BUT, I have finally come around to the fact that I really do not have that much work to do, and Old Man Summer has gradually cranked up the heat (from blessedly warm to stiflingly hot) and the sunshine (from ‘smiling yellow friend’ to ‘omnipresent melonomic oppressor’) to the point where some time spent inside can be downright wholesome. Hence, a blog post!
As I mentioned it is quite hot here in Berlin. We’ve topped 30 degrees The Rest of the World (maybe 88 degrees America) the past two days, and today is looking to be even hotter. In addition it has been wickedly feucht (the very expressive German word for humid, pronounced “FOY-sht,” usually with a look of disgust on your face), and also I am surrounded by several square miles of concrete and stone, i.e. Berlin is like a big, multi-cultural brick oven these days. This is three dry t-shirts and two cold showers a day-type heat. Those people who professionally pretend they know what the weather is going to be like have been promising a big heat-breaking Gewitter (thunderstorm) since Wednesday. If it doesn’t show up today I might have to hire a fleet of firefighting planes to follow me around and simulate a rainstorm wherever I happen to be.
School is going well, and most of the things I was worrying about have proven to be not worth worrying about at all. Most outstandingly, what I thought was gonna be a 20 page research paper for my literature class is in fact a 5 page non-research essay, because I am a dumb foreigner. Yesssssss. Also I did well on my first French test, also I think my German test went well yesterday, also technical translation apparently comes fairly naturally to me, and also finally I have a structure for my political thought final paper and I have a dream of finishing it this weekend. I am sorry I am using the word “also” so often, it just seems appropriate this morning, I think the heat is getting to me.Heh heh. All these really hot, uncomfortable looking Germans keep slouching by my window, and woman on the sidewalk just finished up a 10 minute shouting match with a man in a first story (i.e. 2nd story for you USA-types) window. It would probably be very easy to start a riot today. All you’d need is like 5 dudes and a brick. Hahhahah Shouty Jean McShouterson has started hollering again. SHES SO HOT AND ANGRY.
What else What else:
1. Oh right! I guess I can officially announce this now: I won that writing contest! I was informed a couple days ago, but I’ve been keeping it under my hat until now. Thomas, the extraordinarily friendly IES employee who ran the contest, wants to give me my 100 euro prize in some kinda ceremony. Preferably my winnings will be in the form of a big sack full of 2 euro coins, handed over by a pool with some girls in bikinis dancing in the background.
ANYWAYS, outside of being something to boast about, this win means I have enough dough to afford a trip down to Austria to visit family friend Ted France—also known as The Nicest Man In The World—and his wonderful family in the breathtaking Alps in early July! Buuuut various technical difficulties have been getting in the way of my ticket purchase. Hoping to get it cleared up today, will let you know when it is set in stone.
2. Joe Mauer Postcard Contest Update:
Longtime readers will no doubt recall the highly contested Joe Mauer Postcard Contest, announced in April I think. I challenged my faithful audience to get me a postcard featuring a picture of Minnesota Twins catcher/reigning American League MVP/fantastically bland St. Paul boy Joe Mauer. I guess I just assumed that if a guy is essentially the most famous person in Minnesota, and you can get his face on a stick at the State Fair, and they’re INSTALLING FIFTY STATUES OF HIM around the cities, it would be fairly simple to find a postcard with his picture on it.
Oh how wrong I was, apparently. As it turns out, Miracle Joe postcards are nearly impossible to find. Correspondence champion Pammy’s homemade effort never made it across the ocean, which suggests to me that their must be some sort of postal service policy prohibiting sending images of Big Baby Jesus through the mail. However, this dearth of conventional options was not enough to discourage my ever-resourceful readership! Let’s go to the film:
Entry number one is from my sister’s roommate/my friend Daniel Catterson:
Very clever, Danny! The postcard clearly states that Joe Mauer is greeting me, and he is even helpfully indicated here on the sidewalk:
This one very nearly fooled me. After all, Joe is well known for being Caucasian and sometimes wearing jeans. The key to debunking this one is right out there for God and everyone to see, in the lower lefthand corner: BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA. Berkeley, that notorious den of longhairs, leftists, and inhalers of illegal heated-up plants, is not the kind of place an upstanding young man like Joe would ever go. He might be tempted—like any man—by stories of loose women and perfect weather, he might even briefly consider buying a plane ticket—just for a weekend, nobody would have to know, I could tell them I was going to Montana to visit, uh, a grandmother or something—might even have the website up and his credit card information entered and his cursor hovering just above the BOOK FLIGHT button, but then he would look out the window of his cabin and see Becky, his riding mower, sitting content and peaceful on the freshly mown lawn. Joe would carefully close the browser window and shut down his computer, drink a glass of cold water (no ice), and go mow the lawn again. Hence, he would never make it to San Francisco, and hence this cannot be Joe Mauer on this postcard. NICE TRY, DANIEL.
Entry number two is from my Aunt Sarah:
The message on the back reads “I know these people don’t look a lot like Joe Mauer, but if you squint and use your imagination, project a Twins uniform and a dugout, I think Joe is the one on the right.”This was another admirably clever attempt to circumvent the apparent European Mauer Embargo, but once again, Miracle Joe’s character contradicts it. In order to appear in this photograph he would have had to (A) cross-dress, and (B) impersonate a minority, two things Joe will never do because he is a PERFECT GENTLEMAN.
Entry number three, the strongest contendor I suppose, came in a package from my father, although I believe Sarah was once again the mastermind:
This envelope arrived on a rough and stressful day and it cheered me up considerably. The I [HEART} MAUER sticker tipped me off to the fact that it contained Minnesota’s First Citizen-related material, but even then I was unprepared for the flood of Mauer paraphenlia that came pouring out when I cut it open:
Why if it isn’t a Joe Mauer Fan Club care package, complete with a magnet, tattoos (temporary, of course), stick-on sideburns (two sets, in case you and a friend want to have a Two-Person Joe Mauer Party), two postcards pre-addressed to Joe Mauer, and this mildly hilarious business card from Marty Hinrichs, President, Joe Mauer Fan Club:
It ain’t exactly what I had in mind, but it is still fantastic! Thank you to everybody!2. I guess the bigger signs were too easy to read.
“No, no, no, it’s not Wedding and Tegel, it’s Wedding and Tegel, you idiot!”3. The Berlin Wall Memorial is on my way home, so I stopped and took some pictures of it. Here, the bike examines a cool 3D map of the wall’s route through Berlin:
I liked the legend:
I was at the little circle in the center here.
This is where the wall cut across Gartenstraße, a road that had been in operation since 1752, which makes it OLDER THAN AMERICA. Gee-whiz everybody, history is all around us!Everybody is always asking about the difference between East and West Germany. It’s really quite simple. East Germany looks like this:
While West Germany looks like this:
See? Night and day.Sorry if I’m being obnoxious about this. I have just been learning about the divison of Germany for a month or so now and the whole story continues to be mind-boggling and unbelievable and generally infuriating.
To review the basic chain of events: WWII ended, Germany lost and was divided into four sectors, three of which—those under French, British, and American administration—were unified relatively quickly into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD, or West Germany). Due to a lot of complicated political factors the Soviet sector was never integrated into the new Germany, and instead became the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR, or East Germany), a socialist state that quickly developed in the always-fun direction of one-party totalitarianism. Oh, and Berlin was also split into quarters, and again the three western powers unified their bits into West Berlin, a little island buried deep in the Soviet sector.
The DDR was poor, corrupt, and oppressive—you couldn’t study or buy or say what you wanted to, and talking to the wrong people or asking the wrong questions or listeing to the wrong damn kind of MUSIC could get you thrown in jail. The populace got tired of that right quick and started a mass migration towards freedom, blue jeans, rock n’ roll, etc. Millions of people—nearly a 6th of the population of the DDR, if I recall correctly—emigrated to the west, a disproportionate number of them being the young, ambitious, intelligent sorts that the floundering sociaist state really could not afford to lose.So, did the head socialist honchos nervously adjust their tie-pins and horned-rim glasses, look around at each other and say “Well heck, fellas, these folks are just not going for the dictatorship of the proletariat. I guess we’d better give totalitarianism a rest for a while and let ‘em, heck, I dunno, vote and listen to the Rolling Stones and whatnot.”?
NO, of course not! The problem isn’t the government—it’s those lousy PEOPLE! The problem isn’t that we’re being too repressive—we’re not being repressive ENOUGH! The solution, as any idiot can see, is hundreds of miles of concrete and barbed wire. Oh, and machine-gun toting guards. Gotta have a few of those around. Maybe some dogs whiel we’re at it.
Here’s a ridiculous poster produced by the SED (the DDR’s ruling party) after they split the city of Berlin in two in a quick and secretive process, specifically covered up to prevent a last-minute flood of escapees.
This thing spins the wall as a “protective barrier against the corrupting influence of capitalism,” but fails to mention that those soldiers didn’t point their guns west, at American soldiers on the border—they pointed them east, at the poor souls who wanted out.The border guards were authorized to shoot and kill anybody trying to escape. Over 150 people died on the wall. Here are some of their faces:
Most of the fellas from the ‘60s seem to share the same sort of poofy, sculpted hairstyle.
I wonder if their society was so repressive that having newsman hair was a sign of like counterculture rebelliousness:I think these two dudes have the best coiffures:
The guy on top looks like an 18-year-old Dustin Hoffman who is getting ready to meet the President, and the guy on the bottom looks like an evil hypnotist.The victims of the 70s were much more obviously "way out."
The memorial is built on what used to be “no-man’s land,” a wide open strip of dirt along the border designed to deprive escapees of cover. Along this stretch the wall ran through the graveyard of the Sophienkirche (Sophien Church), so the SED powers did the obvious thing and DUG UP HUNDREDS OF COFFINS and reburied them a little bit further into the glorious DDR. This cross commemorates the (probable) mass grave of hundreds of WWII bomb victims who were never done the honor of getting dug up and schlepped east.
As one might expect, the Sophien parish was pretty pissed off when the state decided to requisition a big hunk of their graveyard for a hideous barrier, and they were pissed off further when, post-reunification, the new unified government decided that this was the perfect spot for the wall memorial and told them no, you can’t have it back. As part of a compromise the church was allowed to put some monuments of their own in the memorial, and (in my humble opinion) said monuments are sort of incongruous and obnoxious and mess with the unity of the whole set-up. For example, this gate, which was locked, has a little plaque next to it that reads “This gate is locked,” which does not strike me as a very open or inviting motto for a memorial to a tremendously psychologically damaging structure that was all about separation and imprisonment:
And this rock, which has a perfectly fine dedication to the victims of socialist totalitarianism on the other side, features the Zehn Gebote (Ten Commandments) for no apparent reason. 
To be fair I am totally unfamiliar with how controversial the Ten Commandments are in German public discourse, but to me this seemed intrusive and unnecessary.The memorial had a cool rusted-metal motif to it. I suppose it’s meant to convey the passing and impermanent nature of the things people build. This big orange-brown wall was probably my favorite part.
I think Bikey is contemplating his escape.The best part about massively symbolic structures of oppression is that they sort of make their own monuments. This stretch of the wall, chipped to bits by souvenir-seekers, was pretty cool,
And these sinister original floodlights, which remind me of the spaceships in the old War of the Worlds, were thoroughly creepy,
But I liked this geometrical watchtower, tucked away behind a couple of funny little turns, the best.
All in all a fine and unsettling outdoor exhibit. There’s a lot more too it, including some kind of visitor center and a memorial church with some neat architecture, but I think I may have had my fill of the wall for a while.
4. Other Stuff
I like the warm colors on these buildings. Bonus for the red n’ yellow hatchback out front.
(Side observation: European cars are pretty boring and ugly in general.)This little bit of grafitti was apparently produced by giant ants who are still enthusiastic fans of Alf.
On Wednesdays I have a half-hour turnaround between my French and translation classes. I was hustling my way up Friedrichstraße as usual last week when I saw a cop car…then a cop stopping traffic and directing it to the side…then more cop cars…then a huge line of police vans…aaaaaand then a massive protest march coming right towards me:
From the slogans on the signs this looked to be a bunch of students angry about how their higher education system isn’t absolutely perfect and completely free. Poor them. Oh, and don’t worry, I made it to class on time.I have spent a lot of beautiful days in parks lately. This experience is hard to capture photographically. Please to accept this one picture as representative of many happy sunny hours:
This is Mauerpark on a Sunday, and the very dense group on the hill in the middle is the jam-packed amphitheater crowd watching karaoke. German after German, fearless on beer, sings badly and dances around like an idiot. Good clean fun.Whooooo finished another blog post. The good news is the heat has broken, the bad news is I have ANOTHER flat tire. Today I will fix that and watch America beat England and soccer, ideally with other Americans to back me up when I piss off a bunch of drunk Englishmen.
Sorry about the once-a-week pace, everybody. I will try to get a lot of schoolwork done quickly so I have more time for relaxation, adventures, and blogging as my Berlin experience winds down.
