. More likely than not, the kids from the neighborhood would all be swimming already and we tried not to splash too much.

The highlight of each summer was when a large communal garage at the center of the half circle of homes was cleared of cars and set up for an all day/all night barbecue. The guests spanned several generations and they came to eat, drink, play games, listen to music, but mostly just to talk. I attended a party in Langenberg yesterday, south of Essen on the way to Wuppertal, that was organized by the Feuerwehr from Velbert and although it was a good deal larger over all, it had a similar feel to those old neighborhood blowouts. This party too was in a garage, but in this case it was a garage intended for fire trucks rather than the personal vehicles of our neighbors. The Fire Department Band played a remarkable line up of favorites including "On Wisconsin," by John Philip Sousa and "Dancing Queen," by Abba, which I had never heard performed by a brass band before.

Other attractions included a small shack that had a smoke machine inside. There was a line of little kids waiting their turn to turn the hoses on the shack, but each time they "put out" the fire, a fire department official would turn the smoke machine on again. Endless fun. Other kids were operating hook and ladder equipment, climbing a self built tower of Bierkisten (see photo sequence below) or wandering around eating their fourth Bratwurst. I spent most of my time in the garage, eating, eavesdropping on conversations and enjoying the music. Two elderly woman across from me discussed "Der Heinz," who one of them was sure was long dead. "No, no...," assured the other, "I saw him at Christmas..." "Oh, I thought he was long dead," repeated the first. "No, no," assured the other, "I saw him at Christmas..." And so on. I listened to plenty of such conversations at neighborhood parties and always wondered what was wrong with adults. Now I have conversations like that too.

Unfortunately conversations in my youth often trended toward the war in Vietnam and it was rarely a good thing, usually ending in some ineffectual blows exchanged and groups holding back the fighters. Yesterday was election day for the European Parliament, but I heard almost no discussion of that. In the Ruhrgebiet only a third of registered votes cast a ballot. I think most people would agree that the Greens are the big winners, to the extent that anyone can be said to be a "big" winner. But I think the most evocative element of the experience was the prevalence of smokers in the crowd. Please don't get me wrong. It's a filthy habit and I'm glad I gave it up after a few years when I was twelve. But in the 1960's just about everyone over 18 smoked and the world had a nice familiar stale nicotine aroma that was somehow comforting. Now smokers in the US are an endangered species, but being at an outdoor party in small town Germany is a little like being in one of those time warps that seemed so common on "Star Trek". Lots of lined faces, deep phlegmy voices and coughing. It gave me a warm nostalgic feeling for my youth.

Rad Curiosities

2009-06-01T19:57:00.012+02:00

One day just isn't enough for many German holidays. In the same way that Hollywood just isn't satisfied with "Rocky," but has to go on to "Rocky II," here there is a Christmas 1 and a Christmas 2. This past weekend was such a doubled holiday with Pfingsten 1, followed by Pfingsten 2. We have many friends in Germany and they often provide me with insider info about cultural traditions. On Pfingsten 2 we went on a cycling tour with two such friends. We'll call them Michael and Marita. They told me that for many German citizens, a common pattern is to spend the first day of a twinned holiday with family. That means Mom, Dad and the kids, but also any available Omas, Opas, cousins and so forth. Michael claims that after a day in the bosom of the family, everyone needs a second day so that they can recover from all that loving togetherness.

So, we chose the second day of the two day holiday for our bike ride, the day that virtually all of North Rhine-Westfalia also decided to take a bike ride. It began auspiciously with a conversation on the S-bahn train to Hattingen. I attract a certain amount of attention with my glasses-mounted mirror (see photo) and a gentleman of about sixty asked me the usual questions: "Did I make it myself? How does it work?" While I was chatting with him I was checking out his ride: a classic Hollandrad that was about as old as its rider and retrofitted with some essentials. Among them, an ashtray on the handlebars. This detail told me everything I needed to know about the riding style of my temporary co-traveler.

We began our ride at Hattingen, heading south on a disused freight train line, cutting left to strike the Ruhr again, and then following the river back into Hattingen in the company of four or five hundred thousand other enthusiastic bike riders. The Ashtray kind of set the tone for the day and at every turn of the crowded path it seemed we saw another amazing variation on the basic bike theme. One guy was pushing a baby carriage while riding a unicycle. Bike trailers filled with dogs were common. We saw folding bikes and kids barely old enough to walk rolling along on bikes that would fit into any roomy backpack. In addition to the recumbent bike I was riding, we saw a variety of other recumbents including a Giant "Scooterbike" and a sure-enough lower rider recumbent built for racing. I photographed as many of the attractions as I could, but many went by too fast to be documented.

There were tandem bikes and crowds of people just walking too. With my North American ideas about personal space, I found the bike path a little crowded, but Michael's enthusiasm couldn't be dampened. Even after almost 60 km. and several rather large beers to help us unwind, he continued to lobby for riding the river path back to Essen and skipping the train ride. He wouldn't take "Nein" for an answer until we pointed out that we needed to be home in time for Tatort. That turned the tide and we were able to bring the day to a close, waving to Michael and Marita as we left them on the Bahnsteig.

The day closed with one last wheeled oddity. A rolling Kneipe, that I saw right in front of our building on the Rüttenscheiderstraße. There was space for twelve customers, six on either side of a central aisle where the bartender takes turns pouring beers and steering. Each customer has pedals under their seat and from time to time the revelers can move forward at a very dignified pace. If Michael wants to get me back to Hattingen again, I think this would be the proper vehicle for the trip.

Der Tod von Benno Ohnesorg

2009-05-30T17:05:00.003+02:00

Bild, or the Bild-Zeitung, as it is sometimes called, is a hugely popular daily newspaper in Germany and in the opinion of some, a cause for national shame. It's the largest selling newspaper in Europe, but stories are often based on very thin evidence and headlines are always sensational. Stories in Bild are written at about a fifth grade level
and in many ways it would make ideal reading for someone like me who's language skills are less than perfect. But for a variety of reasons, not limited to the generous and sleazy cheesecake always featured just below the fold on page one, I can't even pick one up when it's laying unclaimed next to me on the streetcar.

Bild tends to polarize people in Germany. In a country that takes newspaper journalism very seriously, Bild seems an insult to the level of excellence established and maintained by papers like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But more than that, Bild has a long history as a conservative paper that allows its editorial point of view to shape (and at times maybe create) the news. Into the 1980's, Bild, founded by Axel Springer in 1952, still referred to East Germany as the Soviet Occupation Zone and only began using the GDR official name a little later in quotes. When university student Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by Karl-Heinz Kurras, a West Berlin police officer during a protest against the visit of the Shah of Iran in 1967, Bild actively shaped public opinion against the student movement and supported the need for police to defend themselves with deadly force.

During the time of those protests, which were mirrored in countries around the world, including the US, where our own Kent State shooting has many parallels to the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, lines were drawn along traditional Right/Left boundaries. Student activists protested against the new capitalist government which was supported by the United States and, in the eyes of the students, was simply a neo-Fascist follower of the Nazi regime. At rallies and speaches, they often used the rhetoric of the East German state and the vocabulary of Marxism. As the movement developed over several years and the actions of a violent, radical splinter group of the student movement began to dominate headlines, groups like the Red Army Faction actually formed secret alliances with the German Democratic Republic in the East.

On the other side, police, members of the conservative and centrist middle class and the politicians they elected, all used anticommunist rhetoric to support actions against the protesters and back up the policeman, Kurras, who was tried for Ohnesorg's murder in two separate trials. He was seen as a champion of pro western Capitalism and cleared of all charges in 1970. He eventually reached the level of Detective Chief Inspector in the Berlin police department. He has never shown any remorse for his actions and in fact commented on them by stating that "anyone who attacks me is crushed" (Wer mich angreift, wird vernichtet. Aus. Feierabend. So ist das zu sehen.) By all accounts, he is an authoritarian type, not given to self doubt and a strong supporter of order and obedience. And last weekend it was announced in the German press that he was also a secret supporter of the East German State, a communist party member and Stasi agent. (Stasi = Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the official secret police of East Germany.)

If this fact had been made known in 1967, it's unlikely that any of the left wing protesters would have believed it. More probably they would have assumed it were just another trick of the bourgeoisie neo-Fascists. But the facts are now clear, discovered by accident in the mountain of documents left behind by the fall of East Germany and the Stasi. Kurras, now in his 80's doesn't deny his membership in the party. So looking back, we can see that virtually all participants were allied with their own natural enemies and working at cross purposes to their own interests. The East German Communist party allied itself with radical activists to destabilize the West German government although they hated disorder and hippies and disobedience above all other evils. The students joined forces with the very people who were at least indirectly responsible for killing the left's greatest martyr. Western capitalists joined ranks and did everything in their power to unknowingly protect a communist secret agent. And with hindsight it's easy to see that the fight wasn't about socialism versus capitalism. The true battle front was running perpendicular to the one we were all watching so closely and the good news is, the good guys won, albeit completely by accident.

This story is still unfolding and the Stasi archives likely hold many more secrets, although it's hard for me to imagine any could top this revelation. There is no evidence to suggest that Kurras was acting under orders from his Stasi controllers when he shot Ohnesorg, but his actions contributed significantly to the speed and intensity with which the left wing student movement turned violent. Like the Reichstag fire in 1933 that Adolf Hitler used to solidify his power base, the Ohnesorg murder was a rallying cry for left. But the truth of the Reichstag fire is still unknown. In the case of Ohnesorg's murder, the truth has come out with the shock and certitude of a Hitchcock plot twist in the final frames of the film. Bild Zeitung is reporting on the story too, but with no mention of its former support of Karl-Heinz Kurras and certainly no apologies. I guess I didn't expect any.

Moseltal

2009-05-28T19:13:00.007+02:00

I've had innumerable conversations with citizens of Germany who have tried to explain America to me. I'm sure that with their more objective point of view they must have some insights I've missed, but let's face it: the idea is absurd. I've lived in the States my whole life more or less, and they've seen a bunch of films made from Steven King novels, but they want to explain my country to me? Ich don't think so.

And I know many Americans, most of whom have never been to Germany, and they in turn want to explain Germany to me. They think they know all about it because they watched Hogan's Heroes every week in the 60's, so now they're experts. But the world is complex, too complex for such instant evaluations. Still, we need to file our experiences into mental shoe boxes in order to understand them. I've found, in fact, that the less I know about a topic, the more confident my opinion about it can be. Having spent three years living in Germany, I find that my picture of what Germany represents or what it means to be German is more complicated than ever. My cycling trip in the Mosel Valley just added to that complexity with a series of experiences that defy the mental shoe box.

I don't think it's possible or profitable to categorize all of our experiences, but it seems to be a universally human trait. The fact is that every country is filled with contradictions and Germany is no exception. The stereotype is, all Germans drink beer and lots of it. The reality is revealed in the view from my guesthouse window in Lösnich. Everyone in the Moseltal makes and drinks wine. Beer is an also ran.

I learned in fourth grade that Germany was the land of the barbarians. Home to the germanic tribes that sacked Rome. The reality is, Trier was the largest Roman city north of the Alps. The Moseltal is filled with the ruins and artifacts of hundreds of years of Roman culture. They planted the grapes, built the terraces and watched the show at the Trier amphitheater. The city gate is still standing and in good shape.

And aren't Germans supposed to be a little wild? Pierced tongues, shaved heads, tattooed eyelids, Rastafarian armpit hair... Yes, it's all relatively common at, for example, a Gymnasium in Berlin-Friedrichshain, and that's before the students show up. But this Konditorei, where I breakfasted in Trier, was preserved like a museum for the Spiessers of the 1960's, and the women who work there have never pierced anything more dramatic than a Schokowalnußkuchen, and then only to see if it were time to take it out of the oven.

It seems to me, that as soon as I learn enough to define a stereotype, I find a dozen exceptions that make me re-think my original thesis. Probably I'm better off not trying to draw any conclusions, but then I come back to a fundamental truth: Germany is distinctly different when compared with, say, Poland. And France is distinct from Spain. There are differences, but they're complicated and not easily grasped. For me it all became clear with a beautiful Jungendstil gate I saw in Traben-Trarbach, just before boarding a train back to Essen.

Clearly influenced by Art Nouveau, this arched gate on the bridge between the town's two halves is distinctly German in the way color is used, in it's proportions and in the romantic reference to the castle seen in the turrets on either side of the arch. But what really struck me was the small traffic sign down at street level. Yes, you may be driving through the vineyards of the Mosel, visiting one of the most charming tourist cities in all of Rheinland-Pfalz, but what's really important is that you know the proper speed limit in case you need to cross the bridge in your tank. It's the kind of detail that's just not left to chance in Germany.

The Butcher's Sign

2009-05-25T07:38:00.006+02:00

Back in Essen and sorting through the photos for a blog post. It will take a while to process all the experiences and synthesize them in one (or two) insightful and pithy essay(s.) But in the meantime, I've got to post these photos I took in Traben about halfway to Koblenz along the river. We stopped to check the map and saw the finest butchershop sign in southwestern Germany. I knew all Forschungsjahr readers would want to see it.

Trierradweg

2009-05-21T22:08:00.001+02:00

I was riding the Mosel bike path until 10 pm this evening and passed this tent as I went through Trier. It was the site of a particularly nasty heavy metal concert, but without the accompanying sound, it looks quite picturesque.

Zollverein

2009-05-19T22:12:00.003+02:00

As planners in Essen prepare for all the excitement of the 2010 European Cultural Capital celebration, I'm sure at least some of them are wishing they had a spare cathedral or a few Fachwerkhäuser at their disposal. Or maybe a nice old chunk of city wall with a gate included, like the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin. Instead, Essen has a coal mine. And ultimately, you can't plan an event with the Sehenswürdigkeiten you wish you had: you have to work with what you've got.

But it's not just any old coal mine. When Fritz Shupp and Martin Kremmer were charged in the late 1920's with developing a design for Shaft XII of the Zollverein coal mine, their brief was to build the biggest, most efficient, most beautiful coal mine in the world. The architects were influenced by the same ideals of simplicity and rationality that were driving the Bauhaus aesthetic and they combined those principles with a monumentality that has to be seen to be believed.

I've been on the grounds of the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site at Zeche Zollverein countless times and yesterday I had a tour with a really knowledgeable expert on the topic. But I still find it hard to grasp. The site is complex and not easily filed in any existing categories that I've got in my brain. But perhaps the most significant thing about Zollverein, and one that's easily overlooked, is that for all its overwhelming size, the above-ground presence of the mine is dwarfed by its subterranean counterpart. I've never been down the shaft, and I'm not at all sure I want to go. Even though my understanding is incomplete, I'll be happy to share some of the pictures I took yesterday with my 2.0 mm mobile phone camera. Enjoy the photos and make your plans to visit in 2010.

Musik in the Ruhrgebiet

2009-05-14T19:59:00.006+02:00

I'm reasonably pleased with my decision during the past year to subscribe to a national newspaper, but there's no denying that it has had its drawbacks. Because I've been reading Die Zeit each week, I haven't been reading the local paper for Essen (Die Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung). It means that I've been out of loop for some events in Essen, but I've tried to make up for it by paying closer attention to posters and fliers. When I'm out walking, I often snap a quick photo of advertisements like this one for a concert I attended last night:

The Yellow Jackets have a group of dedicated fans who have been following their music for thirty years, but I'm not one of them. I first heard of them back when I lived in Long Beach and they were playing somewhere in Los Angeles. They got some airplay on the campus station and I thought they were pretty good, but I didn't follow up on my interest. But the thing about live music is that it's almost always good. Even if it's something you would never otherwise listen to, there's something about being there that makes it worthwhile for me. A fan might say, "The boys were off their game last night. Bob Mintzer seemed tired from the flight, and they didn't play their best stuff." I, on the other hand, have no particular benchmark for last night's concert. Maybe they've played better in the past, but I'm comparing the performance to staying at home and preparing my Pausenbrot for the next day. As they say on the sitcoms, it's a no brainer.

In the past ten days we've taken in several concerts here and I'm wondering why we haven't been hearing live music more regularly during the year. I guess I know the answer: now it's relatively warm and staying light until about 9 p.m.. A few months ago, it was damp and cold and got dark a little after four. It was hard to get excited about leaving the house at all. My mantra now is, Today is the first day of the rest of your sabbatical. No regrets.

So I'm up for anything now, including a classical accordion performance by the students of Mie Miki, who's in charge of the Akkordeonabteilung of the Folkwang Music School here in the Ruhrgebiet. Miki has been called the Pablo Casals of the accordion and she performed a short piece along with her students. After hearing the concert I decided to get a recording of John Zorn's 1986 composition, Road Runner, which Frau Miki performed. I listened to it today, and probably for the last time. Live, it was electrifying. As a recording it doesn't do much for me. It's not bad music, it just strikes me as pointless. A little bit like watching a magician on TV.

Even the musique concrète concert we saw last week was different live. Admittedly, the sounds are all recorded and the "performers" just stand over a mixing board and move sliders. The spot lights were all directed to the speakers sitting on an empty stage. Still, the music is moving around you, and the concert hall setting forces you to pay attention. If the same music were playing on my Stereoanlager at home, I'd probably think it was a good time to balance my checkbook.

And on Saturday I experienced a performance by a group of not especially talented young musicians from Bulgaria. They were playing a mixture of Bulgarian folk music and pop standards from the U.S. on the street in downtown Essen and I had to stop and listen. In spite of the less than optimum performing venue, or maybe because of it, they were excellent. Passers by began dancing spontaneously and everyone was in a great mood. I don't know what these guys would sound like if I bought their CD and they didn't have one anyhow. The point is, is was sunny, it was Spring, it was Saturday and they were there. Unlike the Yellow Jackets drummer (Marcus Baylor; he's phenomenal) who has a full drum kit with seven or eight cymbals and the best technicians money can buy to set up the mikes, The Bulgarian band just had some weird middle-east tom-tom and a kid who looked about sixteen to hit it, but it was great. I hope they hang out in the Ruhrpott for a few weeks and I'll keep looking for fliers. With ten weeks still to go, I want to experience as much as I can before heading back to Logan.

Ruhrlangsamweg

2009-05-10T17:36:00.007+02:00

I really enjoy riding my bicycle in the Ruhrgebiet, but it's not without its stressful moments. I often have people comment on my behavior while I'm riding and although my interactions with them are far from conclusive, my natural guilty conscience makes me imagine I might be breaking some traffic rule. Today, for instance, as I headed down Bredeneyerstr. for the path along the Ruhr, an elderly fellow waved at me as I approached him. He didn't really say anything, but seemed irritated as he pointed to the crosswalk lines on the street in front of him. He was standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross, and as I pulled even with him I stopped and waited for him to explain himself. He looked at me, I looked at him, I looked at the crosswalk lines and at the red "don't walk" light across the street. He remained silent, I saluted and went on my way. What was he trying to tell me?

Traffic rules here are so complex, I imagine that at any moment I might be breaking several laws as I ride. Unlike most parts of the US, where bicyclists are seen as a nuisance to auto drivers, but of no more real significance than the bugs that get caught in your radiator, most European countries try to incorporate cycle traffic into the big mix. Sidewalks often have a "bike path" down one side and points are awarded for each pedestrian maimed. On other streets there might be a narrow lane painted red on the right margin for cyclists. It's sometimes hard to see these lanes as you ride along, but they are most easily identified by all the trucks parked on them. A street might be designated one way for cars, but bikes are allowed to weave in and out of traffic in both directions with no designated lane. And when in doubt, you can just follow signs like these:

In spite of all this chaos, everyone seems to get where they want to go and there is a minimum of "road rage" killings. I do my best to follow the rules, but sometimes my inner cowboy takes over and I just do what seems to make sense. Mostly I'm met with tolerance and I find I can usually return the favor.

Today I rode about 25 kilometers along the Ruhr, from Werden to Mülheim. If there is a means of locomotion I did not encounter along the way, I am unaware of it. I saw a really cool tandem bike with a recumbent seat up front and an upright saddle in the stoker position. I saw a wheel chair fitted with a rowing mechanism for propulsion. I saw unicycles, inline skates, kayaks, canoes and sailboats. One passer by was carrying a bicycle across his chest instead of riding it. Some bikes go by creaking and squeaking as though they haven't seen the light of day since Willy Brandt was in office. Others are so loaded with cargo, you can only imagine the riders are planning a three week trip, camping on every street corner between the Ruhr and the Mülheimerbahnhof. I thought I had seen it all and then as I was having a refreshing Pilsner at a beautiful Biergarten on an island in the middle of the Ruhr, a Viking ship came by and pulled into the locks to continue its progress down river. I can't wait until next Sunday.